prompt: Sam and Paulina are forced to work together on something, and they're begrudgingly coming to realize that they have more in common than they'd like to admit @ikiracake
hgftdxcfvgbhjnk
Sam flew in the sky after the Box Ghost.
“You’ll never get me!” He shouted over his shoulder. “You can’t face my corrugated boxes of doom!”
Sam rolled her eyes. “They’re just cardboard. How much damage could they do?”
He was silent for a second before he shouted again.
“Beware!”
As Sam pulled the thermos off her hip she saw someone chasing after her on the ground, waving their arms. At a closer look she saw that it was Danny. She furrowed her brows. What was he doing?
“My power is too great for- ahh!”
Sam sucked the box ghost into the thermos and placed the cap back on top. She flew down to Danny and landed on the ground. He ran the rest of the way up to her, out of breath.
“Sam- it’s Dani- she- Vlad-”
Sam brought her hands up in a calming motion. “Hey, slow down. Catch your breath first. What happened?”
Danny took a couple deep breaths. “Dani came to visit. We were hanging out at my house and Vlad suddenly showed up and took her.”
“What?” Her eyes widened. “How did Vlad even know she was there?”
He stuck his hand into his pocket and pulled out a small, damaged electronic device.
“He’s got these all over my house. I think they’re cameras.”
Sam scowled. She really hated Vlad. He was a creep. She wished he would just leave them all alone.
“It’s okay, Danny. We’ll figure it out. We’ll help her.” She moved to place a comforting hand on his shoulder when she was hit in the back with an ectoray. She hissed and doubled over. She turned to look over her shoulder.
The Pink Huntress, aka Paulina, was standing in the street. Her gun was still smoking from the blast she had fired at Sam.
“Get away from the human.” She growled out.
Sam tried to ignore Danny’s swoon and turned to Paulina.
“Sorry, Pinkie Pie, but I can’t play right now.” Sam jumped into the air, her legs forming into a tail. She grabbed Danny’s wrist. “We’ve got an emergency.”
Paulina fired another blast at her. “I’m not letting you get away, ghost. And not with a human in your grasp.”
Sam rolled her eyes and flew to Paulina. “Does he look like he’s struggling? Like he’s trying to get away from me?”
All Danny did was sigh dreamily as he stared at Paulina. Sam shook him. His head snapped up.
“Oh! Uh, yeah. I’m totally willing.”
Paulina looked between the two of them. Sam started to back up.
“How do I know she’s not coercing you?” Sam groaned.
“Look, his cousins been kidnapped.” Paulina’s eyes widened behind her mask. “It’s a really complicated situation, and I don’t feel like giving you every detail. Follow us there if you don’t believe me. But I can’t keep sitting here chit chatting. We have to go.”
Sam turned to fly away but she felt a hand grab her shoulder. She turned her head behind her.
“Let me help.” Paulina said. “I can help get her out of there.”
Sam studied her for a moment before nodding. She took off and Paulina followed behind her.
“The man in question is Vlad Masters.”
Sam looked at her from the corner of her eye to gauge her reaction. Paulina seemed surprised, a little angry.
“Vlad would never do that.”
Sam shook her head. “There’s a lot you don’t know about Vlad.”
“I wish I didn’t know as much about Vlad as I do.” Danny scrunched his nose up. “He’s got a thing for my mom.”
Sam faked a gag.
“Gross.” Paulina said. “I can’t imagine anyone being interested in either of your loser parents except each other.”
“Hey! They-”
“I didn’t say that was a bad thing.” Paulina interrupted him. “I couldn’t imagine my parents being with anyone besides each other either. Not even after my mom passed away. I’m just saying they were probably made for each other.”
“Oh.” Danny said. “That’s kind of sweet.”
“Yeah.” Sam sniffed. “I didn’t expect that from someone so shallow.”
“I’m not shallow!” Paulina hissed, turning her head towards Sam as they flew through the air.
“You are so superficial.” Sam frowned. “All you and your friends care about is material possessions and your looks. That’s shallow.”
“That’s how you make friends in our world.” Paulina ground out. Sam looked at her. Her shoulders were hiked up. “Your parents make you go to banquets, you have to look pretty and woo the guests. All they talk is money. You wouldn’t understand.”
Sam looked back ahead of her. “Believe it or not, my parents are filthy stinking rich. So I do understand. I just don’t let their wealth define me.”
“Go, you.” Paulina sighed. “It must be nice to not be worried about whether or not your friends would like the real you.”
“Yeah, it is.” Danny squeezed her side with the hand on the arm that was wrapped around her. She squeezed him back.
Vlad’s mansion was coming up. She steeled herself. She didn’t know what they were going to find in there.
“Come on.” Sam waved a hand at Paulina for her to come closer.
“What?” Paulina looked at her suspiciously.
“We’re going to go in intangibly.” Sam hissed. “It’ll be faster and easier than going through the doors. And it’ll make it easier to sneak up on him too.”
Paulina stared at Sam’s hand for a few moments before holding hers out. Sam grabbed onto it.
“Okay, here we go.”
Sam floated them down into the ground and flew them through the dirt until they were in Vlad’s lab. Paulina looked around.
“I didn’t know he had all this.”
Sam opened her mouth to respond when she heard maniacle laughter coming from the center of the lab. She crept up to a large machine and peered from around the side of it.
Vlad stood over an examination table in his ghost form. Dani struggled against the restraints while Vlad laughed.
“You foolish girl. You thought you could escape me?” He turned to face her. “How sweet it was of you to want to visit your ‘cousin’. Your desire for family was your ruin.”
“That’s your cousin?” Paulina pointed at Dani. “She’s a ghost.”
“I told you it was complicated.” Sam said. “She’s not just a ghost.”
Paulina laughed quietly. “How can you be anything more than a ghost?”
“It’s-” Sam stopped to think. “I don’t know the science behind it. I just know it’s possible. She’s not the only one.”
Paulina turned to look at her sharply. “Not the only one? How do you-”
“Danny will save me!” Dani cried out. “He’ll get help!”
Vlad barked out a laugh. “Who do you expect to help him? That Wraith girl? Please. That girl is no match for me.”
Sam took that as her queue. She fired up an ectoray and shot it at Vlad. It hit him square in the back of the head. He growled and whipped around to face them.
“Get away from Dani!” Sam yelled. Danny peeked out from around the corner.
“Oh, so scary.” Vlad mocked a frightened expression, staring at her for a second before he laughed. “Why don’t you two go home like obedient little children.”
Vlad was suddenly being blasted from his other side. Sam looked to her left and saw Paulina was gone. She floated in the air above Vlad on her board. Sam hadn’t even seen her move.
“You must not know Wraith very well if you think she’ll go down without a fight. I know she always gives me a hell of one.”
Vlad growled and threw an ectoblast at Paulina. Her hoverboard disappeared and she fell to the ground, narrowly avoiding the blast. She landed and rolled before standing back up and shooting at him again.
Sam flew up from behind Vlad and rammed her shoulder into his spine. He grabbed onto her hoodie and flung her ahead of him towards Paulina.
She caught Sam midair easily and set her back on the ground. Sam stared at her.
“Wow, I didn’t realize you were so strong, Pinkie Pie.”
“Cheerleading has its benefits.”
Another blast was shot at them and Sam jumped into the air while Paulina backflipped out of the way.
“Well now you’re just showing off.”
Paulina smirked and jumped back on her hoverboard, flying towards him. Vlad was preparing to shoot at her again when Paulina jumped off of it and let it fly into him.
She saw Danny running towards Dani, she stared at him with big scared eyes.
Unfortunately, Vlad saw him too.
Sam flew at Vlad and grabbed the fabric at his shoulders. She pulled at him and flipped him over her head behind her. Just as she was turning around, Vlad blasted her in the back. It sent her flying into one of the tall metal machines that stood around the lab. Paulina rushed Vlad and sent him flying away again just as something fell and hit Sam in the head.
She fell to the ground and her knees gave out. She tried to fight losing consciousness but she couldn’t resist it.
Laying on the ground, she didn’t know how long she’d been there. It must’ve only been for a few moments because when she came back to the sounds of battle still rang out in the lab. Sam looked up to find Danny but her heart jumped in her chest when she saw her hair.
“Shit!”
She transformed back into her ghost form. She didn’t know if Paulina saw it or not. But she couldn’t worry about that now.
She looked up at Danny again and saw him struggling with the restraints around Dani’s wrists and ankles. He seemed to desperately be trying to pull them off.
“Come on, come on!” He whispered anxiously.
She could hear Vlad thrashing around deeper into the lab but the sounds were growing closer. Sam looked around her to see if there were any buttons or remotes when her eyes caught the thermos at her hip.
She debated for a moment before pulling it off. With the time crunch, it seemed like the easiest option to get Dani out of there.
“Danny!” Sam slid the thermos across the floor to him and he stopped it with his foot. He looked down at it, confused, and picked it up. Dani glanced at it and her eyes widened.
Danny looked at her. “Are you ready?”
She swallowed and nodded nervously.
As Danny was about to open the thermos, Vlad popped up from behind a machine. Danny ducked to the ground. Sam shot at him and blocked him from springing on Danny. Paulina jumped off her hoverboard and kicked him away midair.
“Help!”
Sam paused as a voice rang out from somewhere. Paulina paused too. As Sam listened she could hear that it was Vlad’s voice.
“Help! I’m trapped!”
Paulina looked ready to dart away but Sam stopped her.
“It’s a trick!” She waved her hands at her. “Vlad’s trying to trick you.”
Paulina dodged around Vlad’s punch and pushed him away. “He’s trapped, how could he be trying to trick me?”
Sam looked between Vlad and Paulina. “It’s- it’s complicated!”
“Oh, do you have a grudge for the mayor, Wraith?” Vlad laughed. “You want to keep him trapped and locked up?”
Paulina flashed her a glare.
“No!” Sam shouted.
Danny stood back up but dropped the thermos. Vlad turned his head at the sound. He launched himself at Danny.
“No!” Sam wouldn’t make it over there in time.
Paulina jumped forward, pulling her own thermos out. She pressed down on the button and the beam caught Vlad and sucked him in. His shouts could be heard the whole way down until Paulina put the cap on.
Sam watched as Danny slumped back down to the floor, relief washing over his face.
“Uh.” Dani said. “While I’m glad I didn’t get sucked into the thermos, can you guys figure out a way to get me out now?”
“Yeah! Sorry.” Danny stood up and started examining things at a much slower and organized pace. After a minute of looking he pressed a button and the restraints came undone.
Dani sat up and hugged Danny. Paulina looked away from her thermos and in the direction that Vlad’s voice had come from before.
“Mr. Masters!”
She ran over to a utility closet and jiggled the locked door handle. She pulled a blaster out and shot it off, ripping the door open.
“What?”
The closet was empty.
“Where did he-“
“He duplicates himself.” Sam walked up to her. “When you sucked up Plasmius, his duplicate disappeared with him.”
“Vlad’s a ghost?” Paulina stared at Sam disbelievingly.
“Half ghost, technically.” Dani jumped on the table and stared up at Paulina.
“Half ghost?”
“Half human, half ghost.” Sam said. She crossed her arms and looked away. “It’s very rare. Not that many of them.”
“Oh.” Paulina looked from Sam to Dani. “I think I’m gonna leave him locked up in here for awhile.” She shook the thermos.
“The fruitloop deserves it.” Danny ground out. “C’mon, Dani. Let’s go back home and hang out while Vlad’s out of commission. We can play hide and seek but it’s us versus Vlad’s bugs.”
“Okay!” Dani smiled up at him and grabbed onto his arm, flying them up and through the ceiling.
Sam looked at Paulina. “Let’s get out of here.”
Paulina held her hand out and Sam took it, pulling them both into the air and through Vlad’s house. Once they were in the sky Sam let go.
“Thanks for helping us.” She said. “You didn’t have to do that.”
Sam watched Danny walk away with Dani and sighed, absentmindedly floating up. Paulina floated up to hover next to Sam and she glanced at her. Sam met her gaze.
“So half ghosts?” Paulina asked, but it sounded more like it was a statement.
“Yup.” Sam popped the P.
“Are there three of them?”
Sam paused and looked back at the ground where she could still see Danny and Dani. “Yeah.”
“You’re one of them?”
Sam looked at Paulina again and she had a knowing look on her face. “Did you see me transform?”
Paulina sat down on her hoverboard and nodded. “I heard the clatter and I was expecting you to be getting back up but when I looked you were on the ground.” She looked out at the cityscape ahead of them. “Then that ring appeared and you were…”
“Sam.” She sighed.
“Yeah.”
Sam looked up at Paulina and saw her biting her lip in thought.
“So you died?”
Sam looked at the sky. Her hair blew in the wind as she thought.
“Kinda. Like I said, I don’t know the science behind it. I’m kinda dead, kinda alive. Who knows what really happened to me. I don’t.”
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?” Sam raised a brow at her. “It’s not your fault.”
“No, I-“ Paulina shook her head and her hands. “I mean for making your life even more difficult. On both sides of the mask.”
“You should be sorry for that even without the person being dead.” Sam sat down on the hoverboard next to her. “It’s not cool to make fun of people just because they’re different than you.”
Paulina looked at the ground, nodding. She still looked like she was thinking.
“But, we've at least got one thing in common.” Sam nudged Paulina’s shoulder with her own.
“Oh yeah? What’s that?”
Sam smirked at her and leaned back on her hands.
“We’re both badass.”
“Hell yeah we are.” Paulina smiled at her and looked back at the sky.
mourner’s playlist was probably the easiest to define genre wise but was really hard to find songs for. it was always going to be punk, rock, grunge bands with a focus on female vocalists but apparently female rock bands were a lot harder to find than i thought! for a lot of these i had to dig deep, googled a lot of stuff, asked for recommendations from my lesbian friends, ect. there was a lot of bands that weren’t even on spotify so that made the task a lot harder. with a lot of these songs being on the shorter side, mourner’s playlist is also unfortunately the shortest out of all of them despite having 26 songs in it.
i was eventually able to put it all together though! theming here is pretty obvious so i probably dont have to go into my thought process on that one lol. also, brutual should’ve really been a bonus track but because of this animatic by fishyartist i just knew i had to include it in the playlist!
For @bubblegumbeech
Prompt PR047 - "Nocturne likes getting into peoples heads and manipulating them, that making them happy and complacent is a secondary benefit…sweet dreams are so very sweet after all."
ao3 | ffn
Second poem for @phicphight - this time a villanelle preserving the rhyme scheme! I hope you enjoy!
Goodnight, my little dulcet one,
And sail through a starry sea.
Your dreams have only just begun.
In waking life, you cannot run;
But when you sleep, your wings are free.
Goodnight, my little dulcet one.
And who'd stop you from soaring? None!
They can't, when your mind holds the key.
Your dreams have only just begun.
So dream the fantasies I've spun!
Let fade the squawking birds of three.
Goodnight, my little dulcet one.
A dreamer's work is never done,
And you're as busy as a bee.
Your dreams have only just begun.
So sleep, my pet, for everyone—
And dream a honey dream for me.
Goodnight, my little dulcet one.
Your dreams have only just begun.
I keep adding songs to my dp playlist for very specific amvs I construct in my head (as you do)
this is an old concept I built forever ago but this song drew it back out of me, and I want to revisit it
imagine if you will, Void Danny from Reverse Trio AU, in a timeline where the Phantom of his world (in this specific scenario it's Tucker) did not succeed and was killed by Nocturn
Nocturn at the height of his power is able to use his foot in the dream realm to clip through space, aka he can make portals, at first he just uses them to spread across the world, he teaches Danny to do the same
one day he lets slip that he can make portals to other alternate universes, and that when they are finished feeding on this world, they will move to another
at this point, with Nocturn growing overconfident and complacent, his grip on Danny's mind starts to slip, Danny starts to miss his friends, he starts to regret what they've done
in a moment of gathered willpower he decides to open a portal to a world where his friends are still alive, but midway through he hesitates, what will they think of him? he killed them after all, wouldn't they hate him? wouldn't they think he was a monster? he desperately wants to see them but he can't bare to have them see him this way
the portal opens, but it opens to a world of lush green leaves, a huge tree with a girl sitting beneath it, she has her hand on the trunk, she's crying
he recognises her
the portal had found a version of his friend who would not hate or judge him for what he had done, it found a version of his friend who was just like him
he speaks to this Sam and she tells him that he can't be here, that she killed him, his body was beneath this tree, Danny was her Phantom
he tells her where he is from, that he's escaped to find the friends he lost, he says she's not the Sam he knew, but she's clearly a Sam who regrets as he regrets, who wants what he wants, he reaches out his hand and asks her to come with him, they still have one friend left to find
she takes his hand
he opens another portal, this time to an Amity buried in sand, there's a boy holding a golden staff, he stares out over the buried ruins of the city, the grave of his friends and family, one he had dug himself with the whispers of Hotep Ra in his ear and the memories of an ancient king piloting his body, Sam was his Phantom
Danny and Sam reach out, they tell him to come with them, they'll find a new home together, in a world where none of them exist, a world that none of them have broken
he takes their hands
from here they can go anywhere, to any universe, to find a place for themselves where they are away from the influences that changed them, they are still monsters, in their own ways, with powers granted to them by those who changed them
Danny cannot survive without feeding off dreams, he roams through the dream realm every night, giving people pleasant dreams but leaving them tired and drained come morning
but he thinks perhaps if he feeds lightly, takes just enough energy from just enough people, if he makes sure to feed from different people every night, perhaps he won't need to cause anyone harm
Sam needs sunshine and soil to thrive, but she still has no sympathy for the humans who destroy nature, dragging anyone who threatens her into the ground with her roots
but maybe she can use her powers for something more, rejuvenate the land she walks on, find and connect with humans who want what she wants, they're out there, she knows, she used to be one of them
Tucker uses his magic to survive, to steal food and clothes and shelter for them all, he may have left his kingdom but he is still a king, why shouldn't he take whatever he wants? who are they to tell him no? he could crush them like bugs in his fist, they were only peasants
but does he need to kill them? can't he just take what he needs and make them forget? he has killed so many already, and for what? an empty desolate kingdom? he left that place for a reason
as the influence of their manipulators wanes, the people they once were slowly return to them, they will never be the same, they have been changed far too much, but they are together, and together they remember how to be people again, not quite the people they all once knew, but close enough to count
but eventually their guardians will notice they are missing, Nocturn will follow a trail through dimensions, he will meet others whose wards have disappeared, they will come looking for their disobedient runaway children, and they will destroy whatever lies in their path to get them back
Sam is struggling with a lot of things. She's half-ghost, she's in love with her two best friends, she's desperately trying to keep both those things a secret, and to top it all off, one of those two best friends is missing, and she's doing everything she can to find him.
For the prompts: Sam has two secrets. One: She's in love with her two best friends. Two: She's a ghost. [from @carelisswriting] Danny has been missing for 2 weeks. Sam and Tucker find him floating, unconscious, in the Ghost Zone, but something's different when he wakes up. [from @hippykattrs], and Reverse trio au but through a series of shenanigans Danny still ends up being the ghost king [from Yellow]
Read also on AO3
[Warning for canon-typical violence and kidnapping]
Sam Manson had only two real, genuine, secrets. The kind of secrets a person held close to their chest and kept as if their life depended on it. The kind of secrets a person lied and tricked people in order to keep, no matter how guilty it made them feel. First, that she was a ghost; and second, that she was in love with her two best friends.
The first of those secrets, only her two best friends knew. They were the two people she trusted most in the world, and the only two people she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt wouldn't ever share that secret, even under threat of death.
The other secret, she hadn't told even them. And she probably never would.
It wasn't that she didn't trust them with it, of course she did. It was just that she didn't want to make things awkward between them. Her being a ghost only changed their entire world-view and understanding of human mortality. But her other secret, her secret crush—that getting out could ruin everything.
Her feelings weren't knew to her. Back in eighth grade, she'd started to develop a crush on both of them at the same time, and she'd thought she was a bad person for not being able to pick just one person to like. She'd since gotten over that, because she'd decided it was stupid, and then a little bit after that, she'd also learned what polyamory was, which cemented her decision that her guilt had been stupid.
As time passed, her feelings grew beyond just a couple of simple crushes, and into genuine, actual love, so strong that it hurt a little. She always scoffed and rolled her eyes when the subject of romance came up, pretending she wasn't interested, and that she thought anyone who would waste their time with something so ridiculous, especially in high school, was an idiot.
It helped to keep her true feelings hidden, even though every time she listened to Tucker all but waxing poetic about the most recent tech he'd found at the scrapyard and was gutting, either to repurpose into recycled tech or new techno-goth accessories—or heard Danny bragging about getting the high score on the NASA shuttle flight simulator, or ranting about stars, she was sure they were written all over her face.
She was down bad, and she knew it—but she would rather die than admit it and risk changing their group's whole dynamic, or even worse, losing her friends completely because she'd made it weird between them.
Danny and Tucker had been friends practically since they were born, but Sam had only become their friend in the sixth grade, and even though that was still a solid three years at this point, she still felt that three years wasn't enough to cement her position if she did something too crazy, like confessing her undying love out of nowhere—not that she would do it like that, because even if she was brave enough to confess at all, that would be coming on way too strong.
The other secret was... more recent. Freshman year had barely started, and the three of them were all hanging out at Danny's house. His parents had made a portal, claiming that it would lead to a place called the Ghost Zone. Unfortunately, it didn't work. It was still cool enough—in theory, at least—that Danny took Sam and Tucker down into his parents' lab to show it to them.
Sam took a couple of pictures. It did look really cool, for a hole in the wall. very futuristic and techie.
"You should go inside and let me take a picture of you," Sam suggested to Danny.
"Are you kidding?" Danny scoffed. "This is untested technology, what if I get electrocuted or something?"
"Fine, I'll do it, and you can take the picture," Sam replied with a roll of her eyes. "It doesn't work, anyway." She handed her camera off to Danny.
"At least put a protective jumpsuit on?" Danny requested. "I don't wanna see you get hurt."
"That's sweet," Sam said. Her tone was sarcastic, but her feelings were genuine. Danny always was sweet—and was only sometimes a bit of a jackass. "Make sure to get the whole portal in the picture. Don't just focus on me and ignore the background."
She borrowed one of Danny's jumpsuits and put it on over her clothes. It was a bit loose on her, and Sam always somehow managed to destroy or stain white clothes, but her main complaint was the big Jack Fenton decal on the chest, which she promptly tore off and threw away.
"I'm not walking around with your dad's face on my chest," she said, then went to stand just inside the portal. "Alright, take the picture."
Danny did, and once the flash faded, Sam turned around to get a look at the big, steel tunnel she was standing in. It was cold and dark, and gave her a strange almost menacing sort of energy that made her body feel like it was buzzing, and she kind of dug it, to be honest. It was weird, but cool.
"This this is actually really cool," she remarked, taking a few steps further in.
"Be careful, Sam!" Danny shouted after her.
The deeper she got in, the stranger it became. In the darkness, the seams in the metal interior seemed to faintly glow and pulse with green, like something was trying to squeeze its way through the cracks, even though the portal didn't work.
Before Sam knew it, she was all the way at the back of the tunnel, and there was some kind of iris shaped mechanism. It, too, appeared to glow, ever so faintly in the dark. Too curious for her own good, Sam put her gloved hand on the mechanism. That turned out to be a mistake.
It happened in an instant, too fast for her to even scream. And when she gasped it felt as if her throat was being filled with silly putty and she choked. Her body was flooded with energy. Simultaneously, red hot pain tore through her every molecule, and an icy chill engulfed her like she'd just fallen through the ice into a frozen lake. The force of the energy from that mysterious mechanism sent her flying backwards as a bright, toxic green filled her vision, pressing in on her from all sides.
The next thing she knew, she was flat on her back in the Fentons' lab, with Danny and Tucker both leaning over her, repeating her name in panicked tones.
"Hm?" she groaned out. "What... what happened?"
Danny and Tucker looked at each other, both of them seemingly at a loss. Danny still had her Polaroid camera, and he held it up and snapped a picture of her, for some reason. She flinched at the flash.
The photo printed, and Danny pulled it off the camera and started to shake it. "Now... don't freak out when you see it but..." he looked at the picture with a pained expression. "Here."
When he turned it around to show her, she couldn't believe what she was seeing. If she hadn't watched him take the picture, she wouldn't have believed it was even her in it. Her hair had turned shock white, and her violet eyes a glowing green. In the back of her mind, almost hysterically, she noted that the jumpsuit was black now, meaning she had once again managed to ruin another piece of white clothing—although it definitely wasn't just a nasty-sauce stain this time.
"What... happened to me?" she asked, her voice a raspy croak.
"I think... you're a ghost," Danny said.
"But hey," Tucker added, obviously trying to bring up the mood. "At least you look cool!"
She did, admittedly, look very cool. Although the dark and spooky aesthetic was more in line with Tucker's than her own.
As it turned out, Sam was only half ghost, or at the very least, if she was a ghost, she could transform to look basically human. If she looked very closely in the mirror, she could see the differences from the way she looked before. The way her hair was lighter, and seemed to almost float whenever she turned her head. The ways her eyes reflected when she moved, or when light shined directly on them.
It was fine.
She was fine.
That had been a few months ago, now, and with the help of all the ghost hunting technology Danny managed to 'borrow' from his parent's lab (though he usually had to modify it with his own engineering skills to make it actually work), Sam had become something of a hero around Amity Park—the Specter. Once Sam had gotten the portal working, other ghosts started to cause come through it into Amity Park, and unlike Sam they all seemed to want to stir up trouble. Although Danny liked to argue that Sam stirred up plenty of trouble herself too.
He used to argue anyway.
But the problem Sam was facing right now wasn't secrets, or crushes, or ghosts. The problem she was most worried about at the moment, was the fact that Danny had been missing for two weeks. According to his parents, he'd been carried off by a ghost, one who hadn't stopped long enough for a chat.
She and Tucker were pretty sure he was somewhere in the Ghost Zone, but that hardly narrowed it down. The Ghost Zone was endless, infinite, impossibly vast. They could search for decades and never find Danny. That didn't deter them in the slightest though. They couldn't get away with just abandoning their lives to search for their friend, but every day after school, and all through the weekends, Sam and Tucker had borrowed the Fenton's Specter Speeder and gone into the Ghost Zone to search for him.
In two weeks, they hadn't seen hide nor hair of Danny. They had, however, seen the Ghost Zone looking more dismal and chaotic than they'd ever seen it before. Fights breaking out left and right, skeletal ghosts swarming places. As much as Sam wanted to help, they couldn't afford to stop. They had a lot of ground to cover, and they had no idea if Danny was even still alive.
By three am, they had found nothing, and decided to call it before they made themselves late for school in a few hours. They'd be back again the next day at 3:30 to search some more.
And they did.
But when they came back at 3:30, everything was different. Peaceful.
Somehow, all the aggressive skeletal soldiers had magically vanished, and the chaos that had defined the Ghost Zone since they started the search for their friend had died down in just a few hours. There were no fights, no new destruction.
The ghosts they saw paid them no attention, focused on rebuilding and cleaning up the various carnage and detritus of the previous battles. None of them seemed the slightest bit concerned about being attacked again.
Just in case, Sam and Tucker kept the ghost shield around the specter speeder active, but it was the strangest thing. For the last two weeks, it had been like the Ghost Zone was a war zone, and now the war had somehow ended. Curious as it was, it didn't matter to their search for their missing friend. They could try to figure out what had happened later, once Danny was safely back with them.
After a few hours, as they started to steer into another area they hadn't searched yet, they saw rows of ghosts, floating silently in the green.
"What are they doing?" Tucker whispered, as if he was worried they might hear him and get angry if he spoke too loud.
"I don't know," Sam whispered back. "I'm gonna take us up a little higher so we can see what's going on."
She pulled back on the steering and took them up over the rows of ghosts. From above, they could see the ghosts lined up almost as if on the banks of an invisible river. In the distance, the ghosts standing what would be upriver, started to float away in a wave.
"What are they doing?" Sam echoed Tucker's question. "I'm gonna fly us closer."
Tucker nodded and she brought them in. As they got closer to where the ghosts were leaving their positions, they could see something floating down the invisible river. When the object—the figure, they realized as they approached—drifted past them, they would fall out of line and float away, as if they'd been standing vigil until it passed for some reason.
"Wait a minute, is that...?" Tucker stated to say, squinting at the drifting figure.
"Danny!"
Sam immediately put on the speed, bringing them right over the drifting figure.
"Deactivate the ghost shield," she said. "I'm going ghost."
Tucker hit the button and Sam, in the ghost form, dropped out through the lower hatch to grab Danny. After two weeks of searching, he was just floating there, unconscious. And all these ghosts seemed happy to stand around and watch without bothering to help him.
When Sam wrapped her arms around her unconscious friends, the ghosts around them hissed and jeered.
"You dare lay a hand on him?" one demanded.
"Back off! He's my friend," she all but snarled at them.
"The Specter..." a different ghost observed. "She must be."
"He is safe, then," said another.
Word started to spread down the line, and steadily, all the ghosts dispersed. For a moment, Sam just watched, then she shook her head and flew herself and Danny back into the Specter Speeder.
"We're in! Reactivate the ghost shield," she called out.
Tucker did so, and as soon as he hit the button, he hurried over to them.
Gently, Sam laid Danny out on the floor and started checking him over for injuries. He still had a pulse, so that, at least, was a good sign. Less good was the fact that he was covered in scrapes and burns, although none of them seemed too severe.
"We should take him to a hospital when we get back, but he should be okay," Sam said.
"You should take him to a hospital," Tucker corrected, holding his hands up. "I don't do hospitals... should we try to wake him up?"
Sam gently tapped Danny's cheeks. Her heart was pounding and she didn't think she'd ever been so worried for anyone in her life. Or so relieved.
Danny groaned slightly.
"Danny," she said softly. "Danny, wake up."
He groaned some more and blinked his eyes open, squinting up at them. His irises had a strange, iridescent quality that Sam recognized vaguely from her own. But they also weren't like her own in a way she couldn't quite describe. Whatever it was, by reaching out with her ghost sense, she could at least tell for absolutely sure, that Danny was still human, and a not a ghost, or half-ghost like her.
"Sam?" he asked. "Tucker? What are you doing here?"
"Us?" Tucker scoffed, "What are you doing here? You've been gone for, like, two weeks. What happened to you?"
Danny chuckled weakly. "That's... kind of a long story," he replied.
The two of them helped him up off the hard floor of a speeder and into a chair, then Sam went to program the autopilot to take them back to the Fenton Portal.
"We've got time," Tucker told him, crossing his arms.
Sam had always thought it would be kind of uncomfortable to cross one's arms with fishnet sleeves, but Tucker never seemed to mind it.
Now that he was sitting up and moving and stuff, Sam noticed that Danny looked a little thin. He probably hadn't been getting enough to eat or drink in the Ghost Zone the past two weeks. Luckily, they kept a very well-stocked snack drawer in the specter speeder, and a case of bottled water, too.
Once he had some food in him, Danny was much more willing to talk, and he started to tell them the story of his time in the Zone, starting with his kidnapping.
"While I was helping my parents in their lab," he began, "you know, tweaking their designs, thinking about what might be useful to the three of us ghost hunting as usual. And the portal was open, because we figured if anything came through, there were three of us in the lab, surrounded by ghost hunting equipment, so it would be fine.
"But the ghost that came through didn't want to fight, or escape. He just flew in, grabbed me, and flew back through the portal. It was a matter of seconds. I'm sure my parents tried to chase after us, but in the time it would have taken them to get to the specter speeder, the ghost had taken me far away."
"Why you?" Sam asked. "What did you do to tick off this ghost?"
"Nothing," Danny told her. "He actually thought I was you."
She stiffened. Honestly, she shouldn't have been all that surprised. Ever since she started kicking their asses and sending them home with their tails between their legs, ghosts had been coming after Sam left and right, but they always wanted to pick fights, not kidnap her. Well... arguably Skulker wanted to kidnap her, but he knew the difference between her and Danny.
"Why?" she asked again.
"Apparently there's this Ghost King, seriously bad dude, and a long time ago, he was imprisoned in this thing called the Sarcophagus of Forever Sleep. But a little while, somehow, he was released or broke out or something. Not really sure which. So basically, they wanted you because you're a halfa, and the way they told it, halfas are way more powerful than regular ghosts for some reason.
"Except they messed up," Danny said. "They knew the halfa was a teenager, and that you'd been turned by the Fenton Portal, but they didn't know who you were, so when Rustle came through the portal and immediately saw a teenager working near it, he assumed that I was the halfa."
"But then you explained the situation to them right?" Tucker guessed. They both knew damn well how much Danny loved to explain things—it was one of his most adorable and sometimes annoying—so it was a reasonable conclusion to draw. "Why didn't they bring you back?"
"I didn't get the chance to explain it to them until Rustle had taken me all the way back to the lair the resistance was using as a base of operations and they told me why they kidnapped me in the first place," Danny said. "By that point, the king's spies had told them about the resistance's plan and he sent a crap ton of his soldiers to block off access to the Fenton Portal. Once it was guarded, it was way too dangerous to send me back or try again to get the right person, so they had to make do with me.
"They told me I wasn't going home until the Ghost King was defeated."
Danny paused in his story to drink some more water and open another back of corn chips.
"Seriously Danny?" Tucker asked. "You're leaving us hanging for corn chips?"
Danny didn't bother to swallow before saying, "Dude, I haven't had human food in two weeks, okay? These corn chips taste like fuckin' heaven right now. You guys can wait."
"Come on, what happened next?" Sam asked.
Danny chewed faster and swallowed before finally continuing his story.
"Well, luckily, I'd been working on some prototype Fenton Tech when Rustle grabbed me, and I managed to hang onto it all the way to the base of operations. Plus, I always have some scraps on me, and Technus and Skulker were part of the resistance, and they have some pretty good tech, too.
"So I spent two weeks, with Technus as my incredibly annoying lab assistant that I had regularly threaten with violence to keep from stabbing me in the back, heavily supervised by the ghosts of the resistance, jury-rigging a super anti-ghost ray gun like some kind of megalomaniacal comic book supervillain. I barely had the time to eat or drink anything, and when I did, it was all ghost food, which was not doing great things for my productivity or energy levels, let me tell you.
"Eventually, though, I finished the weapon. I designed it to absorb energy from the plentiful ectoplasm in the Ghost Zone and harness it into a single, supercharged beam that would be powerful enough to bring any ghost to their knees, and it worked amazingly, if I do say so myself," Danny said. Then he went back to his chips like that was the end of the story.
"What happened after that?"
"Oh, I sniped the ghost king through a window of his keep, knocked him right back into the sarcophagus and blew the crown right off his head."
Tucker laughed.
"What's so funny?" Sam asked.
"Nothing," Tucker replied, shaking his head over his chuckles. "I just still can't get over the fact that engineering geek over here has the best aim of the three of us. Like, it I get why, because his freak parents have been teaching him marksmanship since he could pull a trigger, but it's still funny."
"Yeah, laugh it up," Danny said, smirking. "Which one of us defeated the ghost king, again?"
"I yield," Tucker told him. "What happened after that? You were unconscious when we found you?"
"Oh, well, the ray gun worked, but it kind of overloaded and blew up immediately after that," Danny said. "That's the last thing I remember, but judging by the lack of skeleton soldiers, one of the other resistance guys must've locked the sarcophagus when I was done with him. Not sure who it could have been, though, 'cause I didn't think they even had the key."
Upon hearing what Danny had been put through in his absence, Sam was overcome with emotion.
He'd been kidnapped, blackmailed, starved, forced to work with a ghost that had a very personal vendetta against him, to build a super-weapon that would have gone way against Danny's usual morals, and then defeat an incredibly powerful ghost, the literal king of all ghosts, with an unstable ray-gun that blew up immediately after use, knocked him out, and sent him careening, unconscious, through the Ghost Zone.
And Danny was trying to play it off. He was crunching on corn chips and casually waving off all the traumatic shit he'd just been through like it was no big deal, the same way he always waved off traumatic shit, and Sam... Sam couldn't take it anymore.
"Oh, Danny..." she said, her voice trembling with emotion and eyes wet with oncoming tears.
Her horror at what he'd been through combined with her relief that he didn't have to go through it anymore, and mixed with the feelings she'd been hiding for so long, and she didn't know if it was a case of her wires getting crossed or just momentary insanity, but she reached out and pulled him into a hug and kissed him right on the lips.
His lips tasted like salt and canola oil, and the second she realized what she was doing, Sam pulled back, her face turning an alarming shade of red.
For an unbearable moment, the awkwardness strangled out all sound. Then Tucker let out a forced chuckle.
"What, no kiss for me?" he joked. "You're makin' me feel left out."
Sam, halfway to panicked and not sure what else to do thought 'fuck it', and grabbed his cheeks to plant a kiss right on the lips and instantly smudge his black lipstick all the way up to his nose, unable to stay steady with how incredibly anxious she now was.
Whatever shade of red she'd turned before was so much darker now she felt lightheaded, and Tucker looked dazed as he brought two black-nailed fingers up to his lips in shock.
And just when Sam thought she might die of embarrassment, Danny reached over, grabbed Tucker by his black leather vest, and—whether to ease Sam's embarrassment, or for some other reason Sam couldn't possible comprehend, especially in her current state—he pulled the other boy close and kissed him, too.
They spent the rest of the, thankfully short, ride back to the Fenton Portal steeped in awkward silence. Once they were back in the human world, Tucker sealed the portal while Sam helped Danny upstairs to his parents so they could take him to the hospital.
They didn't say a word about the... kissing incident, even when they started talking again. At least, until about 1 am that night when Tucker sent them an IM on their private group chat.
TooFine: So... we ever gonna talk about that kissing junk? Cus its literally keeping me up at night
Sam was already awake when the message came in. To be honest, it was keeping her up too. She didn't want to say anything, didn't want to explain, but... actually, it felt like it might be easier to tell him, both of them, when there was a screen between them, as if it was a layer of protection. Even if Danny might not see it until later, since the hospital had decided to keep him overnight for observation—although his parents might have brought him his laptop to pass the time.
So Sam took a deep breath and started typing.
Samanson: actually... there's something i need to tell you guys.
Samanson: i've kind of had a crush on you - both of you - since middle school.
Samanson: a huge crush. probably more than a crush, honestly.
Samanson: i didn't want to say anything because i was worried about ruining our friendship, but i guess the cats out of the bag now.
Once she started, she had to forcibly stop herself from sending more messages and pouring out all her feelings in the group chat. She forced herself to sit still, wring her hands, and wait with bated breath for a response, even if she had to wait all night, because god knew she wasn't going to get any sleep after this.
After a long moment, a message came through.
SpaceDanny: Yeah....... me too, actually.
Sam very nearly cried with relief. Danny might tease her sometimes, like they all teased each other, but he knew when to take her seriously, too. She wasn't sure exactly how much he meant by that little 'me too', but at the very least it meant he didn't hate her.
TooFine: Wait ACTUALLY actually???
SpaceDanny: Yeah
Samanson: also yeah.
SpaceDanny: I had a whole sexuality crisis over it, but it was about the same you came out and I didn't wanna steal your thunder, so I decided to keep it to myself for a while.
SpaceDanny: And then I worked it up into such a big deal in my head somehow that I just never did '-_-
Samanson: sooo.......
Tucker hadn't actually said anything about it yet.
Which, on the one hand meant he hadn't shot them down, but the other hand followed that fact with a pretty damn big 'yet'.
Tucker continued to not say anything for several minutes, and Sam started to worry that he was just going to ghost them from now on, which, while ironic, would majorly suck. Even if he didn't want to date them, he was still their best friend and they didn't want to lose him. But they couldn't force him to stay, either.
Finally, another IM came through.
TooFine: You know what? Awesome
Sam let out a sigh of relief and fought back the waterworks again.
TooFine: Ill be real, Ive never really though about it before, but Im definitely not NOT into it. Im getting a girlfriend AND a boyfriend out of this and thats sick as hell.
TooFine: You guys wanna have a movie date saturday?
SpaceDanny: YES
TooFine: Yk, once weve all caught up on some sleep lol
Samanson: definitely. that sounds nice
SpaceDanny: So much yes do I want that
Sam did cry then, but she would never ever tell the two of them that. After the emotional roller coaster that day had been, she was just too happy to hold it in.
Things started to get... weird after that. Not because they all started dating, though. That part was really nice, and went amazingly well right off the bat with the three of them holding hands and cuddling up during school whenever they got the chance—to the point where Ms. Tetslaff called them out at lunch for excessive PDA. No, it was weird for other reasons.
None of them had sufficiently caught up on sleep by the time Saturday rolled around, and Danny still sported bandages from his hospital stay, but it didn't matter. They met up at the movie theater for a matinee and planned to go to dinner at Nasty Burger afterwards. They'd done the same exact thing on plenty of other Saturdays, but it was different this time.
They hit a tiny bump when they got to their seats and decided to to rock-paper-scissors for who got to sit in the middle, Sam won. It hardly mattered though. They pushed up the dividers between the seats, and all fell asleep halfway on top of each other before the halfway point of the movie. The usher had to wake them up and send them out so he could clean the theater before the next showing.
They had a good laugh about that as they all walked to the Nasty Burger.
Up until that point, it was going really well, and the three of them were all happy and having fun. Then a ghost showed up.
And that was when things started to get weird.
The ghost showing up wasn't weird in-and-of itself. Tucker and Danny knew the drill. They blocked Sam from view so she could go ghost and prepare for a fight. Ghosts came to fight Sam all the time, so this was nothing new. Except that this ghost wasn't there for Sam.
This ghost ignored her completely to fire off a ghost ray at Danny and demand that he fight them.
And that was weird.
Still, it wasn't exactly a problem. Danny activated his wrist ray, and although Sam co-opted the bulk of the battle, he provided some solid support. Within a few minutes, the two of them got the ghost into a position where Tucker could capture it in the Fenton thermos. Sam ducked behind them to change back, and they could be back on their way.
"Did you recognize that ghost, Danny?" Sam asked curiously. "One of your resistance friends?"
Danny shrugged and shook his head.
"Weird," Tucker noted.
"Yeah, that's so random," Sam agreed. "Why would a ghost go after Danny? Especially after he literally saved their whole dimension from an evil warmongering king. Way to show him your gratitude."
"I don't know, and I don't care," Danny said coolly. "I just want to go to Nasty Burger, and have dinner with my awesome boyfriend and girlfriend and not have to think about ghosts for a while."
He held out his hands for each of his partners to take, and they walked the rest of the way to Nasty Burger side by side by side, awkwardly and laughingly navigating past street lamps and telephone poles that made the sidewalks too narrow for the three of them shoulder to shoulder, never releasing each other's hands.
Danny got his wish to forget about ghosts for the rest of their date. But that night, he was woken up by a ghost coming into his room to try and attack him in his sleep. It didn't work, because Danny was a light sleeper, and went to bed wearing a wrist ray with an ecto-gun and a Fenton Thermos on his nightstand.
Sam and Tucker were both equally concerned and baffled when Danny told them about it when they came over to hang out the next day. Once could be written off as a fluke, and maybe twice could be a coincidence.
But it kept happening. Every day or two, a ghost would show up to challenge Danny for some reason.
It got to the point where Sam forced Danny to wear a specter deflector at all times for his safety, even though he constantly pouted about not being able to hold her hand or kiss her.
Tucker had rolled his eyes, promised to give him twice as many kisses to make up for it, and then called him a big baby.
Danny immediately started working on a way to make the specter deflector ignore Sam's unique ecto-signature, of course, because he was a sweetheart like that, but he kept getting interrupted by random ghosts showing up and demanding to fight him. Even when they couldn't touch him—either directly, or with ghost powers—they still tried.
It was after school when the three of them were all heading to Sam's house for bowling, that they got any semblance of an explanation.
Another ghost none of them recognized stopped them on the street, but this one was chattier than the others. She had long, flowing blue hair, and shimmering blue skin, and pointed an unnaturally long finger right at Danny.
"I, Mistress Mona, spectral siren, have come to challenge you for the throne of the Infinite Realms," she declared. "Prepare to meet your match, ghost king."
"What?" Danny breathed out, looking more confused than Sam had ever seen him.
The ghost didn't wait for them to ask questions though, she attacked them with a ghostly green wave that appeared out of nowhere, and started to sing.
The trio didn't give her song time to take effect. Danny shot her directly in the throat, silencing her with his perfect marksmanship, and then Sam kicked Mona's butt all the way back to the Ghost Zone. Or into the Fenton Thermos Tucker was holding, anyway.
"Why the hell did she call me the ghost king?" Danny asked. "I'm not the ghost king. The ghost king is Pariah Dark, and he's locked up in the Sarcophagus of Forever sleep."
"I think we're gonna have to take a rain check on bowling, boys," Sam said, turning around to walk back the way they came down the sidewalk. "We're going to the Ghost Zone, and we're gonna get to the bottom of this."
"What?" Tucker complained. "But I wanted to go bowling!"
"Me too, but there's no arguing with her when she gets like this," Danny said with a sigh, and the two of them followed Sam back toward Fenton Works.
Danny's parents were working up in the ops center today, so the lab was empty when the three of them arrived and Tucker went to warm up the specter speeder.
"You alright, Danny?" Sam asked, noticing that he looked a bit jittery.
"Hm? Yeah, I'm fine," he assured her.
He wasn't, but he always pretended none of this affected him. She wasn't sure if it was toxic masculinity making him think he had to be strong all the time and never tell her when he was stressed, or if he just didn't want to process everything he'd been through for some reason, or if his brain genuinely didn't register how much it was affecting him, but whatever the case, she knew she wasn't going to get anything out of him until or unless he wanted to tell her, so she didn't bother to push it.
"You don't have to go, if you don't want to," she told him instead. "I know the last time you were in the Ghost Zone wasn't exactly the best. If you don't want to go, Tucker and I can handle it."
"What? No," Danny said, frowning. "I'm the core of this problem, somehow, I'm not just gonna leave it to you guys to deal with on your own. I want to help."
"Alright," Sam conceded. He did make a good point. "If that's what you want, I won't stop you."
At that moment, Tucker hovered in with the specter speeder and Danny climbed in next to him.
Sam opted to go ghost and follow alongside this time, to more easily talk to people, since it seemed like they were probably going to have to ask around to get the information they were looking for from ghosts that passed.
Danny, however, had to stay in the speeder with the ghost shield active, because there was a good chance that as soon as they got into the Ghost Zone, he'd be swarmed by more foolhardy ghosts trying to fight him for some reason, and unlike Sam, he didn't have ghost powers to protect himself, just his wits and a specter deflector. And to be fair, he'd been doing pretty well on just those so far, but up until now he'd only ever had to fight one ghost at a time.
They stayed in communication via their Fenton-phones.
As expected, once they got into the Ghost Zone, they were approached by ghosts goading Danny to turn of the ghost shield and fight them head on, but they either gave up when they realized he wasn't dumb enough to do that, or Sam chased them off.
It wasn't long however, before Sam found a ghost that wasn't openly belligerent, and approached him. Although his clothes were very old fashioned, he was still recognizable as some kind of farmer.
"Excuse me," she said. "I'm Specter, and I was wondering if I could ask you some questions."
"Oh, of course," said the ghost. "Anything for the new king's general. Unlike those ruffians, I am forever grateful for his majesty saving us from his predecessor's rule."
"Uh... okaayyy, lot to unpack there," Sam said, turning up the receiver on her Fenton-phones so Danny and Tucker would be able to hear what the ghost Farmer said from inside the speeder, "but let's start with: how can Danny be the Ghost King? He's not even a ghost?"
"Doesn't matter mum," the farmer ghost said. "The title of ghost king is won in single combat."
"How does me sniping him from fifty yards away count as single combat?" Danny demanded in her Fenton-phones. "He never even saw my face! He never had the chance to fight back."
Sam relayed the question, as well as Danny's arguments to the farmer, who simply laughed.
"I don't make the rules, mum," he said. "Your friend made the machine that defeated the king, and he alone fired it. That makes him the new king, no ifs, ands, or buts about it."
"But... but..." Danny tried to complain, but he was drowned out by Tucker laughing at him.
Sam bit back a smile.
"What about what you said before about me being the new king's general?" Sam asked. "How does that work?"
"You're the ghost the king trusts to protect him personally, and whose advice on all tactical matters he heeds," the farmer replied. "That makes you his general."
Sam wanted to argue, but she supposed that all of that was technically true. She fought a lot of Danny's ghosts for him—with his help, of course. And when she'd told him to wear a specter deflector, he did, even though he didn't want to.
Ghost king's general, huh? That sounded kind of badass, actually.
"Thank you for your help, sir," she told the ghost.
"Think nothin' of it," he replied.
"This is ridiculous!" Danny grouched. "I can't be the ghost king! I'm not even a ghost!"
"Shoulda thought of that before you sniped Pariah Dark, I guess," Sam teased.
Tucker hadn't stopped laughing at him, and now that she wasn't mid-conversation and trying to keep her cool, Sam laughed too.
