Disclaimer: I don't own DP.

Thanks to sexyshewolf, hrisi292, Chaoshift, BB, Invader Johnny, Roses-R-Rosie, CatalystOfTheSoul, Mrsce, chickadeebabe, starwater09, SweetestChick, MushuFireLorde, Yasz1221, Starco, JadeliketheGem, Savior of khaos, Guest, Guest, sharkyskadi, DiaUmbralumen, Iblamepie, and ChibiLady for reviewing and for providing thoughts and support. You all make me feel like no matter what, I always have a home here in the Dark Gray community, and I can't tell you how much that means to me. Seriously, thank you. I love Valerie Gray and Dan Phantom and really enjoy being able to share in this ship with you all. Many of you have followed this collection for years, and I am very humbled and appreciative of that. I hope to continue contributing to this little DP community we've built!

Chapter Summary: A sixteen-year-old Dan and Valerie enact their first truce for unexpected reasons.

Chapter warnings: None.


Deliverance

Shot 69: Growing Pains


In the blur of constant battles for the destruction of the Human World, sixteen-year-old Dan Phantom had little time to think much of himself. He had noticed his limbs were growing stronger—he could feel the taut ridges of muscles along his body. His hair had begun to grow longer, and the weight of it made several strands no longer flame up, but flicker around his neck. He was several inches taller, his voice deepening. He had already adjusted his jumpsuit to compensate for his growing body, and he'd created for himself a cape (perhaps out of some Plasmius fetish for one, but he didn't want to think about that).

He thought himself quite the successful conquer at age sixteen. The only forces that stood in his way included the terribly annoying Valerie Gray…

…And, that day, himself.

"What is this?" he whispered in disgust. His fingers shook as he grimaced in pain. All along his temple, storming down one cheekbone, and along his jaw were several deep bumps. He pulled off one of his gloves, eyes wide as he felt the skin of his face again, only to realize that he had not been mistaken. It hurt to even touch his face, which pulsed as if it were burning.

Dan dropped to the oil-polluted waters of the nearby lake in his ever-ex. In the black waters, he caught a reflection of himself, and he peered closer in desperation, narrowing his blood-red eyes.

That was when he saw it.

"No," he said shakily in horror, touching his face again. "No, no, no—"

His smooth, blue skin had broken out in a strange way, distorting his features. And it hurt. Everything hurt. He felt weak as he stared at himself.

Deep down, he knew this condition intimately.

For the first time in two years, real tears burned in the eyes of Dan Phantom as he stared at himself. He felt fear—pure, unadulterated fear that might have challenged the fear of his own victims. And then a tumult of rage came over him, and he slammed his fist in the water to break his image. Water splashed up with the brute force, disrupting the few fish still swimming below.

A snarl tore from his throat.

He collapsed down on himself in the polluted mud

Dan recalled then that the infamous Vlad Plasmius had never obtained a cure for his condition. He had occasionally broken out from time to time. And by stealing his power core, Dan had taken all of Vlad's strengths and weaknesses with him. Tears of hysterical fear burned his eyes, and he shakily held there on his hands and knees in the mud, unable to separate from Vlad's memories and emotions of the shame loneliness isolation self-hatred.


In a simple grocery store decades ago, the recent outpatient Vlad Masters walked. The twenty-one-year-old man had spent months in the hospital, being tested. Doctors had found several anomalies in his blood, but no medication they had could separate the ectoplasmic toxins from his DNA. He was, as it were, "permanently infected." On occasion, he sensed strange things and knew that more was wrong with him than just his face. He sometimes felt weightless. His fingers would glow. Only with intensive concentration could he maintain a normal human visage.

But even his normal human visage carried the scars of his lab accident.

"Mommy!" cried a little girl. "What's wrong with that man's face?"

The young Vlad quickly turned away in horror, a heat of shame tearing through this entire body.

He could hear the girl's mother admonish her, "Dear, that's not nice. Don't say things like that."

But the damage was already done, and the once-confident and carefree Vlad Masters fell back into despair and self-consciousness. He pressed his fingers against his face to hide himself as he turned away.

Others were looking now.

Everyone was looking.

The deep scars from his condition had left his face pitted and splotched. He felt crippled, not even capable of making a run to a grocery store without gaining the pitied and disgusted glances from other patrons. He clenched a jar of jelly tighter, face twisting, eyes burning. All he saw and felt was disgust disgust disgust—

He disappeared down an abandoned aisle.

It was then, in his greatest desire to turn invisible, that he actually did.


Dan's breath hitched, tears squeezing out of his eyes. What was he going to do? He couldn't possibly attack anyone looking like this. No one would take him seriously. He wouldn't take himself seriously. A deep panic set into him as he touched his face—his beautiful and handsome face that was his and yet somehow, he no longer knew it.

The great Dan Phantom.

A child. Weak.

Then a new horror seeped deep into his bones. What if Valerie saw? Would she laugh? Use it against him somehow? The burn of his shame left him feeling raw. He could still hear that little girl's blunt voice from the back of Vlad's memories: "What's wrong with that man's face?"

He gnashed a fang into his lip, biting so hard as to slit the soft skin. A soft well of green blood began to well upon his lip, and he remained frozen for a time on the sensation, simply in want for a distraction from the other pain he felt stretching through his collarbones. He regretted the impulsive decision to merge with Vlad Plasmius, to corrupt himself with something lesser. Although he'd gained great power, the consequence was more self-loathing than even Danny Fenton had felt.

Dan squeezed his eyes shut as he curled in on himself, feeling ill. His face hurt. His power core hurt. He felt suddenly as if he were drowning in cement. He wanted to disappear, and so he shakily pulled away from the edge of the lake, wiping his bloody lip and licking his sharp fang.

He had enemies. He could not allow any of them to see him in such a vulnerable position.

He could not allow any of them to see him.

Suddenly, he heard the ever-familiar whine of a blaster.

In a panic, Dan turned away, raising a deep red barrier. It surged around him with black sparks, his red eyes widening.

Valerie Gray, now known to the whole world as the Red Huntress and quite possibly the only human to survive in single combat against Dan Phantom, stopped short. She maintained her blaster level at the barrier, even though it would likely not cut through his power. "Hiding around caves now?" she said sweetly. "How fitting for something ugly like you."

His eye twitched. Ever since he'd…changed, Valerie had made a point again and again to express dislike for his blue skin and red eyes, perhaps because she had thought him cute prior. It made gaining amusing flirtation time from her more difficult, because she would never flirt back. Something about that irritated him.

"Go away," he said, his voice rumbling against the breadth of the valley and the stone of the natural cave beside the lake. He tried to discreetly wipe his eyes in case she were to storm up to him. "I do not wish to see you now."

"You don't wish to?" she raised a brow. "Dude, you're gonna see my face every day. Every day until I've destroyed you."

"I will not…attack Amity Park, for now, if you leave," he said, voice caught in an odd pattern.

Valerie swooped closer. He turned away, thankful for the flickers of his growing hair, which kissed his cheeks and hid his eyes as he moved.

"Why won't you look at me?" she demanded, narrowing her eyes. She swooped to another section of the barrier.

He turned away again. "I don't want to."

"Something wrong with your face?" she asked suddenly.

"No," he said, voice too quick, too defensive.

He could almost feel her wicked smile grow behind her mask. "I think there's something wrong with your face," she said.

His deepening voice rose roughly. "There is nothing wrong with me."

"But you won't look at me."

"I am a superior being. I do not have to explain myself to you."

She huffed at that in a form of irritated amusement, and she re-holstered her blaster. "You want me to leave you alone? Fine. Then here's a deal. Next time I don't feel like fighting, you'll leave me and Amity Park alone. You won't attack, just as I haven't attacked you today."

"…Deal," he said, voice rough in an attempt to hide a waver. He would agree to just about anything to make Valerie go away. She was so terribly annoying sometimes.

In the blur, his opponent stormed up, flipping her jet sled to a harsh angle to catch a glimpse of his face, the elegant smooth of his cheek disrupted.

The boy inhaled sharply beneath the barrier, raising up his hand to darken the power between them, hiding himself within the smoke screen.

He could still see Valerie's bright white teeth stretching like a ray of light as she righted herself on her jet sled. "Aww, still going through ghost puberty?" she mocked, raising a sculpted brow.

His broad shoulders tightened with fury. "Shut up."

Valerie giggled. It was a dry sound. "Aww, I guess even dead losers like you have to grow up sometime."

The boy's red eyes lit hot orange, his handsome face scrunching despite the pain the action caused him. His large hands clenched with a warp of power, his core revving in demand for blood. "Get out of here!" he snarled. "Or I will destroy you here and now."

The girl hummed in an airy way, still triumphant that she had caught Dan Phantom, of all ghosts, in a moment of weakness and shame. Something she would surely never forget. "As if you could kill me," she said. "But I guess I did make a deal, and I got better things to do than babysit you today." Thrusters on her jet sled began to whine up. "One of these days, I'll collect on my free day too." Her voice darkened. "Let's see if you even have enough honor to hold up a deal, shall we?"

And then Valerie stormed up in a self-important huff, for the first time allowing Dan Phantom to remain in the Wastelands without beating him back to the Ghost Zone.

From beneath the barrier, he watched her, the rage in his eyes dying back down into an odd despondency.

It was all he could do to fight down an impulse to chase after she who dared to enter his territory.

He liked fighting her most days. Even if she were annoying. And impossible. And human and therefore not as perfect as he was.

Dan's powerful barrier flickered away, leaving him as a sole glimmer in the valley of death. He swallowed hard as he sat back down on the dirt by the lake, wrapping his arms around his knees. In the silence of nature, he was alone. No one would see him like this, now that Valerie had broadcasted her own patrolling presence across miles.

The years of impulsive vanity from Vlad Plasmius left him frozen, and he felt the burn of tears—of frustration—the emotions of it all leaving him at a great loss for the first time since before Danny Fenton had split himself and become a new creature.

Shame. Disgust. Ugly.

He could think back through Vlad's memories of laser resurfacing surgeries, and the awe of feeling smooth skin again after months of expensive battles and hiding away from society. The bill of good health from the doctor. He longed for that relief suddenly.

Except this time, he'd likely already killed all the doctors with advanced laser technology.

His lip quivered in a childish self-consciousness, lifting up his hand to heal himself, only for nothing to happen.


It was a few weeks before the infamous Dan Phantom showed his face again. But when he did, he swept through the Wastelands straight to Amity Park. In his time away, the barrier towers had been fully constructed, and a light barrier reflected in pulses around the city.

His lip curled in disgust. Dammit.

Of course the human insects would take their vacation away from him to finish constructing the skeleton of their defense system. But the barrier was only minimally existent, with several empty foundations for towers to tighten the distance between each. He figured he could blast it down easily enough, especially without one particular Red—

"Stop!" cried out a raspy, female voice. "Don't you dare blast this barrier, you hear me? I'm serious!"

He knew that voice anywhere.

His widening mouth split into a glimmer of fangs. "Ah," he greeted, turning his red eyes to an ever-inclosing figure. "Hello, Valerie."

Valerie walked to the edge of the barrier, looking quite ill. Every single step was pained. She had her hand wrapped over her lower stomach. All of her color was gone, and a sweat sheen covered her skin, her curls largely unkempt. "Don't attack," she said breathlessly. "Not today."

He narrowed his eyes at her, roving over the full of her body. "What is wrong with you?"

She looked a bit uncertain, but she was nothing if not brutally honest about everything. She hardened her gaze and stared at him straight, unblinking. "Girl stuff."

He stared at her for a time, not quite understanding. He tilted his head, awaiting a better answer.

Valerie swallowed hard, her voice straining. "Don't make me say it." There was embarrassment in her. Shame.

He found the karmic value amusing.

"Say what, Valerie dear?" He'd taken to calling her that a few months back and had delighted in the way it made her face flame up in absolute fury. Her dark face was too pale. She needed some color in her.

One of her shaky fists clenched. "Dammit, you know what I mean."

"I fear I do not."

"I hurt," she hissed, "because I'm on a cycle right now."

The handsome boy, floating several feet above her, paused entirely. For as intelligent as he was, he struggled to make a connection. Then a green blush began to tinge his cheeks all the way to the tip of his elfin ears, his red eyes widening a fraction. "Oh."

"Yeah. Oh." She crossed her arms and leaned against the nearest shield tower. "Now keep your end of the deal and go away. I just need, like, a day out of the two weeks you took. Which leaves me thirteen days of my own, by the way. That I can claim anytime."

He couldn't help but get a jab in. He leaned against the barrier, eyeing her up and down. "Don't tell me you'll do this every month."

"Shut up," she said, voice rough. She looked suddenly as if she would vomit. "My meds ran out. Cos somebody destroyed our medical facilities, and we're still rebuilding."

"…So you won't do this every month?"

She looked pained. "Dammit, I've fought you for two years. Have I ever done this before?"

"No," he murmured in reflection, tapping his chin. "This is certainly a first. Which is good, because I would kill you for weakness otherwise."

It was strange to think of Valerie having growing pains.

That time was passing.

Two years.

Valerie put her hands on her hip (those were growing more defined too, Dan noticed) and huffed. "Oh, and like you don't have your own problems? Don't act so high and mighty. You've got the same problems as everyone else."

"No, I don't," he hissed, red eyes glowing. "I am not a human like you. I am a superior being."

"Huh uh," she said, unconvinced. The wind swept back the flickering hair from his jaw, and she caught sight of a few dark marks on his skin. He still looked a bit skittish and self-conscious in ways she'd never seen before, turning his face away upon realizing she was staring. She would almost smile about it if she weren't about ready to collapse on the ground and cry in pain from her own body.

That would certainly result in his amused scorn, which she did not care to hear that day.

"Look," she said, waving him off. "Go away for now, and we'll never talk about this again."

It was an attractive offer. As much as he wanted to mock and torment her for her own weaknesses, it would mean she could do the same against him. And he wanted to avoid that spark of shame forever.

He supposed this was quite the awkward stalemate. The first, official compromise they'd enacted since his transformation.

He sniffed. "Because you honored your end of the deal for two weeks, I shall honor mine. Your ridiculous city and its sub-par ghost shield will not be leveled by my hand. For now."

A strained relief came over her. "Okay," she nodded.

His fingers tapped against the barrier as he watched her walk away. He had never forgotten that Valerie was inherently female, growing into a real woman—and that Daniel Fenton had carried multiple, unspoken levels of affection for her.

He supposed that was why he decided to never attack a medical facility again, for he would rather her die by his own hand than by some kind of sickness.

A deal with Valerie Gray, the Red Huntress.

The handsome ghost's lips twitched up. Then he cupped his hand to his mouth, calling out to her, "What day is this for you, anyway? Perhaps I shall mark it down so I may anticipate the best time to strike—"

Valerie snapped backwards, pulling out a blaster and shooting straight for his heart.

Dan materialized away as the purple blast seared by him, and then he laughed as he reconfigured his form from the black mists.

He could not help but tease her.

She was cute when she was angry.

The girl's jaw clenched hard as she glared at him, her brilliant eyes hard. "We have a deal," she hissed. "Now get your ass off my shield."

Dan's brows angled at that. He leaned against the shield a bit more, rubbing his back end on it once before sliding down to step onto the earth as a human would. The edges of Amity Park hummed beneath his boots with the generators for each of the towers. Primitive technology. "You know it will not last against me!" he mocked her lightly. "One day or another, your precious shield and your city will fall to me, just like all the others." He waved at her. "And you, as inferior as you are, will fall to me as well."

Despite her pain, Valerie's back straightened. Her fist clenched. "Leave now," she demanded roughly. "Or I swear on everything holy, the next time you have a problem, I will fucking drag you through the dirt with it."

The powerful ghost made a face, wiping invisible dust from one of his lithe arms. "As if you could," he sniffed. Then he lightly scratched at his sharp jaw without thinking, where he could still feel shallow scars that remained. He was thinking he could hide them with some facial hair over time.

Passing time.

His red eyes flickered to Valerie. The soft of her cheeks had, over two years of hard labor, sharpened a bit with the loss of her childhood innocence.

In that moment, he felt a distance and camaraderie with the strange Valerie Gray. Though she was still alive, and he was dead, they were both changing. Becoming more than they were.

He had a feeling she would continue to be thorn in his side for years to come.

The thought inspired a dark smile across his handsome face before he suddenly materialized away, his lithe form sparking out into the mists of the Wastelands, leaving one Valerie Gray to stand at the edge of her city.

She still held a hand to her lower abdomen, looking pale with a cold sweat at her brow.

And then she breathed out a sigh of relief that perhaps there was still some kind of honor in the insane being who was named Dan Phantom. Who tormented her night and day.

Who'd started teasingly calling her Valerie dear.

Of all things.

"Damn ghosts," she whispered before shakily walking away, deciding her next course of action was to find pajamas and curl up somewhere on a comfy couch with a heating pad. "Got no sense about them. Just a bunch of crazy asses making life miserable for the rest of us."

She did not know that Phantom had remained within the vicinity of Amity Park, watching the red shadow of her form as it hobbled back to headquarters.


A few days later found the enduring Red Huntress back on her jet sled, pacing the Wastelands. She held an uncomfortable twist in the line of her lips, her blaster tight in her hand. Phantom had not returned to the limits of Amity Park. But then she supposed she had accrued several days of "time off," given that he had hidden for nearly two weeks.

"I can feel you out here," she snapped to the air. Her tracker on her arm buzzed with the all-encompassing weight of Phantom's signature in the air.

He was waiting for her to appear again, on her own time.

Which was almost kind.

The days of silence had given her father and the resistance enough time to reinforce the Shield. It now hummed over Amity Park with a strength that made Valerie wonder if perhaps…Phantom wanted it to stand, for all of his declarations to end humanity.

"Hn. If it is not the Red Huntress, in the flesh once more."

His ever-deepening voice sent a chill—a thrill?—down her spine.

She turned around, her black and red armor glimmering in the hot sun, eyes narrowed. She said nothing for a time, watching him materialize onto the human plane.

The action itself was always a performance to behold, the lithe and strengthening lines of his body knitting together from the mists of the air. His blue skin glimmered with a light that made him angelic, his white hair flickering in a curiosity about his cheeks.

He was in a good mood today.

"Yeah, whatever," she snapped. It was as close to a pleasantry as she could manage with him. "Don't act like you're playing innocent out here—I've been tracking you."

He tilted his head, his handsome face splitting with a dark smile. "Tracking me? I would have thought you were resting in your weakened, human condition."

Valerie eyes lit hot, and in a blur, she pulled out her blaster and shot him in a ray of purple. The unsuspecting ghost slammed back into a nearby tree trunk, his shoulder burning a crispy dark. Stunned, he froze there for a time.

He groaned. 'I'll take that as a no."

She blew the smoke from the barrel of the blaster, raising a sculpted brow. "Let's get one thing straight. You were gone for two weeks. I took two days. Between the two of us, you're the weaker one. Got that?"

Dan's handsome face twisted as he peeled himself off the tree, bark cracking to the ground around him. "Don't be so sure," he hissed. His long fingers began to glow green, and he blasted her back.

She swooped her jet sled sideways to avoid it, lips stretching.

That did it.

He blurred towards her, his nose nearly inches from her own.

"For the record," he murmured, "I think you are becoming a beautiful woman." And then his voice dropped, his fangs glinting in the sunlight as his red eyes narrowed. "But you'd be more beautiful dead."

Most humans would have shuddered before him.

Instead, Valerie Gray narrowed her eyes in curiosity and reached out to poke his cheek. "…Wait a minute. You have stubble," she accused. Over the course of two days, his sharp jaw had begun to sprout stiff, white glimmers, mostly situated upon his chin.

He face-faulted. "I am trying to banter with you, Valerie. You missed your cue."

"You have stubble," she repeated again incredulously, still surprised by the various ways the dead boy was becoming a man. Then she pulled away, realizing that without thinking, she had touched him.

And he had allowed her to.

His red eyes followed hers, trailing down to the odd flush in her dark cheeks.

Dan's lips stretched. "Oh, Valerie," he murmured. "I like you too."

She lunged for his throat, and he pulled away with a laugh, their moment of truce broken with her demand for a fight over the Wastelands.


A/N: Hi, all. Apologies for the late update. I'd been flirting with other fandoms (mostly Voltron: Legendary Defender; I still can't believe how it ended), and then I started an extended Dark Gray story but ended up with writer's block and somehow wrote this, haha. If you're ever wondering about the status of a story, feel free to PM here or message me on tumblr (my username is thelightningstreak).

I wanted to thank you all again for the outpouring of support over the last few months. I feel a lot better about writing as long as I just don't think about late last year, haha. It's getting easier. I'm still unsure about returning to Aftermath in particular, but I definitely want to continue this overall collection. Dark gray fandom is good fam.

If you have any prompts for Dark Gray as well, please let me know!