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Clear Days	By : WallyLondo Category: +1 through F > Danny Phantom > Het- Male/Female Views: 9108 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: This is a non-profit work. I do not own, nor do I claim to, Danny Phantom or any of its subsidiary or adjunct components.

Chapter List
- 1-Calling Out
- 2-Your World
- 1
- 2
To say the least, I'm happier with this chapter than the original chapter two, so I supposed I did what I wanted to. I don't know how much the average AFF reader looks into symbolism and whatnot, not being a model 'average reader' myself, but I think it will still serve as an acceptable plot movement for the casual reader once the story is complete. Enjoy.

The door swung open and nearly violently collided with the cabinet behind it right at the peak of its swing. Claire adjusted the back of her shirt so that it fully covered the small of her back. Carelessly, she crashed down into her school chair, coolly flicking her head from side to side quickly to straighten out the stray hairs that had become more obvious. The class was indifferent to her wonderfully typical attitude and truancy, besides the universal cringe at the screech of the ancient bureau’s bowing frame in a battle against her harsh treatment and the stubbornness of the solid ground.

Danny stirred, confined by his cage of a desk.

“What happens to the physiological effects of her fear?” the teacher paused in contemplation of the poorly worded inquisition. “Well, I mean, they aren’t there; they’re gone from her behavioral repertoire. It’s the Amygdala that generates the dilated pupils, the sweating, so she doesn’t experience them. If it is calcified off the way it is, none of the fear effects that it creates can possibly transpire, and so she can’t generate new fears of things. That’s not to say she couldn’t understand that she should be afraid of something, she just can’t be. Look, we’ll get back into this in the future; I know you all have to get going.” The words gradually faded into his hearing as he regained consciousness.

‘Who would ask questions about this? Surely they just want to dive out of here as quickly as possible. This isn’t important.’ Danny privately voiced his life grievances to himself. The first thing he saw through the film of sleep on his eyes was the pink-and-white blur of a girl sitting in front of him. He ran his fingers front to back through his dark greasy hair and watched as it bounced back forward into place, taking a look around, obviously exhibiting his awakening with a squint in his eyes and a robust stretch.

“Ah, glad to see you’re ready to join us, Danny.” He looked around the room. He was back in school.

“Right… sorry,” At the least, Danny was just glad to be alright, but a little confused by his reverie, too. “I guess a man can dream… I guess,” He contemplated to himself, awaiting what might be a similar outcome to the night after the town meeting, with a potential continuation beyond the abrupt interruptions. Sam had already accepted his invitation to meet on the hilltop over the telephone, and he was going to remind her at lunch if he could catch her. Danny thought to himself of how the chain of events seemed fairly plausible, sans, perhaps, the appearance of the shadow and witnessing his own downfall. It all felt so real, and returning to reality was a melancholy occurrence. Danny paused in consideration of the implications of his dream, nightmare, perhaps. It was a fleeting thought.

“Alright, finals begin on next Monday; for all of you, that means yours should be the first slot on Friday, and then you get to take off for your holiday breaks. I can’t stress enough that those of you who are not exempt from my test demonstrate your most studious behavior over the upcoming week.” She leaned in towards Danny, “That means you, too. Just because you did what you did doesn’t permit flunking another major examination. I’m no stranger to your records, and people like you build up a hefty stack of records.”

Danny sighed. “I know, I know.”

“Okay, tutorials are Monday morning and afternoon, and if you have any brief questions, I’ll probably be around school this afternoon for about an hour doing some paperwork. The rest of the week I’ll be around, but I will be fairly busy, so if you have something to say make sure you cover it after class today or on Monday – Well, we don’t have class on Monday, but I mean during tutorial. I. . . I’m sure you all understand. I’ll see you on Friday.”

Danny groggily stood up amidst the crowd and grabbed his backpack, slinging it over one of his shoulders and slinking delicately out the door. He stretched and gradually twisted his head from side to side, making a left turn for the cafeteria. The halls looked a lot crisper than the picture he remembered. He’d always found it funny how convincing a dream can be at the time in contrast to what reality really is. ‘The power of the mind. . .’ he wondered at the marvel.

Busting through the loose-hinged doors and having them delicately sling back into place behind him, Danny spotted Sam at the usual table, sitting idly with her head propped up by her two balled fists, wearing, to his surprise, the same new clothing he had seen in his vision just earlier. He raised a single eyebrow and slowed his pace for a moment. ‘Alright,’ he thought to himself, ‘I suppose I must have spotted her this morning on my way in. I like it. Don’t forget to complement it.’ He shrugged, undetected, and crept over, setting down his backpack beside him in the seat directly across from her.

“Hey, Sam, how’s it going?” Danny smiled.

Sam focused her vision out of a look of contemplation into space to a refined gaze at Danny. She looked him over and bent her mouth into a shy half-smile. She paused, just looking into his eyes. “I like the new look, didn’t see it in any of the newspaper articles,” she seemed to break the silence with something a little less than what Danny had expected.

Danny laughed a little, grinning. Not much of a hello after all the time they had spent apart, but they had been friends since young childhood, it was forgivable. “Yeah, the whole hero bit isn’t really my bag. All the media coverage and force promotion was really a pain. Well, I suppose we’ll get to cover that some more, later tonight.” Danny felt like a broken record. The tangibility of his fantasy made it seem as if he had said this all before.

“Oh, you mean at the meeting? We weren’t planning on going to the meeting, were we?” Sam had a furtive look about her, a concerned one.

“Nah,” Danny said with the distinct bite of innuendo in his voice and his face, shyly grinning that she had put some real thought into what they had agreed upon, “I’m glad you remembered from – well – however long ago we talked it over.” Sam averted her eyes and the corners of her mouth pursed in a sort of stifled smirk.

“And I’m glad you think my outfit’s alright. I played it to your keen sense of style,” Danny nodded, conveying his seriousness, but communicating that it was also facetious. “I noticed a change in your wardrobe, too. It’s… really nice.” Danny gave himself a tentative thumbs-up in his mind with points for remembering, but a definite deduction for the presentation.

Sam leaned on one of her open hands, letting the other fall to her lap, showing off her new hair draped off to one side.

“The hair’s really great, too. All of it, err… you.” Danny smiled awkwardly. “You know you’re really underappreciated for your beauty.”

Sam faced was flushed, particularly at her cheeks. “I don’t really have something like that to say to you. I can tell you from what people are giggling about around the town that you certainly aren’t underappreciated for your handsomeness.”

Danny felt significant in a good way again, a big-shot around people he might have actually known. “Is that right?” He tried to confirm, but partially in an effort to make Sam comfortable again.

“Oh, well. . .” she didn’t’ seem any less displaced, “I don’t know. You definitely get some compliments around here.”

“Don’t worry, the only ones of real significance are yours,” Danny did his job. Sam smiled and kindheartedly laughed at the banal politesse, only subconsciously acknowledging that he had brought her back to a feeling of normalcy.

“Oh, wait,” With raised eyebrows and the stereotypical enlightened finger pointed skyward, Sam reached into her backpack and pulled out a small matte-red box, the top tied on with a little white ribbon. She gingerly placed on the table and slid it across the table to Danny. “I hope you didn’t think I forgot,” Sam grinned, “Happy birthday, Danny.”

Nobody really could have caught the actual shock that he experienced at that. “Wait, what?” Danny rapidly processed this. As he thought about looking at the calendar, speaking to his parents and sister that very morning, seeing Tucker on his way out to prepare for the night’s town assembly as Danny headed into school, he realized that everybody but Sam had forgotten about his birthday. Even Danny had forgotten his own birthday. He was never big on celebrating that kind of thing, but people had never forgotten like that, especially not himself, and they usually had some silly idea of doing something for him. Danny sighed. “That’s today…”

Sam straightened herself out. “What, surely it’s today, right? Hey look, if I’m wrong, it’s not because. . .” She trailed off.

Danny nodded. “Yeah, it’s today.”

“I totally forgot,” he added, with a mild head-shake of disbelief and the raised inflection of a younger child in his voice, “Nobody has said a thing, but you.”

Sam reached across the table and put her hand on Danny’s own outstretched palm. “Hey, cheer up. Maybe they’re just throwing you a surprise party or something, and they want it to be as much of a surprise as possible.” Danny laughed a little, with an embarrassed shrug like he hadn’t heard what she had said.

“Thanks, Sam.” He wrapped his fingers around to the palm of her hand and gently grasped it. “I think that if I could have chosen somebody who I really wouldn’t want to forget my birthday, it would definitely have to be me,” Danny laughed at himself, “But you’re number two.”

“The new number two, eh?”

Danny laughed breathily, but only because they’d made Prisoner reference a thousand times before, and he grew used to having one thrown in here and there with little warrant or context to someone unfamiliar. “I don’t know if you should be concerned about keeping this position, as important as it is.” Danny took a long absorptive sigh.

“So, what exactly is it that you got me this year?” he rhetorically mocked her previous birthday gifts, lightheartedly, pulling on one of the ends of the tied ribbon with his free hand, and slipping it effortlessly off.

“I guess you’ll just have to wait and see.”

“Aww, no guessing game this year?”

Sam shook her head. “I don’t want you shaking the box or anything. I was careful to keep it safe in the office until just now before lunch; it’s a fragile and important gift.”

Danny looked a little surprised. “Oh is it?”

“Just open it.”

He reached down and placed his hand around the box’s top, smiling as he histrionically lifted it off the rest of the box.

With the motion of the top being pulled off to the side, a torrent of nearly opaque white light silently flooded out in beams obstructed only by the contour of the box-lid, and blinded Danny. He toppled off the back of his seat and hit the floor with a dull packing thud on his upper arm and shoulder at first, but then collapsing over onto his side and nearly losing consciousness, barely closing the box as he pulled it off of the table with him. All that filled his vision was the stinging glow of the light. Danny shielded his eyes with his arm and rolled over to face the ground. After he could see with certainty the intensity of the glare fading through his tan flesh, he opened his eyes again. All that was revealed was a blurry picture of what might have been the lunch room, but which was far less discernable. Danny curled himself up and buried his head in his chest, rubbing his eyes, trying to clear his vision. He looked up again, this was not the lunch room he was in, but he still couldn’t make anything out. He blinked rapidly, still recovering from the shock of the light.

Danny had to squint when he was finally able to clear his eyes enough to see. He was in a small white room, about the size of his own back at home. There was no furniture in the room, nor any details or lights on the walls or ceiling; it was as if it was illuminated from an invisible source within the walls. The only way one could define the cubic shape of the enclosure was by faint creased shadows inexplicably present towards the corners. From what he could tell, there was no way in or out of the room, and the fortifications all seemed fairly stable.

“Hello?” he called out, thinking that somehow he may just be having a horrible dream again. The walls yielded no reverberation to his words, and every move he made, the breaths he took, the shuffling of his clothing, all felt like it was being amplified to his hearing. He fell back to the ground, sitting in a peculiar static silence. Deciding to test the enclosure’s strength, Danny stood up and walked towards one of the walls. The cla-clack of his shoes as he moved only a few steps should have been enough for anyone in an adjacent holding room to hear. Danny swept his hand across the wall, and pressed on it, leaning his whole weight into the solid barrier. It did not yield, but it changed.

From behind the wall, Danny could hear the faint echoing of stifled music. It was some sort of symphony piece, blasting away from quite a distance, to the best of his perception. Danny raised his fist back behind his head and brought the side of it into the wall. “Hello?” he called out, assuming that surely somebody was the source of this music. “Hello!?” His calling out continuously provoked no response. He pounded the wall a few more times, but to no avail. Trying to take a grasp of the situation, Danny looked back to see if the box was still with him. It sat on the floor, lying on its side, open. Danny shuffled over to it.

He plucked the box, then the box top off of the floor and examined it. It was just an empty red box, nothing inside that could have emitted the light. Danny’s arms limped off to his sides and his fingers loosened, dropping the box. In desperation, he firmed his bicep and raised it off to his side, bending his forward knee and narrowing his eyes at the wall in front of him. He rushed towards the wall, and collided with it at full speed and with all of his might. It gave, Danny could have sworn, but when he pulled away and regained his balance, the wall stood just as firm as ever. He sighed and pivoted around on one of his legs, swinging the other outward and in large rotations as he walked in circles in the confinement.

With a mighty exhalation, Danny brought himself to a relaxed posture. He threw his arms out to his sides in a crucified position, and was ready to throw out his little catch phrase when he decided it was really unnecessary. What he expected to see was a pair of light circles emerge out of the thin air and change his form, but nothing occurred. He rethought his actions. “Alright,” he felt mocked, “I’m going ghost,” he paused momentarily.

Still nothing. Danny let his arms fall back to his sides once more. He looked around and took his weight off of his feet, falling backwards. As he crashed into the ground, he could feel a torrent of cold air rush through the vicinity and over him, chilling him to the very bone. Danny reached for the arms of his sweater and rolled them down, one by one, before looking to the source of the wind. Opening his eyes, he witnessed the walls and ceiling of his enclosure collapse all around him. He rolled over onto his chest and covered the back of his head instinctively. He didn’t feel anything as the pieces crashed down. Danny reluctantly looked out from cover of his arms, only to find that there were no apparent remnants of the place he had formerly been in.

His new domain was a similar one, but notably different in a couple ways. The music he had heard when he was in the room was mysteriously not present anymore; the floor was the same, but it stretched out to an infinite, continuous plane. The ceiling was just as similar, but it was a fair fifty meters up into the air, definitely unreachable with Danny’s current handicap. There was nothing clear where the well lit white ceiling hit the well lit floor at the distant horizons in all direction, only a blur. Danny spun around a few times to confirm that there was nowhere to go. It seemed that his opportunities had been greatly expanded, though still so bleak. Were he to head one way, only to find that it was a dead end, he would be twice as far from the right direction of travel.

Danny’s chest heaved up and down, breathing heavily through his mouth and bending his arms in a readied manner, should he have to act upon something. “Hello?” He called again, hoping that maybe someone might have heard his calls and answered them. His voice carried no echo in the unreserved chamber, just as before, only bluntly carrying to be heard a single time. “Hello? Is anybody out there!?” Danny spun around, looking to and fro.

He stopped cold in his movement when he felt something prompt the raise of the hairs on his neck and shoulder. Danny looked off to his side. A hand sat atop his shoulder, lightly, gently. Danny turned towards the figure behind him, throwing the hand off simultaneously. His eyes widened and his brow furrowed. In front of him was a female figure that Danny did not recognize, but seemed fairly nontoxic. Around her svelte form was draped a loose white cloth formed into a heavenly robe, its hood pulled on, and over her face so that could be seen of her were her slick, red lips.

She smiled, innocently. “Who are you? What is this? How did I get here?” Danny demanded. The figure clasped her hands behind her back.

She only slightly opened her mouth when she spoke. “You know the answers to these questions.” Danny loosened up.

“What?”

She smiled again. “Who am I, what is this, how did you get here?” she quoted him in a derisive character, “Did you even think to introspect, to ask these of yourself?”

Danny’s eyes widened, he cocked his head a little, and his eyebrows perked up. “Sam?” He finally recognized the voice, the face, and stepped up to her, grabbing the rim of her hood and pulling it back over her long black hair. Her look was striking without her standard purple lip gloss. She smiled furtively back at him.

“Am I?” She rhetorically quipped to his proposition. Danny leaned into a hug with his friend; a missed sight of sanity in whatever it was that consumed him. She didn’t budge or return the favor. Danny drew back in a distant, alien feeling.

“Are you- are you alright?” His look was concerning, scared.

“Do you think that I have any answers you don’t?” Sam spoke gently and almost monotonously, but still with her regular grace and charm. Danny was silent. “Don’t I look alright?” Danny nodded, diagonally, almost, after a brief pause.

“But… where is this? Please, Sam, tell me what’s going on here,” Danny couldn’t bear to become impatient.

“This is here. This is where you are; you are here.” She spoke fluidly and soothingly, the way she barely moved her lips to talk almost mesmerizing.

“I know that,” Danny didn’t have it in him to become frustrated at the nondescript nature of everything she said to him. “But, this is unlike anything I’ve ever seen, in the ghost zone and the real world alike. And why can’t I use my ghost powers?”

“Oh, can’t you?” She didn’t sound surprised, but still provocative.

Danny raised one of his eyebrows, while still furrowing the other. “No?” He clutched his fist tightly and took on a combative stance. “I’m going. . .”

“Why do you say that?” Danny stopped for a second.

“I- I don’t know. It always seems to work when I say that.”

Sam shrugged, almost undetectably with the delicate way she carried herself. Danny reprised his position, but to no avail. He closed his eyes and felt he had no choice. “I’m going ghost. . .” Nothing happened. He loosened up and stood fully upright again, shaking his head inquisitively at Sam.

“It doesn’t work.”

Sam paused, and blinked. “You didn’t expect that to work, did you? I mean you already tried before, right?”

Danny tensed the muscles around his mouth. “Alright, quit toying with me. Do you want to explain this, Sam? How did I get here, where is this?”

Sam slowly closed her eyes and lightly sighed. She reopened them. “You were conscious the whole time, right? How did you get here?”

Danny conceded. “Well, when I opened the box, there was. . .”

Sam cut him off. “I know exactly how you got here, all of that. You don’t have to tell it over from the beginning.”

“Well, why are you asking me how I got here then?”

Sam smiled a little at this. “You’re asking me,” she exhaled a drawn out breath. “Danny, turn around.”

He quickly pivoted, firming his arms out to his sides. “There’s nothing there.” The ‘huiffe wuiffe’ of Sam’s feet shuffling across the floor towards Danny was just as loud as ever. She slid her hands around his chest and up to his eyes, covering them gingerly. He tensed up, but tried to cooperate.

“No peeking,” She cutely remarked. Danny faithfully closed his eyes. Sam kissed the back of his neck, her cool breath sending goosebumps down his back. She removed her hands from in front of his eyes. “Alright, you can open them now. Take your time. . .” Her words trailed off into the wind that was picking up around them. Danny obliged and slowly lifted his eyelids.

His eyes flicked about the new skyline. His cheeks went pale and he shivered at the bone-chilling crosswind blowing through the high altitude. It was night, pitch black beyond the stars that hung coolly in the sky. Danny leaned forward and looked down. He and Sam stood atop a massive skyscraper, larger than any he had seen in his recent years confined to Amity Park. In the streets below, it was as if everyone had died. There was no traffic, no bustle, no movement discernable from the height he stood at. Danny turned around to face Samantha again.

“Wh- where are we?” He asked, almost holding himself back at the end.

Sam smiled. “You’re on top of a building; a tall one at that. But you’re not blind, I’m sure you knew that.” Sam felt detached and composed.

Danny sighed, and opened his mouth again. Nothing came out, and he slowly collected himself. “Is something wrong?”

Sam pouted and shrugged. “I’m alright. You seem a bit distressed though. Wonder why. . .” Sam was almost inaudible as her whisper dissolved into the breeze, her eyes dodging away.

Danny leaned into a heartfelt embrace with Sam. This time, she squeezed him back, and he turned to meet her gaze. As the muscles around her eyes tensed merrily, Danny opened his mouth, fitting it into the crooks of Sam’s. Surging his lips around in pattern, Danny developed a rhythm for his kiss, and Sam followed suit. With the passion building between them, the clinch was further intensified by Danny’s own tug, and Sam was able to release her grasp, moving her hands up and down his back. Danny pulled back from her again, minding his step from the certainly fatal drop to his backside. He smiled at her and brought his fingers to her face, petting her cheek gingerly with the back of his own hand.

“Does this mean something?” Danny asked, sarcastically, as if he had really proven some underlying point of his. “Is this all even real?”

Sam continued to grin back at him, dragging her hands down his back from their former position, off his hips and to her sides. The joy faded from her face. “You can dodge what it means to be real, hide from reality, but you cannot escape the dire consequences of this avoidance. This is more real than anything you have ever known.”

“What?” Danny couldn’t interpret this. Finally, she says something substantial, and he couldn’t even understand it. It was real . . . was that it?

She shook her head and moved her legs around, shifting her weight.

Sam brought her hands back up to Danny’s forearms and pulled him closer. “You have told yourself what you want to hear only, and telling yourself what you want to hear means hearing what you already know to be false. Keep that frame of mind, and you’ll never learn. I know that you meant what you said, but it might be in your best interest to reconsider your feelings.”

Danny shook his head, and managed to get off a restrained choking sound before Sam removed her hands from his arms and placed them square on his chest, leaning into him and pushing with all her might. He staggered backwards into the meager barrier at the edge of the roof, unable to gain a solid footing. Danny proceeded to trip and tumble over the very thing designed to keep him safely on the roof, and out into the airspace above the street, adjacent to the side of the massive structure. As he flipped backwards, he scrambled to take a grip on something, anything – the wall, a window, a gutter, but his fruitless efforts were marked by the pitiful sweeping squeak of his fingers on the smooth, newly-polished glass. Whilst he plummeted downward, Danny clenched his fists and squinted, making his best effort to return to his desperately-needed ghost form. He didn’t change. Continuing his transformation efforts, Danny made the quick reconciliation in his mind that this was it. He was over. The specks on the ground grew into recognizable forms and then into detailed models, and Danny relaxed his body. At terminal velocity, and with impact approaching, as if in a slowed version of time, his eyes flickered green, his hair shot stark white, and his garb transformed into his ghostly superhero wear. Danny was caught off guard when he spotted Sam, leaning over the edge of the building at him, now a hardly defined mass of wispily sailing white cloth, highlighted by her silky black hair.

He didn’t even hear the disastrous shatter of the glass and compaction of the car’s roof upon impact. The arc of his back struck first, shortly followed by his legs, all of these serving as an axis for his limp head to rotate on as it wrenched backwards and cluttered his hair with miniature, rectangular fragments of glass from the windshield it shattered.
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Clear Days