[2] Compromises

The eastern sky was beginning to turn blue again when Danny finally phased into his bedroom. He hissed as he peeled his t-shirt off. He'd been caught right across the back with the sharpest claws he'd ever had the misfortune to come into contact with. Luckily they'd only skimmed him (instead of skinning him).

The thermos lay on the floor where he'd dropped it. Its little light blinked red instead of green. Occupado.

The victory was hollow, though. He kicked it across the floor until it thunked softly into the bookshelf. He hoped Spectra and Bertrand were really damn uncomfortable in there because he wasn't putting them back into the zone for at least a day. Served them right for fucking up what could have been the best night of his young life. Instead, he had spent the last few hours chasing them out of a nursing home, through downtown Amity, and into a closed dentist's office before finally capturing them. Not before getting a few choice cuts and bruises (seventy percent of which could be attributed to dental equipment) and one disappointed and very tired girlfriend.

After the battle was over she had almost fallen asleep on Tucker's shoulder as Danny vainly tried to force the smoking remains of a dentist's chair back into one piece. After Jazz had left in her rickety old Ford, with a sleepy Tucker riding passenger with his boots up on the dashboard, Sam had let out such an impressive string of yawns that Danny had carried her home bridal style, which she usually objected to on the grounds of retaining her gothic dignity. But she'd allowed it with no protest tonight. Despite the howling wind as he flew through the upper class district toward her house, her eyes had fluttered shut by the time he reached her bedroom.

All he'd wanted was to climb back into the soft bed with her. He wanted to do way more than that. But he settled for pulling the thick blanket up over her and brushing a strand of hair away from her lip. He didn't think she was asleep yet but she didn't open her eyes, and she said nothing as he flew out the way he came.

So now he stood in his own dark bedroom, alone, gingerly poking the bruises on his ribs. They were only skin deep, thankfully. It wasn't so bad. Except that he was alone.

He fell heavily onto his unmade bed. The stars that had been stuck to his ceiling for ten years weren't glowing; his room had been dark all day. Things had changed a lot in the last ten years, but cloudy days followed by dark nights would always equal out to dark ceiling stars. He phased his jeans off and threw them at the pile of laundry by his door. And missed.

Whatever.

He rolled over, turning away from his window. At least it was a Saturday tomorrow. The sky was already growing bright. The sun would be up soon, forcing its way through his eyelids. Was it even worth trying to sleep? Groaning, he pressed his pillow against his face. Ruined, ruined, ruined. A funeral march of disappointment battered the inside of his skull.

For twenty minutes he flipped back and forth, trying to block out the annoying shade of blue peaking through his blinds. Eventually he threw the pillow, which hit his desk and knocked off his backpack. He stared at his shoes, which were by the window. After a while he realized why the sky had reached a maximum low-level brightness and what that faint sound was; it had begun to sprinkle outside. He stared at the ceiling. This was so stupid.

He found himself standing, unsure what he had stood for. He stared at his shoes again. Maybe he wouldn't try to sleep after all.

He sat back down on his bed, eyeing himself in the mirror on the opposite wall. In the subdued morning light he looked thin and ragged. He didn't know what the hell he was supposed to do to fix this. Why couldn't they have normal relationship problems? Like "you forgot our anniversary and now I'm mad" or "people are flirty with you and I don't like it" or something. Swiveling his head more toward the mirror, he wiped a splotch of smeared white toothpaste from the side of his neck.

Rhetorical question. It was for the same reason they couldn't have a normal relationship of course. Same reason Danny couldn't have a normal anything.

His bed looked small and empty. For a brief moment he imagined Sam laying there, asleep on his other pillow, her dark hair fanning out the way it always would as if she was underwater, her arms tucked underneath her, her pale skin gray and warm in the darkness. He instantly wished he hadn't done that, because he had the sudden urge to reach out and touch her. She wasn't there.

He stood again, abruptly, and fished his clothes off the pile on the floor to tug them back on, tripping on the jeans. He was halfway through rebuttoning his shirt when his bedroom door creaked and he wheeled around, ready to stammer his way through an explanation to his parents for why he was just getting home at five-thirty, but went slack-jawed when Sam slipped into his room and closed the door with a soft click.

"What.." he began stupidly, and Sam jingled her keys in response, before tossing them onto Danny's desk. His parents had given in and made copies of the house key for her and Tucker long, long ago. But that wasn't what Danny had meant. He didn't know what he meant. His jaw flapped a couple times before he just closed his mouth again, fingers still frozen on the fourth button of his shirt.

But as she strode toward him purposefully his brain fired up again, telling him he needed to speak, he needed to apologize or something, anything, say something noble or nice or boyfriendly, anything it took to erase that angry look she had on her face as she cornered him on the opposite end of his room, staring him down like a tiger on the prowl. And when he did at last open his mouth to speak, when he'd been backed all the way up to the far wall, he barely had time to suck in the breath that would fuel his apology before Sam had interrupted him by standing on her toes and kissing him.

He stumbled back and together they fell into the wall. Danny's head rapped sharply on the framed Hubble Deep Field poster. Whatever feeble half-baked parts of an apology speech he'd manage to construe in his mind evaporated as Sam tried to meld them both into the poster. After a heated minute she pulled away. She had that look on her face, the one she got whenever Tucker said something ignorant by accident which meant she was about to launch into a lengthy political lecture about right and wrong.

But when she opened her mouth to dole out whatever wisdom she had prepared for him, Danny blurted loudly, "I think you should break up with me."

Sam closed her mouth, arching one eyebrow at him lazily. Her fingers tapped on his shoulders. Nervously, he awaited the verdict.

After a very heavy pause, Sam shrugged and pursed her lips disinterestedly. "Yeah. Yeah, okay."

Danny watched her hands as they fell from his shoulders to her sides. They went so slow, like he was in a dream. His tongue was glued to the back of his teeth. The part of his brain that formed speech patterns lit up with an automated response. But even as he said, "Really?" he looked up and saw plain as vanilla on her face that she was only being Sam.

"No," she deadpanned, "you stupid idiot."

Danny lowered his gaze, half relieved and half disappointed. "You should, you know-" But she was already kissing him again. The shallow cuts on his back rested on the frame behind him uncomfortably. "Sam-"

Sam responded by throwing her head back and groaning. "Stop. I don't want to do the whole relationship drama thing," she complained. She huffed and her expression softened a bit, then she snaked her arms around his neck, scraping one fingernail amusedly at a bit more dried toothpaste on his collarbone. "Listen, I know it sucks," she said, with more tenderness than she usually spared anyone. "Yeah, if our lives were different we'd have more time to spend with each other but they're not and we don't but I still appreciate the time we do get, okay? We make the most out of what we get." She stopped to take another deep breath, as if saying something romantic was causing her extreme physical fatigue. "And sometimes we have to make compromises. I can live with compromises."

Danny grinned bitterly, resting his hands on her firm biceps, his forehead on hers. He hated how she was always right. She was raising her eyebrows at him, waiting.

"So, what then?" Danny snapped, caustic. "We accept it for what it is? We just run out the clock until the next ghost attack?"

"No, no. We race the clock."

"What... oh." Sam was running her hands up the inside of his shirt along his cool skin. She looked up into his eyes again and everything else had been sapped away from her face, all the sarcasm and practicality and even the grudging romance, everything but a touch of wanting.

Despite himself, despite everything, he found himself opening up his mouth and spitting out the first joke that came to mind.

"So... you're saying... you wanna make sweet sweet compromises?"

He started to laugh at his own joke but then his hands flattened against his wall as Sam pushed up on him, pressing her hips against his without even a hint of preamble. He expected her to make fun of the joke or rebutt him wittily, but instead she shocked him by simply saying, "Yes."

That was it. There was nothing left after that but her hips. And her hands. And her breath, which was suddenly on his neck, hot and heavy. Humming softly he reached one hand up behind her neck to guide her mouth towards his - but instead she caught his wrist and began dragging him toward his bed.

He started to grin (she looked so damn serious, her face set like stone) as she sat at the edge of his bed, still pulling unceremoniously on his arm, but then he caught sight of the thermos. Still blinking red, down by the base of his bookshelf. It sent a flash of uncertainty through him, a sharp reminder, like the five minute warning in the SAT, like someone had flipped over the minuteglass and he was watching as the sand began to fall. He allowed Sam to yank him down then, crawling onto the bed toward her as she settled down into his rumpled blanket. He could feel the sand trickling now, and he was gonna be damned if he'd let it all trickle out before they got what they wanted this time around. Even if it meant compromising. He could live with compromises too. He would compromise until he had nothing else left in the world if it meant he could still have her.

He locked his fingers through hers, pressing her hands down above her head into the mattress, attacking her lips with as much fervor as Sam had his at the beginning of the night. He remembered laughing off her urgency. It had been so stupid of him to think they had spare time, that his plans might have given them that. Sam's back arched off the bed and he pressed his thigh into the crook between her legs, sucking on the side of her neck, tasting her skin, leaving a trail down to her collarbone.

"Wait," she said abruptly, as he dug a hand up under her shirt. "Your sister.." She glanced at his headboard, where it lay against the wall his bedroom shared with Jazz's.

Danny glared at it, then was struck with an idea. "It's fine," he said, "we'll just go upstairs."

Before she could question the fact that they were already upstairs, Danny grabbed hold of her and transformed, to phase them up through his ceiling, through a crawl space, and into the dark OPs center. She dropped nimbly onto her feet, and in the dull blue blinking lights from the wall of electronics on the opposite end of the room he saw her swiveling her head around. "Up here?" There was a sarcastic "Seriously?" there between the lines. Her eyes flashed blue as Danny reversed his transformation.

"Not here."

Danny looked over to the stairwell pointedly, then half floated half bounded across the room, pulling her stumbling along after him, and phased them through the door on the other side of the railing, into the crowded storage room.

The space was packed nearly floor to ceiling with old boxes full of stuff like baby clothes and books and piles of half finished inventions and parts and pieces of things long forgotten by his parents. Danny, looking around hastily in the dark with only his green lit hand for a light and the very faint light of day leaking in through a vent in the far corner, yanked down a few boxes from the top shelf by the door and pillaged through them, tossing old Christmas sweaters everywhere until a box yielded a handful of blankets.

He took Sam's arm again and led her along intangibly through shelves and shelves and boxes and boxes until they came upon the back wall, where two old brown leather couches and a matching armchair sat wedged together, lonely and forgotten, gathering dust. Though the thick wall he could just make out the sound of sprinkling water hitting the side of the house. Danny turned to ask Sam to help him lay out the blankets, but when his eyes met hers she lunged forward, crunching plastic underfoot as she crossed over a fallen rack of CDs, pushing him back onto the couch, onto the pile of blankets he held haphazardly under his other arm.

Warmth clouded his senses. It flooded through him and smothered any hint of any other emotion. Sam's hands roved his chest madly, and came to rest eventually in his hair, where she held on as if her life depended on it while he hugged her body as close to his as he could without crushing her. The blankets were bunched up beneath him uncomfortably and the air in the storage unit was stagnant and dank, but he could only smell her now, was breathing her mint-tinged breath and the entoxicating scent of that same perfume she had been wearing now for six years and beneath that the smell of upturned soil, as if she had only just come from the greenhouse.

Her hips moved down fluidly against his with the motion of a wave, and Danny groaned against her lips, moving his hands to her sides, pulling her down again, and again. He wasn't nervous anymore, strangely, not at all. He didn't have time to be nervous. He squirmed beneath her, spilling her off him toward the backside of the couch, where she fell half buried into the disarrayed blankets. Hesitating, just for a moment as he leaned over her and pressed a hand against the warm fabric on her stomach, he remembered the way her jeans had shed so slowly from her legs, the hint of pink that had crept into her cheeks as he steadfastly unclasped her bra. The slowness and the drinking it in.

But the moment was gone. Sam was staring up at him, barely visible in the dark, one hand reaching around his neck and tugging him beckoningly, as if asking him why he'd gone away.

"Come here," she demanded abruptly, moving her grip to tug on his shirt. He allowed himself to be pulled toward her again, and when Sam began to yank at his shirt he grabbed hold of it, phasing it away, tossing it behind her.

For a moment he expected her to scold him, and throw out a joking "No cheating!"

But she said nothing. She only responded by squirming and struggling to remove hers as well, so he obliged, phasing it away from her effortlessly. He kissed the top of her breast and she sighed. Here he nearly paused. To bask for a while, to go through the motions, to take his time like he was wont to do whenever Sam's clothes started coming off piece by piece.. But then it passed. Sam was already kicking off her shoes beneath him and trying to undo the button on Danny's pants. So, again, he obliged. Without much ceremony he quickly phased away the rest of their clothes, tossing them behind him onto the pile of broken CD cases, but not before fishing the unopened condom from his back pocket that he'd been trying to open for weeks.

Awkwardly he rolled it on with a surge of self-consciousness, but it faded when Sam's hands moved up around his waist, pulling him toward her. He wished he could see her. It was so dark; he remembered now, far too late, that there was a hanging light somewhere in the storage room that he could've turned on. He poised over her, all his weight on his arms, and gently probed with the very tip, searching for the entrance... but he suddenly stiffened and coughed as a spark of ice like a coiled snaked flashed out in his chest, forcing itself up like bile into his throat. He coughed again, turning away from Sam as a chilled mist came out through his clenched teeth and his nose.

"What are you waiting for?" she said, clutching at his hips. Hers wiggled impatiently beneath him. Had she seen? Did she feel his breath chill for a moment?

"Just uh, thought I'd make you wait a tiny bit longer..."

Danny reeled, options and possibilities and logic sailing through his brain, like fast changing tv channels.

They all sailed by.

"I don't want to be teased anymore," she said, gritting her teeth, "I just want - ah -" she was silenced abruptly when Danny found what he was looking for.

"I know," he said. Slowly he pushed in further, and Sam winced, ever so slightly, and dug her fingers harder into his skin. "Me too."

That coiled snake was still settled icily in the center of his chest, thrumming on his senses like a breeze on a spiderweb. But it was small, the feeling fainter now. A natural portal must have opened up somewhere in the surrounding neighborhoods. Danny quelled it, burying it as deep as he could manage, and pushed forward until he'd gone as far as he could go, his hips settled tightly against hers.

He pressed his lips against her neck as he pulled back, slowly, and she shuddered against his chest. Stars danced on the inside on his eyelids.

He pushed in again, as slowly as he could manage, trying to stay conscious of her - was he hurting her? He brushed his thumb across her cheek and realized she was biting her lip really hard. "You okay?" he managed to say.

"Yeah," she breathed. "I'm fine, don't stop."

He didn't. He rocked his hips into hers, a little faster this time, and buried his face in her hair.

Thunder rolled somewhere in the distance, rattling plastic and porcelain together on the shelves around them. Light flashed briefly in the window. Sam pulled her legs up until they were bent at acute angles and moved her hands up to Danny's neck; her hands were hot against his cool skin. He pushed in again as thunder cracked, louder, drowning out Sam's sharp intake of breath. His heart hammered. The glass pane in that tiny window shuddered. It was like making love at the end of the world.

He ran his thumb over her lip again; she was still biting it. "I'm not hurting you, am I?

Her hands roamed down his biceps and he could hear the blankets rustle as she shook her head. "It's a little uncomfortable but I'm-" She paused, groaning. "I'm getting.. used to it."

A crazy urge flashed through him at the sound she made, and when he pushed in a little farther than he'd meant to she groaned again, her voice muffled through tightly closed lips. "Is that a good mm," he breathed, "or bad mm?"

"Stop talking," she gasped, "it's good, it's good."

That was all the assurance he needed. He abandoned the restraint, his arms falling further and further into the tangle of blankets as he thrust downward, meeting Sam's hips halfway as she began to replicate his rhythm. He hissed pleasure through his loosely clenched teeth and pressed his lips to her cheek again, and her ear - but his grip on the blankets suddenly tightened when that cold snake reared its head and lashed out at his senses again, biting at him, as if he'd grabbed hold of a live wire. He pulled his face sharply away from hers as the air in his lungs churned and chilled, but he choked it down and it didn't expel itself. The coil retracted again.

"Danny?" Sam's hands moved to his chest, which shuddered momentarily from the force of keeping down that cold flurry of air.

Danny chose not to answer. He didn't trust himself to speak just yet, lest his cold breath give him away. The ghost wasn't close - it couldn't be very close, the sense wasn't strong enough. But it was on the move, somewhere in his city. His body ached from the physical strain of not responding to the sense, of forcing it back down. It defied his nature.

He pulled away from Sam's hands, paranoid she'd feel the cold seeping through his chest, though that never actually happened. Before she could connect the dots he rolled off her onto the armchair that was squeezed up face against the couch, and hastily tugged her along after him. She came without question, sidling onto his lap, her knees sinking down on either side of him into the padded leather. Lightning flashed, outlining her body for a brief instant with gray light. She looked like an apparition.

"Danny.." she said, with a hint of skepticism, and he knew then what an idiot he was for trying to hide it from her - she must have known the instant his chest shuddered. The thunder finally reached them, a crackling roar. Defiantly he ignored her tone, instead grabbing hold of her hips and pulling her down around him. She shivered, resting her forehead on his shoulder and settling her hips into the smooth heavy rhythm, bringing her hands flat against his chest, before suddenly snapping upright again. "Danny - hey, you're not breathing, you idiot!"

He grabbed her wrists as she tried to grab at his face, groaning from the effort of holding his breath. The rhythm he'd reset suddenly faltered as Sam grappled with his hands until she broke free and slammed the heel of her palm into his chest.

Like a collapsing balloon Danny's lungs expelled a small burst of cold air, stinging his nose and his lips. He didn't even have time to turn away from her; lightning flashed and for an instant Danny could see the fog lit up ghostly white, the particles spilling over Sam's exposed skin. She shivered involuntarily. They stared at each other, frozen, until thunder clapped overhead. Porcelain and plastic clinked behind them.

Sam made to rise from his lap, pushing on his shoulders for leverage. "Well, that's that."

Desperate, he threw his arms around her shoulders, pulling her back down hard. She sucked in a short breath. "No," he said. Goosebumps raised where his breath touched her skin. "No, it doesn't have to be."

"But your ghost sense-" She trailed off, hands grasping at his chest again. She was speaking protests but her hips weren't.

"It can - wait."

"It - shouldn't."

Danny gave up trying to talk. It was too hard to form words. The effort was too much when he was inside her. It felt like he was only alive where he was touching her.

"Danny, stop."

Abruptly he stilled, trying to see her face in the dark.

"We have to go see what's out there."

"Fine, get off me then." She huffed indignantly and tried to rise, but she didn't even get all the way up before he pushed up into her, halting her progress. "Aren't you gonna go?" he said, slyly hooking his arms around her waist.

But Sam didn't buy into the game. "Danny, we have to. You have to!"

"No I don't," he snapped, defensive.

"I'm not saying you're required to, okay? I'm saying you want to." One hand came to rest gently on his cheek, and in the faint blue light he could just make out her face, her wide eyes. "I know you, I know how you feel about the responsibility. You don't have to do anything, but Phantom has to protect-"

"I don't want to be Phantom right now." Danny grabbed her wrist, pulling her hand away from his face. He hated how gentle she was being, how consoling. He didn't want consolation. He hadn't folded yet. "I just want to be Danny, okay? Just this once. For ten measly fucking minutes I want to be Danny."

She exhaled sharply as he rocked his hips again, the chair creaking beneath them. "This isn't - compromising," she accused, breathlessly. "This is giving up - entirely."

"You don't know.." He ran out of breath and pulled her closer, her chest against his chest. Her breaths were short and quick and hot on his neck. "You don't know - what you're talking about." She didn't even snap back at his comment, instead moaning quietly. His skin buzzed where her lips rested. He tightened his grip around her waist and pulled her hips down again and again. Her teeth scraped lightly against his shoulder as her mouth fell open with the barest whisper of a sound. "I am compromising."

Weakly she pushed herself up, glaring at him in the dark. Through her stony expression he could just barely see a bubble of curiosity and confusion surface, and for a moment he was starkly offended that she didn't understand what he meant. Even so, it was hard to look at her without melting, the way she was having trouble breathing steadily, the way her chest rose and fell, the way the strands of her hair moved just so, slipping on and off her shoulders as he moved in her.

For all her brilliance and cleverness, she was so god damn oblivious.

"I didn't want to have sex with you in the attic, Sam." He moved his hands up to her neck and threaded his fingers through her hair, pulling her forehead to rest against his. "I didn't want it - like this." Rushed and ragged, pressed for time they didn't have. "I wanted all night with you," he reminded her. His voice was gravelly from the effort of speaking. "I wanted every night with you." Her hands clutched his shoulders, her nose bumping rhythmically against his. "So yeah," he finished gruffly, "this is compromising."

Sam said nothing. He looked up at her but she had closed her eyes.

He couldn't bring himself to look away from her and the sharper their breaths came the further he fell, into a place he knew he could never return from. He'd made his choice and he chose her. Only time would tell the consequences.

Sam gasped, her back arching, and she looked at him through half lidded eyes. She must have seen the determination on his face for what it was, because she pressed both hands to his face and planted a chaste reassuring kiss on his lower lip, before dissolving again into breathlessness. "Don't stop," she pleaded, and he could tell she was close because she'd done a complete one-eighty in her argument. "Don't—"

He didn't. His fervor grew, and if it weren't for the pouring rain and occasional thunder he would have been worried about getting caught for Sam's shameless vocality.

When she began to shake he flashed her his most confident smile and scooped her up, dropping her on her back on the couch to keep going before she could even catch her breath. Lightning flashed, etching shadows across their bodies, and less than a second later thunder split the room so loudly Danny's ears were ringing. It wasn't until the roll of thunder died away that he heard her whimpering, understood the way her hands had gone limp around his neck, the feeling that drove her to throw her head back and cry out.

Seeing her in the throes of ecstasy sent him careening over the edge and he only lasted another few seconds before he lost it. She whimpered again, back to biting her lip in that way that set his heart racing, and he made a point of kissing the puff to her lip before collapsing on her in comfortable exhaustion.

"Wow," Sam groaned.

"Mmghh," Danny mumbled, his face buried in the crook of her neck. He mumbled again as her fingers found their way into his hair, and he turned his face just far enough to speak. "I could stay here forever, I think."

"What, here?" she answered dryly. "In this crawlspace?"

"Yeah I was thinking of renting it instead of moving out for college," Danny sassed.

"It could use some redecoration, but it could work."

Danny playfully flicked her in the arm. "I can't even tell if you're joking or not. I didn't mean this room, Sam. I meant here. Y'know... Here." He trailed one finger down her arm from where he'd flicked her, lightly down to the side of her ribcage, to her hip, which he strongly took hold of.

"Here, like, in my arms?" Sam wrinkled her nose at him. "You're so cheesy. I'm a vegan, Danny, you have to be more careful with all that cheese."

Danny pushed himself up on his free arm and took a good long look at her. The disheveled nature to her hair and her flushed expression stirred something primal in him and Sam breathed in sharply as she felt the effects. "For all your 'queen of the night,' 'darker than dark matter' act, you're pretty innocent, Sam." He took her cheek in his hand and leaned in close, cutting off her sarcastic retort. "I mean here." Having never pulled out, she was fully informed of his slowly reawakening erection as he pushed his hips down into hers. Her grip strengthened on him again. But his confidence wavered and he found himself blushing so hard he couldn't meet her eyes, and instead found himself whispering in her ear as he said, "Here, like, inside you."

"Oh," was all she could say.

Lightning crashed the moment, and Danny finally pulled out.

"No round two?" Sam asked dejectedly as he fished around for his shirt.

Danny chuckled and tried to untangle his shirt from hers. "Round two is ghost fighting, babe."

Sam worked her shirt over her head and and attempted to flatten her hair. He kind of liked how mussed it was, though. "So... what's round three?"

"Round three is we meet back here and hope the thunderstorm is still going strong."

Sam blinked at him, paused halfway into pulling on her pants. "What? Why?"

Danny leaned over her and pressed a light kiss onto the top of her head. "Because, Sam, you are loud as fuck."

"I'll be as loud as I wanna be," she snapped, pulling away from his kiss. "That's one thing I won't compromise on. Where are my shoes?"

When she tried to rise Danny leaned over her, keeping her seated. "No, wait, don't you get it? Loud as fuck. Hahaha!"

"Yeah, I get it Danny. Now tell me where my shoes are you fuckboy."

"Hey! I resent that!"

"Where are my shoes, Danny? I can't see anything in this pigsty." Lazily she sifted through the broken shards of CD cases, until Danny offered a glowing green orb for light.

"'m not a fuckboy," he mumbled, almost too quiet and offended to be understood. "You are."

Sam dropped the CD case she was holding and turned her attention to the space between the couch and the armchair to search. She drawled sarcastically, "I'm a fuckboy?"

"I don't know!"

"Success!" Sam held her shoes aloft like a coveted trophy and then jammed a finger into Danny's chest. "Are you ready to go, ghost boy?"

"I guess," he griped mockingly. He went to the tiny window and peered out at the grey morning, the streaks of water on the glass making it impossible to see anything but indiscernible shapes and drowning colors. "Are you coming or what?" he asked. He turned around to find she was right behind him and he almost jumped.

Sam's smile turned coy and she propped one hand on her hip as she leaned in for the kill. "Why, I don't know. That depends on round three."

Danny blinked like an idiot, until he suddenly comprehended what she'd meant and he shouted, "HA! Sam! You made a terrible pun! Oh my god. Oh my god. Alert the presses!"

"We needed to lighten up this evening anyway," she interrupted, "don't expect it to happen again soon."

"We'll see about that," he crowed. With that he took ahold of her arm and whisked them out through the side of the building. All at once that feeling rose up in his chest again, that harmonic plucking of strings that shouted ghost at 12:00. He turned due north and made his way downtown. "After all, we're apparently good at finding compromises."

Thanks for reading, guys. I know I've been very inactive as of late and I appreciate those of you that still follow my writing adventures. I just want you all to know that I've had 90% of this story written for an entire YEAR. The only reason I put off finishing it so long was that I just couldn't bring myself to write the ending... See, the ending you just read was not what It was supposed to be haha. I ended up going with an alternate ending. The original had them falling asleep in the attic-space after the fact, and waking up in the morning with the frantic realization they never went after the ghost he sensed. Sam sneaks down the fire escape to avoid being caught, while Danny turns on the news downstairs to learn a citizen was killed in last night's attack. The story ends with Danny arriving at Sam's and she's watching the news, and she knows what he's going to say before he opens his mouth, so she shushes him and says something like, "I want to be with you, Danny, but I can compromise. Being your friend is enough." And it ends as a fucking tragedy cause Danny is a Nobel loser who thinks everything is his responsibility to bear. End scene. Exit. Audience sobs. Curtains.

I still think that ending is WAY better than the funny cop-out ending I went wit, but that depressing ending was the sole thing keeping this fic from getting published haha. I just really haven't had the emotional energy to write that haha. This is... almost as good.