Phantom of the Fallen: (by timydamonkey)
Disclaimer: I don't own Danny Phantom, nor do I make any profit making this fanfic. I am a fan, and that's all.
Author's Notes: The story is short and mostly written, so don't worry about agonisingly slow updates and short chapters. They'll be coming out fairly close together – shouldn't be any more than a week apart. Enjoy and please review.
Chapter One:
It was unusually quiet in the classroom. Normally, Lancer had to deal with children doing their best to defy him and appear 'hip' and 'far out'. The lack of noise was disturbing; it was as if everyone had lost all traces of life. He tried to hide the discomfort, but didn't think he was doing a very good job.
He supposed he should be happy at the semblance of normalcy that still nobody appeared to be listening, but it just irked him. Even in outstanding circumstances, it seemed, his class would find a way to ignore him. It was this irritability that prompted him to drop the book he'd been reading out of on the desks of one of his students to elicit a response.
"Foley! Please, be kind enough to tell everybody exactly what I have just been telling you all about."
The boy's stare was blank, his eyes red-rimmed. A similar response was present in his friend, Samantha Manson. Lancer sighed. Clearly, today there would be no victory for learning. He supposed he should forgive the boy, but he also believed that if you started making excuses now, you'd never stop. Still, he decided to take the heat off him.
"Can anybody tell me?"
He could almost hear the crickets chirping.
The bell rang, and as if it was a signal for the end of the silence, a babble of chatter broke out as people collected books and wandered out of the classroom. Foley and Manson, Lancer noted, didn't speak, just walked out of the door, looking rather like animated zombies. They seem to be running on the bare necessities of everything, with no focus on anything.
Were they having an argument? It wasn't exactly the best timing, was it?
He closed his eyes and sighed. He didn't normally pay such attention to his students, let alone any in particular, but the news had concerned him for their well-being. At least they were in school, he supposed. Jazmine Fenton was not.
He opened his eyes again, looking to the door. There was no point staying in his classroom all day. He was determined to go and get some lunch, but something made him pause.
Standing at the door, looking quite lost, was a boy. He had white hair and wore a strange black jumpsuit, and something about him disconcerted Lancer. Perhaps it was the way he was staring into the classroom but didn't seem to be taking anything in, and his lack of direction was immediately obvious to anybody.
"Hey," he started, intending to ask what the boy was doing, but as soon as he began to speak the boy seemed to jump a foot in the air. The boy stared at his face, seemed to go even paler than he was already, and Lancer had the discomforting feeling that he was being scrutinised. He didn't have time to ask, however, before the boy just disappeared.
It was… very odd. One moment there was a boy standing there, and then the next it was as if he'd never existed. (It was oddly lifelike, he mused, in that one moment a person can be alive, and the next you hear that they're dead.) He shook his head; clearly he'd had too much coffee. People couldn't just disappear. It was inconceivable.
He walked out of the room, wondering whether he was more flustered than he had initially thought.