Cirque Berserk
by. Poisoned Scarlet

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Epilogue

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Things were going back to normal.

Slowly but steadily.

With the fact that Lydia, technically Danny's co-worker, tried her best to keep Sam away from Danny, sometimes going as far as creating false emergencies in which Danny would fly off and leave her, most things had begun to slowly fall into a cycle they could all be content with.

Tucker watched his best friends, recently reconciled due to the life-threatening situation involving malignant shadows, try their best to converse. There would be times when Danny would flinch and look away for a second, trying to regain the self-control Tucker knew his other half, whom was rightfully dubbed Dan, was trying to steal from him.

At first Tucker had been puzzled as to why Dan helped Danny out with saving Sam.

To him, it had been a perfectly good situation to get rid of her, all things considered. She could have gotten sucked up into the vortex of doom and every one would go back to living their lives after some mourning... but, apparently, according to what Dan had told Danny when he sincerely thanked him for his quick thinking, if he had let this happen, Danny would have wrecked havoc on him.

"He said my human self would devour my ghost self and he'd end up stuck in my head as a prisoner or something." Danny shrugged, as the two boys waited for the girls to came out of the Nasty Burger. "I have no idea how that works but Dan sounded pretty shaky about it."

"No kidding." Tucker took a long drink of his coke. "It sounds like you'd totally crush him!"

"Yeah, he mentioned something like that." Danny agreed, thoughtfully. "I wonder if I could do that willingly...maybe then I'd be able to get rid of him!"

"Or you could use your parents totally-new, totally-awesome, Ghost Unifier 3000!" Tucker chirped, ignoring his bewildered face. "Paranormally proven to unify ghosts and humans to form one single, uniform, being!"

"Tuck... we already ARE one single being!"

"Nooo, I meant Dan would go back to being dormant since it'd unify your ghost and human self once more, causing them to work in harmony like before! Geez, learn to listen! No wonder you didn't get into college!"

Tucker ducked a swing from his friend, laughingly adding: "But you DID make thousands off that circus!"

"Still am." Danny grinned. His grin shrunk to a troubled frown. "Hey, Tuck?"

"Yeah?"

"Have you ever wondered how my parents build everything we need right in the nick of time?"

"I always thought it was because they just had good timing that way."

"Very scientific, Tuck. I can see how YOU got into college..."

"What—hey, what? I was being serious! Dannnyyyy!"

They had yet to try that Ghost Unifier 3000 on Danny since it was fairly difficult to lull Dan into a false sense of security – Dan tended to overload Danny whenever they even got CLOSE to the machine that was sure to return everything back to normal – for real this time.

Sam was still brainstorming ways to get Danny close to the machine without Dan noticing.

So far they were coming up with blanks but Tucker had a feeling the only way would include dressing up the machine in a ridiculous outfit and telling Danny it was a cotton candy maker...

What?

He thought it would work...

But the rest – basically composed of Sam, Sam, Sam... and, surprise! Sam – were pretty hard on the idea and automatically rejected it. Tucker could see nothing else but that working in the end, and thus they (Sam...) would have to finally agree that his ideas, however ridiculous they sounded at times, weren't all mindless.

"TUCKER!"

"WHAA!" He nearly fell off his chair, directing bewildered eyes to a very annoyed Sam.

"I've been calling you for the past five minutes now!" She growled, narrowing her eyes at him. "What the heck were you thinking about so deeply that you didn't hear me?"

"Yeah, it must've been pretty important." Danny added, popping up behind Sam. At his incredulous look, Danny grinned and waved. "Hi Tuck."

"What the heck are you two doing in my room?" He exclaimed, surprised. "And how the heck did you guys get in my house in the first place!"

Sam rose an unimpressed brow. "Hello, Danny's a ghost, remember...?"

"Oh." Tucker laughed, nervously. He had forgotten about the perks of having a halfa as a best friend. "Right." He fixed his skewed glasses, asking: "Alright, you got my attention. What's up, Sam?"

"I figured out the equation." Sam smirked, when Tuck's eyes flashed with knowing. Danny, however, eyed Sam weirdly. "All we have to do is follow it by the book."

"Book, huh?" Tucker bounced over to his bookcase, taking out a Calculus textbook. "Will we need... the book cover?" He pointed to the stretchy material encasing his textbook, raising a sly brow at her.

Sam breathed in deeply.

This was annoying.

She didn't want to admit it but...

"Yes. We're gonna' need a lot of book covers..." She mumbled, wishing she had some good dirt on Tucker at the moment...

"HAH! SUCCESS!" Tucker hooted smugly, pumping a fist in the air.

"Hey, what're you guys talking about over there?" Danny frowned, uneasy about being left out; especially since their talk about equations and textbooks was highly offensive to him.

Another thing that hadn't changed over the course of five years: his hatred towards math.

But nearly everyone already knew that...

"Oh, nothing, Danny!" Sam patted his arm as she walked out, smiling when he followed her out automatically. Tucker stayed behind, mumbling to himself about the new 'project' he had now. "Nothing at all..."

Whoosh

The white sheet fell dramatically, revealing a rather odd machine.

"What... is it?" Danny stared at the machine in front of him, eying the strange shape of it. It was tall and tube-like and he could barely discern what seemed to be like a laser from all the fluff and bulk his friends had seemingly dressed the machine in.

Dan made a rude comment but Danny blocked him out in favour of listening to his friends explanation.

"This, Danny," Sam began, pushing him encouragingly closer to the machine. The next words sounded forced through clenched teeth: "...is a—cotton candy machine!"

Tucker just grinned, smugly.

Danny had a feeling Sam wasn't too happy about this 'cotton candy machine' by the way her smile twitched and she sent periodic glares at Tucker, who merely widened his grin with every glare shot his way.

"Cotton candy machine?" Danny repeated, suspiciously.

Both friends held their breathes.

If he believed it, they were golden.

If he didn't...

Finding another way to get him this close to the machine would be a long and difficult journey...

Danny, however, grinned. "Sweet!"

Sam and Tucker breathed out in relief.

Good; his cluelessness had kicked in just in the nick of time.

Now only one thing was left...

"Okay, Danny, stand right here and don't move!" Sam instructed, pushing him onto a very plain red X on the floor. Danny eyed the X, unsure of why it was there in the first place, and began to feel nervous. He never had to stand on letters to get a cone of cotton candy before...

"Uh, guys?"

"Tucker, are you ready?" Sam hissed, low enough for Danny to remain unaware. She watched as her friend typed in a few things into the built-in keyboard in the back; the small screen above it displaying a roll of information that Sam had no idea how to even begin to read. "Tuck! Hurry up, before he catches on!"

"I'm going! I'm going!" Tucker whispered back, filling in a few more blanks before finally slamming his finger on the enter key. "Done!"

"What's done?" Danny asked, narrowing his eyes. His posture straightened, his senses heightening with the uneasiness that stabbed in his gut. "Sam, Tucker?"

"Your cotton candy is done." Sam smirked, tearing off the top sheet to reveal a giant laser beam.

Danny barely had time to register what was really going on before a bright ray of white enveloped his vision and he felt something akin to being torn apart and being torn together once more. The excruciating pain, made audible by his scream, was sure to travel down the lonely streets of his block for miles – he was glad his parents had gone grocery shopping and his sister would not be home but off in the mall with her friends for a few more hours.

The agonized scream was nearly enough to make Sam turn off the machine but Tucker assured her it would be no painless feat – he had to be under the beam for approximately thirty seconds or risk having either Dan being in total control or simply not having it work at all and making them go back to square one.

Tucker hoped the machine would work.

Neither option sounded pleasant, in his ears.

"There! Thirty seconds have passed!" Sam anxiously told Tucker, who shook his head.

Abruptly, the beam ceased, and Danny crumpled to the floor.

"Now thirty seconds have passed." He said, although it went unheard as Sam had rushed to Danny's side, rolling him on his back and placing a tender hand on his pale cheek. His eyes were closed and Sam had the terrifying thought that somehow, someway, the machine had failed to return him to normal and had somehow managed to split his ghost self out of his human body—!

Blue eyes clashed with violet and Sam breathed in relief, her tense shoulders relaxing.

He was fine.

"Sam...?"

And, thankfully, coherent.

"Danny?" Sam asked, hesitantly. "How are you feeling?"

"Like I got hit on the head with a jackhammer." He humored her, further relaxing her.

Danny making lame jokes was a good sign.

"Hey, dude, you alright down there?" Tucker squatted beside Sam, observing his slightly disoriented gazing around for anything that appeared unnatural.

Danny blinked a few times before finally re-focusing his scrambled thoughts. The blotches in his vision had yet to erase but that would soon disappear with time, as he forced himself up and rested against Sam, who patted his back soothingly.

"Yeah, I'm fine, Tuck." Danny grunted, shaking his head. "What was that?"

"Ghost Unifier 3000." They answered in unison, making Danny chuckle.

"Yeah, I figured you'd try to disguise it as something else."

Sam eyed him. "... Did you, really?"

Danny shifted his eyes away sheepishly. "... Kind of..."

"He didn't." Tucker deadpanned, standing up and jerking a proud thumb at himself. "Now that that's all done and over with, I believe you two owe me a big, gushy, thank you Tucker!" He grinned, crossing his arms over his chest. "I'm waiting."

"For what?" Sam squawked, mouth twisted in annoyance.

"Hello? I was the one who came up with the cotton candy idea, the one you rejected because you thought drugging Danny would work better, remember?" Tucker taunted her, making her seethe as Danny nervously looked between them.

"It would have worked if you hadn't basically given it away to Danny!"

"Hey, a dude has a right to know if he's gonna' get slipped a roofie—!"

"It wasn't a roofie, you idiot, it was a highly powerful sedative—!"

"Uh huh, sedative... pfft..."

"IT WAS—!"

"GUYS!" Danny shouted, shutting them up. He grinned. "Good news: I can't hear Dan anymore!"

Sam visibly brightened. "Do you really think he went back to being dormant?"

"I don't know. It's a possibility. But I can't hear him anymore – and I don't feel like I'm about to lose control or something!" Danny assured, fisting his hand experimentally. "I think I'm back to normal!"

"Only one way to find out!" Tucker stated, pushing Sam up near his face without a seconds waste.

Her face flushed and he felt his breath catch in his throat, as he caught her at the last second. Their noses bumped, and their hearts stuttering in their ears as they stared into each others eyes for a long moment before Tucker pulled Sam back by the collar of her shirt and nodded to himself firmly.

"Yep. Dan would've been nagging at you by now, right? Close proximity with Sam is a big no-no."

Danny shook himself from the daze, his face feeling hot, and nodded jerkily. "Uh huh. Definitely. I don't hear anything in my head right now, too..."

"Then it worked!" Sam squealed, bringing him into an excited hug. "You're back to normal!"

"Y-yeah..." He smiled slightly, resting a hand tentatively on the small of her back. His eyes flashed up to Tucker, who waggled his brows knowingly in his direction, and he had been on the verge of sending him a nasty look when his ghost sense went off.

"Ghost!" Danny alerted, snapping his head westbound to where he felt the unearthly presence.

Tucker smirked. "Well, then, let's go catch it!"

Sam pulled back, also smiling. She stood up and held a hand out to Danny, her smile contagious as he soon began to smile as well.

"Well then, what're we waiting for?" Sam started, her lips curling into a smirk. "I can finally catch up with you, Danny." She activated her suit, watching him through the dark haze that was her mask.

Danny grinned, wasting no time transforming into his alter ego. He was pleased to see there were no unsightly side-effects – and Dan's harsh voice had been put on a permanent mute.

"Let's go kick some ghost butt!" He shouted, leading the way to where he sensed the ghost was wrecking havoc.

Normalcy was slowly dominating their lives...

Tucker thought they'd be alright for the next few dozen years – as long as that Lydia chick didn't try anything remotely diabolical, that is...

A/N: Son of a bitch. That was a long time I took to update, huh? I'm sorry you guys - I had meant to put in an epilogue all along even if I had set the story to completed. It just took me a long while since this chapter had been unwritten. The first couple of chapters of this story had been previously written, hence the quick updates.

I hope you all enjoyed this story! :D

Scarlett.