Author's Note: Cross-posted from AO3. Title comes from The Faint's "Fulcrum and Lever," which I would conveniently link but, y'know, ffn.
Valerie Gray has no fear of heights. How could she? She's a hunter made, and she hunts ghosts. It was either learn to fly or find a safer hobby.
True, when the mysterious packages began to arrive on her doorstep she was cautious, dismantling and studying each piece of equipment before deciding to make use of it (Daddy wasn't raising any kind of idiot). Learning how to use the guns and the traps and the suit took time, but they'd been easy compared to the board. She'll never admit how often she tumbled off of it as she practiced for long hours in empty lots and on rooftops, but once she got the hang of it, oh.
Nothing could compare to flying. To hurtle at-what had seemed then, in the beginning-impossible speeds across the city, hunting down the innumerable ghosts that plagued Amity Park; she couldn't imagine life without that thrill. Some secret, stamped-down tomboy facet of herself crowed with childish delight whenever she donned her suit and jumped atop her board. She was an honest-to-god superhero, and she never wanted to stop.
But superheroes always had their super villains to fight, didn't they? Hers was the ghost kid that ruined her A-lister life and set her on this path of vengeance and vigilantism.
Phantom.
He endangered humans, assaulted the police and the mayor, destroyed city property on a weekly basis, and yet he had the nerve to call himself a hero. She hated him, wanted nothing more than to blast him into a puddle of hot ectoplasm, and yet he dared to extend his hand to her, as if she didn't know a twitch of his fingers could burn the meat off of her bones.
Ghosts were insane, obsessive, simple-minded. Ghosts were incapable of human concepts like mercy or gratitude. If a ghost saw weakness, they never hesitated to take advantage of it, and so she learned to do the same. Phantom insisted time and again she was wrong, but didn't he always prove her wrong? Why else would he never hesitate to shoot her off her board?
Valerie Gray has no fear of heights, but that is not the same thing as having no fear of falling.
Humans are incapable of unassisted flight. Humans cannot phase through solid objects. Humans have bones that can break, muscles that can tear, organs that can be punctured. Humans are so fragile. The bruises, the scrapes, the burns and the fractures she has endured since donning the suit-what can a ghost ever know about pain?
To fall is to die, and a ghost doesn't care. A ghost will never care.
Time and again she fell, yet she always had the strength and determination to get back up. That was, at least, until Phantom blasted her suit to pieces. For all his talk he proved himself to her that day. He was just like every other ghost-unfeeling, malicious, cruel.
That could have been her. That should have been her.
In the brief, ugly time without a suit, without her board, without even the tiniest ray gun to protect herself with-Valerie had never felt so vulnerable, so naked. But then that ghost in Axiom Labs had done the unthinkable; he had helped her. He didn't just give her a new suit, no, he fused her to suit so improved from her own it may as well have been from the future. It was as much a part of her as her heart, and no one could ever take it from her now.
Valerie Gray has no fear of heights, this is true. But when she had pursued Phantom up, up, up after Technus, out into the thinnest reaches of Earth's atmosphere, she realized something. Something wonderful and yet terrible, something wonderfully terrible and terribly wonderful. Earth had been so bright and shining, so gloriously alive, and yet out there where gravity lost its grip of her, she had seen just how tiny it all was. How unutterably small humanity was, how fragile. And ghosts like Phantom were trying to destroy such a wonderful thing.
Her new suit frees her from all limitations. It is inescapably a part of her, and she loves what it is capable of. What she is capable of. Once upon a time Valerie Gray had been a little girl more worried about school gossip and stains in expensive shirts. Now she can punch through Earth's gravitational well and shoot plasma blasts with a thought. She felt more like a god than a superhero nowadays.
Catching Phantom was only a matter of time. She imagined his false screams of pain, she imagined his ectoplasmic hide bubbling gouts of green, and she smiled.