Are you excited? This is a real-life legitimate chaptered fic, you guys! :3 Actually, it's a oneshot that kept growing so much that I think it will work better broken into chapters.

The inspiration / premise for this story come from an odd twist in the DP episode "What You Want" but I can't tell you any more than that right now or it will give the whole thing away. ;)

Jumping at Shadows

~ Prologue ~

EDIT: no longer a 100 word drabble

Dash nearly yelped when the light softly clicked off and plunged his bedroom into darkness.

His mother must have seen the glow coming out of the bathroom across the hall and thought that he had been careless and left the doors open again. After all, this was the third night in a row that it had happened.

He had been pretty tired lately, not getting nearly enough sleep, but leaving the door open and the light on was not an oversight on his part. Not tonight, and not the past two nights either. It had been very intentional to let the light flood into his room when he was supposed to be falling asleep, but he didn't dare raise his voice to correct the misunderstanding.

He listened to his mother's footsteps fade away down the hall and soon a deep silence pervaded his senses, as oppressive as the darkness.

For the third night in a row, he just sat upright in his bed, trembling, too terrified to get up. Even if he turned on the main light or the one on his desk, the light switches were too far away. He would have to get up and expose himself on all sides to the shadows if he did that. No, he was much safer here in bed. Besides, his parents would see the light and yell at him for wasting electricity and staying up too late.

So Dash sat in his bed, with his back to the wall, listening to his frantic heartbeats as the minutes passed.

His eyes finally adjusted to the soft moonlight that peered in through the slit above his curtains. It was barely enough for him to see that his hands were shaking.

The jock tried to laugh at himself for being so silly. But just like the part two nights, his laughter failed to snap him out of it. He couldn't help it.

Not with everything that had been going on. Not now that it was completely dark and he was so vulnerable.

The glowing green numbers of his alarm clock looked even more eerie now than they ever had before as they proclaimed that it was nearly midnight.

Dash tried to talk himself out of it, tried to knock some reason into his thick blonde head. But he wasn't listening.

He had never been scared of ghost stories. He had never believed in monsters under the bed, or ghosts in the closet. So then why… why was he staring at the door and clutching at his stuffed bear in a white-knuckled death-grip?

Cross your fingers and let's hope this works! X3