Chapter Text
It occurred to Danny as he trudged through the snow, blood crystallising in a trail behind him, that he really ought to have seen this coming.
He didn’t mean to sound self-pitying, at least not too much, but he should have known something would happen, just based on the last week alone. He’d never felt so light, so free, as he had since he’d brought her home. The universe didn’t ever let him have nice things for too long, at least not without making him pay some price or another.
His knee dropped into the snow drift and he chuckled weakly. OK, maybe this was too much self-pitying. He might be about to die, he should be reflecting on the best moments, right? Not the tendency of reality to drop nonsense on his head.
Danny’s hand, the one propping him up on the ground and not trying futilely to hold his blood in his chest, stung. He’d forgotten, almost, that cold was supposed to feel uncomfortable. It hadn’t since the portal accident, and he just hadn’t noticed until Frostbite had spelled it out for him. There goes the hope that being in the cold would help with healing. Then again, with his powers neutralised, that was probably a futile idea anyway.
As his legs finally gave out and he collapsed into the frigid embrace of the frozen earth, face twitching as it was lashed with falling snowflakes, he thought over his life and all the good times. Fishing with his dad, where they’d be lucky to catch a thing, but it didn’t matter, they had each other, and they had the laughter. Road trips with mom and Jazz, singing whatever song came on the radio and talking space and stellar phenomenon. Movie nights with Sam and Tucker and bowling and ghost hunting and arguing and all the times they backed each other up unflinchingly, they were as much a part of his family as the rest. Not to mention getting to finally, finally, live without secrets and lies, at least amongst the people he cared most about.
Barring one.
If Danny was going to let himself dwell on one regret, right now, it was never getting to explain, properly explain, to the one girl he hadn’t been able to keep from his mind for very long. Explain why things had happened how they had, who he was and how it had happened. Let himself take whatever punishment she wanted for his part in the problems of her life, if only to set her free from the obsession that drove them apart in the first place.
Alas. He’d have to hope someone would tell Valerie Gray the whole, sad story. Probably Jazz. She would know he’d want her to know everything.
His vision flickered, and he saw a splash of red in the sky above him. Of course. Not the slow, peaceful, almost painless death in the snow he had thought he was about to receive. No, this would be a short, brutal execution from the man who had wounded him to start with, if those red, red eyes were any indication-
Wait. Those weren’t eyes. They were too… square. Cubes?
“Danny?! Oh my god! What happened?!” A slightly metallic voice cried from his left, getting closer with every word said, snow crunching as heavy boots ran across it.
Danny felt strong, warm arms lift him carefully from the snow, and his eyes tried to focus on the face of the person who was, apparently, not attempting to finish the job of murdering him. His eyes snapped into clarity for a brief second and he saw…
Ah.
Well, on the one hand he might not die right this second, and the spurt of immense relief and gratitude and will to not waste this second chance bolstered his fight to stay conscious. On the other, this was about to get more complicated.
Because what this really needed was more complications.
This hadn’t been what Valerie had expected.
When her ghost radar had registered that Phantom was nearby, and fighting something powerful, something not on her records, she’d made her excuses at her job and taken to the air as quickly as she could. With no small amount of trepidation, for once.
Not because of the fight, she was confident in her own abilities to come out of most ghost fights unscathed, this one in particular, as she planned on siding with Phantom against whoever this other ghost was (seriously, who was this, the readings were off the scale, only Phantom himself came close and even then there was a big gap). No, it was afterwards Valerie was worried about. Talking had never been her forte.
Because that was the plan – sit down with the ghost she thought was her prime target, the emblem of all her hatred of the denizens of the Ghost Zone and listen to him for once. Get his side of what had happened, everything he’d done, everything Valerie thought was justification for hunting him down like… like an animal. Because it had become plain to her that he wasn’t¸ that there were things she was missing, and she felt he had the answers. And if she had to swallow her pride and ask, then so be it.
Danielle had been the tipping point. How could she not be? A girl who was both a human and ghost, dying because of Valerie’s wilful ignorance, with Phantom pleading with her to save her. A ghost, a being who was supposed to be mindless instinct and obsession, begging her to help save his family. If the so-called experts were wrong about that much, how much else were they wrong about?
And then there had been Masters.
Or Plasmius. Whichever he preferred.
Valerie was done being his pawn. Maybe she and Phantom couldn’t team up against him right away, she’d accept there might be a significant amount of trust building, but that was the endgame. After that? If he was as on the level as he’d claimed before, as people thought, maybe they could protect the town together. Her sleepless nights attested to her need of a partner as it was.
She shunted the thought of who she originally wanted as her partner in this and other things aside. Danny wasn’t the type; he ran from every ghost attack the first chance he got. He’d be perfectly happy to help in any other way, ecstatic even, but in the end, he was too compassionate for what she thought her real job was, and she thought her work was more important. So that was that.
Maybe, she thought wistfully, if I hadn’t broken things off, he’d have helped me realise sooner.
Contemplation later. Phantom now.
So, she had gone in search of the fight. To her eternal frustration, Phantom dropped off the radar not long after she took flight. He always did this, and she never knew how. Oh, he’d still be here somewhere, he wasn’t gone, she knew that from experience, but he had this irritating ability to completely mask himself from scanners. She’d shoot him if that wasn’t something she didn’t want to do anymore.
The cube drones she sent out converged on one point quickly. They claimed they tracked a faint ecto signature to this spot just outside an abandoned apartment complex, but when she took a look through their cameras remotely…
Well, that wasn’t what she saw.
What she saw made her forget about everything else, and nearly break the sound barrier on her board getting there.
And here she was, armour retracted, Danny Fenton in her arms, bleeding profusely from some horrible… They looked like gouges in his chest. What could do that? Was this what Phantom had been fighting?
“Danny?! Danny, I need to know if you can hear me!” She called out, trying her hardest not to panic. Her worst-case scenario playing out before her and she didn’t even get to have the good parts beforehand. God, she’d never regretted anything more in that instant than not letting herself have those good times with this boy.
“… Hey, Val,” came the murmured reply. “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”
She almost burst out laughing, only stopping herself because she could tell it would be uncontrollable and hysterical. Here he was, paler than the snow around them, barely able to talk, and he was still making god damn jokes. A strangled laugh did escape in spite of herself, which didn’t go unnoticed if the slight quirk of his lips could be believed.
“Never mind me, I’ve got to get you to a hospital, can you tell me wha- “
“No…” The words were vehement, if quieter than he’d probably like them. “No hospital. He… He’ll find us there.”
He had been attacked by something, probably the same something that Phantom was fighting. All the old hatred resurfaced despite her resolve to bury it. If Danny… If he… If Phantom could have stopped this and didn’t-
“Wis… Wisconsin Ghost,” he gasped out. Valerie felt her muscles tense and she tried not to grip Danny too hard.
“Plasmius,” she growled.
“Vlad Plasmius,” Danny added, his eyes open and examining her, sharper than they had any right to be in his condition.
Valerie did not miss the emphasis he put on the first name.
“… You know?” She whispered down at the boy in her arms, the boy who fled from any and all danger, the boy who professed to have no interest in his parents’ ghost hunting obsession, the boy who spent his days with his outcast friends making jokes and playing games and only worrying about the school hierarchy, and even that had petered out as she’d watched him grow past the need for popularity, at first with confusion and then with admiration.
The boy who was bloody and covered in horrible injuries and looked two steps from death and knew Vlad Masters secret.
“Oh good,” he said faintly. “You know as well. That saves us some time…”
It was the last thing he said before his eyes closed and he lapsed into unconsciousness.