Disclaimer: Don't own DP.
Hey, all! So I've noticed in looking through fanart that there's not a lot of drawings of Dark Dan or Valerie that alter Butch Hartman's style of them (which to me is fun but sometimes awkward or too stiff). So I gave my hand at drawing them the way that I see them in my mind. You can also go to lightningstreak. deviantart . com (remove the spaces) and access these pictures from my main profile. Let me know your thoughts! I will post a permanent link on my profile to these as well. It's possible in the future that I may try to draw more, as I'm very out of practice and would like to improve my skill. Please note this pictures are in no way professional, and I did not clean up the lines at all.
Thanks to Invader Johnny, Cookieplzandthnx, Above the Winter Moonlight, starwater09, ZoneRobotnik, SweetestChick, Xand'r Coldhearted, too enigmatic 2 b urs, Silverstone007, SerenaPotterSailorMoon, Zanza Flux, and plosek for reviewing!
Shot 17 Summary: Valerie wonders why, in ten years, Dan Phantom has never attacked Amity Park on Christmas. Rating: T, Genre: Friendship
Deliverance
Shot 17: Tis the Season to be…Friends?
Amity Park did not celebrate Christmas the first year of Phantom's attacks. It had been a dark time in which they feared for their lives far more than they feared receiving pointless gifts. It was strangely anticlimactic when Dan Phantom never showed his face.
The second year, they tentatively celebrated. By the third, they decided to hell with it, and they celebrated with what little they had. Since then, Valerie counted Christmas as the only time of the year that she could freely roam in her army fatigues without worrying about suiting up to fight Phantom.
Which was why everyone was looking at her strangely today.
As she locked her helmet on her head, checking over her gear, her father asked, "Dear, it's Christmas Eve. We know he's not going to attack. Why are you going out and looking for trouble?"
"It's bothering me," she admitted. She began to online her Phantom Tracker on her arm. "I gotta know what he's doing."
"Who cares? It has nothing to do with us."
"You don't know that; he could be…regenerating or something. Or hibernating."
"It's going to snow," Damon pleaded. "It'll be cold, and you'll get sick."
"My suit has heat," she said. "I'll be fine, trust me."
"Baby girl, I don't wanna lose you on a day like this," he begged harder, his voice tired and breaking. "I don't want you to die."
She rolled her eyes to hide her discomfort at her father's concern. "It's been almost ten years. If Phantom could actually kill me, he would have done it by now." She checked the storage port of her jet sled and noted with satisfaction that it was full. "Don't worry," she said. "I'll be back by midnight to celebrate, okay?"
And then she shot off down the hall before Damon could interject. The aging father simply stared at the hall and shook his head with a sigh. She'd given him too many gray hairs to count, but there was never any stopping her. She was strangely similar to Dan Phantom in that way—headstrong, impossible, solitary. He feared that she found more enjoyment in fighting than in being with her own kind.
So he prayed that whatever had stopped Phantom from fighting in the past would keep Valerie safe, because the Amity Park Christmas celebration would not stop for her alone.
Beyond the barrier, the world was white. The Wastelands spanned far in a cacophony of strange, snow-covered piles and shapes. Valerie could feel herself struggle to maintain a straight course from the occasional pull of the howling wind. Although Amity Park was decorated to the brim with Christmas lights and happy laughter echoing from every corner, everything was barren in the lands that Dan Phantom had claimed.
She glanced down at her tracker, puzzling for Phantoms' location. Usually, it was not difficult to find him. Either he was attacking the barrier, or she was flying about, using his prominent ecto-signature to track him.
"What the hell?" she muttered under her breath in consternation, hitting the tracker on her arm to make it work. Today, it was as if there was interference blocking every ecto-signature in the world. Phantom's signature was but a blip on the screen, which made her suspicious that perhaps it wasn't really him. Or that something was wrong.
Eventually, she tracked him past the section of the Wastelands that were once the suburbs of Amity Park. Her technology began to beep to alert that she was closing in on an ectoplasmic being, and her heart began to rise in anticipation and curiosity. What did a ghost who wanted world conquest do on Christmas Eve, anyway? Was his power really compromised?
Valerie wondered if there were some kind of magic in Christmas air that drained him of his powers.
Instead, she found him sitting on the edge of a rolling cliff that overlooked a lake. The dark edges of his cape hung to the side of him, disappearing into the snow. He looked no different than ever before. At least from a distance.
"You know," she called out, "I was expecting some kind of diabolical hibernation!" She flew down to him, just above eye level. "What the hell is this?"
But something was very off with him. Instead of immediately blurring into action, Dan simply sat there with the irritated expression worthy of a sulking teenager. "Go away, Valerie," he demanded, red eyes never leaving the frozen lake. "I will not fight you today."
She raised her hands to show that she was without visible weapons. "I know that," she huffed, eyebrow raised beneath the visor of her helmet. "I just wanted to know why."
"So that you could use it against me?" he said irritably, looking away. "You have wasted your resources." He waved out at the vast nothingness surrounding them. "In case you haven't noticed, I'm not the only ghost who takes this day off." He glared at her. "Can you not tell that I don't want to be bothered?"
Valerie put her left hand on her hip and raised her right arm to showcase the minimal radar bleeps on her tracker. She looked exasperated with him. "I noticed that too. So for my Christmas present to myself, I'm gonna find out why so I can stop worrying about it. And you're going to tell me what I want to know."
One of his white eyebrows raised. "How thoughtful of me."
The ghost hunter simply floated above, arms crossed in expectation.
With a tired roll of his eyes, he looked back at her with complete honesty. "What you are witnessing is the truce," he said stiffly. "All ghosts adhere to a truce on Christmas Eve. For twenty-four hours, we stop fighting to…celebrate. The alteration of my ecto-signature is simply the result from not broadcasting my power. It is customary for ghosts to do so on today only, as a sign of faith that we will not break the truce."
She realized he looked oddly lonely and offbeat. The flickers of his hair were soft and slower than typical. His mouth was set in a too-tight line.
It was strange to think of the entire ghost race as having limited human emotions and truces. She thought Dan Phantom was perhaps the only one who did such things. "Why Christmas Eve?" she demanded. "When did the truce start?"
"I don't know, and I don't care," he said, the baritone of his voice tinged with derision. "It's tradition. It is law set forth by the Ghost Council."
"…So no matter what I do," Valerie said lightly, "you can't fight back?"
His nose scrunched, and his lip curled into a snarl. "Don't push your luck," he said. "You're not even a ghost. I could slice you in half without breaking the truce."
"So then you've chosen to not fight me," she concluded, almost amused. "This that why you're all depressed and whiny?"
The ghost's shoulders tightened in frustration. He knew that Valerie was trying to gain information about a potential weakness. "I don't need a reason to do what I want. Go away."
But Valerie did not move. "You know you can't fool me, Phantom." The strange conditions of their rivalry made it that Valerie knew more about Dan than she did about herself. She had seen him exhibit sparks of humanity, which had made her consider more than once the possibility that she could perhaps talk him down from destroying everything. Maybe she could make him see the futility of his actions.
And maybe the ghost truce would give her a chance to learn about him more—to find out what was inspiring the strange depression in him, and then use it to further turn his mind around.
As she jumped off of her jet sled, she treaded carefully, for she knew that raising Phantom's ire too much would result in altercation—which neither wanted. She had not brought her heavier artillery, and she knew Phantom himself was compromised.
He watched her angrily. "I said to go away," he demanded. "Do you not understand me?" His fingers clenched, and a red glow began to pulse from his fingertips. "I will shoot you."
Valerie hopped onto one of the snow-covered rocks beside him and allowed her feet to loosely swing in the air. "To really hurt me," she said lightly, "you'd have to stop masking your signature. But then that would be against your truce now, wouldn't it?"
He began to eye her with growing hesitance and curiosity. It was rare for even their nonviolent encounters to begin without weapons. The thought left him a bit unsettled, so he tried to compensate. "I could still strangle you."
Valerie seemed entirely unaffected by his threats. She eyed him right back and asked point-blank, "So if this Christmas truce is an all-ghost celebration, why are you being antisocial out here instead of partying with them?"
"Why the hell do you care?"
"Because it's my job to know your business." She crossed her arms in a haughty manner to hide her own curiosity. "If you don't tell me, I'll just capture one of your little ghost friends and force it out of them. Your choice. I know you're hiding something important."
His lip curled downward. "They're not my friends, and if you must know, I just don't want to waste my time with those degenerates." He seethed a bit in more anger than Valerie was expecting, but it was not directed at her. Rather, his tone was defeated and halted with multiple emotions.
She tilted her head with sudden clarity. "They just don't want you there, right?"
A flush crossed over his cheeks, and he turned his head away. "I don't want to be there," he said shortly. "This is my decision. I prefer solitude. I like it this way. And you're interrupting the silence."
Valerie was unconvinced. "Right," she said slowly, a sly smile raising on her face. "Because sitting around and staring at nothing is your favorite pastime."
He growled at her. He supposed he could tell her the truth, but then he would have been falling into another of her traps, in which she baited him for information. She was good at that, especially when she wasn't holding a gun.
In truth, it was not his decision to spend the day in solitude. It was ghost instinct to attend the Christmas truce, but the first year after he had transformed into his full-ghost self, everyone had avoided him with barely-repressed disgust and fear. It had felt like high school lunch all over again until he had physically assaulted Skulker for sneering at him. The messengers of the Ghost Council had then intervened with a declaration that he was thereby banned from any ghost festivities, and that the Council would prosecute him if he did not uphold the nonviolence clause of the truce, even in his exile.
He supposed it was revenge of sorts.
Valerie's hands raised suddenly, and he tensed as if ready to fight her. But she simply eyed him as she began to unbuckle her helmet. "Well," she said, "I guess if your power is really tied by a truce, then I can do this." And she pulled her helmet off and shook her ringlet hair free, sighing in relief. The cool air struck her face.
Dan's eyes widened a bit, watching Valerie lower her guard before him.
The snow had begun to fall from the sky again, lightly dusting into Valerie's hair as she pulled out her ponytail. "Finally," she breathed. "I can actually enjoy this." She leaned back into the snow much like a child would, sighing in satisfaction at the crunch around her ears. "You've no idea how long I've been wanting to just play out here."
Dan just looked confused. "Why aren't you back in Amity Park?" he retorted, eyebrow raised. "Would you not rather spend your time with family than irritating me with your presence?"
She folded her arms behind her head and stared up at the sky as the snowflakes kissed her face. "I'm not missing anything. Dad always makes speeches, people always get drunk, and we all pretend we've got more than we do." She huffed. "It's not like anyone really cares about me anyway."
Dan honed in on the strain of vulnerability in her voice. Perhaps he could learn something to use against her after all. "What do you mean, no one cares?"
She shifted a bit uncomfortably in the snow. "Well, I spend most of my life out here," she said slowly. "Fighting you. I don't have time to socialize and make friends. The holidays make me have to pretend to like people I don't know, which is way more of a nightmare than you are."
"…You mean," he concluded, eyes narrowing, "you're out here because you're avoiding socializing with other human beings?" He laughed, almost genuinely. Shades of depression began to lighten from his shoulders. "After all of your big talk that humanity is worth saving?"
She blushed a bit. "Hey, there's a difference between avoiding people and thinking they should die."
"I don't differentiate on nuances," he waved away her concern.
"That's not a nuance, Phantom. That's not even in the same category."
He snickered. "And yet, here you are. Begging for my presence instead of for your own kind."
"Shut up. You know you're bored too. Or I guess I could fly away and leave you here to sulk in the Wastelands by yourself."
He contemplated the thought for a second or two before simply falling back onto the snow beside her. It was not the closest he had ever been. It was not the first time they'd simply spoken instead of fought. "You do know me well," he admitted. "I suppose I would rather endure your company than have no one to insult. Although I find myself shocked that you have split ties to your precious holiday traditions."
"Oh come on," she complained. "Didn't you ever get tired of the holidays before you died?"
For a second, it appeared that he was honestly mulling over her question. But then he seemed to remember something, and he growled. "You should change the subject. I want to kill people just thinking about that."
"I'm just curious about your pre-afterlife."
"I'd like to forget it," he huffed. His voice was pointed and accusatory. "Hard to do when you keep asking about it all the time."
"But this explains so much about you. Maybe you just want world conquest and annihilation because you never had a good Christmas experience."
He swatted snow at her, and she narrowly avoided it by sitting up in a hurry. "That's a horrible deduction," he complained. "I am chaos. I had no beginning. I have no end."
She huffed. "…Yeah, you're just a hurt kid, like the rest of us."
He snapped up, eyes red with anger. "You will not compare me to anyone," he demanded, leaning closer to threaten the space between them. "I am not some sniveling human being to be psychoanalyzed."
"But you were."
Dan fell silent after that, angered. His presence grew sullen and more withdrawn. He laid back down beside her and muttered, "As if you would know."
Valerie realized that this psychological warfare of hers was working—Dan was compromising. But she feared that focusing on him too much would make him grow more irritated with her. He'd fly off or clam up. So she switched tactics again.
It was always a dance with him, honestly.
She laid down as well and clasped her hands together over her stomach, staring out at the darkening clouds above. "You know," she said in mild frustration, "you're not the only person with problems. Growing up, I had nothing. My mom and dad scraped pennies to put food on the table, so I'd get apples and homemade candy for Christmas. And I'd be so happy, until I'd go back to school."
Dan's eyes slid back to her, watching in curiosity.
Valerie knew she had his attention. She could feel his eyes were trained on her, so she tried to focus on the snowflakes falling on her face. "All the other kids would have computers and scooters and expensive toys," she said. An unconscious a twinge of jealousy worked its away deep into her voice. "And they'd look at me and laugh." She closed her eyes for a second, and she modulated her voice into something mocking. "You only got candy? What, your daddy don't love you? Santa forget about you? What kind of a dumb present is an apple?"
She sighed. "Here I was thinking I had the world, and then everyone told me I'd been duped. Made me feel real good. Screwed me up for years."
He sat up on his elbows, eyeing her hard. "In what way?" he demanded.
She craned her neck a bit to face him. "I thought that the more shit I had like everybody else, the more important I was. I didn't wake up until you started destroying everything." She bit her lip. "I realized then that I'd been pretty stupid. I'd let people turn me into something…not good."
She hardened her gaze at him and swatted snow back into his face. He sputtered in surprise, jerking back. A twitch of a smile appeared on her face. "So don't tell me that your bad Christmas experiences didn't mess you up too."
"Oh, and a good experience will make me stop wanting to kill people?" he drawled, irritated at the snowflakes still in his hair. He tried to shake them out. "That's asinine."
She shrugged. "You're the one sulking cause not even your own kind wants you at their party."
He swallowed hard. "Well, I didn't want to mingle in their inferior presence anyway," he retorted, but his voice was a bit strangled. "It's better this way."
Valerie gave a slight nod. "At least this way I can keep an eye on you instead of wondering where you've gone off to." She mocked, "I get worried when you don't call, you know."
And Dan, for the first Christmas Eve in his entire existence, felt something warm swell in his heart. It was a strange feeling to know that Valerie had thought of him every day he had not confronted her. Even if it were born from worry and hatred, Valerie had thought of him.
A bit flustered that Valerie was teasing him instead of vice versa, he looked away from her. He did not want to admit how much he suddenly wanted her to stay, so he tried to push away the thought. "You shouldn't be here," he said, tilting his chin towards Amity Park. "You should go…celebrate your shitty holiday."
"I am celebrating my shitty holiday," she retorted, eyebrow raised in amusement. "Right about now, Dad would just be finishing up his speech. We all usually share candy and stuff. Which reminds me—"
She leaned over to her jet sled and pushed a button on the side. From the storage unit where she usually hid her snacks, she pulled out a small bag of what looked to be a mix of chocolates, pretzels, and assorted sweets.
Dan tentatively eyed the small bag of sugary trail mix, wondering what in the world it was doing in his life.
"It's a tradition," she explained. "You kind of destroyed our economy, so all we got is candy—you know, stuff we can make ourselves." She popped open the bag and grabbed a few of the sweets on top. "Kind of like old times for me."
"How nice that I unintentionally provided you with a blast from your past," he said, voice dry.
She shoved the bag at him. "But I gotta spread the calories out, and everyone in Amity Park's got enough candy to sink a ship. So take one for the team and help me eat this."
A twitch of a smile raised on his thin lips, even though he was desperately attempting to hide it. "Are you begging me to save you from confectionary treats?"
"This isn't me begging," she said flatly, even though her eyes glinted. "This is me actually trying to kill you with candy."
"…Then I approve of your tactics," he said simply. He grabbed a few of the red-hot candies from the top of the candy pile. "It's quite sinister and underhanded, and I feel myself giving way to the temptation."
"Yeah, I figured you'd appreciate it."
He bit down on the small red candies, satisfied at the cinnamon taste and the way it seemed to warm his mouth. "So you were planning on coercing me to death with sweets?"
Valerie shrugged, "I actually meant to drive a stake of holly through your heart, in full Christmas spirit. This stuff was just supposed to be my celebration snack, but you know how life goes."
He chewed on the red-hot, slightly concerned. "…Sometimes, I really can't tell if you're being serious or not."
"I get it from you," she retorted.
Genuine delight rose on his face. "On second thought," he hummed merrily, "I think you weren't being serious. Stakes work only on vampires and Norse gods, especially ones of holly."
"Wanna find out for sure?"
"…Not today, no."
"Maybe later?"
"If it's on someone other than me, yes."
And so the two enemies sat shoulder to shoulder on the ruins of a suburb, munching on Christmas candy, watching the world sigh into sleep. Snowflakes drifted onto them as they rested in silence. Something about their heightened camaraderie carried with it a sacred air that neither dared to break.
Dan realized how natural it was for him to be comfortable around Valerie—to not question her presence. He had not felt such rightness within the world for years, and he craved it. The simple act of eating candy from a bag between them was something so human, it was strange for him to reconcile it with himself. And yet it was…nice.
It was nice.
"Hey, why are you hogging all the red-hots?" Valerie complained suddenly, digging through the bag to find her favorite candies, most of which had already disappeared into Dan's mouth. "Seriously dude, sharing is caring."
He smiled innocently. "I thought you were attempting to kill me only. Are you instead trying for a homicide-suicide through your laced candy?"
She found one red-hot candy remaining, and she grabbed onto it. "You would just love that, wouldn't you," she muttered.
"I do enjoy good deaths," he said. He chose the pretzels as his next victim. "It would be quasi-Shakespearean for us to both die in your attempt to snuff my existence on a corporate holiday."
"Except we're not Romeo and Juliet," Valerie pointed out. "And I can understand everything we're saying."
His eyes crinkled a bit in amusement. "Are you admitting to inferior reading skills?"
"You saying you can actually understand that shit?"
"It's elementary, Watson," he said dramatically, waving a pretzel stick in the air. "It's not at all that difficult; it's just a bunch of middle English innuendoes mixed with death and violence."
The woman groaned in disgust. "But I don't care about middle English innuendoes or Shakespeare stuff."
He leaned in. "Not even about the beast with two backs?" he wondered mildly. "I found that one quite engaging. I could show you sometime what it means."
Valerie flushed a bit, more aware of the little space between them. "I already know what that one means, thanks," she said flatly.
"Well, anytime you want to experience it," he shrugged, lips stretching wide with a lazy smile, "you know where to find me."
The two fell into silence after that, Dan's offer hanging off the edges of their open world. Valerie thought to banter against it, but she knew it would only entice him to suggest more explicit innuendoes, which would make her uncomfortable with being so close to him. He had no concept of knowing when something was too much.
Eventually, they worked their way through the whole bag of candy, during which Valerie discovered that Phantom held quite an affinity for everything that she did. Or perhaps he was simply trying to irritate her by eating all of her favorite candies—in which case it was working. She growled at him, but he just smiled cheekily back at her. "Hey, you're the one who wanted my help," he reminded her, popping a chocolate square into his mouth with a hum of delight.
Before she could retort, a shiver suddenly rocked through her. The snow had begun to melt through her hair and siphon down into the cracks of her suit. Her suit's heating system was struggling to compensate for her choice to go helmetless. She began to shiver again from the cold, her nose and cheeks flushed. "Damn, did the temperature drop or something?"
"No, you're just a weak human," he piped up, eyeing her over as he savored the last bit of chocolate in his mouth. "You should have kept the helmet on."
She glared at him, "I get tired of being cooped up in a tin can, is that so bad?" She stood up from the ledge, dusting snow off of her limbs. "Looks like time's up, anyway. It's getting dark."
Dan's expression darkened with disappointment. "…You're going to leave?"
"I can't afford to get sick over this," she said. "Especially if we're gonna fight tomorrow. And I did promise my dad I'd be back soon; you know how family is."
He supposed he did. It made his non-beating heart hurt to think about it, and the reality that he would be alone again—that this was all too temporary—sunk deep into him. Dan bit into the last pretzel mindlessly, his red eyes distant. "I will make a deal with you, then," he said. "From this year forth, you will spend every Christmas Eve with me as proof to the Ghost Council that I have maintained the Truce. In return, I will offer you…from now until after New Year's Day to rest."
She paused for a second, her teal eyes widening. "…What?"
"You heard what I said." His voice was firm, eyes honest if not a bit haughty. "This is my only deal. Take it or leave it."
Valerie gaped at him for a second. "Damn, I'll take it."
"Good." He nodded firmly, his fangs crunching down on the pretzel in his mouth. He reveled in her shock, satisfied that he could still be unpredictable from time to time.
She gave him a weird look that was searching but in no way negative. "You know, Phantom," she said as she locked her helmet back into place. "You're really not half bad when you're not destroying everything. You should be like this more often."
He raised a brow sharply, surprised at the backhanded compliment. Something deep within his chest moved. Like a heartbeat.
Valerie blushed a bit and jumped onto jet sled. "Well, I guess…Merry Christmas," she said. "I'll kill you later." And then she blasted off towards the distant dome of Amity Park, disappearing into the white snowfall.
The snow felt colder without her, but the memory of her was warm in his mind. He latched onto it, unable to hide the smile that graced his thin lips. "Kill you later," he whispered to her in amusement.
Whether he had intended it or not, the infamous Dan Phantom had a Christmas tradition now. And it had everything to do with Valerie Gray, which was wonderful and scandalous and terrifying at the same time.
A/N: Hey, everyone! Merry early Christmas/happy holidays! To celebrate the spirit of the season, I wrote this one-shot. I wanted to explore Dan's possible experiences with a Christmas truce, as well as what Valerie's reaction would be to a truce-locked Phantom. It ended up being a bit more heartfelt than I intended, but I tried to soften it with some of their more typical banter.
Anyways, updates to both Karma and the Aftermath miniseries are next, per your request!
Please leave your thoughts, comments, and one-shot requests in a review! Thanks!
