A/N: Written for ghostportals over on tumblr. They asked for Gray Ghost, and I gave them Valerie beating the snot out of Danny and then Danny having a Really Bad Day. So, uh. Points for trying? Title comes from Block Party's "Flux."
Valerie finds him six thousand feet up, swooping and diving through flocks of birds flying south for the winter. This high, he isn't even trying to be discrete. She can hear him easily a long way off, whooping his delight, not a care in the world. That doesn't surprise her, though she can't help the growl of disgust that escapes between her clenched teeth. Filthy ghost, she thinks venomously. He ruined her life and never bothered with so much as an I'm sorry.
Not that she'd ever accept an apology from the likes of him. No, Phantom's got a bad habit of treating her like a joke, like she's a welcome distraction from trashing the city with all the other ghosts. Not this time. This time, she's gonna make sure he knows how serious she is.
A bazooka materializes in her hands. It takes a few seconds to charge. The stupid ghost isn't paying her any attention, and on a clear day like this her suit may as well come equipped with a whole billboard's worth of blinking neon lights. An electric whine and a glossy pink shine down the muzzle tells her when it's ready. This thing's powerful enough to make tuna cans out of a school bus, but even a direct hit will only stun Phantom, if she's lucky. It's a start.
Valerie takes aim and fires.
Without even a glance her way, Phantom arcs left, and the pink bolt passes harmlessly through the smear of clouds above, burns out uselessly. He swoops down, swings up in a tight circle, stops on a dime just yards away from the prongs of her board in two, maybe three seconds. He isn't laughing anymore.
"I wasn't doing anything wrong!" he says, crossing his arms over his chest. His creepy ghost tail snaps like a banner in the wind, matching the frown furrowing his thick eyebrows.
"You existing is wrong enough for me!" Valerie retorts. This close, there's barely any need to aim. She drops the bazooka, lets it fizzle out in a burst of pink light, and summons up a handgun she's been practicing with. She can empty the clip in three seconds, burn a hole the size of a quarter in her practice targets. Ghosts are still trickier to hit, but her hunting gear is powerful enough to liquify nearly every ghost that's gotten a belly full of pink in them. This close, she's got a chance at getting one bolt into Phantom. This close, she might actually hurt him.
But Phantom's paying attention now. Before her finger can settle on the trigger he's got a shield up, a buzzing square of saturated green. She fires anyway, pointlessly. His shield absorbs bolts she knows can pop the lesser ghosts that terrorize Amity Park. Phantom? He doesn't even flinch.
"I don't want to fight you," he says.
"Too bad, 'cuz a fight is what you're gonna get!" And with a thought her trap fizzles into existence: a dozen blinking bombs honed in on his ectosignature, with him stuck right in the middle of them all.
Phantom's fast, but not fast enough to dodge them all, and Valerie's grin is all canines when his expression goes from sour to shock. But he isn't afraid. Not yet.
"Just try and run," Valerie snarls triumphantly, and he does, takes off straight up with enough force to rock her board. She only laughs, unafraid of falling. Her bombs whistle after him, only feet behind his tail and inching closer.
Three explode harmlessly, smothering him with smoke. Two he detonates himself, hanging a hard angle and firing green bursts of energy over his shoulder. Two he manages to make crash into each other, but he takes just a half-second too long to appreciate that bit of cartoonish skill and the eighth gets him in his rematerialized leg. He screams and falls some forty feet down before he recovers, but he's slow. Too slow. The last four nail him, every single one.
Phantom falls. Valerie allows herself three gleeful seconds to watch his body fall earthward, loose-limbed and trailing greasy smoke. But he'll survive the landing, or recover before he can even make a satisfying crater out of the jungle gym, and then he'll slink off like he always does. Not this time. She's getting her revenge at last, and she wants it up close and messy.
Her V-board is fast, fast enough to allow Valerie to neatly catch him between its sharp prongs long before he can splatter against the ground. Phantom makes a visceral bark of pain and scrabbles her V-board's edges for a firm grip, like she's managed to knock the air out of him. Cute. She's seen that sort of human mimicry before. It doesn't work on her.
She crouches, gets her face right in his. Five metallic cubes materialize above her head, glittering with pink energy. "This is it, Phantom," she spits.
He squints at her, visibly still out of it. She's thrown enough artillery at him to level her apartment building, and she'll be lucky if he bruises. Ghosts. Freaks like him have no place in this world.
All at once Phantom spasms, a ragged cry breaking in his throat. His face twists and his radioactive eyes bulge, fear and agony visibly apparent. Valerie rolls her eyes. "Save the theatrics, ghost. I haven't even gotten started y—"
Phantom screams. He rocks back, curling up on himself and dragging her board along with him. His fingers grip its edges so tight the metal crumples like tissue paper. Sparks fly. Her visor lights up with warning errors. Valerie is suddenly awfully aware of how high up they are.
"Stop it!" she shouts. "Let go!"
Phantom ignores her. If anything, he just grips harder. He isn't paying her any attention again, looking down at himself like he's expecting to find all his guts dangling out on display. He's fine, crazy maybe, but all Valerie's managed to do so far is rough him up a bit. So why is he—
Light. There's light, toxic green and noxious purple, unfolding at—in—his chest. A hole punched clean through him, but there's no blue sky peeking through the wound. There's writhing shapes, shades of eye-searing green and purple, a triangle full of roaring, sucking wind and inhuman howls. Valerie goes cold. It's the Ghost Zone. Right there, in the widening hole in Phantom's chest, is a portal directly to the Ghost Zone.
She stomps a panel on her V-board. Blue-white electricity crackles between its prongs, with Phantom caught right between them. He screams again, arches rigid and straining, and finally lets go. She cuts the juice and tries to reverse, to get the hell away before he can finish—whatever he's doing. She's been to the Ghost Zone once and that was more than enough nightmare fuel for her life. She wants no part in this, even if it means she's the one slinking off with her tail between her legs.
But she can't. Her V-board's powerful enough to take her right through the thinnest reaches of Earth's atmosphere, but it only shudders underfoot. Valerie throws a panicked glance at Phantom. He's gone all noodly, his body stretching and pulling apart like silly-putty. His eyes have gone a solid radioactive green, and his mouth is stretched wide in a noiseless scream.
The hole, the Portal, sucks her clean off her V-board, pulls her through itself and down and down into the chaos of the Ghost Zone.
A scream is pulled from her mouth and whipped away so quick she barely hears herself. She's falling, she's falling, and the ground is too far away to survive this. Purple doors and swirls of green fling themselves past her. There's nothing to grab, her board is literally in another dimension, she's going to die, she's going to die—
She hits the ground and bounces.
Once, twice, three times more, she's bounced pell-mell up and down, and the next time she hits the ground it's ground, grass and dirt and hard. All the air gets knocked out her, and she rolls down a knoll to settle in a shallow ditch. The whole world spins.
She lays there, dazed, until she can breathe again. A headache has settled firmly above her eyes. Not for the first time, she's grateful her upgraded suit comes with a proper helmet instead of a hood.
Unless the Ghost Zone has thrown her suit for a loop, only about five minutes have passed since she was pulled in. She sits up gingerly, hissing pain through her teeth. Oh, she's gonna have bruises on her bruises tomorrow. She looks up. No sign of Phantom up there, or a triangular cutout of blue sky. The Portal's gone, and with it her V-board. A look around puts her in some kind of old battlefield, overgrown and weed-eaten, but she can still make out faded banners and rusted weapons nearby. Bones too, and lots of 'em. Her suit doesn't detect any activity nearby, but she remembers all too well the skeletal horde that had marched on Amity Park. She'll have to be careful.
Her suit pings. On the edge of earshot, she hears somebody retch.
She jumps to her feat, ignoring her body's protests. She re-summons her block array and charges up the hill. She's memorized that ectosignature. Phantom's just over this hill and he's gonna pay hell for dropping her smack dab in enemy territory—
Valerie stops, stares.
The ghost—Phantom, it must be, her suit's never read a signature wrong before—groans, a weak and curiously young sound. He's sprawled out, stark against the red earth, resting with arms folded tightly under him. Blue smoke wafts from him, and the ground around him is burned clean of grass. His legs melt and regrow, melt and again and his ghostly tail seems oddly liquid. But none of this is what leaves Valerie gaping. No, it's his suit—his face—that does it. All the colors have gone strange, gone inverted; black where he was white, white where he was black, and his skin's a rich emerald dotted with flecks of bright lime.
He retches again, and again. Green splatters out of his mouth, and the ground sizzles under his chin. He swears, his voice rough and raspy. His legs reappear, and this time they stay. Phantom always has recovered quick.
Valerie shakes her head and stomps up the last few feet to the top of the hill. She fires two quick blasts that he's too slow to avoid. Burns darken the shoulder of his jumpsuit, knocking him on his back. "What the hell is wrong with you?" she shouts.
He twists, slow and grimacing, to glare at her. Valerie can barely hold back her gasp. His eyes have changed too. In place of that glow stick green, his eyes are now a blazing, bloody red.
"Oh, what—" he grunts, levering himself onto his elbows. "—like I planned for that to happen?"
"Of course you did! You opened that portal to finish me off on your own turf. Well think again!" She doesn't expect to get lucky twice, but she does. Two more pink bolts sink into his exposed belly and he's knocked flat again. He curls up, clenching his teeth and squeezing his eyes shut. Valerie hates herself for feeling relief, now that his awful eyes aren't looking at her.
"I didn't—" he gasps. "I can't—I can't make—portals."
"Then how else did we get here?" She doesn't fire again. She wants answers, plus… plus, she can tell herself all she likes that ghosts aren't human, that ghosts are liars, but there's still something that makes her taste bile, to see a ghost that looks no older than her so twisted up and hurting.
"A—a natural portal." He eases himself sitting, rests his forehead on his knees and grips his temples like he's afraid his head's gonna split open. "They're—they're rare. I've only ever s-seen a couple, before this." His voice drops. Valerie has to crane to hear him whisper, "It… it opened up inside me."
"So… you did make it?"
"No!" He winces, and the ire drains from his shoulders. "No. I can't do that. There's no telling when or—or where one will open. It was just bad luck."
Valerie gives him a dubious eyebrow. "'Bad luck?'" What do you mean?"
He manages a weak laugh and raises his head again to look at her. His eyes are like brake lights at night; her headache spikes in protest. "Natural portals," he says, "They're tricky. They might stay open for hours or seconds, and then—then that's it. They're gone. We can't—get out that way again."
Well that was bad news. Valerie looks over her shoulder at a clump of green bones. The only active ectosignature nearby is still Phantom's, but she can't help but feel paranoid. Well," she says, looking back at him, "I guess we're just gonna have to take the long way back to Amity Park."
Phantom raises an eyebrow. "What, together? But you hate me."
"And I still do," she admits with relish. "But I've only been here once before, and I don't plan to go wandering around this creepy place without a guide." She dismisses her cubes, glad he probably couldn't see her reluctant expression through her visor. "Tell you what: you get me home safe and sound, and I might consider giving you a headstart next time we run into each other. Sound fair?"
He chuckles. "Ordinarily I'd jump at such a generous offer, y'know? But I've got more bad news."
Valerie tenses up, checks for ectosignatures again and finds only his. "What?"
"I've never seen this part of the Ghost Zone before." He sighs and lets his head fall back, his eyes burning holes in the writhing sky above. "I don't know how to get home."
A/N: Danny's inverted/full ghost design here can be credited to lazerfight on tumblr.