A/N: I feel this chapter's a bit weak, but I was kind of at an impasse, and decided to just submit it and move on. Will probably clean it up later, but I plan to leave the details all intact, so don't feel obliged to come back to it but also don't be surprised if things have changed slightly on your next read-through.
And…totally didn't know that I wasn't supposed to reply to reviews within the fic. I guess that's why they installed that 'reply to,' button, bah. When I do the final edit, I'll clear the notes off, just to be safe. XP
I'll say a general thanks, since as far as I can see, that isn't against the rules! conan98002, L'ange-Sans-Ailes, Crazy Billie Joe Loving Freak (thanks for the heads up, too!), Epyon Zero, Annabelle Carter, Galateagirl, Anomaly25, …, dArkliTe-sPirit, littlekittykat, Ohka Breynekai, Yoshi, SilverstarsEbonyskies, HAlFa34, Jimmy the Gothic Egg, Phantom of a Rose, animeobsessed3191, pwykersotz, Leppers, HokiPoki1213, shadow929, mrit, Kagome M.K, Fanficaholic and Sweeteen19, your reviews were much appreciated!Hope you enjoy this chapter too!
I like how everyone is theorizing how this will end. I'll just say that nothing is impossible, for now!
Estrelas
Chapter 19
By Shimegami-chan
Locating Valerie was simple enough – she had returned to her house and was staring, dazed, at her ecto-gun when Jazz, Tucker and Danny knocked on the door. She allowed them to enter in order to answer their questions, pointedly avoiding looking at Danny Fenton. "Of course I don't know how to reverse the effects. Why would I need to?"
"At least let me have a look at the weapon," Jazz pleaded, holding out her hand. "You don't seem to understand how important this is."
"I think you should just be thankful that I haven't called the Ghost Squad," Valerie said bitterly. Now that the truth was out, it was all over – images of Danny pulled from 1960s newspapers were being plastered all over the news checkpoints on TV. The hunter now felt empty somehow, as though her victory over Phantom had been robbed of its meaning, but despite that lack her anger remained. Danny Phantom was Danny Fenton. Danny Phantom was Danny Fenton.
He'd lied to them.
Except to these two, Val reminded herself. Tucker and Jazz had clearly known well before today that Danny had been the ghost boy all along. She wondered if maybe she was the only friend he'd left in the dark. That thought, of course, made her even angrier.
Danny, for his part, hadn't done any of the talking, instead hanging back behind Tucker and tactfully directing his gaze elsewhere. Looking at him - alive and well, an image of her long-forgotten childhood – had instilled a sense of surreal disbelief upon the entire situation. She was glad that he hadn't tried to apologize or even speak to her.
He did seem pretty preoccupied, Valerie noticed, finally handing Jazz the ecto-gun. Danny (for somehow, boy and spook were still registering as two separate entities in her perception; she now tried to force herself to call and think of him as Phantom) kept touching his hand to a strange green orb on his left ear, barely concealing worry. It was an expression she'd seem on his ghostly face many times before, but for all the years Valerie had spent hunting him, she'd never connected the dots.
It was infuriating.
It was enough to make her want to scream…but Valerie controlled herself. Keeping grudges wasn't good for the soul, she now believed, though she couldn't stop the anger that this particular situation had spawned. She had every right to be angry, Val chanted mentally. She'd been lied to and betrayed. She'd been humiliated. All these years…all that work and hate and hiding had been for nothing. She'd only succeeded now in losing the false sense security she'd wrapped around herself since Phantom had disappeared fourteen years before.
Of course, Valerie mused, she'd be coming out of this with just wounded pride. Something told her that now that the media had gotten hold of this evidence against Phantom, there'd be no safe place in Amity Park for him. Especially if they believed he'd been forcing himself on the girl he'd been kissing in the photos…
That girl. Her face had been shielded from the camera, her back to the amateur photographer who had been thinking only about zooming in on the spectre. Valerie wondered if he really had been doing something terrible to her. "Hey…Phantom."
The boy ghost started, as though he honestly hadn't been expecting her to address him. "Uh…yeah?"
"The girl in the pictures…"
He frowned.
"What did you do to her?" Valerie's lips were a grim line. "You didn't…?"
Phantom stared at the hunter as though she had grown an extra head. "Sam? I didn't 'do' anything to her."
"Sam," Valerie repeated. "So it was the same girl from before. And you really were that guy... 'William'."
"William?" Tucker bent double with laughter. "And let me guess, 'Bill' for short? That's genius, Danny, really."
Danny silenced the older man with a glare that eventually shifted over to land on his sister. "That one was Jazz's idea, thanks."
Valerie, however, was persistent. "So she was kissing you willingly? That wasn't some kind of ghostly trick?"
"Geez," Danny exhaled. "I can't believe you'd even suggest that. Yes, it was consensual. No, I didn't do anything awful to her. She went home, where her parents promptly found out about me, thereby ruining any chance I might have had with her."
"It's better that way," Valerie told him with a frown. "A ghost in love with a human? It'd never work."
"I am half human, in case you forgot," he replied dryly. "Well, I was. Now I seem to be entirely human."
"I don't really see what's so bad about that," Tucker said, rolling his eyes.
"You've got to be kidding, Tuck! It matters a lot," the halfa said, his words rising in pitch, "when Spectra and Bertrand are out there doing who-knows-what, zapping whatever victims they came across next! It matters when I've all of a sudden lost what's been my identity for the past fifty years! And what happens if I still can't die or cross over? How about that? You think I want to sit around the mortal plane for all of eternity?" The last syllable was a gasp that seemed to hang tangibly in the air like a dying ember, the sound of it echoing a million times in Danny's ears before finally receding. Nobody laughed.
"Danny," Tucker said slowly, "did your voice just crack?"
The raven-haired boy's eyes were wide. "I…"
None of the others seemed to know what to say, and only Valerie was unable to grasp the significance of what had just happened. "What the heck is going on? What's wrong with you all?"
"I'm not really sure," Jazz said, looking dazed. "That hasn't happened before, right?"
"No," Danny replied slowly.
"Could you please fill me in?" the hunter demanded again.
"Danny's going through puberty," Tucker said, awed.
"I am not!"
Jazz finally supplied the explanation, blunt and to the point. "Ever since the accident that gave him his ghost powers, Danny's been kind of…chronologically stuck. No ageing, no maturing, not even in his human form."
"Really," Valerie mused, squinting at him. It was true that he didn't look the seventeen years he had supposedly lived through, instead seeming a little smaller, a little shorter, a little more youthful than what she remembered the boys of her teen years being. She'd never taken much note of it when Danny was alive, but then again, he had always been a bit scrawny, she recalled. "But that's changed?"
"Could be changing," Jazz corrected. "There's no way to know for sure, of course, but maybe removing his ghost half actually might have been more beneficial than we thought. I wonder what the effects would be over time."
"You think there's a chance I might have started ageing again?" Danny looked hopeful, but something in his expression seemed almost…sad. If Valerie didn't know better, she might have thought he'd preferred being a ghost.
He…didn't, did he?
The hunter realized that in less than five minutes Danny had already won her over. Try as she might to stay angry, as the pieces of the puzzle fell into place, a memory came unbidden to her. An overcast afternoon in August of 1968, when on the shores of Lake Jejune she had confronted the Phantom paying his 'respects' to the memorial of a teenage boy who had drowned there. What was it he had said? She didn't remember the conversation…but she remembered the ghost's iridescent green eyes, whose solemn expression had nudged her into complacency, like an unspoken pact between them. She'd thought, back then, that maybe she had misjudged Phantom.
She knew, now, that she had.
"I guess it's time for all the secrets to be out in the open," Valerie finally said, having missed whatever exchange the siblings had shared while deep in her recollection of Danny Fenton's eulogy. "I can take you someplace where you might be able to find out more about that dispossession weapon. The person who made it…he's no longer alive, but I've heard that he might have become…one of you." She swallowed.
"One of who?" Tucker asked, confused.
Valerie nodded at Danny. "I mean that he's become a ghost. And if you're willing to take a trip into their world with me, he might be able to give you the answers you need."
"You have a ghost portal?" Jazz said in disbelief, eyeing the huge, red steel door. "Why?"
"Of course she has a ghost portal," Danny shrugged, at the same time that Valerie sighed and said "Of course I have a ghost portal." The two looked at each other.
"Val," Danny continued, "thankfully keeps hers shut."
"I don't exactly want to make the ghost problem bigger, Phantom," Valerie said, hands on hips.
"It was praise, not criticism."
"Okay, okay!" Jazz intervened between the aged huntress and the boy ghost, extending her arms to keep them apart as though they were children. "Could you two calm down, please?"
Tucker, meanwhile, was looking warily at the doorway. "You actually want us to go into the Ghost Zone? In what? Walker would snap us up like gnats, not to mention that without his powers, Danny—" He broke off, seemingly not wanting to remind the halfa of his loss, but still earned himself a reproachful look from Jazz and a glare from Valerie.
"Actually, Tuck, there's something else you could do that would be a lot more helpful."
Looking hopeful at the thought of avoiding a trip to the Ghost Zone, Tucker tipped his head to one side. "What's that?"
"Go to Whipstaff, and track down Sam."
"What?" The dark-skinned man frowned. "I don't even know what she looks like. How am I supposed to find her?"
"Well, you said you knew the area! Start asking around, or something. You're not going to have any easier a time finding her than me, at least not like this." Danny gestured at himself. "She's a little taller than me, with chin-length black hair, and she's Goth. She has violet eyes. That's…about all I can tell you. Oh! And I know that her parents have a lot of money."
"You could go back to our old house and ask her grandmother for more information," Jazz suggested. "Just tell her you're a friend of mine."
Tucker looked as though he wanted to protest, but his eyes darted back and forth from the Portal to Danny. It was clear that he was not interested in going to see Valerie's supplier…and while Jazz didn't know it, and Val didn't know they knew it, both Tucker and Danny were pretty sure they knew exactly who they'd be paying a visit to. And while he didn't like the idea of asking his arch-enemy for help…he was getting desperate. "All right already, I'll go look for your girlfriend. Just as long as you get in and out of the Ghost Zone as quickly as you can, and meet me there."
"Deal."
Valerie was readying a small, pod-like contraption that looked somewhat like an invention his parents had once owned. Danny supposed that the hunter didn't always travel by hover sled, especially not in the Ghost Zone (not that he could figure out why Valerie might go to the Ghost Zone – maybe just to drop off ghosts she had captured?) when there was a much better chance of getting attacked or arrested. "Okay, get in."
The curly-haired woman fiddled with ancient controls and brought the ship to life as Danny and Jazz strapped themselves down, ignoring Tucker's waving and cheerful smile bidding them good bye. The Ghost Portal yawned open in front of them, the world beyond it a fluctuating mass of green punctuated by black smoke and swirling clouds. Jazz cringed. Guiding the ship forward, Valerie flipped a half-dozen switches and displayed a detailed map on her navigation screen. "Now…like I said before, I don't know for sure if my contact is still around, or how he'll react to visitors. I know he was never very fond of you, Phantom."
"You don't know the half of it," Danny muttered.
Valerie's eyes narrowed. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"Never mind," the halfa sighed, peering out the front viewport at bleak scenery. "Do you even know how to find him?"
"No," Valerie admitted. "But I'm not entirely without associates here, it might surprise you to know. Not all ghosts are evil."
Danny stared at her incredulously, but Valerie kept her eyes front. "I can't believe you just said that."
"Believe it."
"Danny knows the Ghost Zone pretty well," Jazz said helpfully. "Is there a directory or something?"
"No," Danny said with a dry laugh, "but if he hasn't changed much since the last time I saw him, his Portal will be about as subtly disguised as a train wreck. Heck, maybe it's even in the same place as it used to be." It leads somewhere else now, if Vlad's a full ghost, Danny thought, remembering what Valerie had told them in the living room. But Vlad is still Vlad, I'm sure…
"Okay, now I know there's something you're not telling me," Valerie said through clenched teeth. Danny simply pointed to her left, and she swung the ship in a wide turn, taking them deeper into the murky ghost world.
"Hey, I could be wrong," Danny shrugged, avoiding looking at Jazz. He wasn't sure what she'd think of seeing Vlad again – she didn't like the man any more than her brother did. But it was really too late now to rethink things.
They drifted closer to what appeared to be a giant purple football, floating in mid-air. "Uh…okay," Valerie said slowly.
"Or, I could be right."
"This is where we're going?" Jazz asked, glancing furtively at Danny.
"It's behind the football."
Valerie used the mechanical arms on the outside of her ship to shift the football away, revealing a large, glowing green door. "Well, then…"
"Yeah…he hasn't changed."
"I didn't realize you knew my supplier," Valerie finally said lamely, guiding them through the doorway and into a large, opulent room that could be a library or some sort of study. The walls were lined with books, and the portal was situated like a hearth, with the Ghost Zone's landscape flickering, firelike, beyond. The hunter parked the ship just outside the door, looking at Danny with raised eyebrows.
"I know him, yeah. I knew all along."
"I don't understand."
"I don't know if he really wants it all explained." Danny sighed. "That's better left to him, I guess."
"Wait, this person has been giving Valerie weapons to kill you, and you not only knew it, but you didn't put a stop to it?" Jazz looked at him disbelievingly.
Danny shrugged. "I tried to stop him, but he blackmailed me. He knew I was only half-ghost."
Both Jazz and Valerie's mouths fell open then, but Jazz's closed first and slowly, and her eyes hardened. "What did you say this guy's name was, again?"
"I didn't," Danny said simply.
"Well…if it isn't my dear Daniel." The ghost himself had appeared seemingly out of thin air, a vampiric figure with fangs, glowing red eyes, and spiked, pointed hair that resembled a demon's horns. His expression seemed perplexed, though. "I'd wondered if I'd ever see you again."
"I'd hoped you wouldn't," Danny replied evenly.
"Dear me, Daniel, that kind of malice isn't necessary now. I'm actually quite grateful to see you unharmed and…rather unmistakably, still half-human. Curious." The vampire ghost's eyes had landed on the two women. "Oh my, and this is quite the surprise. Miss Grey…and Jasmine as well."
"Mr. Masters?" Valerie asked slowly, her voice coloured with shock at his appearance.
"Masters? Vlad Masters?" Jazz rounded on Danny, her eyes fiery. "Let's just leave, Danny. We don't need or want his help!"
"Jazz, what are you saying?" the halfa asked, taken aback. Okay, admittedly Vlad had been kind of a creep, hitting on their mother all the time and putting their father down, and Danny wasn't exactly thrilled to be begging for his help now. But Vlad had made the weapon that had stripped him of his ghost powers, and he was probably the only one that could tell them how it worked. Jazz's next words, however, shocked them all into silence.
"This guy," she gestured wildly, "is the person that killed our parents."
-to be continued…
A/N: Was that a cliff-hanger? I meant to be better about the cliff-hangers. You can pretend you didn't see that last line, if you want!