Remember, clean one at www.fanfiction.net/~cordria, author's notes on this version.  If you enjoy reading, comment!  I will not continue if people don't seem to be reading.  :D

Real Life
A Danny Phantom FanFiction by Cordria
Author’s Notes Version

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(chapter 4)
In Which Being a Friend Isn’t Always Easy
Author’s notes in bold

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Danny wandered through town, his eyes fixed firmly on the sidewalk.  He’d never seen so many ants than he had today – tiny red ones, quick brown ones, huge black ones – Amity Park really had an ant problem.  There was, of course, a reason why the ants were so interesting today.

So, at the beginning of chapters, I repeat the big, important information.  In a normal book, this wouldn’t happen.  But I think it works best for fanfiction, ‘specially since most people read a bunch of stuff in between and don’t necessarily remember what’s going on.  XD  My theory, anyways.  That’s what this whole section is for.

Actually, there were three really good reasons to keep his eyes one the ground.  Danny shivered to himself as he tried to figure out where he was based solely on the cracks in the sidewalk, not daring to look up.  But, in the end, he found himself completely lost and he had to look.  

His eyes flickered to the coffee shop just ahead of him.  The blurry forms of the humans that sat at small tables sipped drinks in the warm evening.  Tiny ripples of emotions flooded out from each one, gathering together and forming small waves that were tinged with delicious smells.  Those strange wrinkles in the air weren’t really smells, they were more feelings, but they tingled the back of his nose.  The small crowd at the coffee shop collectively felt like warm cookies, hot chocolate, and a thick blanket on a cold winter’s night.  

Around the humans, flickering in the shadows and coiling under tables, were nearly a dozen other things that weren’t quite so human.  They collected in areas where the almost-unseen ripples were the strongest.  Snapping and hissing at each other, they created an unnatural cacophony that drifted just underneath the warm babble of the humans.  These creatures gave off these tiny undulations of energy as well, but they were cold and unfeeling, laced with instinctive fury and protectiveness. One of the long shadow-things slithered out from under a table, passing right through a young woman’s leg.  She reached down absently as if she were going to swat a mosquito, confused when there was nothing she could see.  

Danny wrenched his eyes away from the scene, burrowing his shaking hands into the pockets of his jeans.  All throughout the day he had seen these things: bat-like creatures that had flitted around in the cafeteria; rat-things that had run through lockers; and more than once he had seen the large fox in the hallway.  Nobody else seemed to know that they existed.  

Up until today, he hadn’t noticed them either.

Forcing himself not to glance up again as he strode past the coffee shop, he shook his head, mentally tallying the reasons he shouldn’t have looked up.  The first was those odd ripples of life that so fascinatingly swirled and eddied.  A second, easily, was the creepy shadow-things that nobody else could see.  The last – the worst – was the look in people’s eyes when they met his gaze… a shiver, a glance away, a slight retreating… a tiny bit of fear.

One foot in front of the other, Danny worked his way down the street.  People walked around him, unconsciously drifting farther away from him than they usually would.  Crowds of people surged, but Danny was alone in the midst of it all.  Normally his slight frame would’ve been jostled and shoved, but today nobody seemed to want to get near him.  It was like he had some sort of poisonous cloud around him.

Creepy…  Sometimes I wish people would leave me alone like that.

Finally recognizing the corner that led to his house by the strange cracks on the ground (Tucker swore that it looked like a map of Amity Park but neither Danny or Sam had ever been able to see it), he turned to his right and headed up the street towards home.

There’s a series of cracks at the bus stop by my house that looked like a picture of the United States.

Not fond of this section, but like I said… I felt it was necessary.

--

Sam drummed her chipped fingernails against the table of the Nasty Burger.  Danny had vanished nearly an hour earlier and the manager had long since replaced the lights that had broken during Danny’s tantrum.  She and Tucker were still there as the sun began to set, waiting to see if Danny was going to come back and apologize.  Well, Sam was waiting for Danny to come back.  Tucker was there because Sam had blackmailed and bribed him into staying.  

“So what if he’s a ghost,” she muttered darkly for the seventh time since Danny had disappeared, “that doesn’t give him an excuse to be that rude.”  

“He’s scared,” Tucker said as he grabbed a fry from his third order of cheese fries.  “It’s kind of hard to blame him for running away.  I’d be scared too.”

“I don’t care.”  Her eyes blazed.  “Danny’s our friend and he should be nicer to us.  We don’t care that he’s a ghost.”

“Are you…” Tucker trailed off, his eyes fixed firmly on the table, unable to look up into his friend’s eyes.  He cleared his throat.  “Are you a little… afraid of him?”

Yes, I am, actually.  The question is… why isn’t Sam as scared as everyone else??  She goes near Danny, AND she stood up to the ectopus thing when everyone else ran…

“He’s our friend Tucker!”  She couldn’t believe that he’d say that.  But even as she said it, a weird feeling surged up inside of her.  Even though he was her friend, there was no doubt about the fear that had been swirling through her all day.

“I know he is,” he said quietly, “but he’s not entirely human.  Some of the things he can do…”  Tucker looked up into her eyes and shrugged.  “There were times when I had to really fight not to run in the other direction.  Especially when he’s a ghost, you know?  And sometimes when he’s human.  Sometimes there’s no life in his eyes.”

Sam sighed and propped her chin up with her hands.  “I’m not afraid of him,” she said after thinking it through, “but yeah, I’m frightened of what he can do… and what he is.  But he wouldn’t hurt us, not on purpose.  It doesn’t really make sense…”

And no, that’s not the real reason why.  ;)  I’m not coping out like that.

Tucker nodded.  “Yeah...”  He popped the last of the cheese fries into his mouth and licked his fingers before glancing at his watch.  “Drat.  I missed supper.”

“You’ve been eating non-stop for over an hour!” Sam said incredulously.  “How can you still be hungry?”

“Fear does that to a person.”  

hehe… my friend and I have ‘horror movie’ night and we’re both wimps when it comes to horror and fear.  She eats, like, three pizzas a night, giving the same excuse.  When she’s scared, she eats.  Me?  When I’m scared, I just whimper and hide in a corner.

And darn her for being able to eat and eat and eat and still looking like she doesn’t.  SOME of us (me) have to exercise.

Sam pressed her eyes into the heels of her hands and groaned.  “What are we going to do tomorrow, Tucker?  I’m not sure I can take being around him like this for another day.  It’s too nerve-wracking being on my toes all day and checking over my shoulder to see where he is.  But we can’t ignore him.  He’s our friend.”

Tucker was silent for a long time.  “I think he understands,” he said very quietly.  “I think one of the things he’s afraid of is us running away in fear.  He knows we’re scared of him.”  He pushed a small pile of fry crumbs around his tray for a moment.  “But I don’t think he can really help it.  Maybe that’s just what he is now.”

“How does that help?”

He played with his salt for a few seconds.  When he spoke, Sam could barely hear him.  “I think that if we don’t go over and talk to him, he won’t come over and talk to us.  I think he’d understand.  That would solve the problem.”

Tucker…

I’m sooooo going to get killed for putting that in there.  BUT!  I needed to show just how scary Danny was… even to his most devoted friends.  Keep reading, that’s all I can say.  I do make up for it.  

“What?”  Sam’s voice was even softer than Tucker’s.  She couldn’t imagine the words coming out of her friend’s mouth.  “You mean stop being friends with him?  Ignore him because he’s different?  Run away because it’s not as easy being friends with him any more?  Not help him fix this?”

“Sam.”  He looked up at her.  “I don’t think this is something that is fixable.  I’ve been thinking all afternoon about this, and I’m pretty sure I know how Danny got to be like this.”  He shook his head sadly.  “I think the part of him that’s a ghost is what’s keeping him alive.”

See the next chapter for the long version of his theory. *science-y*

“So you’d just leave him?”  Sam fought back the tears that were threatening to appear in her eyes.

“He’s scary.  Did you see what he did to those french fries?  He did that because he was frustrated.”  He leaned across the table, looking the furious girl straight in the eyes.  “Sam, what’s going to happen when he gets frustrated with us?  What happens if he sinks even farther into this ghost persona?  Remember the park?  He was inches from attacking us.  I was willing to ignore that… but then he did it again here.  He looked me in the eyes.  There was murder in his eyes, Sam.”

And cue real life sinking in.  Danny’s got scary, uncontrollable ghost powers.  Anyone with a lick of sense would be running as far and as fast as they can.

“He won’t…”

“You don’t know that,” he cut her off.  “He’s obviously got no control over what he’s doing.  He could kill us and not even mean it.  The safest thing…”

“NO!” she screamed.  Silence fell in the Nasty Burger as she pushed her chair back and stood up.  She wasn’t going to sit here and listen to this.  This was Danny they were talking about; the one person that she trusted completely.  Not even Tucker could talk about him like this.  “I don’t care what the safest thing to do is.  Being friends isn’t always about doing the safe thing.  It’s about doing the right thing.”

I’m HTML-ed out.  I have GOT to stop using italics.

“Sam…”

“Shut up!”  She slammed her hand down on the table.  “You, Tucker Foley, are… are…” she was so furious that she couldn’t come up with an appropriately low and slimy metaphor.  She just gave a strangled scream and turned and stormed out the door.

I can never find appropriate metaphors until it’s too late either.  She’ll think of one in a few hours.

--

Danny slumped into the old sofa in the living room, closing his eyes tightly to try and force out the images of everything he’d seen that day.  “What a day,” he whispered.

“Did you say something, sweetie?” his mother asked as she walked into the room.  She had her lab goggles pushed up on her forehead and a basket of laundry balanced on her hip.

You wanted Fentons?  You get Fentons.  ;)

“No,” he moaned sourly as a chill breeze seemed to blow down his neck.  “I think I’ve just got a headache.”  

“What some aspirin?”

Danny shook his head and opened his eyes.  He glanced over at his mother, but his eyes were drawn to a small puppy sitting in the basket of laundry.  The mastiff had a thick, spiky collar, red-brown eyes, and appeared to be partially rotted.  “AH!” Danny yelped, jumping out of his feet with his eyes fixed on the ghost dog.

CUJO!  Is he really called that or is a fanon thing?  ‘Cause Cujo is a famous movie dog…

“What?” his mother asked as she checked behind her.  

Danny’s eyes flickered from the dog snuggling into the shirts to his mother’s confused face.  “Um…” he stuttered.  Just for a second he contemplated telling Maddie Fenton exactly what was wrong.  Mom, there’s a ghost dog sitting in your laundry and only I can see him because for some reason I’m a ghost part of the time myself.   But he choked it back with a small sigh.  Nobody would believe that.

“Oh, I know,” his mother chuckled softly, “that was my reaction when I saw it too.”  She nodded down at the basket.  

Blinking in confusion, Danny waited for her to continue.  

Okay, so in a bit of confusion and horrid inability to PLAN what I write, I missed a section earlier, and now am trying to compensate.  Unfortunately, I just glaze over it.  You probably wouldn’t notice if I didn’t point it out, however.  Can you find it?

“After getting that mess in the lab cleaned up, your father tried to integrate that new spectral engine into the dryer.”  She set the basket down, reached through the ghost dog like it wasn’t really there, and pulled out a mangled and torn shirt.  “On the positive side, it appears that we’ve invented an engine that uses the ambient emotional energy in the air – there was a fifteen percent decrease in the nominal power draw.  On the slightly more negative side, we can’t control it.  That extra energy comes and goes without warning and it blew out the motor somewhere during the ‘cool down’ cycle.  Look at all this mending I’ll have to con Jazz into doing for me.”  She dropped the shirt back into the basket with a small grin.

Yes.  I forgot to mention the fact that the lab got completely trashed and there wasn’t any questions.  Still aren’t… actually.  Come on.  Their lab got TRASHED and they don’t question it???  Darn.  That’s a horrible plot hole.  I fix it later by putting it down as a ‘mystery’.  Maddie and Jack do not know how the portal/window started to work, and they don’t know that Danny was down in the lab.  They figure the mess was a side-effect to the belated turning-on of the ghost portal.  There.  That’s my excuse for forgetting to stick in the breakfast scene in chapter… one.

“Oh,” he managed to get out.  The dog burrowed out from under the ragged clothes and vanished into the kitchen.  For a few seconds he watched the door, waiting for the puppy to reappear, but then dragged his eyes back to his mother.  She was looking at him with concern.

“Are you sure you’re okay?  You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

*dies*  Oh the irony.

“Yeah,” he said softly.  He shot her a pale smile.  “I’m fine.”  

She nodded slowly.  “Well, take some aspirin and get to sleep early tonight.  If you need me I’ll be bribing your sister into fixing all these shirts.”  She winked at him, her smile growing.  “Try to stay away from your father tomorrow – that Ghost Portal we’ve been working on mysteriously started working last night and he’s been dying to find someone to ramble his theories to.”  Picking up the basket and sending him one last smile, she headed up the stairs.  

Danny sunk back into the sofa with a groan.  Nothing really seemed to be able to express the horrible twisting sensation in his stomach.  He could feel the terror, nervousness, and panic simmering just under the extreme exhaustion that was settling into his mind.  But strangely there was something else there as well.  Hidden beneath the fear was a tiny bit of excitement.

What was going to happen tomorrow?

--

Tucker pushed the power button on his computer and waited for the comforting whir of the hard drive.  He glowered at the screen as it buzzed into life, thinking back over the horrible mess at the Nasty Burger.

Sam had just left him like that, sitting in the totally silent restaurant, everybody staring at him.  He’d deserved it on some level; Danny Fenton was his best friend and he really shouldn’t have said what he’d said.  Up until today, he’d been sure that he’d do anything for Danny.  He would have said that he’d jump off a cliff for him.  But now?

Tucker shivered, playing with the mouse.  That was before he’d seen Danny glare at him, power whirling around his friend, a cold hand clawing at Tucker’s heart.  He could ignore what happened in the park since that ectopus thing had been there, but how could just ignore the Nasty Burger?  It had all been kind of fun and mysterious until he’d seen the uncontrolled frustrated rage in his friend’s eyes.  Now, though, deep down inside of him, he knew that hanging around with Danny was an extremely dangerous idea.  Danny barely had any control over these powers he’d been cursed with.  One argument might be all it took for the teen to accidentally kill them.  

It all came down to one all-encompassing question.  Which was more important to him: Danny’s friendship or not risking his life?  

*snicker*  Tucker-angst.  But we all know which he ultimately picks.  Right?  It’s just the question of how long it takes.

Logging onto the internet, Tucker sighed and stared blankly at the Google homepage, not having decided where he wanted to go.  

HAPPY 9TH BIRTHDAY GOOGLE! *random trivia*

There was no question that Danny would understand if Tucker pulled away.  He bit his lip.  Danny’d be hurt, but he wouldn’t push it.  Tucker let go of the mouse and buried his head in his arms, his brain starting to hurt.  

“Tucker?” his mother called.  She knocked on his door before letting herself in.  “I heard you come in.  Are you hungry?”

Uh-oh… Tucker’s mommy.  She’s modeled after my other-mother… so this ain’t gonna be good…

Tucker, head still buried, shook his head.  

Janet walked over and rubbed his shoulder.  “What’s wrong, sweet heart?”

Tucker groaned into his arms.  His mother was always a little too perceptive.  Although he had to admit that it didn’t take a genius to know something was wrong when he skipped supper and was sitting like this.  She was usually pretty helpful though.  “If you had a friend,” he said, not lifting his head out of his arms, “that caught some kind of horrible disease that made it really hard to be around them… what would you do?”

Hehe… ghost-i-ness as a ‘horrible disease’.

His mother’s hand stopped its comforting circles.  “Is this ‘horrible disease’ a curable one?”

Shaking his head, Tucker glanced back at his mother.  Concern sparkled in her eyes when she saw the pain in his eyes.   “What if it was… dangerous?  How good of a friend would they have to be for you try and stay around them?”

Janet settled down on his bed, folding her hands in her lap.  “That depends,” she said, “on what kind of friend you are, not what kind of friend they are.”  She leaned closer.  “Tucker… where are these questions coming from?”

I feel a fortune-cookie message coming…

He winced and struggled to find something he could say.  “I… he… they… they don’t want everybody to know yet.  I’m not even sure I should know.”

“This ‘friend’ is a good enough friend that you’re lying to your mother about it.  That’s saying something already,” she said simply.  “You’re going to have to make your own decisions.  But if you get thrown in jail, I will kill you.  If you die, I will call your great-grandmother to make sure you are tormented forever in the afterlife.  And if this has to do with drugs, drinking, or sex, I will personally make your life a living Hell.”  

*wince*  Word-for-word what my own mother told me when I asked her for advice and she told me to make my own choice.

“Thanks,” Tucker whispered sourly.  

Word-for-word my response.  XD

She smiled.  “Tucker, I will say this.  A good friend is there for his friends when they fall down.”  She touched his chin and looked into his hazel eyes.  “He’s not there to fall down with his friends… he’s there to help pick them back up.  Understand?”

I knew that fortune cookie was here somewhere.

“Kind of.”

“Good.”  She stood up and brushed some imaginary flour off of her skirt before heading for the door.  “Now.  Are you hungry?”

Tucker shook his head.  “No, I ate with Sam at the Nasty Burger.”

She paused and glanced back at him.  “Where was Danny?”

Uh… what?

Caught completely flat-footed, Tucker fought for something to say as his face paled.  For one of the first times in his life, nothing jumped into his mind for him to say.  His normally talkative brain was dead silent.

“Ah,” Janet said quietly and closed the door behind her.

No, no, no… WHAT?!?!  Why does SHE know?  Who the freaking-hey wrote this?!?!  STOP THAT!

Tucker let his head drop backwards and he half-screamed.  He sat there for the longest time, staring up at the small cracks in the ceiling, contemplating Danny, his mother, and the whole messy situation.  Finally, with his neck protesting every movement, he turned back to the computer.  Shaking his mouse to clear the screensaver, he found himself staring at the internet.

But this time he had a small smile on his face.

Very carefully, he typed in one word: ‘Ghosts’.

--

Danny yawned and stretched under his warm blankets, glancing blearily at the alarm clock sitting next to his bed.  It was going to go off in a few minutes.  He curled up, fully intent on keeping his half-asleep state as long as possible.  All his problems from yesterday were out of his mind.  For these precious few moments, he felt like a normal teenager.

I love sleeping.  Wrote this after waking up… kind of… and not wanting to.

In the sleepy quiet of the early morning, he didn’t notice when the world blurred and faded around him, the soft sounds of his mother in the kitchen vanishing.  His mind fell into a dream-like trance.  Nothing around him seemed quite real.  He took a few deep breaths and let himself sink farther into his dream.

Things in his room misted into unreality in his mind.  The ceiling, walls, and floor vanished from his mind and left him feeling like he was floating in a world of nothingness.  And then he let the comfortable bed beneath him fade away…

He fell.  His eyes flickered open just in time to see the underside of his bed before he phased through the floor and down into the living room.  A startled yelp worked its way out of him just as the thought of how hard the living room floor was going to be flooded through his head.  With that one thought, the world around him took on a very real – if blurry and indistinct – solidness again.

hehe… he falled down go ‘boom’.

Danny crashed into the couch, bouncing once before tumbling to the floor.  He moaned, pushing himself onto his hands and knees and shaking his head to clear it.  The smell of apples on a crisp autumn morning swirled into his nose and he glanced up.  A giant bluish smudge was kneeling down in front of him, its apple smell tinged with the sounds of tiny claws skittering on a hard floor.  The blur made a sound and Danny tried desperately to focus on it to try to figure out what it was saying… or at least who it was.  This early in the morning, it could’ve been anybody.

Then, suddenly and without warning, everything was back to normal.  “Danny!” his mother said again.  Her eyes were wide with worry as she reached out and brushed his hair out of his eyes.  “Are you okay?  What’s wrong?”

Danny blinked a few times.  “I fell,” he said.  “I’m okay.”  He pushed himself unsteadily to his feet and smiled at her, wondering if his smile reached his eyes.  Still crouched on the floor, the skeptical look she was wearing seemed to indicate that it hadn’t.

“You sure?” she asked quietly.  “You didn’t look very good last night either.”

He nodded.  “I was just hungry…” he hesitated as he tried to form the lie in his head, “so I got up a little early to get something to eat and… tripped?”  Forcing himself groan when his sentence came out as a question (and an obvious lie), he waited for his mother’s answer.

You think she’ll call him on it?  I’m sure she knew it was a lie.

“Oh.  Well, we’re out of cereal,” she said after a moment, still studying him, “so you’ll have to have oatmeal this morning.  I left out some of the instant stuff next to the microwave for you and Jazz.”  She pushed herself to her feet.  “You know you can talk to me if you ever need to, right?”

Microwaves… microwaves…. MICROWAVES!!!!  It’s COMING!

“Yeah.”  Danny sent her a grin that was a bit more real than his last one.  

She laughed softly and ruffled his hair as she turned and headed upstairs to get ready for the day.

Danny watched her leave before glancing up at the ceiling he had just fallen through and heading into the kitchen.  He really was hungry.  Grabbing a bowl and the small packet of oatmeal, he let his mind wander back to what had just happened.  “I fell through the ceiling,” he whispered in quiet disbelief.  “I wasn’t a ghost this morning, I was human… so why did I fall like that?”

After dumping the oatmeal into the bowl he walked over to the sink, quickly filled the bowl, and mixed the cold glop distractedly with his finger.  “Was it because of how I was feeling?  That un-real-ness?”  He made a face as he dropped the bowl into the microwave and punched two minutes into the timer.  “Is un-real-ness even a word?”

Is it??

He leaned against the counter before he stared the microwave, gazing out into the cloudy morning air.  The world blurred quietly into what he was growing to term ‘ghost’ mode, and he watched the ghost dog from last night trot across the back lawn.  It was easy to see the bullet hole in the dog’s head against the greenish smear that was the outside.  “I fell through a ceiling and I’ve got the dead specter of a puppy haunting the laundry.  Huh.”  Shaking his head at the absurdity of it all, he squinted down at the black smudge that was the microwave and felt for the ‘start’ button.  He pressed it.

drum roll…

“AH!”  He barely stifled the scream as he backpedaled away from the thing and pressed his back against the far wall, his hands pressed against his ears.  The device had shrieked into existence, smashing waves of energy against his senses.  The front of his body felt like someone was jabbing small pins into his skin.  It screamed into his ears and echoed into his mind, dashing all of his thoughts into shards.  Distantly, he thought he could hear the painful howl of the puppy.

For the very first time, he railed against the blurry world that surrounded him.  There was no way he was going to stay like this.  He needed his mind to be completely human and he needed it now.  He couldn’t wait for it to fade away like yesterday.  He twisted his mind and everything slammed into clear existence.  The agonized howl cut off and the demonic shrieking of the microwave vanished.  The startling agony of the waves of energy disappeared, leaving his skin prickling and aching.  Danny panted softly, staring in horror at the device across the kitchen.

Now, I’d explain WHY… only I can’t… ‘cause that’s a part of the story… all I can say is the two words ‘electromagnetic spectrum’ and wonder if you can figure it out. ;)

The most important point for now is he controlled whether he was ghost or human for the very first time.  He’s learning control.

“Danny?” his mother called, sticking her head around the doorframe and glancing over at him.  “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he said shakily.  The microwaves beeped quietly, signaling the fact that the oatmeal was done.  “I just thought I… heard something.  But it’s gone.”

She walked the rest of the way into the kitchen and crouched in front of him, pressing the inside of her wrist to his forehead.  “You’re skin’s so cold,” she murmured in concern.

No, his skin temperature is NOT colder ‘cause he’s part ghost.  His normal temperature is a fairly normal 98.6F.  He’s colder because... oh, I can’t tell you that EITHER!  Darn!!!

Pushing her hand away, Danny pushed himself to his feet.  “I’m fine, I just thought I heard something.”  When his mother’s expression showed that she was willing to argue, Danny forced a small smile on his face and rolled his eyes.  “Can I eat my breakfast before it gets cold or are you going to drag me to the hospital for a physical?

She let a small smile flicker across her face.  “Fine, fine, but if you’re not feeling well, I want you to stay home from school today.”  

Danny sighed and sank into a chair when his mother was gone, steadfastly ignoring the quiet beeping of the demonic microwave telling him is food was warm.  The idea of staying home from school today was extremely tempting.  He could hang around his room, pretending to be sick, trying to get a hold on these… ghost powers.  Maybe he could figure out why he fell through the ceiling.

Then he groaned sourly.  He still needed to apologize to Sam and Tucker for how he acted yesterday at the Nasty Burger.  He needed to tell them that they were right and that he was sorry.  One of the reasons why he’d been so adamant about the fact that ghosts weren’t real was the worry that he was dead, just like Sam had been trying to tell him.  And then there was the thing with the fries.  He wasn’t at all sure of how he was going to explain why he’d been so angry at the fries.  It was just that after everything else that had happened that day, not being able to pick up a simple french fry had been impossibly frustrating.  It had just bubbled over.  The nearly identical expressions of fear on their faces afterwards had only made things seem worse.  He had run away because he needed to get away and clear his head.

That, and he’s newly full of ‘ghost’ instincts, which also includes a VERY short temper and a bunch of other stuff.

All told, it wasn’t something you could just apologize for over the phone or in a text message.  He’d probably have to actually track them down at school – no doubt they would be avoiding him.  He would have avoided himself if possible.  Why would you want a friend that scared you so much?

I agree and the text message thing.  On a related note, don’t ever break up with someone via text message.  I had someone do that to me and it’s very rude.

*random* It’s 6:11pm and the telemarketers are calling.  Again.  They always do right at this time and I’m finally learning to NOT pick up the phone.

Staring morosely in the direction of the microwave (which was beeping quietly and still holding his oatmeal hostage), he muttered, “To school.  Fantastic.”

He stood up and walked over to the microwave, pausing a few feet away and studying the thing.  The mind-shattering noise echoed through his head and his skin prickled with remembered pain for a moment.  He slowly reached out a finger and shakily moved closer to the button that made the door open.  Just before it touched the machine he yanked his hand back.

“This is stupid, Fenton,” he hissed.  “You can’t be afraid of a microwave.  Open it already.”

hehe… stupid torture, sorry.

His hand snapped out and pressed the button, but he couldn’t quite stop the flinch when the door popped open.  He snatched the steaming bowl of oatmeal and slammed the door shut, retreating into the living room to eat his oatmeal.  “The couch is just so much more comfortable,” he grumbled quietly, just in case anybody was watching.  Daniel Fenton was not afraid of a stupid microwave.

--

It might have only been his second day of school, but Danny decided he now hated coming to school.  The invisible creatures that scampered around feeding off the human population seemed to congregate where there were lots of people.  Hundreds of them flocked to the town’s center for drama and angst: Casper High School.  

To make it all the worse, he hadn’t been able to track down Sam or Tucker that morning to apologize.  Not that he had looked very hard… he’d spent most of the early morning sitting on a bench way out of the way, watching out of the corner of his eyes as dozens of spectral creatures flocked to the school on the heels of his peers.  Thankfully they seemed to steer clear of him, but they were still creepy and it had taken nearly fifteen minutes of persuasion to get himself off the bench and closer to the school.  

Sam was normally in his first hour class, but she had some big volunteer thing she had been doing and was probably off doing that.  Tucker, who also should have been there, was mysteriously absent.  Danny spent the entire hour with his eyes carefully trained on his paper, trying really hard not to think that his friends were avoiding him.  Somewhere between the eleventh and twelfth flinch away from something flitting on the edge of his vision, he began to seriously contemplate whether or not he could handle being around his parents all day and being home schooled.

Wouldn’t that be horrible?  Home schooling?

As it was, Danny slunk into his next class without much hope left for the day.  He sank into his desk for math – his worst subject on a good day – and tried his hardest not to stare at the three bats flapping around the room.

“Mr. Fenton,” the math teacher called and Danny quietly raised his hand, showing that he was there.  As Mr. Falluca took the rest of attendance, Danny focused his attention down on his paper.  But he still couldn’t help the nervous tic at a flicker of iridescent light.

Another confession.  I have no idea if this Falluca guy does math.  I was just told that he IS a canon teacher and I took a guess.  He doesn’t do gym, ‘cause that’s the creepy female, and he doesn’t do social studies, English, science, or literature because Lancer seems to do all of those.  ;)  So I guessed at which was left.  

He doesn’t really do home-ec or something… right?

“You okay, Fentonia?” a voice whispered from his right.  

Danny looked up into the face of Dash Baxter, resident football star and sports idol.  He couldn’t really figure out what to say to that.  Dash usually went out of his way to torment and torture the ‘losers’, and now he was asking if Danny was alright?  For that reason, Danny figured it was some kind of trick – one he wasn’t going to fall for.  He settled for giving Dash a confused look.

You wanted Dash too.  Dash’ll be crueler as the story goes on, stuffing people into lockers and stuff.  But he’s here.

“Jeez, Fenton, I was just wondering if that twitchy-thing of yours was contagious.”  Dash rolled his eyes and turned back to his own notes.

Danny curled his fingers in a fist under the desk.  Even Dash was noticing that something was wrong.  Great.

For a second, the world felt like it was going to blur into ‘ghost’ mode, but Danny fought it off with a quiet snarl.  He was going to be normal all day at school today, even if it killed him.  An image of his friend’s terrified faces filtered through his mind.  He never wanted to see that expression on them ever again.  That is, if they were still his friends.  He needed to get control of this… whatever it was.

Where ARE his friends anyway?  Did they choose to run?

As the teacher droned away in the front of the class, Danny moaned and dropped his chin onto his arms.  The whole question was how?

--

Bring back the evil.  XD

Not too far away, the well-dressed man from the Nasty Burger leaned against the wall of his hotel room, opened his cell phone, and called up a small picture he’d taken of the three friends yesterday afternoon.  He gazed down at the snapshot like the pixels would reveal the identity of the black-haired teenager.  “What a display,” he mussed quietly, “so much potential.”  After yesterday, there was no doubt that the boy was infused with a large amount of spectral energy.  The question was how much.

“Is he powerful enough to obtain a supernatural form, or is he just an overly powerful medium?”  Either way, the boy would become an incredible asset to his plans with some practice, proper guidance, and, of course, a lot more control than the young man had displayed in the restaurant.  Before he could approach the youth, however, he would need more information.  He needed to learn just what and who this boy was.

Scarlet flames flickered around the edges of his blue-grey irises.  “Calev, Yosef, Tal.  Come here.”  He accompanied his echoing words with a wave of blood-red energy that flooded out in every direction.

hehe… Here comes my own little twist to fanon.  ;)  Silly idea that cropped up a while ago.

He wrinkled his nose as the room became quickly full of the smell of dusty feathers.  Two ancient and transparent vultures appeared out of nothing, the third a heartbeat behind them.  The three brothers supposedly had been slain for ‘accidentally’ flying a little too close to the crucified form of Jesus of Nazareth, making them just over two thousand years old.  The details of their life’s story shifted as often as the wind, but the creatures were usually reliable and helpful.

I looked it up, people.  I did the math.  They died at the right time.  They’re 2008.  Making them born right around the year 0.  I’m not a history person, but I think I remember that the AD thing means ‘After Death’… so it’s very possible that they died at the same time as Christ.  And they’re Jewish.  Now.  I’m neither Jewish nor Christian, so don’t yell at me for this, k?

The closest of the birds spread his wings, huge gaps where feathers had been torn from him.  The head of an arrow showed just above his right shoulder, the bloody fletching still sticking out of his left breast.  The bird opened his beak and let an ear-splitting caw fill the air.  His blood-red eyes fixed on the human, energy sparkling on his broken wings.

The man’s blue-grey eyes instantly flared red.  “You dare,” he hissed, the room suddenly filling with energy.  Power snapped and crackled around the two of them as they stared at each other.  After just a few moments, the bird closed his wings and settled back down.  “Stupid ghosts,” the man snarled.  They were constantly fighting him for dominance.

“You see this boy here?”  He held out the screen to the spectral creatures and tapped on the small screen with a little more force than necessary.  His eyes were still a sparkling, angry red.  

The eldest vulture, Yosef, nodded what remained of its bald head.  

I do know some Yiddish.  This is pronounced more like ‘Joseph’.

“I want you to find him and follow him, but don’t let him know you’re there.  I want you to study him.”  The man glared at the three ghostly birds for a long moment, power coursing through him and around the birds to reinforce his command.  “I need to know how powerful he is.”

Ooh… should he start stalking after Jack soon?

Calev – the smallest vulture – bowed his head and shrugged his wings in submission, scarlet eyes glittering.  Yosef merely nodded again.  It was the tallest of the three, Tal, that kept his eyes locked on the man.  After a long, tense moment, he nodded as well.  “Rikhtik,” he squawked.  The three of them vanished.

Calev=Caleb, Tal… is Tal.  :D  Rikhtick (phonetic, so sound it out) means okay.

The man didn’t watch them leave.  His attention was focused down on the picture of the boy.  “Who are you?” he whispered.

--In real life, being a friend isn’t always easy.

(end chapter 4)