Disclaimer: I still don't own Danny Phantom. Nickelodeon and Viacom do, and they are very big companies armed with lots of money and lawyers. Since I'm not making any money from this and I never will be, there is nothing for the law-ninjas to sue out of me.
Author's note: Hey, I'm on time for a change! Huzzah! For the record, the scene that dominates this chapter is one I've been looking forward to writing since before I even really started PLANNING Indemnification. Hope you like it!
Chapter 16: Who's to Blame
"I know I better stop trying
You know that there's no denying
I won't show mercy on you now
I know I should stop believing
I know that there's no retrieving
It's over now
What have you done?"
-"What Have You Done" - Within Temptation
Silence reigned over the lab for a long moment after Dan and Valerie's departure.
"You know we can't leave those two alone, right?" Tucker finally broke the uneasy quiet.
"No kidding." Danny agreed, still staring at the spot where his allegedly worse half disappeared with the huntress in tow.
"And we still need to find that gauntlet." Vlad reminded them.
Paulina stepped forward from where she had been silent and out of the way during the retelling of the War of the Ascendancy, the Latina's expression stern. "Okay, so we need to figure out what to do. Tucker, I want you to go after Valerie and Dan. I don't know whathe's got in mind, but I know Valerie won't be reasonable if she's alone with him. You're probably the most powerful out of us here and best able to break it up if they start fighting."
"Ur... right." If Tucker was thrown by the former cheerleader's swift command of the situation, he didn't show it for more than a moment.
"Dora, you help Tucker search for those two. We don't know where he took Valerie, but I doubt they went too far." Paulina continued. "Danny, Sam, you guys are with me; we'll round up the rest of the Patrol and figure out how to start searching for that gauntlet. Mr. Masters, you implied you knew something about the gauntlet earlier, so you're joining the meeting upstairs."
The old man offered up a wry smirk at being bossed around by a girl less than half his age. "As you wish, Miss Mayor."
"Let's go, people!"
---
"Put me down!" Valerie snarled, trying to pry herself loose from the iron grip the fire-headed ghost had on her. "Put me down so I can destroy you!"
"Hardly a compelling reason to." Dan remarked icily, the city flying past below them at a few hundred miles per hour.
It took every ounce of restraint he had not to just kill the woman right then. It would be so easy; all he had to do was tighten his grip and crush her fragile human body. Perhaps channel a small blast of ectoplasmic energy into her at point blank range. It could be as simple as letting her go; altitude combined with the momentum of his flight would dash her body against the ground with enough ballistic force to leave nothing recognizable.
Instead, he spied the location he was looking for and arced toward it, cape flapping loudly with the wind of his passage. Broken concrete and the toppled, rotted hulks of old trees littered the area; fountains caked in years of dust and dirt, their cisterns cracked and empty save for the occasional stagnant puddle. The wrought iron gates stood skewed, rusted and twisted where the metal still remained upright; an old, weather-worn sign that marked the ruin as an old park still hanging half-broken from a signpost.
"Perfect." Dan touched down in the middle of the wreckage and pitched Valerie a few feet away like some piece of unwanted baggage.
"Ow-!" It wasn't a hard throw, just enough that Valerie was certain she would be sporting some bruises from tumbling over the shattered asphalt and debris. In a flash she was back on her feet and leveling her autocannon at the ghost.
"I'm sure you remember this place, Valerie." Dan said quietly, voice ragged as he surveyed the area.
"What are you getting at, ghost?" Valerie hissed, sparing only the barest glances at the surrounding terrain; most of her attention was on him alone, her opponent, her nemesis, the figure that had plagued her nightmares for a full decade. "This used to be the park."
"Yes, the park." Dan strolled a few steps away from the huntress, studying one of the shattered fountains. "The park, near the school. Where it all began, thanks to you."
"What?!" Valerie recoiled, her voice cracking in surprise on the query. "What are you talking about?!"
"You know perfectly well what I'm talking about." Dan finally turned, glaring at the huntress. "Eleven years ago!"
"Ele- the Nasty Burger explosion?" The unexpected turn toward conversation made Valerie lower her weapon and relax her combat stance however slightly.
"Close." Dan crossed his arms. "Try the day after. Something very important happened the day after that."
Valerie's frown deepened. "The park... this is where Danny wanted to meet me after sc-"
"Where I wanted to meet you after school." Dan snapped, cutting the huntress off with the harsh reminder.
The ghost gestured angrily at the decrepit scenery; the broken buildings around the park, the grey ruins of what had been a vast metropolis brought to its knees over the years of chaos.
"This is your fault, Valerie." Dan pointed accusingly at her. "Ten years of madness, all thanks to you."
"What?!" Valerie's expression hardened into a harsh glare as though she could bore holes in the ghost with her eyes alone. "You've got a lot of nerve trying to blame your slaughter on me!"
"And you have a lot of nerve denying it!" Dan snarled back.
"You're the one that came back from Wisconsin after you-" Valerie choked momentarily at the memory. "After you killed him!"
"Yes, I killed him. I killed my better half." The fire-headed ghost's voice dropped dangerously low, he seemed very nearly shaking with pent up anger. "Why is that? Haven't you ever wondered what would drive someone to... suicide?"
"Don't try and play the pity game with me, ghost! It was murder!" Valerie tightened her grip on her weapon, confused.
She hated the ghost, this was fact. His actions had her off balance; they were supposed to be trying to kill one another, not talking about who did what a decade ago! Not to mention he was trying to pin his mass-murder on her, and that was just patently absurd! The huntress knew she should have just opened fire and started things the way they should be, but the ghost's words rankled, and her own pride refused to accept such statements without argument.
"It's the same thing, Valerie!" Dan whirled and stalked toward her, stopping barely two feet from the end of her cannon. "In case you need reminding, and you clearly do, I was Danny Fenton! I was him, and I killed him. And do you know why?"
"Because you're a psychopath bent on killing, that's why!" She bristled, her own anger rising to match his. "Danny, Dash... my father! You killed them all!"
"Because you betrayed me!" Dan growled, fists clenched at his sides as he stood tall, looming over the shorter human with his fangs bared. "I trusted you, Valerie! Eleven years ago, when I had nothing left and needed just one person, just one to know the truth, to understand! I trusted you, and you threw it in my face!"
Valerie backed away at Dan's outburst, surprised. Hadn't she blamed herself, in some nightmare-spawned corner of her subconscious for what had happened? No, she had made a mistake, to be sure; but the betrayal was his!
"You promised-" Dan sneered the word, those two syllables oozing bitter sarcasm, a decade's worth of pure loathing before he shifted his voice into a falsetto; a mocking, painful sound. "'Don't freak out on me, please!' I said. 'I swear I won't, we're friends, right?' You said."
Dan hadn't realized just how much that day had truly rankled. All the things he must have thought about that day, all the things he had wanted to express back then but lacked the words to put to that all-consuming anger and hurt. Valerie's ongoing sense of righteousness and being the morally superior of the two had finally spilled over beyond what his fragile patience could put up with; the floodgates were open. It was time they settled things; or at least laid all the old scars open once again.
"And as soon as I showed you the truth? The first thing you do?" Dan continued, the tirade moving too swiftly now to stop or to censor. "'It's your fault! You lied to me, ghost!' and then BLAM, right on the attack! Like you didn't know you were trying to kill someone you had just called a friend!"
"I was surprised!" Valerie found her voice and forced a word in against the ghost's verbal barrage. "What did you expect me to think? 'Oh wow, Danny, you're a ghost!'? Get real, who would have believed something like that?!"
"Funny, Sam and Tucker believed it." Dan retorted. "Jazz believed it!"
Not that Valerie would know about that; the revelation that Jazz had known his secret, that she'd been proud of him back then was a fact known only to him in this timeline. It was little more than a mental trinket he had carried with him when he returned from that alternate past.
"This isn't about them!" She countered. "You chose to run off to Vlad and agreed to that asinine operation that led to this! You tried to take the easy way out!"
"To try and kill the pain!" Dan shouted over her protest. "Where else could I go? The last person in Amity Park I thought I could trust was trying to kill me, was I supposed to just stay in that empty house!? I was just fourteen, don't you dare tell me you would have reacted any better than I did! At least Vlad gets it, being a ghost! Something you never got, and never will!"
"If you hadn't run off, I was worried about y- about Danny!" The huntress shrieked, her cannon quaking in a white-knuckle grip. "Or did you forget when you got back? I said I was sorry! I tried to make up for it! And you threw that in my face, ghost! I humiliated myself begging forgiveness!"
"That you didn't deserve, and still don't." Dan snapped, crossing his arms.
"Oh, and because of my actions, it was right to cripple my father?!" Valerie lowered her cannon only slightly and stalked a step forward, glaring up at her opponent as she shouted at him. "Because of my actions, Dash had to die? Paulina had to put her life on the line?"
"Dash-" Dan's voice dropped briefly to a smug purr. "-deserved it. The rest just got in my way."
"For a bunch of juvenile pranks?" Pure disbelief colored the huntress' voice. "The price of schoolyard bullying is death?"
"Funny, I found him with an ecto gun that day. Hardly a 'juvenile prank', is it?" Dan's gaze slid over her, the way someone looks out the corner of their eye to avoid looking directly at something offensive. "In fact, a lot of my classmates were fighting. I'm sureyou had absolutely nothing to do with that. Surely you wouldn't lead our dear classmates into mortal danger!"
"Cut the sarcasm, ghost." Valerie snarled.
"So once again, it's your fault they were hurt, that they were killed." Dan sneered.
"A fight that nobody would have had to fight if you hadn't started to slaughter innocent people for no reason!" The huntress shot back. "I trusted you, I was glad to see you, and even when you started to attack me I didn't fight back! You almost killed my father that day because I was trying to apologize!"
"Too little, too late!" The ghost hissed in response. "Two weeks too late, to be precise!"
"Oh, of course." Valerie spat. "The operation... because you had to take the coward's way out instead of dealing with grief like the rest of us have to!"
"What do you know about grief?" Dan snapped, the huntress' statement clearly striking a nerve.
"Oh gee, let me think for a minute." It was Valerie's turn to ooze sarcasm. "Two sort-of friends die horribly in an explosion... my best friend disappears, and I later learn that he'd been brutally torn to pieces and murdered... dozens of my classmates slaughtered, my own father crippled... and then later killed. Not to mention my entire home town destroyed, thousands of people massacred that I was trying to protect... But I suppose you wouldn't know what it's like to feel like you failed everyone that was counting on you!"
It was Dan's turn to recoil under the verbal barrage. Apparently a decade of trying to kill one another wasn't enough to actually vent out all the enmity that existed between them. In all actuality, that long span spent on violence had likely been counter-productive; cementing the mutual animosity into place without ever having a chance to actually say what they were so upset about. Now that the ghost was rational enough to try and put his reasons for the past into words, the entire decade of anger and hate had simply reached critical mass between the pair and was going to detonate.
Like Nasty Sauce storage tanks left to overheat.
"I don't know that?" Dan snarled, lifting inches off the ground angrily, his fists clenched tight enough that his nails would have been digging into his palms were he human. "How do you think I felt after the explosion, huh? 'Oh whoops, my friends and family died horribly when I could have saved them, oh well, time to destroy the city!' Is that what you think it was like?!"
"Well if you could have-" Valerie's tone was positively venomous. "-then why didn't you? I don't think you wanted to!"
Were the conversation not already so heated, Valerie probably wouldn't have made such a barbed statement. In the heat of her anger however, at long last able to be given voice and words and thrown in his face, she wanted to leave as much of a mark as possible. What better subject to attack than the handful of deaths that had been the ominous prelude to a decade of slaughter?
"Why you-!" From the look on Dan's face, it seemed likely the ghost was holding back from attacking the huntress by only the slimmest of margins.
Valerie could see the familiar glint of rage in the ghost's bright red eyes, and in her own re-ignited fury chose to press the verbal attack further even as she gripped the wrist supporting her cannon with her free hand to steady the weapon's aim. A soft beep from her wristband was inaudible over the hum of the active weapon.
"You could have just turned everybody intangible! Or used your creepy ghost powers to get them out before it blew up!" She hissed, daring to push her luck further than she would have ever considered just a year ago. "Or better yet, you could have just not used your powers to cheat on the C.A.T. eleven years ago and taken the stupid test like every other student had to!"
"Shut up!" Dan struck out, his backhand strike catching Valerie upside the head and sending her tumbling a good few dozen feet.
"No way ghost! The more things change, the more they stay the same!" Valerie sprung quickly to her feet with a snarl, a spray of covering fire tearing into the asphalt, shattering the nearest fountains. "I should have finished you off when I had the chance!"
"You think I'll just stand here and let you?!" Dan shot into the air, avoiding a flurry of additional cannon blasts that tore through the cloud of dust. "You think after ten years that you have the power to?"
Valerie's only reply was another flurry of cannon fire; the huntress herself tearing out of the cloud of dust atop her black and red jet sled, the device's four engines whining loudly as the board knifed through the air. Dan threw himself out of the way, a mid-air sideways tumble that put him briefly upside-down as he did what anyone being attacked would do.
Return fire.
Considering his emotional state, the fact that the counter-attack wasn't more explosive was perhaps a better testament to his sanity than anything he could have said on the subject. Regardless, the green energy burst was still the size of a small car, and Valerie barely had enough time to pull her sled up and out of the way. The blast hit the old roadway into the park, tearing a gouge in the ground a few feet wide and several feet long before it detonated against a tree, turning it and a chunk of the old fence to charred slag.
There was simply no return to even heated conversation after the mutual volley of physical violence. Shots had been fired, and neither was willing to back off from their rhetoric to stop the fight; nor would either wound their own pride by being the first to try and get the other to back off peacefully. There was simply too much mutual hatred for Dan or Valerie to treat the other in a remotely rational manner.
The ghost gave a startled grunt when a pink beam blast managed to score a hit on his bad shoulder, tumbling Dan to a halt against the park sign and breaking the already battered post completely.
"Maybe I should thank that Maghnus guy for smacking you around for me!" Valerie sneered from overhead.
Dan growled as he climbed back to his feet and lobbed his own attack; a swarm of small green blasts moving unpredictably as they arced through the air. "Yes, and then I could laugh at you when you end up in oblivion, too!"
The huntress used some sort of shield projecting weapon mounted in her suit to deflect most of the shots, but gave a startled cry when one arced around the barrier and struck her jet sled. With a miniature explosion the board flipped over and threw Valerie through the air with a yell, one finger already on the recall button in her wristband.
Dan launched himself into the air again and caught Valerie by the front of her suit. "Or I could save him the trouble and finish things n-OW!"
His growled taunt was cut off by a cannon blast to the side of his head. He wouldn't admit it, but the guns that Valerie's little Patrol were packing these days were a great deal more powerful than anything fielded before the ghost shield had fallen over a year ago. Startled by the unexpected pain, his grip on Valerie slipped just enough; and she wasn't going to let the opportunity pass.
"You first, ghost!" One leg shot out, Valerie's kick catching Dan square in the thin wound still visible across his chest. She used the force of the kick to spring away from him midair, her sled already almost there to retrieve her.
"KNOCK IT OFF!"
Except a large, dark form arrowed out of the sky with the rumble of displaced air, thunderous roar enough to rattle the ground as it snatched Valerie out of the sky with one massive forepaw. Dan scrambled to get out of the way, but was caught by surprise as well and unable to move quickly enough. With a ground-shaking WHUMP, the serpentine form slammed Dan to earth, still holding Valerie immobile in its large talons.
The impact raised more dust, briefly obscuring the immediate area under its gritty pall.
"I can't believe you two! We're in the middle of a crisis, and you guys are busy in the middle of nowhere trashing the place?" The rough voice was familiar, albeit deeper and rougher than either the ghost or the huntress was accustomed to. "If you guys want to keep up the ten year vendetta, do it on your own time!"
"Tucker?" Valerie choked out, coughing on the dust in the air.
"Feh." Dan turned intangible just long enough to sink into the ground and out from under the dragon's claws, dusting one sleeve off as he reappeared. "So much for that."
"So much for what?" Tucker peered down at Dan as he carefully set Valerie down, the huntress uninjured despite a probable blow to her pride.
"Let's just say we were busy airing some dirty laundry." Dan spat, glaring at Valerie.
Tucker's timely arrival had done a smashing job of throwing the combatants off their groove, so Valerie didn't lunge at Dan as soon as she was set down; nor did Dan seem in any great hurry to resume the attack while the multi-hued dragon loomed over them both. With the physical violence so jarringly disrupted, it gave both time to start to digest the words that had been exchanged prior to the escalation.
"More like you're trying to blame me for your mass murder!" Valerie snarled.
"Whatever." Dan turned away from them both, crossing his arms over his chest. "It's been eleven years Valerie. Eleven years of coping. People change, or at least try to."
He turned his head slightly to glare at Valerie over his shoulder as he lifted a few feet into the air, preparing to leave the area.
"But then again, maybe it's like you said." The ghost sneered. "The more things change, the more they stay the same...and you haven't changed a bit. Not surprising, I suppose it was my mistake to expect that perhaps you were ever capable of changing."
With that, he was gone.
Author's Note: Well, that could have gone better, couldn't it? Dan may have come a long way from what he was like in Jeremiad and Anathema, but he and Valerie both are still extremely immature regarding each other; playing the blame game for what's happened, despite the fact that they're both responsible at least in part for the events of the past decade.
Anyhow, musings aside, once again I must give my awesome readers my undying thanks for putting up with the delays, cliffhangers, and other general chaos. I noticed a lot of new faces in the review list this month, too, so welcome to the fic, hope you continue to enjoy it! Thus, big virtual Easter baskets full of chocolates and those marshmelow peep thingies to: Phantom-Akiko, Akino Ame, TPcrazy, Fulcon, Anne Camp aka Obi-quiet, Eleirah, Xade, Skandragon Blackheart, Selofain, i AM the Random Idiot, Sukoru, Enray, BaronOBeefDip, Bloxham, Luiz4200, Seren Maris, and Angelic Kittens!