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faeriekit · 6 months

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Down and Out

phic phight prompts taken from @sillysugargliders and @akela-nakamura

“Technowizard!” Tuck declared, pointing up towards the glass ceiling. The ratty Hack-A-Thon tee-shirt and Star Wars print pants did not an imposing outfit make.

Sam’s avocado-coated face barely even looked up from her phone. “Lame.”

“The Finest Pharoah!” Tucker tried again, glaring straight down at Sam as he posed again— this time, with his other hand.

“Cringe,” was Sam’s bland contribution.

Tucker threw both his hands in the air in sheer exasperation, narrowly avoiding sending Sheila2 flying up into the air with them. “The— oh shoot— the Tech Menace! The Electric Enemy!”

“Makes you sound like a bit-rate villain,” Sam drawled, finishing out her level of tetris with perfect accuracy. She clicked off the phone before she could get suckered in. “Tucker, have you considered any good names? At all?”

Fair revenge was fair revenge, and Tucker didn’t want to waste his own pillow on vengeance. Using Sam’s bamboo-woven pillowcase against her facemask was fair game— and her shriek of rage over the smeared facemask was just desserts.

Tucker eventually lost, of course, smothered underneath the very same pillow he’d assaulted his friend with, but hey; he’d given it his all, and that was what mattered in the end.

Winning would be nice, though. You know. One day.

In the meantime, though, they were squatting in Sam’s greenhouse, reclining on air mattresses on recycled wooden palettes. It was kind of cold— Tucker was glad Sam had thought ahead and brought blankets— but there were no bugs, and there was no rain, even if there were frogs singing bleakly outside glass walls throughout the night.

Sam was good at pretending it didn’t bother her.

Tucker knew it had to, though. Sam was used to having things. Being comfortable. Having her bamboo toothbrush and toothpaste tabs at the ready, with her natural fiber blankets and her desktop computer and a credit card that would solve the majority of her problems.

Instead they had used the cheapest versions of everything at the dollarstore. Abrasive discount soap. Deodorant with added aluminum. They’d brushed their teeth at the spigot where the hose screwed on, and tomorrow they’d wash with the hose the same way.

Card could be traced. Tucker was the only one who’d been carrying cash in the moment.

Man, Tucker thought, tunnelling himself under his blankets. Running away sucked. At least the only thing Tucker had to miss was his parents. And his spare parts.

…He hoped his parents weren’t looking for him. The "proper authorities" had probably already informed them he was infected. They should…they should hopefully know that being gone was safer than being there.

Sam’s black-nailed thumb and green-coated face peeked at him from under the covers. Without his glasses, she mostly looked like a blob, so Tucker just waved. He wanted to be social. He wanted to be happy.

It felt like everything was falling apart through his fingers, and there wasn’t anything he could do about it.

“Hey,” Sam said. “If you want to charge your tech, I’m out of the plug.”

It was a sweet gesture. “Thanks,” was all Tucker could say. But he didn’t want to leave his cave.

Sam, of all people, knew what level of trust the gesture meant when Tucker gave his phone over to her. She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t have to; it was the same level of trust Sam was showing to him by letting them stay here, together, instead of apart, the way Jazz had originally planned.

Running away properly would have been safer. But here, in this moment, they were warm, and safe, and somewhat fed.

Tucker stuck his face into his pillow and thought It doesn’t get much better than this.

…Man, it was supposed to be roast beef dinner tonight. He was missing out!

“...I still think that Technowizard is a cool name,” Tucker grumbled to himself. Sam shot him a fond, if exasperated look.

“No.”

“Fine, bossy. What did you pick?”

“Foxglove,” Sam replied simply. “Most famous poisonous plant in the Western world. It’s poetic.”

Tucker thought on it. It…had merit, but… “You know people are going to shorten it to Foxy, right?”

Sam paused.

…She set her phone down with clear disgust. “Ugh. I hate that you’re right.”

“I’ll never let you down,” Tucker offered, very seriously. “I’m always right.”

Sam pulled the blanket back down over him until he squawked in indignation.

“Okay,” Sam’s voice came in muffled through their blanket barrier. “Maybe we can both hold off on names until we decide how we’re doing this, exactly.”

This, of course, being their new life on the run— ideally, taking down the GIW and their hold on Amity Park, or in the short run, cutting and ditching in every effort to not get captured. Their plan so far wasn’t much better than “wait for Danny to get home from Space Camp”, but, you know…needs are as they must. Or something.

“How about Cryptid?” Tucker offered, poking his head out of his blanket hovel. His glasses were…somewhere, but no matter where he groped for them, his hands still came up empty. “Short. Simple. Lots of hard consonants. Easy to muddy up in an internet search with other information. They’d be looking for you and find, like, the Entfield Horror.”

Sam gave that thought its due while Tucker found his glasses. “It’s…better than Inviso-Bill for sure.”

Okay, that one was worth the laugh.

“You could try Technomage,” Sam tried out in turn. "It would be like naming a snake 'snake', since you’re going through magical puberty or whatever, but…”

Tucker snorted. Magical puberty.

…But.

She’d been the first to notice when Tucker hadn’t even needed to touch Edna (PDA of the month) to write her new programs in class. She’d taped over his stylus to prove it to him— and Tucker hadn’t even noticed with the weight of a phantom stylus in his hand as he coded telepathically. Realizing he hadn’t been tapping any of the buttons had been. Spooky.

His phone didn’t need a SIM card anymore. He was saving his family a lot on outgoing and ingoing calls, apparently, and the reported number of texts they’d had to pay for was a big fat goose egg.

Also, he was pretty sure someone was emailing him at the moment.

…He wasn’t sure how he knew. But. It kind of tasted like blue raspberry. It was probably Danny’s sister.

So. Um. the magical puberty thing hadn’t been too off track. It had certainly been less subtle than Sam’s newfound ability to speak with plants, but…at least talking to your flowerpots looks normal from the outside looking in.

Apparently lawn mowing day at school gave Sam real trauma, though. Finding her in the nurses’ office with her head buried under her denim jacket had been scary.

“Better than nothing,” Tucker begrudgingly agreed. He left his glasses wherever they were; he’d find them in the morning. “I mean. We technically don’t even need names. If we just start breaking their stuff, they’ll probably name us anyway.”

Sam laughs. The green on her face is gone; she likely wiped her mask off when Tucker couldn’t see. “With you hacking their stuff?”

“And you growing your freaky vines out of their gear,” Tucker added. “The…what’s the one. The one that ate that one house?”

Sam leans her head down onto Tucker’s mattress. Her clean, damp face swims into view. “Oh. The kudzu?”

“Uh huh.”

“Yeah, I can cultivate that— not here, since it grows so fast. Did you know Kudzu’s supposed to be eaten? People usually take it off the roadside in China for an easy food source. That’s why it overtakes so much stuff here: there’s no one taking on the role of its natural predator.”

Huh. Well, sounded like something Sam would know. Tucker wedged his pillow further underneath his head; Sam’s still had some goop on it, so he gave her his extra blanket instead.

Sam stuffed it underneath her head with no issue. Without her purple lip and filled in brows, she just looked like Sam— just like a girl in his class, who wanted to make the world a better place, and didn’t know how to do it.

Tucker wanted to do better too.

But they wouldn’t do it alone. They’d be better off with Danny than without.

“All we have to do is make it until Danny comes back. And then we can reconvene.”

…And then what?

“And then?” Tucker asked, a little too quiet.

Sam had never backed down from a challenge. She never would. “And then we kick ass.”

Well. When she said that, it was all so simple.

The lights clicked out in the greenhouse, and just in time— the outside started to burst with light and sound as agents tore up the road outside the Manson property.

The door was locked. The daisies at the door and the wispy strings-of-hearts would give them more than enough warning if the agents swept through.

It was bedtime, or good enough as.

Sleep wasn’t restful, but the quality of the night didn’t matter; it only had to get them to the next day.

#phic phight 2024 #danny phantom #Phic phight #tucker foley #Sam Manson #ambiguous timeline when they're on the run from the GIW! 🎉#Danny's fine he's just out of town #'where' space camp. he's on a break #giw as a bad guy with local regulatory power #fill

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