Written for Day 7 of Ectober Week 2021: Insomnia!
Valerie hadn't slept much since that night. Her father suggested melatonin capsules, but they never seemed to do the trick. Her muscles would relax and she'd slip into a calm stupor but release from consciousness would never come.
She didn't go to school either. Mr. Lancer had stopped by her apartment a number of times since Vlad's death. Her father was always at work when the school called and Valerie never picked up the home phone herself. The first few times he'd visited Valerie, he'd used words like truancy and expulsion, but as the frequency of his visits increased she could see the worry deepen in his brow.
She wondered how she looked to him.
She knew that she didn't look well, not to herself.
The bags underneath her eyes were pronounced and dark, her hair unkempt and needing more maintenance than Valerie had energy for. Each day her hair grew worse and she couldn't find a reason to care.
Not after what she'd seen.
Not after what she'd done.
She still hadn't made sense of it all, and that was the worst part.
No, that was a lie.
The worst parts were what she'd already pieced together, what she knew now.
Valerie knew that she'd killed a man, a man that she'd thought she'd trusted. And she hadn't even given him a chance to explain himself, she'd been so overwrought with terror that she'd shot before she collected her thoughts. And then everything happened in a rush, the explosions. The screams that left ringing in her ears, even now.
And then she couldn't see or breathe or move and she was dead—!
But she wasn't. She'd made it out, somehow. Well, at least physically she made it out. Something inside of her must have died then, because she still couldn't sleep. What little sleep she had was ridden with nightmares, flashes of that night.
She couldn't stop the memories once they started either. Everything escalated so fast, one event running into another. And before she knew it Valerie was screaming into her pillow, grabbing fistfuls of her comforter. Her father tried to calm her at first, making her chamomile tea and whispering soft assurances that she was safe now, that he wouldn't let anything hurt her again.
She didn't have the heart to tell her father that she wasn't afraid of getting hurt.
That she was afraid that she'd leave more death in her wake. She was a killer.
Gradually, her father grew more and more distant each night. Some nights he still tried comforting her, making her chamomile tea and rubbing vanilla lotion across her palm. Other nights he was gone, asleep in his own bed, waiting until her screams dissolved into a fit of silent sobs.
She couldn't fault him. He had to sleep too, after all.
The mornings were the hardest. Wiping her tears and struggling to make simple conversation because her throat was still raw from the night before. Her father would encourage her to go back to school, just for one day.
"The first day is the hardest, sweetie! If you just do this one day, it'll be easier with each day going forward."
Valerie didn't look up from her cereal. It was soggy. She hadn't wanted cereal, but her father had poured it for her. Insisting.
"Please, Valerie. I'm just trying to understand why you won't give school another shot! Nothing bad happened at school."
No, nothing bad happened at school. But people were there. People were reminders.
Specifically, one person was a reminder of—
No, no, no! Don't think. If you start remembering you won't stop remembering.
(You can't remember that day now. You remember enough at night.)
Instead, Valerie brought a spoonful of cereal to her lips. The texture reminded her of paper-mache. It took everything in her power not to spit it out on the spot.
"Val…"
"Maybe tomorrow," she said. "Not now."
Her father deflated, looking torn. "Val. I know whatever's been going on has been hard for you. Mr. Masters was your benefactor and it must've been hard to watch him pass, but you can't let this eat at you. He'd want you to keep living."
She wasn't sure what Vlad would want now. Vlad Masters was an enigma she'd never have the chance to unravel because she'd killed him in cold blood.
"If you don't want to talk about it with me, I understand. But… if you want I can find someone else for you to talk with?"
Oh, and now he wanted her to see a shrink.
All things considered, that was probably fair—she was a mess of a person that was ruining her father's life. Not that she'd agree to talk with one.
"We can't afford a therapist," she reasoned. "I'm fine."
"Sweetie, when it comes to your wellbeing I don't think price is an issue."
"But I'm fine."
"Val, look me in the eye."
But the cereal was so captivating, as gross as it tasted.
He sighed. "Valerie Rhiannon Gray."
Oh, he just had to play the middle name card. Didn't he? In moments like these, Valerie hated that she was named after her mother. She could never ignore him when he spoke her mother's name. It felt wrong. Reminding Valerie that she could never live up to the woman that had raised her.
(Especially not now.)
Reluctantly, she looked up from the pool of milk and Spook-E-Os (Amity Park's favorite cereal!). She found that her father's deep brown eyes were brimming with sadness, guilt. The tension at the table was almost palpable.
"Why won't you talk about it? You're not fine and you're not getting better. I can't—I can't stand to see you like this!" He placed his head in his hands. "Not after your mother. I can't do this again, Val."
She was hurting him.
Her doing this, wallowing in her own misery, was hurting her father.
God, she hated herself. She wished this was all over. She wished that she'd never gone down to Vlad's lab that night. She'd just meant to ask about when she'd receive her next compensation because it'd been far too long since he'd last paid her. That's all! Just a question, something she could've honestly written an email for.
But no.
She'd ventured down into his laboratory. The same laboratory he'd told her never to visit without his permission.
Valerie had… had heard sounds at the door. They weren't good sounds. They were wet sounds and tearing noises and muffled screams. She could see green light through the crack of the door and feared for Vlad's life. She'd thought her benefactor had maybe been captured by ghosts and that they were hurting him.
When Valerie had thrown open the door to the laboratory she'd found Vlad Masters standing at an operating table, donning a brown apron smeared with streaks of red and green. On the table was a young boy, no older than her. His chest was sliced open, flaps of skin pinned back to expose the contents of his chest cavity. Glistening organs, red and pink with an unnatural green sheen to them.
She'd almost dropped her weapon in shock when her brain caught up with her eyes. Because she recognized the body on the table.
It was Danny Fenton.
She'd know his hair anywhere, black and swept up so that it just drooped over his eyes. There was a gag in his mouth, which might have once been white, but was now stained green. His blue eyes were blown wide in anguish, in pain.
Vlad, on the other hand, seemed to relish Danny's screams. His fingers were clutched around something that Valerie couldn't make out, something pulsing and dripping and holy-shit-is-that-a-heart-what-the-FUCK—!
"Oh, don't you worry, Little Badger. I'll give it back," Vlad crowed, his smile not once leaving his face. "You know in Ancient Egypt, they would weigh the heart to see if it was light enough for passage into the afterlife. I wonder if yours would pass…"
Valerie couldn't think. No, that's wrong.
She was thinking too much, too fast. Too many thoughts to process, too many feelings to unravel. What she thought she knew wasn't aligning with what she was seeing. Danny Fenton was dying. Vlad Masters was killing him, experimenting on him. Vlad Masters, the man that had given her a second chance; the man that had put a gun in her hand; the man that was holding Danny Fenton's heart.
Phantom always said that she never thought before she took a shot.
Well, he was wrong. Valerie was thinking now.
There were many things she didn't know, but the one thing she understood with every fiber of her being was this: Vlad Masters must be stopped.
Silently as she'd crept into the lab, Valerie stepped forward to get a better vantage. She aimed her weapon, lining her line of fire with Vlad's shoulder.
Vlad was none the wiser, too engrossed in the moment. This was her chance.
"Will your heart pass, Mr. Masters?" she whispered.
By the time Vlad turned his head, Valerie had already pulled the trigger. The shot hit its mark. Vlad's shoulder sizzled with pink ooze and he stumbled to the side. But that wasn't all. Her shot kept going, it went through Vlad's shoulder and hit the tank behind him. There was a brief flash of green before the lab was thrust into darkness with a BANG.
The laboratory exploded in a dizzying maelstrom of force. The only thing that kept Valerie on her feet was her suit's automated momentum. In the center of the room, something was glowing and Valerie could faintly make out that it was Danny. Eyes that had once been blue were now toxic green. In the chaos, the gag had slipped out of his mouth. She didn't have any time to think before the screaming started, louder than anything she'd ever heard before. She was certain that her ears were bleeding…
The screams themselves were their own force, bringing down the ceiling above. In the darkness, Valerie could just make out Vlad's figure as it was propelled into a pillar of debris.
She could still feel the weight of the mansion in her bones. She could still hear Danny's screams dissolve into gurgles before he ceased to be.
Gone.
All that Valerie had left was the light in her visor, dim but enough to dig herself out of the wreckage. It was a tedious effort and felt like hours, but her armor spared her from most injuries. In the time she'd made her way to the surface, Phantom had already arrived on the scene. He helped her shove the last of the wreckage off of her, tenderly pulling her to her feet.
She hated Phantom. He was her sworn enemy, the bane of her existence.
Yet, when he found her she pulled him into a hug and cried into his shoulder. His hair smelled like tea tree oil and mint. Ghosts shouldn't need shampoo, but Valerie found the scent comforting.
Sometime in the next few minutes he'd asked her what happened and she struggled to explain. How could she convey what she'd just done? What she'd just seen? That Vlad Masters and Danny Fenton were lying at the bottom of the wreckage and that it was all her fault.
One of Vlad's Packers mementos flapped in the wind. She shouldn't remember that small detail, but the surrealness of it all cemented it in her memory.
"Val, you can take your time. I just have to know, are you still in danger? Where's Vlad?"
She picked up on the unsaid implication at once. Phantom thought that Vlad Masters was a danger.
He wasn't even wrong.
"I think he's dead."
Phantom shook his head. "Not Vlad. Vlad pulls through."
"Vlad is dead," she said, "and so is Danny Fenton."
Phantom stared and took a hesitant step backward.
"How do you mean that?" he asked. "That they're dead, I mean?"
"I mean they're dead, stupid! They were in the lab before—before I—" she cut herself off.
Before I killed them.
Phantom looked even more confused. "Danny Fenton was in Vlad Masters lab? We're talking son of Jack and Maddie Fenton, right? That one?"
"Who the fuck else!"
"What was he doing there?" Something in Phantom's face changed. "What was… what was Vlad doing to him?"
How much did he know? Was he… he couldn't be complicit in this, could he?
"It was—" she hiccuped. "It was bad. He was killing him. It was torture, some kind of… experimentation. I don't fucking know. It's the worst thing I've ever seen. I loved Danny once… and I watched Vlad pull him apart from the inside out."
Phantom looked shaken. He didn't often lose his heroic demeanor.
All of it together made Valerie want to crawl back underneath the wreckage and let the weight of the world squeeze all the oxygen out of her lungs.
"Vlad vivisected Danny Fenton." Phantom's voice shook. "He… he gutted him."
Phantom dropped out of the air and onto the ground. He lowered himself to the ground, broken glass and all, and sat cross-legged.
"I tried to stop him. But my shot… it caused the entire mansion to fall on us." Valerie threw her head in her hands. "I did this. I did this! I didn't want this! None of it!"
"I know," he said. There was a beat of silence. "Val, can you sit down?"
Everything in her screamed NO. She didn't want to do what the ghost said. She didn't follow Phantom's orders.
Except Valerie was tired of fighting. Against her judgment she obliged.
"I'm not sure if Vlad… made it or not," Phantom said, "but I can tell you with certainty that Danny made it. It sounds insane, but that wasn't the real Danny."
He was fucking with her, trying to make her doubt what she'd seen. She knew what she'd seen, knew what she'd witnessed. No ghost would gaslight her.
"Excuse me?"
"I know, I know!" He raised his hands in a 'desist' gesture. "Vlad has a history with illegal cloning. He's hung up on Maddie Fenton and wants Danny as a son of his own. So he's made clones of Danny, but he's never satisfied with them. He doesn't see them as real people and will do anything to improve his cloning results. So he… experiments on the failures. It's fucked up and inhumane and I can't stop him. I knew he was killing them, but I didn't know how. I—" Phantom ran a hand down his face "I'm so sorry you had to see that."
Cloning? Wasn't that a bit too sci-fi? Too much of a convenient explanation?
"Prove it," she challenged.
"What?"
"Prove that what I saw was a clone," she said. "We may be ghost hunters, but I'm not gullible."
He pursed his lips. "If I prove it… you'll have more questions than answers, Val."
"Bull."
… it hadn't been bull.
It was days later and Valerie still couldn't sort out the intricacies between Danny Fenton and Phantom. She couldn't wrap her brain around the notion that they were the same person. She also couldn't process that Vlad had been a half-ghost the full time. Not immortal, but close to it.
How could she express any of this turmoil to her poor father, who just wanted his daughter to take care of herself again? How could she express this to her father she kept up at night, screaming into her own pillow?
"I'm sorry, Daddy," she whispered. "I'm sorry I'm like this."
Across the breakfast table, her father shook his head. "You have nothing to be sorry about. I know this is rough, I just want you to get the help you need. Please, let me help you. You don't need to talk to me, just someone. Anyone."
Valerie didn't want to talk.
She wanted to bottle it up and keep it where she never needed to think about it.
Though that was turning out to be a poor strategy so far and she doubted that things would start swinging her way anytime soon.
Her father was right, whether she liked it or not.
(She didn't like it.)
Nonetheless, the next words left her lips before she'd had time to think them.
"Jazz Fenton."
Her father raised a brow. "Danny's sister? The girl with all the college scholarships? Not that I'm disapproving, but why her?"
Danny mentioned she knew about him being Phantom. She knew about Vlad. She knew about the Red Huntress.
If she had to pick anyone to keep her secrets, a good option was someone who already knew it all. Plus, her interest in psychology was a selling point too.
"I just have a hunch."
"Alright, sweetie. But if you ever want someone more… well, licensed, just let me know. I'll hold you to it. I'm gonna trust that you reach out to this girl soon. Not 'eventually.'"
She nodded. "I will."
"Good." Her father stood from the table and moved to exit the room. He gave her a peck on the cheek. "I have to go to work now. Take care of yourself, Val."
"I will."
Her father left her alone.
And for the first time in weeks, Valerie had a restful nap on the living room couch.
ahhh I can't believe this is the end! this was the second part I wrote for this series, after penciled lines. impending interment was third, fleeting summons fourth, and driven anguish last.
I thought it would be a fun idea to tackle these prompts from different perspective, each character connected to the story in a different way. and who knows? maybe if I feel up to it in the future, I'll write out more parts. such as Valerie approaching Jazz, the memorial service, or Jack realizing that some of the things Phantom and Vlad said were a liiiiittle sus. that's a BIG if though. I'm in college now, don't have too much free time (:
hope you guys enjoyed!