Be warned, this story is highly rated 'T' for concepts and language.

This story is alternate universe, meaning I'm doing with the characters what I want and when I want. It's Nickelodeon meets HBO, with a bit of Game of Thrones kicked in, just for fun. Characters do not have immunity from death, doom, and destruction.

That said, I have tried to keep Butch Hartman's characters as close to in-character as possible. The story is mostly canon-friendly, up through the series finale. Consider all major plot points in the show to have already happened as of the start of this story.

With one major exception. And you'll very soon figure out what that is…

-Cori

—1—1—

"White Noise" is defined as a sound containing many frequencies with equal intensities. It is an empty drone that is often used to drown out other, perhaps bothersome noises in order to focus on the thing that matters. I use white noise while I write to balance out the chatter of the TV, the sound of the neighbor's radio, or even my own wandering thoughts. It is the supreme background noise. An endless, world-filling buzz that eventually fades away so all that is left is the one thing that really matters…

—1—1—

White Noise
Chapter 1

-Saturday, August 17-

—1—1—

—Danny—

A man stood in the doorway, shoulder against the peeling paint of the door jam, and studied the documents Danny had handed over. All of them were official looking - covered in signatures and seals and sworn affidavits - and were creased and scuffed from dozens of hands shuffling through them over the last few years. Danny shifted his weight from foot to foot, waiting impatiently for the man to look over the documents.

"I dunno, kid. I only have the one…" The man's voice was rough and hoarse from years of smoking, his face pockmarked with the scars of heavy drug use. His shirt had the sleeves torn off, leaving ragged, sweat-stained edges. A smell that Danny couldn't quite place - but was quite content to never smell again - lingered in the air around him.

"I can pay upfront." Danny straightened in an attempt to look more mature than his barely-seventeen years naturally gave him, cursing his wide, child-like eyes and naturally smooth skin. "Three months. Cash."

The man chewed on his tongue, then his lip, and then brought a finger up to gnaw on. The tip of one of his fingers was tinged a dark blue. Danny wondered if it was rotting. "You have it? Now?" There was a bit of desperation to the man's voice. "Cash?"

Danny nodded.

"A hundred fifty a month. Pay in advance each month. I don't have money by the first, you're out." He shuffled through the papers one last time, not seeming to notice Danny's wince when the drool-covered finger thumbed the documents.

But a hundred fifty dollars a month wasn't something Danny could afford to pass up. Money was going to be tight for awhile.

"And you'll watch the noise. Any complaints and I'll have the police out, hear?" He handed the papers back with a grin, displaying more teeth than Danny wanted to see. What was left of them was yellowed and broken. "You hand over the cash, I'll hand over the key." There was a pause as he eyed Danny, then tacked on another sentence almost as an afterthought. "And we'll get some papers signed down the office."

When Danny had the papers securely back in his grasp, the man turned and limped into the room. It was devoid of anything but a folding table and a pile of trash in the corner. The remaining half of the sign on the door proclaimed this to be the 'offi-'.

There was a rustling noise and the man produced a single paper covered in hastily scrawled words. "Rental agreement," the man coughed. "Sign."

Danny glanced around once more, listening with more than just his ears. The place was quiet. Despite the rundown appearance and the drug-infested manager, there was something safe here for people like him.

Lost people.

He grabbed the pen from the man, careful to not actually touch his skin, and glanced over the paper. Price per month, no late fee – you're simply out if you don't pay, police can evict without warning, management cannot be held liable for accidents and 'deth'. Nodding to himself, Danny carefully wrote his name across the bottom.

"Danny Fetters, welcome to the Rusty Apartments."

The man held his hand out to shake, but Danny didn't dare. Instead, he pulled out his life savings and started to carefully count out twenty-dollar bills. Four hundred fifty dollars was most of what he had. When he triple-checked his counting, he looked up. The man's hand was still out, only this time palm up with a grin on his face. Danny dropped the money into his waiting hand.

When the man just counted and recounted the money, his eyes gleaming, Danny tapped his foot. "Key?" he finally asked.

The manager flinched and looked up at him. "Yeah, yeah." He dug through his pocket and pulled out a key. "Room seven."

"Thanks," Danny said, rubbing the grimy key against his leg. The man left, stuffing the money into his pocket. A door banged as he vanished into a room down the hall.

Absently wondering how much of his rent went to the guy's drug habit, Danny picked up his bag and headed down the hallway. Several of the lights were flickering. Something moved in a corner. Then he was in front of it – room seven. The door was solid looking, with a crooked '7' near the center. Fitting the key into the lock, Danny turned the knob and stepped into his new apartment.

It was everything he'd been told, only dirtier. The one room apartment had a small stovetop, sink, and pint-sized fridge stuffed onto a counter barely long enough to qualify as 'counter'. The bed – also the couch and dining table – was twin-size, striped bare of sheets, with a dented metal frame headboard. A toilet and closed shower curtain stood in the farthest corner near the only window. Peeling blue paint worked well with the white-painted wood floor, worn and chipped with years of use.

Danny set down his backpack on the floor and stalked over to the shower curtain. Pulling it back revealed a small standing shower. Danny twisted and pulled at the knobs until a thin stream of water cascaded out of the shower head. Then he flushed the toilet. After checking out the kitchen, content that the apartment was in working order, if not clean and sanitary, he shut the door and set the lock.

"Awesome," he whispered. It wasn't much, but for a lost soul, it was home.

—1—1—

—Sam—

Amity Park Wholesale Foods was a large grocery store, complete with a child play area near the fresh baked foods section. It also boasted the largest organic and foreign foods section in an eight-county area, which was what usually brought Sam Manson to the store. Today was something a bit different.

She stared down at the small device in her hands as she stood between tall stacks of canned peas and canned corn, watching the screen for the flickering green light. It blipped in and out of view like some sort of old-fashioned radar and she slapped her hand against the side of the phone-shaped thing. "Work, damnit." The light vanished and the screen went dark. "Tucker, you said you'd fixed this," she whined darkly to herself.

Biting back a few curses, Sam stuffed the device into her backpack and looked around with a glare. The store was busy on this summer weekend, families of all shapes and sizes wandering up and down the aisles. One rather large man was eyeing her. He blinked when she caught his gaze. Apparently put off by her unhappy scowl and dark makeup, he hurriedly grabbed a can of corn before trying to lose himself in the crowds. Sam arched an amused eyebrow.

The chatter of the store droned around her as she stuffed her hands into the pockets of her jeans and started to pace through the store. With the precision ghost detector offline again, she was back to ghost hunting the old fashioned way. Up and down each aisle, searching for the typical signs that a ghost was present: a chill in the air, the wary look in people's eyes, the little hairs standing up on the back of her neck. It wasn't something most people would notice consciously. But if you knew what to look for…

And Sam Manson knew what to look for.

Sam paused near the meat section of the store, the cold storage bins dropping the temperature a few degrees. She crossed her arms over her chest and leaned against a display of bacon, carefully studying the crowds, attempting to keep the disgusted sneer off her face at the sight of all the meat. A mother picked up a fussy child, still eyeing the price of hamburger. A father grabbed his son's hand, then hoisted the boy into his arms to point out something in the display. A family near the chicken unhooked their infant from a stroller, holding him close despite the fact that the child was still sleeping, not pausing in their shopping.

Unconscious wariness. It flickered around them in an almost visible mass.

And then there was a sound. A whisper of a whistle, too high to really hear. It almost wasn't a sound at all. She tipped her head to the side, trying to hear better.

Forehead creasing slightly, Sam felt the pulse in her ears pick up its pace. Louder. Faster. Her eyes slipped half-closed, attempting to see the ghost she knew had to be there. Little motes of green light danced in front of her eyes and she stuffed her hands into her pockets. "Where are…"

Someone screamed, the sound transforming into a horrified wail half-way through.

Sam jolted away from bacon, her hand already flying to the small weapon she had in the water-bottle holder of her backpack. It was cold as she wrapped her fingers around the handle and thumbed the switch to 'on'. The battery buzzed slightly. Pushing herself through the standing onlookers, Sam stumbled past the sliced up bits of animal packaged away in thin plastic wrappers.

"Someone call 9-1-1," came a shout.

She stopped at the edge of the crowd, her gun pointed slightly down and to the side, the purple paint on her fingernails fighting to hide the flickering green light shimmering underneath. A sobbing woman lay on the ground near a young boy, a pool of blood growing swiftly around him. Red leaked from his mouth, nose, and ears, and his eyes seemed to be nothing but empty sockets. The top of his head looked off and - after a moment of study - Sam realized this was due to the back of his head being missing. Little swirls of green mist rose from his limp form. Someone else was crouched over them, patting both the woman and her dead son, his voice lost under the volume her sobs.

Swallowing harshly, Sam tore her gaze away from the broken body, looking around for the ghost that had caused this. Heart pounding loudly in her ears and her hands starting to tremble, Sam forced herself to take a deep breath and hold it, closing her eyes, desperately searching for a calm within herself. She needed to find this ghost - not panic.

The smell of roses. The feel of cold soil between her fingers. The warm pride of an exotic orchid blossoming under her care. The crunch of crisp fruit fresh after a harvest.

Her body relaxed. Her shoulders dropped slightly as the tension flowed out through her feet. As she let her breath out and slowly took in a second, the sounds seemed to fade away. "Focus," she breathed.

There, just to her right. A sort of pressure against her nerves. A coldness that shouldn't exist. Her eyes snapped open, gazing straight through the deli counter into the butcher shop behind. Green eyes peered back.

"Found you," she whispered, her mouth curling up into a tiny smile. She could feel the adrenaline pumping through her body as she slipped past the front of the crowd, her eyes fixed on the ghost. The gun was now warm in her hands, the faint buzzing of the battery causing shivers in her spine. She shifted towards the balls of her feet and took the last few steps at a run. It took less than a moment to line up the sights, to press the trigger halfway until the gun whined in protest.

The form of the ghost came into view. An old woman, peering through the crowd with a look of concern on her face. Sam aimed for her head.

Then someone screamed the words, "He was shot!" and chaos erupted. An elbow slammed into the back of Sam's head as the person next to her started to panic. Losing eye contact with the ghost just long enough to cast a hateful glare at the man, she flipped her head back and brought the gun back up…

But the ghost was gone. "Damn," she snarled, dropping her arms back to her side and turning around to watch the mayhem. People were screamed and pushing, several were hiding under glass display cases that offered less than no protection from a real gun. A number of people had been pushed to the ground. And still the woman sobbed, holding her dead child tightly in her arms, both of them bathed in a garish, sticky red.

Sam flicked the gun off and dropped to the ground, pulling her knees up against her chest and holding them tightly. Focusing her gaze anywhere but on the blood, Sam waited patiently for the police to arrive.

And the Fentons. The ghost had to have just set off every one of Amity Park's ghost sensors.

—1—1—

—Danny—

He wasn't sure what had made him get off the bus in this town. The town was rundown and dirty. The bus stop was littered with broken signs, spray-paint tagging, and garbage. Even the sign at the outskirts of town – 'good place to live' – had definitely seen better days. He could have gone further. Michigan was a far cry from as far away from California as he could've gotten. A far cry from as far away from California as he'd wanted to get, when he'd first gotten on the bus.

But he'd gotten off the bus. He'd stood there, looking around in curiosity, as the bus drove away in a swell of fumes. And now, hours later, Danny looked around the dirty apartment, still not quite sure why he hadn't just gotten back on the bus.

The group home he'd just left hadn't been the cleanest on the planet. Between bouts of alcoholic stupor, Mike had made his wards clean the place – or at least the places that were likely to be seen by child services when they came through. The grime had only even gotten so thick before someone went after it with a sponge.

This place, though, was a new level of dirt. There was old food still caked on the countertops. Danny questioned whether or not the mattress was actually moving, and if the tail sticking out a hole in the side was a peace offering from the cockroaches or the previous tenant's idea of lunch.

It wasn't as though Danny was a clean freak. He could be messy with the best of them. But everybody had a limit – and this place was well past what Danny could consider livable.

"Fine," he muttered finally, grabbing his key and stalking out into the hallway. Something scrabbled and vanished. A larger shadow paused to glare in his direction before vanishing and slamming a door behind it. "There's gotta be cleaning stuff around here somewhere."

Danny walked slowly down the hallway, studying the numbers on the doors of the one-floor apartment building. It used to be motel, from the looks of things, quickly converted into its present form. Sixteen rooms – eight on each side. His room fell right in the middle. The rooms all had numbers and doors in various states of repair.

And there, near the end by the dirty window, a room with no sign at all on the door. There had been one, at some point, due to the darker rectangle amidst the lighter color wood. Just big enough to have said 'maintenance', or 'employees only'. Danny grabbed the handle and jostled it. Locked. "Great."

He glanced up and down the hallway. Then up around the ceiling. There were no signs of life, no signs of cameras. In a place like this, he really hadn't expected cameras – but it was better to check.

Leaning with his back against the door, hand on the knob, Danny half-closed his eyes and let out a slow breath. A cool, free-floating feeling started to curl up from his stomach and race down his arms. It tingled and made the hairs on his arms stand up. Then the feeling lurched towards his neck and up to his head and Danny – as usual – closed his eyes and gritted his teeth against the feeling.

The door seemed to vanish. With a quick step backwards, Danny was through the door. By the time he'd opened his eyes, the feeling was gone, washed away, lingering in the center of his teeth and the tips of his fingers.

The solid door was now in front of him, still closed and locked. He grinned, just a bit, as he reached for the light switch. "What do we have…" he murmured, turning around to eye the nearly empty shelves. After a few minutes of searching, he had an armful of cleaning supplies and several sponges.

Flicking the light back off, Danny leaned against the door and sighed, closing his eyes and calling up that feeling again. It made his toes curl. By the time he was back through the door and on the hallway side, the nerves in his teeth were jangling. Using his tongue to push and pull on his teeth – not that it helped much – Danny went back to his apartment.

Kicking the door closed, dumped the armload of cleaners onto the bed. "Lets do this."

The apartment never knew what hit it.

—1—1—

To be continued.