Chapter Text
Sam Manson would not consider herself an ordinary girl. She didn't like the word.
No, that wasn't the right way of putting it. It was more appropriate to say she positively despised the word; and would take it as a personal insult if anyone called her so.
This abhorrence towards normality had been a driving force in most of her life. Shaped who she was.
It had done some damage, true. If she hadn’t been so determined on always dancing to her own tune, she’d probably have a better relationship her parents. If she had chosen a different lifestyle, she wouldn’t be labelled a freak by most of her classmates.
Still, if she had the chance to do it all over, she wouldn’t change a thing.
If she hadn’t stuck to her guns, she wouldn’t have gotten to look at herself the way she did now. She wouldn’t have discovered her love for the dark and weird; wouldn’t have recognized the nauseating way her parents and old friends was acting; wouldn’t have approached the weird kid in the jumpsuit everyone else had been laughing at back in second grade.
Sam Manson wasn’t a normal person, and she wouldn’t have it any other way.
At the moment however, she was fine doing something completely ordinary: massacring her friend Tucker Foley in an FPS-game while waiting for her other friend, Danny Fenton, to join them.
T: goddamnit
T: how the hell do you keep getting me with that tripwire
S: you’re too predictable. you always go for the nexus.
T: well duh
T: thats where all the good items are
Sam smirked. Classic Tucker.
She was just about to set up a new training mission for them, when her phone blared to life.
Sam had to suppress the urge to silence her phone. If her friends ever found out her ringtone was Bleeding Green by the Murder-Puppets From Rosemary Street, she’d never hear the end of it.
S: brb, my phone is ringing.
S: might be danny
T: cool
Sam got out of her chair, snatched the noisy device from where she had thrown it on her bed before dropping onto the soft mattress. She briefly glanced at the screen. Unknown caller, not Danny then.
Curious, she tapped the accept button and held the phone up to her ear.
“Hello?”
It took a second for anyone to answer. There was a lot of noise on the other end of the line. People were shouting in frantic voices, and Sam thought she could hear some kind of machine humming in the background. Eventually the brittle voice of a young woman drowned out the rest of the noise.
“Hello? Is this Sam? Sam Manson? It’s Jazz. I mean Jasmine. I mean... I’m Danny’s sister.”
Sam frowned. Why on earth would Danny’s sister be calling her? They barely knew each other. Sure, they had met a couple of times before, in school or when Sam was visiting Danny’s house, but they never really talked to one another.
Sam had always felt a little freaked out by the older girl. The red headed psychologist in training always wanted to talk about Sam’s feelings or her attitude. And to be honest, despite how much she tried to distance herself from her parents, it was undeniable that the oldest Fenton sibling had inherited their enthusiasm when it came to research.
Jasmin’s parents, and by extension Danny’s, were scientists with speciality in para-biology who also ran a search and containment business by the side.
In other words, they were ghost hunters. Or at least, that was the nice term people used. The less pleasant names numbered quite a few more. Nutjobs, lunatics, and frauds were some of the most common slurs to be thrown around, alongside the ever so popular “dangers to the community” label.
Sam's teeth ground together just thinking about the number of times she had caught her own parents saying stuff like that. They always hid it in some thinly veiled innuendo, but it was obvious for anyone to see what they really meant. The nerve.
They weren't the only ones though. It was easy to brush the ghost hunting couple off as a pair of crazy engineers who had watched ghostbusters a few times too many.
But to do that would a gross lapse of judgement. Sam had seen Danny show off too many of their inventions to think otherwise. Strange machines that seemingly defied everything miss Johnson, their physics teacher, had told them was and wasn't possible.
No, the Fentons were brilliant inventors and scientists. They were just a bit too overzealous when it came to their side job.
That zealousness had left an impact on the family though.
Danny had developed a persona of nonchalance and apathy when it came to the subject of his parents and tried to actively avoid them when out in public.
Jasmine on the other hand, had slammed the brakes hard and gone on the offensive. It wasn’t unusual to hear the honour student in a one-sided argument with her parents about the poor psychological environment they were exposing their youngest son to. The arguments usually left no impact on the oblivious adults, but that hadn’t discouraged their daughter the least as she happily jumped into every argument with gusto.
She didn’t sound like that now. Now she sounded distraught, confused, scared.
“Can I help you?” Sam asked cautiously.
“It’s Danny. He’s… There’s been an accident…”
Sam felt her heart stop. What?
“What?” Was it her voice sounding so small?
“In the lab… He- oh god, he tripped… The- the system wasn’t fixed…”
Sam felt like someone had knocked the air out of her. She got to her feet without noticing it.
“I’ll be over in a second. Do you-”
“NO!” The exclamation was so sudden, so desperate panicked, it made Sam stop dead in her tracks.
“Please,” Jasmine begged, “you can’t come over.”
“Why?” Sam asked frustrated, “What happened to him?”
“He… The… I-I can’t tell you.”
“What do you mean, you can’t tell me? You’re saying my best friend is hurt and I can’t-”
“I’m sorry, Sam” Jasmine choked, “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t you dare-” Sam began. But Jasmine had already ended the call.
Sam tapped the redial button with enough force to leave behind a crack from her nail. She put the phone back to her ear, pacing back and forth like a wild animal while the dialling tone slowly drew her nuts.
“Hi, you’ve reached Jasmine Fenton’s voicemail. If you want to talk, please leave a name and number. If you want to talk with my parents, please don't call back.”
Sam threw her phone with a frustrated scream. It hit the opposite wall and landed harmlessly on the floor. Like air from a balloon, Sam felt her anger leave her and she was overcome with some weird tiredness. Her legs felt weak and unresponsive. Her mind was a jumbled mess of thoughts drowning in one another.
What had happened? Was Danny all right? Why wouldn’t they tell her what was wrong? Why hadn’t Danny called her? What if…
Sam shook her head drowsily. If she went down that path, there was no telling where she'd end up.
Trying to ignore the myriad of thoughts on her mind, she sat back down in her chair and turned to look at her computer. She had lost the mood to play.
She was just about to turn of the computer, when it struck her that Tucker needed to know what was going on.
T: yo sam
T: are you there?
T: are you talking with danny?
S: tucker, it was danny’s sister.
S: danny has been in an accident.
T: what
T: no way
T: what happened?
Sam tried typing out a response, but her screen was getting blurry. Had it broken?
Something was bothering her eyes. She tried to rub it off, only to see a large black smudge on her hand as she pulled it away.
Oh.
Oh…
Sam Manson hated being ordinary, but she was also a human being. And human beings, ordinary or not, goths or not, felt pain when those they cared about got hurt.
Even goths cried.