Challenge topic #1: Remember

Character(s): Danny Fenton

Genre: General

Rating: K

Disclaimer: I do not own Danny Phantom. This story is for entertainment purposes only.

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The room was lit with only a desk lamp. The ancient bulb grudgingly gave forth its light, spitting a flickering glow that had proven to induce minor spasms in the small muscles around the eyes and humming in a tone just below normal human hearing. This served as one further aggravation for the already agitated occupant of the room. The only other sound to be heard so late at night was his spite-filled, growling mutter.

"Stupid Lancer with his stupid projects. Stupid writing assignment that has to be 'original and thoughtful'. Stupid random topics that are a single, stupid, meaningless word. Stupid dictionary for not giving me any inspiration whatsoever. Stupid Jazz who thought it would be helpful to toss a book of quotations at my head when I pestered, I mean politely asked, for her to lend a hand. Stupid index pointing to a stupid quote by… not-so-stupid… Albert Einstein. Wait a minute. Maybe I can do something with this."

"Remember your humanity and forget the rest."

He stopped his pacing long enough to drop into his desk chair and wake his computer from sleep mode. "That would certainly be meaningful enough, especially for me. Soooo… now what?" He could put a spin on a discussion of what it meant to be human, or not. He'd had plenty of sleepless nights contemplating just that. He could add a few sentences on mankind itself. He paused in the act of typing.

"No, no spinoffs into mankind. That would be something for History. Don't wanna do more work than I have to. Too late for that. And History midterms haven't been assigned yet. No way I'm that lucky. Wait on that one. Focus."

He stared blankly at his equally blank screen.

"This would be so much easier if this paper would just write itself. Maybe I can stage a prison break for the Ghost Writer and he'll do it for me out of gratitude. Hmm, no. Not worth it. Although Lancer might give extra credit for the rhyming… No, no, no. I can do this."

He heaved a mighty sigh and tipped back in his chair. Balancing on one leg, he squinted his eyes in the dim light. Slightly dizzy with fatigue, he was able to pretend he was flying among his model rockets and glow-in-the-dark star stickers. This proved to be a mistake, since he almost nodded off. He caught the chair just before it spilled him to the floor. "Don't want to wake the parents and have them come in here guns blazing. Get no work done like that."

Danny's renewed pacing brought him to the far side of the room where his eyes fell on a picture of himself with Sam and Tucker. "I could talk about being humane. Sam is always going on about that. Be thoughtful, sympathetic. Treat all things with kindness. Give aid to people or animals who need it. I do that anyway, but it would be a good topic. And it's not plagiarism if she never wrote it down, right?"

He shook his head irritably. This take on the topic would be no good to him. No matter what her one word topic was, Sam would be sure to turn it into her favorite rant somehow. Then the accusations of cheating would come and Lancer would call Danny's parents. "Protest my innocence. Deaf ears. Condiment explosions. Become jerky, evil nut-job. End of the World. Boom."

Danny glared at the clock. It wasn't getting any earlier and he still hadn't gotten more than "Remember" by Danny Phenton typed down on the page. "Oops. Fix that to Fenton. The paper isn't the only thing that's stupid right now. About to blow my whole secret with a typo."

Cracking a huge yawn, he stretched and headed to the bathroom for some water. The deep reverberations of his father's snores filled the upper story of their brownstone. He splashed some water on his face and filled a glass before heading back to his room. His parents' door was closed tightly, so he took a moment on the way back to stick his head through his sister's door, literally. She was sleeping soundly, a sweet smile on her face and her arms tightly wrapped around Bearbert Einstein, her favorite childhood toy. It was absolutely disgusting… or maybe just excellent blackmail material. Danny smirked mischievously and retreated to his room, trading the glass of water for his camera phone. "Einstein is turning out to be all kinds of useful to me tonight."

After downloading the picture to his hard drive and securing it under three layers of password encryption, he got back down to business. Thinking of Jazz made him think of education, of language, poetry, and nurturing a developing mentality. Maybe he could tap into her years of ear-numbing lectures to reel something out about the condition of humanity as it relates to psychology and some such nonsense.

"How long does this thing have to be, anyway?" Danny stumbled over to his backpack and rummaged around for the notebook that held the scribbled assignment instructions. "Write at least a three page paper on your assigned topic. Mine was Remember. To be turned in Monday morning. Counts as ten percent of my grade. Typed, single space, 12 pt Times font, no repeating of words to make up content. Blah, blah, blah. All the usual rules."

He dropped the notebook next to his keyboard and wiggled the mouse to wake his computer again. And then he stared at the screen. He looked at his marvelous Einstein quotation, typed it into the computer, and then he stared at the screen. Notebook, quotation, computer screen. He was missing something. It was all he could do to keep from screaming his frustration aloud when it finally hit him. As it was, he settled for a mildly delirious giggle. The problem wasn't the assignment. Okay, yes it was, but only in the broadest general sense. The quotation he'd found for the paper was wonderful, awesome, perfect. Einstein was one of his secret personal heroes, after all. That wasn't the problem. The problem was that it was 12:43 in the morning and he'd just wasted at least an hour and a half considering angles to write the wrong topic. Danny had been assigned REMEMBER, not HUMANITY.

He glared at the computer screen as if it had been to blame for his mistake, but slowly everything shifted from dire to absurd. "What the heck. It's too late at night to write anything good anyway. Unless maybe I can put something down on the effects of sleep deprivation for days and days on remembering English topics and passing classes that I sleep through, but want to pass so my parents don't ground me, and I prove I'm smarter than the jocks, who don't have enough humanity not to shove other students into lockers, which always hurts when you hit that darned hook at the back, but I have enough humanity to remember to save them anyway, because I'm the hero and I have good humane… stuff and that's what I do, but I can't write that because the Biology frogs would dissect me for being a gho… Ooh, that didn't make any sense. Better just go to bed." His brain slowly fell into a benumbed state of feverish lethargy. Neither sleeping nor waking, it was more like just existing. This was impossible for now. Just get up and fall into that wonderfully soft bed right over there.

"Set the alarm to wake up early and whip up some half-baked waste of paper." He yawned again. "Just close my eyes and gather up some strength to make it to bed."

A choking cough and a stabbing pain in his neck woke him up. Danny straightened his head from the impossible backwards angle it had been in over the back of his chair. "What was I doing?"

He glanced down at his hands lying limply on the keyboard, then brought them up to scrub roughly at his face. "Right. Going to bed so I can get up bright and early to fail English."

His hand bumped the mouse as he stood, bringing the screen to life one final time. His bloodshot eyes scanned over the open document displayed there and then flew wide in disbelief. There was his title and his name. There was his perfect quote. There was a completely written, nearly four page, single spaced, 12 pt Times font, spell checked English paper.

"What the…?"

Danny shot to his feet, filled with adrenaline. He hastily checked the door and confirmed it was locked. The windows were closed. The blinds were shut. His ghost sense was still. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed. The desk lamp was even still giving a pitiful illumination to his perfectly normal room. He quickly saved the document. Then he thought about it and saved another copy to his thumb drive, which he quickly ejected and hid under his pillow. Finally, he printed it twice before reading it through.

"This is too good to be true. I know I said I wanted it to write itself, but I didn't really expect… Hmm, I didn't wish for it to write itself, did I?" Danny thought hard. "No, Desiree won't be able to come out for at least another couple of weeks. I caught her on the 15th. And I never said 'wish'. But that reminds me." He quickly scanned through his computer for changes. No defaced photos, no new files, and the Internet connection remained closed. Technus could not have been involved either. And the Ghost Writer was still safely locked away in jail.

He read through the paper one more time. "This is pretty good, actually. And it looks like something I'd write. That's exactly how I phrase things. Hmm. So was that whole thing earlier a dream or a hallucination? Or is there a kind of sleepwalking that makes you do your homework?" The clock function in the lower corner of his computer screen ticked over to 2:26 am. He glanced back at the alarm clock on his nightstand to confirm the time and decided he didn't care. Tucking the finished paper into his backpack, he flipped off the desk lamp and dove into bed.

"I just hope I remember to turn this in."

A/N: my own personal-challenge: ≥1000 words. Third person, past tense, single character with no other interaction. And I wanted to channel some of this frustration about not having any inspiration. Stupid useless dictionary and single word topics. I was going to write the actual English paper from Danny's POV, but it wouldn't come out of my head. So I had to fake it. I'll work on my bad habit of run-on sentences in some future fic-let.

-S&S, what-happened-2-nice