Never Good Enough

Ugh. Just… go to the news in my profile to know what happened with this. Sigh. 'T was crazy indeed. Truly crazy. My apologies.

Thanks to my fantastic reviewers: Dreamer for lyf, Bluejolteon, IwuvMyKenshyPoo, Snapcat, DigitalDreamer, proud shipper, DeadlyNightshade, Random-idiot-v2, Frimmy, the sleep warrior, An-chan, xheartkreuzx, Blue Smoke, PrettyArbitrary, and the Great Susinko. Big thanks to Fey Phantom who read and reviewed all my chapters in a 36-hour time span. Wowzers.

Validation

Somehow it had actually been relativelyeasy to feign surprise when the three saw Valerie's injury. It ended up being just a wrist sprain, and she wore a makeshift sling around her arm. Despite how casually she talked about it, her movements were obviously gentle to not cause herself pain. It also seemed that the only person she allowed to get off with fretting over her without a punishment greater than an eye-roll was Danny.

Earlier that morning, Danny had awoken to find himself fully dressed with a furious Mr. Manson over his head, screaming bloody murder at him. Something about his father calling, demanding that he come home that instant. It took him a few moments to remember that he'd fallen asleep at his female friend's house, in her bedroom no less. The yelling had woken Sam up and the two had a huge argument, which ended in her father threatening another restraining order if he wasn't out of the house in three minutes. Sam ran into her closet and threw on an outfit faster than Danny ever expected a female to get dressed and they flew out the door to avoid any more threats on his life.

The first thing Danny thought he should do was to use Sam's cell phone to call his own parents. Best. Idea. Ever. He got relatively the same verbal licking from Jack, only he was relieved to find that he was trusted at least a little. He really didn't understand why everyone thought he'd be all over Sam. That was just… wrong.

As the two walked down the street, laughing about the conclusions adults always jumped to when it came to teenagers, they passed Tucker's house. He came out, smiling proudly to himself, and informed them that he wasn't in the least bit of trouble. Somehow he'd convinced his parents that they had gone temporarily insane and didn't even notice their own son sitting at his desk, chatting online all night. They were searching the yellow pages for psychologists as they spoke.

It was still relatively early in the day, and neither Sam nor Danny had eaten any breakfast. They made their way to the cheapest and closest place for food, which happened to be the Nasty Burger. Correction: the Nasty Burger 2, since the first one had up and exploded. No one had been in close proximity in this timeline. The new name pretty much cleared up any doubt whether it was a fast food chain or not.

That was when they saw Valerie hanging outside of the restaurant, looking both relieved and tired. He wanted an excuse to check on her after last night's ordeal and had found it surprisingly easy to drag the others behind him.

With one hand Valerie held a cheeseburger inches from her mouth, the other still preoccupied with being looked at by Danny. "Chill already, Fenton," she said. "I'm fine. It's just a bump."

"You're sure it doesn't hurt to bad?" he asked, lifting it up higher to inspect it better. "I mean, you did fall over ten feet. Down the stairs," he added hastily to go along with Valerie's excuses.

"Just believe her already, will you?" Tucker exclaimed, shrinking away from the familiar look of contempt from Sam as he swallowed another bite of helpless cow. "She's lucky she wasn't hurt badly, but that's just it Danny. She wasn't hurt that badly."

"That's what I get for helping my dad lug equipment downstairs," she said with an innocent smile. It was almost eerie to Danny.

"What are you doing here, anyway?" Danny asked, finally releasing her arm.

She shrugged. "Quit my job. Thought I should celebrate."

"Ah," he said, nodding in secret understanding. Valerie definitely knew how to lie through her teeth well. That was the reason he was still trying to decide whether he should be more afraid of her or not.

"So," Valerie said, suddenly much more cheerful, "I think we know enough about what happened to me last night. What did you do, Sam?"

Sam, who had been silent most of the morning, looked up from the table without moving her head. "Nothing quite as exciting as bodily injuries," she said sardonically. A brief yet meaningful glance was shared between her and the boys. They all knew what she was getting at, and they couldn't say they'd been caught off guard.

"I guess not," she mumbled in reply. "But didn't you and Tucker do anything yesterday?"

"Well, now that you mention it-" Sam said quickly, sudden very interested in the conversation. Tucker shut his slightly open mouth and glared sideways at her for interrupting. "Tucker was at my house last night. We watched movies and stuff, and then went for a walk. You wouldn't believe what we saw, too."

Valerie's eyes seemed to light up with enthusiasm. Danny flinched, knowing what was coming. He willed her not to spill as Sam took the reigns of the tale and did something crazy with it he'd never have been able to do with a straight face.

"What happened?"

"We saw that one ghost kid. You know, that Phantom ghost with the white hair." Sam took a French fry from Danny's tray, as he was still momentarily paralyzed and put it in her mouth casually. "Then someone in this outrageous red jumpsuit showed up, with this huge cannon aimed at us. I think she was insane… she was a girl, right?"

"Uh… yeah, I think so," said Tucker, eyeing Valerie's narrowed eyes of pent up violence warily. Was that a gleam of triumph in Sam's eyes?

"Anyway, then this other bald ghost guy shows up," continued Sam. "But neither of us got to see what happened because that's when we ran back home." She turned to Danny and smiled falsely. He could almost see the pain in her eyes. "Sorry we didn't tell you sooner, but these days ghosts are just all over the place."

Valerie perked up and turned to the boy next to her. "You weren't with them, were you?" she said almost to herself.

Feeling like a deer trapped in headlights, Danny turned to Sam, the newly appointed expert, and silently begged for help. She shrugged and sipped her soda, giving Tucker a look of death and suffering as he took yet another bite of his double meaty burger.

"I was… I was at my house!" Danny answered, stumbling through. "I couldn't go because my dad made me stay home to clean the lab, wash beakers, you know, all that jazz. It is my only real chore and I always forget to do it, so, yeah, my dad made me stay home and do it." He grabbed his soda and began drinking to prevent himself from rambling any more.

"Okay," she said slowly, turning back to her own plate. Danny sighed and tried to ignore the eye roll that Sam was sending him. Like it was his fault that Sam had a lot of prior experience of making excuses. All right, to be fair, so had he, but he just didn't of the lying ability as much as she did. Maybe it was a girl thing.

Silence prolonged at their table as the only other party in the restaurant filed out. It wasn't quite lunchtime, and as it turned out, Nasty Burger didn't have much in the way of a breakfast menu. They were now left alone in the newer, cleaner site that a month previously had still been a destruction zone. Danny squirmed slightly in his seat and moved his sight back to his meal.

"So what do you think about the phantom?" Valerie said suddenly. "More and more people are deciding that he's not such a bad ghost… what's your take, Danny?"

Great. On the spot again. Was there something in the physiology of girls that kept them on his back twenty four-seven?

"My parent's don't really know either way. They don't much care, as long as it's a ghost." He avoided eye contact with either of his friends. "Me, I guess he's okay. I mean he hasn't really caused much damage since that whole city hall thing, huh?"

"Yeah," Tucker added, "he can't be all bad."

How was it possible to have this long of a conversation made up entirely of lies?

"But he's still a ghost!" Valerie threw the remains of her lunch on the table and looked at Danny disbelievingly. "Your parents have fought it, haven't they? Don't you think that maybe that should mean something? He's stolen from banks, kidnapped the mayor, and all sorts of other stuff! How in the heck does saving the town form one ghost attack clear that all up? The whole town is nuts for thinking that it's, I mean, I did way more... uh..." She looked around at the others. Even the person at the cash register was staring. "Whatever."

So now Danny was an "it", huh? He could forgive Valerie to certain points, but her use of the word it was unsettling to him. Sure he knew Valerie loathed his ghost form. With a passion, in fact. It was kind of hard to miss after having been fired at during roughly seventeen battles with her. But as humans they were supposed to be relatively good pals, weren't they? Well, they were. In her eyes they were, anyway. She didn't even know she had insulted Danny.

Sometimes it was hard distinguishing his normal half from the abnormal one. His brain hurt.

"Maybe you should lay off the caffeine, Valerie," Sam said, breaking the tense silence. She drummed her fingers on the table. "Or the meat. Both make you antsy, so whichever works."

"Meat does not make you antsy!" Tucker counted, pointing an accusing finger at her. "It makes you alert and energized, but not antsy!"

"Forget it, Tucker," she argued, rolling her eyes. "I don't feel like arguing now. Move." She nudged him over until he nearly fell from the booth, then pushed her way past him. Wrapping a hand around Danny's wrist, she pulled up and said, "Can we talk please? We'll be back in a second," she added to the remaining two, before wrenching a wide-eyed Danny by the arm out of his seat.

He yelped as she tugged on his arm, dragging him along to the hallway leading to the kitchen and the restrooms. "Sam, what are you… Sam, ow, that hurts!" Her grip had tightened around his wrist to keep him from squirming as much as he was. At his exclamation she let go and stopped, pushing him gently against a wall. "What?" he asked impatiently.

"Are you okay?" she questioned, crossing her arms and looking at him with a raised eyebrow.

Danny almost couldn't believe the question. "You tried to tear my arm off to ask me if I'm okay?" he cried. "Yes, I'm okay, Sam, can we go back and-" He tried to walk off but Sam put a hand against his shoulder and stopped him. "What?" he snapped. After a moment, he relaxed and noticed the harshness in his voice. "What is it?"

"I'm asking you that." An employee walked out of the kitchen, gave them an odd look, and then went by. Sam lowered her voice to a whisper. He had to struggle to listen. "I've been patient with you for way too long. I figured I'd leave you be, give you your space, until you decided to speak up. You haven't and now I have to say something for you because you're being such a guy." She took a step forward, her eyes boring into his confused ones. "What happened with Clockwork… something happened that you're not telling me or Tucker. You know that you can trust us, right? Something bothered you about that, why won't you tell us?"

Oh, man. This was so not his morning. He shut his eyes and swallowed forcefully. Had he expected her to bring this up now? No, he didn't, not in the least. Plus, they were about five feet from the spot where Sam and everyone else he ever cared about died. At least, in his memory they had. He wasn't exactly feeling up to talking right now.

Or had she done that on purpose?

Girls.

He rested against the wall and scratched the back of his head, looking down thoughtfully. How to word it? Predicting that Sam wasn't going to let him out of his corner until he answered, he was just going to have to say what had been plaguing him in the back of his mind since he first saw his future in Clockwork's keep.

"Fine" he sighed. "It's just… okay, look, basically, the future me was awesome. Wasn't he?"

"Excuse me?" Sam said, leaning back in surprise. That hadn't been the confidence she'd expected to hear come out of his mouth. "How can you say that?"

"He was a jerk," they said simultaneously. Danny rolled his eyes, which earned a characteristic mental dagger from Sam.

"Not 'awesome' in a good way," he added hastily, seeing her reaction. "I meant that his powers were awesome. Did you see all the stuff he could do? Did you?"

Sam cocked her head to the side and looked at him with disbelief. "Didn't you get the wail, anyway? You said you've got the ghostly wail."

"That's not all he could do, though," Danny said. He felt himself getting excited just thinking about it all. "That guy… me… whatever, he could rip holes into the freaking Ghost Zone. You know, like Wulf can, remember? Do you know how easy fighting ghosts would be if I could do that? We wouldn't need the thermos anymore, I could just chunk them in and seal it closed! Can you imagine what I'd be like with those powers?"

She nibbled her lip and sighed. "Yes. I can. And I don't like it one bit, you know that I don't."

"I wouldn't be evil," he argued loudly. He caught himself and lowered his voice. "Just because all the other strong ghosts we see are evil doesn't mean I'd be."

Sam shook her head and waved her hands to stop him. "Shut up, Danny. You can't honestly be jealous of yourself, can you?"

"Pretty much, yeah," he admitted, smiling awkwardly. It fell when he realized exactly what this all would sound like to Sam. She didn't get it. He knew she wouldn't. "I know it sounds weird-"

"It sounds sick." Her nose crinkled and she looked disgusted. "You have the wail. That was his most powerful force. Why are you bugging out about his other powers now?"

Danny clenched his teeth and looked at Sam, pained by her distaste with him. "I… I don't know," he said weakly. Yet another lie piled on top of the rest, but what choice did he have? How was he going to explain it without witnessing her going completely nuclear?

She sighed and rubbed her forehead. "Great reason," she mumbled. "That's ten years into the future though. You can't expect to be that strong so quickly. I figured you'd know that what with all the practicing we've done."

All the practicing just made it harder on him, he thought. He didn't feel like discussing it anymore. The whispers from last night were beginning to flash through his mind…

Little human boy, can you hope, with so little power and training, to defeat a ghost as old as I?

"Let's get back to Tuck and Val," Danny said with finality. He'd already started the day badly; he didn't plan on worsening bonds between he and her.

Nodding in agreement, Sam trailed behind him as he left his post on the wall and moved back into the main room. Faintly he heard her mumble, but it was indistinctive. He wanted no less to ask what she'd said than to worry her or Tucker with what was truly running through his mind.

What if…?

As they neared, Tucker looked up and smirked. "It's been a while since you left, huh?"

"Shut up," they growled, taking seats opposite one another and staring at the table.

Valerie glanced nervously at Tucker. He simply shrugged and nodded his head as if to tell her, 'we'll probably never know.'

Valerie had left the Nasty Burger shortly after that. She'd gone there only to quit her job and to leave, but Fenton, being as Fenton-y as possible, took ten minutes to decide her arm wasn't a mortal wound. He was one crazy kid.

She liked that.

A little piece of her was itching to put on her suit and go out to find that weird bald ghost and give him a taste of his own medicine. However reckless she was, though, she wasn't stupid. Her weapons had little to no effect on him, so she needed better ones. She wasn't going to walk up to Fenton Works and ask if Danny could come out and play, and, oh, could she maybe have a few high charged Fenton bazookas and portable ghost portals?

Only one person could get her the firepower she needed without her father seeing, and that was Mr. Masters.

Sitting on her bed, she flipped open the laptop her supplier had given her. It wasn't like she could afford something this sleek with her minimum wage salary, and not like she even had that anymore. She wasn't going to keep working longer than she had to at a place that exploded.

She opened Mozilla Firefox and opened her email. Quickly she wrote out a notification of ghost activity and request for ammo, described the ghost, what powers she'd witnessed, and what she'd need to be able to overcome those powers. Next she detailed what she could remember of how she'd been injured. It had felt like someone had a tight grip around her brain and squeezed until she couldn't think, then the next thing she knew she was in her bedroom with her father hanging over her.

She had a vague idea as to how she'd gotten back home, and she wasn't entirely comfortable with it.

The email was sent now, and she was free to wait what she predicted would be five minutes until her materials arrived outside of her apartment door. For a moment her mind mulled over how they always got there so quickly. She'd always figured Masters just had a lot of helpful, though creepy, resources. She'd have to ask one day.

After a few minutes of lying back on her bed, taking the rare alone time warmly, she pushed herself off and went into the hallway. Sure enough there was the usual box with her name on it. Also, ironically predictable at this point, he father was standing behind it with a stern look.

"Heh," she laughed, smiled brightly. "From a secret admirer?"

"I'll be looking at these before you do anything," he said, bending over and picking the box up. After he left into the other room, Valerie groaned and hit the wall angrily. With her sprained arm.

"Ouch!" she yelped, pulling her arm into her chest and holding tightly. Bad idea, Val, she scorned herself. Bad idea.

Stupid, stupid Danny, Sam thought angrily, kicking at a random pebble with her black boots. Cars whizzed by on her left, buildings ran on her right, and people pushed by on both sides. She was walking back home, alone this time, since she'd decided to leave on her own. She'd left shortly after Valerie had.

For some reason her conversation with Danny had bothered her more than it should have. It wasn't her fault, though, he was going all emo over something as stupid as jealousy.

Here she was, thinking that maybe it had something to do with seeing her die.

Well, maybe that wasn't very fair. She wasn't the only one he'd witnessed dying when he couldn't do anything. Also, it wasn't like she was really dead anyway. Yet still she was disappointed in his reason for being all depressed and reserved lately. It was stupid and didn't make any sense at all.

Then there was the fact that a strange feeling told her Danny wasn't being entirely honest with her, either.

Her head hurt from being so angry. She hadn't had a real fight with Danny since Desiree had last appeared. It was a lot louder and crueler then, but she was just as frustrated. He was being an idiot and somehow she felt rejected.

She'd have to get over it, though. Cyrus was still on the loose, and whenever they'd gotten into stupid fights over parties or food, the results were never good. In fact they were usually the worst locally centered ghost attacks they'd ever have.

Thinking about Cyrus again sent shivers down her spine. Sure, she said she was fine, and technically she was. Nonetheless, the feeling it had caused her would grace her memory every now and then. In fact, right now she could feel it pressing down against her...

Oh, crap.

She grit her teeth together and grasped her head, trying to expel the hold on her. The only thing she knew about the grip was that it was bad. She looked up and searched the skies above her for any sign, but saw none. She was ready to dismiss the sensations to her psyche when she heard a loud crash behind her.

Sam swerved back and saw cars toppled, people lying on the ground, some kneeling and gripping their hair in what looked like pain. Above the scene of chaos floated a waving mass of black cloth. Cyrus, she thought to herself. She reached into her backpack and pulled out her cell phone, diving into an alley and huddling behind a trashcan. It was getting harder for her to keep her train of thought but she managed to press the speed dial.

"Hey, Sam," said the voice on the other end of the phone.

"Danny!" she cried. "Cyrus is striking downtown, you can't miss it there's a bunch of screaming and cars being thrown around."

"What?" Danny yelled. "What's he doing?"

Sam stood up and peeked over the top of the trashcan to see. Her eyes widened and she temporarily forgot about the cell phone. Remembering it, she said, "Oh my God, Danny, this is bad. You have to get..."

She stopped talking. Danny yelled in her ear, but then it went away. She either dropped the phone or had gone deaf. Either way, she didn't care. Finding herself face down on the filthy concrete ground of the alleyway, she struggled against the presence filling her insides until finally, she succumbed.

The last thing she remembered seeing clearly was a wave of black robe.

Ouch. Sorry about that one. But this was a huge sized chapter, be happy I did this in about two-three days. Well, please read and review and wait for Eternal: Balance or Never Good Enough: Tactics.

See you in the afterlife,

Saramis Kismet