Disclaimer: I don't own DP.
BGM: "Guren no Yumiya" ("The Crimson Bow and Arrow") by Linked Horizon.
Investments
Valerie leans against the lamppost, glaring slow death at anyone whose gaze lingers too long below her face or whose fingers stray too close to her purse. It's booby-trapped, but they don't know that, and there's no reason to announce it to the world. Not for the first time, she wonders how in the world Danny talked her into this.
"Valerie, hey!"
Speak of the devil. She whirls on the spot, eyes narrowed. "There you are, finally. Now can you explain just why you've had me waiting out here since the crack of dawn?"
"Out here" is accompanied by a wide sweep of one arm, the other holding on tight to her purse and the small arsenal of nonlethal weapons contained within, and encompasses the dingy dirty grayness of the street. It's quiet now, residents warned away by a well-honed sense of "supernatural badness incoming, be elsewhere", but she'd been bumped into accidentally-on-purpose a good six times in the last hour and change, and that was seven times too many.
He winces, skidding to a stop inches away, just far enough that he'll have time to dodge if she decides to take a swing at him. "A-about that, Valerie, I really am sorry."
"Sorry doesn't get the gross stains off my boots," she retorts.
He shuffles, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand, the other tucked firmly into the pocket of his tan trench coat. The coat is new, but the rest of his wardrobe hasn't changed since the last time she saw him almost a year ago, same plain white shirt and ratty jeans. She'd been in town to visit her dad for New Years' (which is actually a bigger deal than Christmas in her family) when her sensors had gone off like – well, like alarm bells going off right in her ears. She'd taken a quick detour only to find a distinctly put-out Danny wrestling with the cap of a Fenton Thermos, muttering distinctly uncomplimentary things about crazy washed-up wannabe pop stars. She didn't even want to know.
Valerie just shakes her head. "Okay, truce aside, I know you didn't just call me out here to catch up, not in this crap-hole. So what is this oh-so-important thing you just had to tell me in person?"
"Oh!" he perks up, grinning. "It's not something I wanted to tell you, it's something I wanted to show you."
Valerie is not amused. "So what is it?"
"Follow me," he says, and she opens her mouth to protest but he's already at the door of a six-story office building that has definitely seen better days.
She pinches the bridge of her nose for a moment, wondering why she'd expected him to make sense.
"Hang on just a second," he calls over his shoulder, fiddling with a key. He finally gets it into the lock, then spends a good half a minute trying to get it to turn before the door finally opens, the creaking hinges almost drowning out his triumphant "Ha! Okay, let's go."
Valerie pushes past him wordlessly only to find herself at the bottom of a stairwell, a second door across the landing. Danny notices her looking and points at it. "That's the door to the lobby, and it's how you get into everything else on the first floor. Kind of a weird building design, but hey, the rent's cheap."
She thinks that might have more to do with the bad neighborhood and the age of the building than anything else, but doesn't bother to say it. "So, you're renting an office here? What for?"
He turns to her and grins, suddenly emphasizing the half a foot of height he has over her.
"Fenton Investigations," he says, the words rolling off his tongue like he's been waiting to say them for hours, and he probably has. For all his shyness in most settings, Danny has an impressive dramatic streak, and a knack for getting people to listen to him. He also has a very good sense of dramatic timing, which would be great if he didn't pull the occasional crazy stunt to go with it.
"Are you telling me that's why I was stuck out in the freezing cold for hours?" Then the meaning of what he actually said sinks in and, surprised, Valerie pauses at the foot of the concrete stairs. "You're a private investigator?"
"Licensed and ready to go," Danny proclaims, already on the first landing and bouncing in place like a kid in the throes of a major sugar rush.
Valerie mulls it over for a moment, and then gives a mental shrug and follows him. "Fair enough."
"Why, is it weird?"
She looks at him, still thin as a rake if a bit broader across the shoulders, wide-eyed, shy and subtle as an oversized smiley face sticker. "You're not exactly what most people would expect of a private detective, Danny."
He flushed. "Yeah, well, not everyone can intimidate the daylights out of everyone who sees them. Most of us just ask politely and hope for the best."
"All right, first, since when are you polite? And who's 'us'?" she points out. She knows something's up with Danny, that somehow he isn't exactly a normal human. Now that she knows what to look for, it's obvious. His injuries heal even faster than hers do. She's seen him go from badly sprained wrist to fine in minutes. There are times he stops and stares at nothing, eyes fixed on some point in the distance that she can't see, so intense they could be glowing. Most damningly, he can't go near ghost sensors without setting them off, and she has no idea how people (including his parents, the town ghost hunters, for crying out loud) could just keep forgetting about that. The problem is, ever since That Day, she hasn't wanted to ask.
…Or rather, she wants very much to ask, but she doesn't know how. Okay, Fenton, cough it up. I know you're some kind of inhuman freak, now tell me what you are or else! Oh, yeah, that would go over really well. Never mind that whatever he is, she's not too sure she's that far off anymore.
"…non-ghost hunters?"
Valerie starts, realizing that he'd answered while she was zoned out. She thinks over the answer, and then gives the back of his head a Look, and sure enough, he flinches. "You're telling me you don't hunt ghosts."
"Not officially," he admits, shooting her a look over his shoulder. "You okay back there?"
"Do I look like I need coddling?" she snaps.
"No!" he yelps, taking the next few steps at a run to gain some distance and scrambling onto the landing. "Anyway, we're here."
She glares for a moment, deciding to drop it. Interrogating Danny was a delicate procedure rife with potential distractions and should never be done on or near his home turf. …Meaning she would have to get him out of Amity Park for a while to have any chance for success.
Valerie drags herself up the last flight of stairs and realizes she's breathing hard. "Are you on the top floor?"
"No, I'm on the fifth," he mutters, fiddling with his key ring until he comes up with a plain brass key that looks exactly like three others on the same ring. He smiles, humming his way down the institutional-gray-carpeted hallway and past a flickering light bulb. "Room five-ten, five-twelve – oh, here, five-fourteen!"
Valerie takes one look at the door of 514 and bursts out laughing. The actual door is as expected, cheap brown paint a few shades darker than the walls with a printed label reading "Fenton & Foley Investigations" tacked on. The surprise is a scrawled handwritten note taped up just beneath: "Enter at Your Own Risk".
Danny stares at the sign for a moment. He unlocks the door and pulls it open, ushering Valerie through ahead of him. He stops and mutters something in a sing-song voice, then yanks the key out and slams the door shut. As she watches, it locks itself with a click, chain levitating up to its spot. She stares, dumbfounded. She's seen a lot of paranormal weirdness over the years, very little of it explainable by modern science, but it's one thing to vaguely think that magic was out there somewhere and another to see her dorky ex-boyfriend actually use it.
"What the hell?"
He gives her a sidelong glance, suddenly still as stone. "Sam and Tucker made the security system. Tucker set up all the tech, burglar alarms and cameras and stuff, but Sam added a few of her own touches. Nothing major, nothing that would draw much attention, just little things like warding all the entrances." He nodded at the door.
Valerie realizes that she's holding her breath and gasps sharply, the noise loud in the too-quiet room. Now that his ridiculous energy has faded, she notices how strung-out he looks, the flatness in his big blue eyes. The last time she remembers Danny looking that bad was the Spectra fiasco, and pretty much everyone looked like crap right after that. She swallows hard, throat dry, and asks, "Why are you telling me this?"
He is silent, staring at the door, eyes dropping to scan the office and fix on random details. She follows his gaze, noting little things like the PDA lying abandoned on a table, gathering dust, the scattered pile of flyers she just knows have some kind of environmental message, probably recycling from the symbols, and the rows and rows of binders and notebooks filling an entire bookshelf taking up most of a wall. Her stomach is a knot, heavy inside her, and she shudders involuntarily. Something is wrong.
"You asked me what I wanted to show you, right?" he chirps, and he's smiling again, but now Valerie is watching for the lies and she sees the cracks in it, the sharp brittle edges under the forced cheer, and she knows too well that that can't last forever.
"Yeah," she answers quietly, suddenly feeling like an intruder in the small cluttered space, like she'd just walked into a stranger's bedroom when she'd just wanted a sink to wash her hands.
He sighs and walks over to the desk, a clunky metal thing that sinks into the cheap carpet. He picks up a laptop and turns it on, and they stare as it whirs to life. He picks it up, tapping out sequences with one hand, frowning impatiently. The smile blurs back into place and he turns it so she can see the screen. Grainy black-and-white security footage is playing.
Danny was sitting in his usual booth in the Nasty Burger, his two friends and his sister arrayed around him as usual. Foley was standing half out of his seat, making sweeping gestures with his free hand, a half-eaten burger in the other. Manson was glaring at him, and she yanked him back down.
"Sorry there's no sound…"
Danny's sister shook her head at their antics, paused and said something. Danny and Manson replied in unison, looked at each other and then sharply away.
"This was a few weeks ago. Honestly, it was a total coincidence that we were all in town at once. I was living in my parents' attic, Tucker had this family reunion thing and his parents were hosting, Sam was nearby on a traveling charity drive – I have no idea what that's about – and Jazz had some big announcement that she just had to make in person. Anyway, since we were all in town, we decided to meet up at the Nasty Burger like usual. We'd catch up, eat something, talk about nothing much," he says casually. "Then Sam and Tucker would have left and Jazz and I would have gone home so she could make her big announcement."
"Something went wrong." The words slip out before she can think about them, tumbling out of her mouth. Her voice is strange in her ears, thin and strained. This isn't just Danny's office, this is his friends' place, and they're not here.
He says nothing, and the recording continues to play.
Foley and Manson were in one of their infamous shouting matches, all but screaming the walls down. Danny's sister was wringing her hands and trying to find a break in the noise. Danny suddenly froze, said something and left.
"It was getting kind of loud, so I excused myself and went to get some fresh air for a second. When I got back, well…"
They vanished. Not faded out, not disappeared in a puff of smoke, not even blurred into that translucent static buzz that was all that showed up when someone or something invisible passed in front of a camera. Just vanished, one second arguing and the next, there was nothing left but half-eaten food and bits of random junk.
"Yeah, so you can guess how I reacted."
Danny burst through the doors of the Nasty Burger and rushed to their table. He stopped, looked around and caught sight of Foley's PDA. Back to the camera, he simply held it, standing still for a few long moments.
They stretch just as long in the cramped office, the room suddenly stifling in its emptiness.
A teenager in a paper hat walked up to Danny and said something. Danny turned his head slightly and the hapless child collapsed like he'd been hit over the head with something heavy. Then Danny turned the rest of the way, raised a hand and the film buzzed out into static.
"He wasn't about to leave a trace I could actually use, just enough to make sure that I couldn't get anything more than confirmation from the tape. I'll tell you how I got it later." He's serious again, hands gripping the laptop case so tightly she has to wonder how the metal hasn't warped and the plastic hasn't cracked.
Valerie is suddenly painfully aware of her breathing, chest tight with fear and anticipation.
He closes the viewer and sets the laptop on the desk.
"Why tell me?" she croaks.
He blinks at her, face blank. "What do you mean?"
"Why show me?" she whispers.
His lips quirk into a sardonic half-smile. "Who else was I supposed to ask?"
"Ask what?" she half-screams.
"For help," he says as though he is explaining something to a small and dull-witted child.
"And why ask me?" her voice cracks.
He looks away, eyes fixed on the grimy window, on the odd symbols she can see drawn on the glass. She doesn't know how long they stand there like that. Finally, he turns and looks at her, looks her in the eye for the first time that day, and she can't move because those aren't Danny's eyes, not her Danny. They're blue, but not the right blue, not a warm spring sky, open and kind. They're clear and cold as chips of glacial ice, and she knows that if she closed the blinds and turned all the lights off that they would have their own impossible luminescence.
Then he blinks, then he slumps, and he is the tired young man from minutes earlier, worn down to his hidden sharp edges. He gives her a weary smile, and it is honest in a way that his earlier fake joy never could have been. "That would be because I finally remembered I might just have another ally."
Valerie relaxes and, feeling a familiar weight in her right hand, realizes she'd drawn an ecto-gun out of sheer habit (or trained reflex, or honed instinct). Almost embarrassed, she slips it back into her purse.
He watches, impassive, and then chuckles. "See, now that's another reason. You're a hunter. You don't know how to stop doing it, or even if you can."
She freezes momentarily, whips her head around to glare at him.
He holds his hands up in a pleading gesture. "Don't shoot the messenger!"
"What makes you think you know anything about me?" she hisses, fear transmuted to anger almost as soon as it formed.
"I know enough, 'Red Huntress'."
She takes a step back, and then mentally berates herself for showing weakness. Hasn't he just shown that he's more dangerous than she thought he was? Okay, maybe most of that was in her head, but how in the heck did he get that footage?
"I know you've been hunting ghosts since your freshman year in high school, and that you all but quit when you left town to go to college, and that you're working as a part-time karate instructor. Self-defense classes, mostly. And I know that you've noticed I'm – off. Somehow." He chuckles. "You haven't met my eyes more than once all day. I can't blame you, I guess, but it's still weird."
She breathed. "If… If that's all true, then why tell me? Why not make me help you?"
He raises an eyebrow, confused. "Wh- okay, why do you think I'd do that? I know you can sense something, by now, but do you really think I could do that to a friend?"
"Normally? Never," she answers without hesitation. "But your overprotective streak is pretty much infamous bordering on urban legend. I haven't forgotten what happened to that one guy in senior year."
"He had it coming."
"I helped, didn't I?" she quips. And she had. There were just some things that couldn't be gotten away with, not if there were any kind of justice in this world.
He nods. "Yes, you did. And you've helped me before that, plenty of times. I'm sorry for not thanking you or paying you back properly. I'd say I owe you, but considering you dumped me, that and other things, we're pretty much even right now. So, just for the record: You help me with this, we get my family back, I will owe you forever."
He said it as casually as anything else that day, but somehow the words fall heavily and the air thickens so much she can hardly breathe. It's worse than the video. Finally, she asks the most important question. "What happened?"
"They were taken," he said evenly.
"And you want me to-"
"Help me find them," he pleads.
She stands there, staring at Danny, at her oldest real friend, who she hasn't talked to in years and refused to think about for even longer, not that that ever worked. Eventually, she answers.
He straightens immediately to his full height, coat draping over him like a sorcerer's robe. He smiles, and it is the bright noon sun on snow, a wide manic grin that cuts into his face as though carved inch by inch. He laughs, and there is madness lurking beneath the joy.
"I knew I could count on you," he breathes and extends a hand for her to shake, to seal the deal.
A/N: Mysteries, strangeness and character interactions. This ought to be interesting, with Valerie as the sane one by default. Think I should continue this?
Please read and review.