Disclaimer: I don't own DP.

Thanks to Lady Audentium, Invader Johnny, SweetestChick, starwater09, MushuFireLorde, Catooza (several times!), KraZiiePyrozHavemoreFun, DiaUmbralumen, ObsidianPhantom, Yasz1221, hrisi292, Binx, Heya, JrMintflower, Guest, Happy, and Roses-R-Rosie for reviewing last time. I really appreciate it! I can't tell you how much it means that after so many years, this small dark gray community continues to thrive, and that so many of you return time and again to read and review this monstrous collection. Seriously, thank you so much.

One-Shot Summary: Valerie finds a mysterious man collapsed in the Wastelands, and he is more than he seems.

Chapter Warnings: Valerie has a potty mouth sometimes, haha. General Dark Gray irreverence for things.


Deliverance

Shot 71: The Fifth Element


A lonesome man trudged. His shadow cast a forlorn shape across the lifeless dirt. With every trudge, he stained the ground with blood from a cut on his bare foot. His breath was a rasp from cracked lips, his starved ribs jutting hard against bare skin. The dirty scarf wrapped his middle to hide his nakedness was beginning to unravel.

The sky above flashed with lightning.

Cold rain began to drizzle, then pour.

The man's breath puffed out in shaky gasps. His long, dark hair hung against him in straggles, the dirt of days streaking down him in the rain.

His footsteps began to wash away in the rain as it poured harder, and the winds shrieked harder across the Wasteland.

Soon, a gust pitched him forward, and the man stumbled, then collapsed into the mud, too tired to go on.


Valerie had not seen the infamous Dan Phantom for weeks. She'd beaten him back by only a narrow margin, expecting him to return quick enough to torment her again.

But he never did.

In fear that he was planning something, she tore through the ruined countryside that was once Amity Park's neighboring suburbs. "Where could he be," she muttered to himself, her sculpted brows knitting together. She spun a blaster in her nimble hand restrained anxiety.

Perhaps he'd taken her final insults to heart, that he was a—what did she call him?—a useless waste of time and energy.

Perhaps this was punishment somehow. He knew she liked to track his movements, and he kept her in his sights, paranoid that she would attempt to stretch Amity Park's borders beyond what he deemed acceptable.

They worried over each other in that sense.

Or…they had, before she insulted him and then beat him back.

"This isn't funny, you know," she called out to the Wastelands. "Is this you pouting? You just pissed I hurt your twisted little pride?"

No answer. No blip on her radar, like always.

Valerie's full lips pursed together. She didn't dare to think that she was actually worried for her enemy. There were greater ghosts out there—powerful, ancient beings lurking in the corners of the dimensions. They watched and moved in the darkness. Not even Phantom was silly enough to bother them, for they mostly did not interfere with human affairs or the superficial chains of command within the Ghost Zone.

At least, she didn't think he was silly enough for it.

Maybe he was.

"You whine like a bitch at me for a good fight," she huffs. "I give it to you, and you run off." She pouted openly, dampening the glow of her sharp, armored fingertips. "Don't tell me I scared you away."

Still nothing.

The great Valerie Gray, Red Huntress and Protector of Amity Park, flew by in a daze of boredom, lowering her blaster as well.

Her pretty face scrunched. "I haven't had a proper workout in forever," she moaned. "All the ghosts who try to mess with the Shield are like, dweebs. Little shrimp dudes with puny-ass powers." She ran her armored fingers along the sleek blaster in her grip. "I haven't even had a chance to test out my new weapons. Surely you wouldn't want to pit your strength against mine?"

Nothing again.

Valerie sighed, retracting her helmet as she holstered her weapon. "Yeah, yeah. I know." She pulled out the tie in her hair, allowing her long, stiff curls to surge free down her back. "You'd say nothing would compare to your strength. Even though a human in a suit can totally thrash your ass!"

Her voice echoed with a rough edge of disappointment and irritation.

She huffed again, staring down at the barren Wastelands beneath her. As the years had gone by, many patches of growth had returned to it—save for her ongoing battles with Phantom, which had scarred the land again and again in several places.

It was then, as she looked down, that her sharp eyes caught the image of something very much out of place. Below her, there was a human body in the mud, face down, limbs collapsed in silence.

Valerie's face twisted, and she hesitantly began to fly in closer. Dead bodies were not uncommon to find in the Wastelands, and there had been several times when she'd traversed into Phantom's territory to reclaim her fallen people—to have them identified and be given a proper burial.

Even Dan had long ago turned his face away from her in such moments, as if incensed that she would care so much, when his own human body had been long lost in a great blast, along with any people who would have wanted to bury him, knowing what he had become.

But as Valerie neared, she noticed the body—male—was still breathing. The mud and leaves caked his body, suggesting he was not a straggler from Amity Park. Nor could he have been a survivor from another resistance stronghold. Even Jasper City had basic armor for their soldiers.

"Who the fuck," she whispered in confusion.

Heart beating rapidly, she quickly raised her arm and scanned the body. No ectoplasmic signatures. This being was entirely human.

It hit her then that the close cling of the mud bore no sign of clothes beneath but for some tied material around his middle. Her face began to blush, and she quickly turned to look at his face instead. "Hey," she told him, trying to pick away the muddy strands of long hair from his face. It seemed that his hair was black, but it was hard to tell with the mud. "Hey, can you wake up? Are you okay?"

No response.

Valerie's eyebrows furrowed. She muttered, "You're breathing, so I know you're not dead." She reached out and gently attempted to turn him over.

The man seemed fully unconscious, his gaunt body easily giving way until he was on his back. Valerie peered at his muddy, dirt-streaked face in curiosity. She did not recognize him as a citizen of Amity Park, and so she looked around, eyes hardening. She retracted the glove on her hand and pressed her fingers against his neck. An enduring but weak heart beat against her skin.

She pulled back, checking him over for any broken bones before she called her jet sled to her.

"What the hell happened to you?" she worried under her breath, feeling a wave of protective instinct for the poor soul. With Dan Phantom missing, the Wastelands were a strange and different place. To a single human man without weapons, she imagined it would still be quite terrifying.

Valerie sighed, then dutifully raised him up, swinging a limp, slim arm over her shoulders. The man's muscles were tight and corded hard against him.

Whoever he was, he was a fighter.

The action of moving to lift him inspired a strangled groan from the man. The noise was a deep, hoarse vibration.

Valerie's heart skipped for a time because she could have sworn it sounded like…

"…No," she whispered, grimacing as she shouldered more of his weight, his long, black hair squelching onto her sleek, dark armor. "Get a grip on yourself. It's not him."

The man's eyes squeezed shut tightly as she heaved him up, his body leaning heavily on her. He was tall, his head bowed forward against his bare chest. Despite his slim form, Valerie felt the weight of his bones in a way that left her grimacing

She managed to lay him on his back against her jet sled, nearly falling on top of him from the awkward angles of his limp limbs.

For a brief moment, his eyes flickered open, half-lidded and without recognition as he stared at her. His irises were a brilliant, haunting blue, nearly glowing in the shadows of the Wasteland around them. And then his clouded eyes closed again, his face slacking into exhaustion.


Soon, the mysterious man lay in the infirmary of the Amity Park Resistance, where the resident doctor Kwan fretted over him. The man remained unconscious as Kwan recorded basic biometric markers onto his computer, his brow in a tight line of awe and worry.

Valerie sat next to the bed. "So he's human, right?"

"Yes." Kwan's voice was tight. He moved away from the computer to search through a nearby drawer, pulling out an IV bag and tubing.

"Then why isn't he waking up? What's wrong with him?"

Her friend pulled on gloves. Despite being only twenty-four, he was beginning to show a few flecks of gray at his temples, perhaps from stress or genetics. "He's severely malnourished and septic from a few infected wounds. His blood pressure is very low. He's got a fever, and it's climbing."

It struck Valerie then that the man's inability to wake up was perhaps more dire than she had first imagined. "Couldn't he just be tired?"

"No." He pulled out an antiseptic wipe and turned the man's arm, searching for a place to insert the IV line. The mysterious man seemed pale beneath the mud flaking from his skin, the white of his flesh blooming a bit red from Kwan scrubbing off the mud. "He's in bad shape, Val. I don't think he would have survived another day out there by himself."

She crossed her arms, looking uncomfortable. "Jasper City's not that far."

"I don't think he's from Jasper City," Kwan said, voice dry with worry. "He looks like he's been wandering around for a while."

Kwan had placed a blanket over the man's lower half for modesty, but both he and Valerie had quieted over how this man hadn't even had proper clothing.

Valerie's full lips pressed together. "It's a miracle he didn't get hunted down by Phantom."

"Maybe that's why he's covered in mud—to hide from him?"

A silence came over them both, and Valerie's face twisted. "No, Phantom hasn't been actively hunting people for years. He attacks cities just to get a rise out of the panic, and from me pacing his ass." She paused, huffing. "It doesn't make sense that he'd target some random dude who probably got lost in the Wastelands. If anything, Phantom's the kind of jerk to sit back and watch this man die for the hell of it."

But Valerie swallowed hard, looking the poor man over. Her heart cracked at the sight of him—that he had suffered greatly.

Kwan sighed. "I guess we'll find out more when he wakes up."

If he wakes up, was the silent worry.


By the next morning, the man on the bed still had not woken up. Instead, his temples beaded with sweat, his sunburnt skin paling. With Phantom still absent, Valerie decided to remain at the mysterious man's side, her mouth in a tight, worried line. The human race's numbers were so few that death meant increasing endangerment of the species.

She dunked her hands into a small bucket, soaking a washcloth. "I know Kwan cleaned up your cuts, but you're still looking pretty rough," she said, her voice gruff. She wrung out the washcloth, the warm water dripping down her hands. And then she gently scrubbed at his cheek. The angles of his face were sharp with starvation, his jaw lined with dark scruff, but there was something about the line of his brow and the tilt of his aristocratic nose…

"You seem kinda familiar," she murmured, narrowing her eyes. "But I don't know from where." She swept the washcloth along his jaw, the mud smearing away from his skin easily enough. She re-dunked the washcloth and scrubbed off the mud flecks, then set to work again, sweeping down his neck to his strong collarbones.

His strong, dark brow twitched at her touch. His full lips tightened in something like pain, and a soft noise escaped him—a small moan of pain.

The woman paused again, something dropping into her stomach. The line of his lips. The baritone of his moan.

She knew him from somewhere.

"This is startin' to bother me now," she confessed, her rough voice raising in confusion. "You're not from Jasper City. The next town is like, a thousand miles away, and I don't know hardly any of them. I guess you could have walked, but damn. How would I know you, then."

Valerie's dark curls slipped down her shoulder as she leaned over once more to dunk the washcloth in the warm water. She wrung it out and then set to gently scrubbing at the mud down his torso. "You're a fuckin' mess, whoever you are," she muttered lightly. Her dark fingers grew stained with the dried mud from him, the flecks falling to the sides of his body.

His limp arms were slightly emaciated, but she could see the hard cords of muscle that covered the whole of his body—a reminder that this man was a fighter. A survivor.

"Not just anyone," she whispered, "could survive in the Wastelands by himself." She swallowed hard. "And it's not just Phantom anymore—there's a bunch of ghosts flying around. Is that how you got lost? Did they take your clothes too?"

No response. The man was still in a restless unconsciousness, his face twisted in a mild pain. Occasionally, his body chilled, but not as violently as before. Even asleep, he was fighting off infection—and winning.

Valerie swallowed hard. "Maybe it's just as well you can't hear me. I've been talking everyone's ear off lately." She dunked the washcloth again. The repetitive actions to take care of another human being were keeping her mind preoccupied. "I usually have this jerk who takes up most of my time. Almost lonely without him. Maybe wherever you're from, you know how that is. To be kinda left behind or something?" A pain tore through her, that maybe Dan Phantom had moved on entirely. He was too powerful to be destroyed by most ghosts, but that did not mean he couldn't will himself to move on.

That maybe he'd gotten bored—gotten his revenge—did whatever ghosts did to feel justified in fading to a more permanent afterlife.

He'd been restless, the last several times she had confronted him.

Valerie swept the washcloth over the man's chest in the silence. "You got a lot of little scars and stuff," she murmured curiously. "I bet you did some hard work somewhere, to get all these. Got a few of my own like this—from the jerk, of course."

Some of them were thin and precise lines, as if they were a cut. One ran down his forearm. Another small one crossed his muscled abdomen. A small thread of doubt worked into her as she scrubbed at his skin. The more she thought about it, the more she realized these were not the scars of an average man, nor were they in a particular pattern that would suggest a work accident in a factory or on a farm. And most of them were too old to be scars he could have received so recently in the Wastelands.

One scar in particular made her freeze.

Her eyes widened.

There, glistening from the water, revealed from the mud, was a long, white scar that twisted from his right collarbone down to his heart. Her fingertips brushed against the ruined skin, her memories recalling the sight of the scar several times before—her own hand stroking down with the broken end of a blaster.

"You," Phantom rasped, voice halting in pain as he held his bleeding chest, "will rue this day."

Her breath hitched as she dropped the cloth, haunted. She scooted back in her chair, activating her armor. Her red and black paneled armor locked around her body as she sat there. Her chest heaved with panic as she stared at the man, eyes wide. "Holy fuck."

This man—this human man—bore the scars she had placed herself on Dan Phantom. His brow was Phantom's brow, his facial structure strong and handsome despite his gaunt cheeks.

She could see him now.

His breath raised and lowered in the ongoing struggle of his sickness, his temple shining with sweat. She recalled the color of his eyes—blue. The blue that had belonged to Daniel Fenton before he'd fallen to madness, over ten years ago. And the lines of his body had so often been covered by his jumpsuit and the folds of his cape, but she knew those lithe lines.

She knew this man as a ghost.

She half-expected the sleeping man's eyes to snap open, and for him to twist sideways and transform into the body of Dan Phantom as he lunged at her. But he remained sleeping in a fitful way, his bare chest raising and lowering in an enduring pattern, his ribs occasionally stretching against skin to remind her of his starvation.

"Oh my god," she whispered, tense as she sat there, waiting for something to happen.

But nothing happened, save for the soft beeps of medical equipment that interrupted the silence and the shudder of her own breath.

Dan Phantom.

On a bed.

As a human.

Valerie struggled to hold such revelations in tension together. She shakily reached out to him, her armored fingers daring to touch his hand.

Her sensors registered warm, pliable human skin. The IV in his hand had a bandage that was stained red with human blood. When she rested her fingers against his wrist, she felt the familiar thump of a human heart.

As she sat there in confusion and fear, the man's breath hitched. His eyes slit open.

Valerie watched him apprehensively.

His blue eyes carried a great, feverish daze in them—a disorientation with himself and the surrounding world. He made a slight moaning sound, his baritone voice settling like a dead brick in her body. His dark, mud-splattered hair tousled around his sharp cheek as his head turned slightly. He blinked dully.

And then a spark of recognition lit in him, and his cracked lips stretched.

She knew that smile.

It was a little twitch of his lips when he was at peace—or plotting. His beautiful, blue eyes closed, and he exhaled deeply, neither pulling away from her trembling hand nor grabbing for her. He simply remained laying openly vulnerable before her. As if he knew he was exactly where he was meant to be.

Valerie watched him slip back into sleep from his exhaustion. Her heart was pounding for all too many reasons.

"What are you?" she whispered, her face tense.

But she feared she already knew the answer.

She pulled her armored fingers away from him, shakily. The hair on the nape of her neck raised with the danger this human Dan Phantom potentially represented. "This must be another one of your tricks somehow," she whispered.

But for what?

As a human, he would hardly even be a challenge for her (not that he was much of one even as a ghost).

The man's dark brow furrowed with restlessness as a wave of a chill wore through him. The terribly mundane sickness within him reminded Valerie that somehow, Phantom had suffered in the recent past.

Despite her every gut instinct, she hesitantly grabbed for the blankets at his waist and pulled them up. He still bore a few streaks of mud here and there, but she hesitated to clean him further. It meant too many things. His face and his body meant too many things.

Valerie checked her ghost tracker one more time to confirm he carried no ecto-signature.

Nothing.


"Kwan," she hissed the moment she peeked her head out the door, dragging him to the side in the hall outside the infirmary.

Her friend, who had been casually walking by, stared back wide-eyed.

Valerie looked frenzied, having barely managed to retract her armor to avoid attracting unwanted attention or questions. "I think….our friend in room 6 might be a little hard to handle when he wakes up."

Kwan blinked, bewildered. "What? Did something happen? Are you—?"

"—I'm fine," she cut in, voice rough. "But I'm serious. We gotta hide the knives, sharp objects, maybe put a sedative in his IV or something."

"But why?"

The woman turned away, her full lips in a tight line. "He's got a lot of old scars, like a fighter. And you don't get those kinds of scars working a regular 9 to 5, you know? I think he's—" her voice strained—"a criminal of some kind. I'd rather not chance something happening."

He swallowed hard at that and readjusted his thin-framed glasses. All of his close reading of books had worsened his vision lately. "A criminal? Like, how bad of one? Am I…are we in danger?"

Valerie's face twisted in pain. "I don't know," she whispered honestly. "But I'm serious, Kwan. No weapons, no fast movements. Nothing like that, you got it? And I wanna be there when he wakes up or interacts with you or anyone."

He raised his hands. "Okay, okay." His voice strained with confusion. "You just…you look like you've seen a ghost. I'm a little worried. You think he killed someone? Like, that kind of criminal?"

She stepped backwards, her combat boots making a solid click against the tile. "I know what I've seen," she dared to snap. "And this dude might be human, but he's bad news. I should have left him in the Wastelands to rot."

But even as she spoke, her mind recalculating battle strategies and defenses, some dark part of her heart rose.

Dan Phantom was somehow still in her life.

He hadn't abandoned her.

And she struggled to reveal that identity to others. Because at the end of the day, that dark part of her wanted to speak to him without panicking the whole of the town.

Just to talk.


The next morning, cradled safely in the infirmary of the Amity Park Resistance, the mysterious man awoke fully. His dark brows angled as his eyes fluttered open. His blue eyes were clearer, the broad-spectrum antibiotic in his IV having reined in his blood infection. But he still bore mud in his hair and sweat down his temples from the breaking of his fever.

He thoughtlessly tried to move his wrist, only to feel something stay his hand. Confused, he turned his heavy head against his pillow—a sensation he had not felt a in a long time. His handsome face focused upon what it could see of his wrist, and he saw the flicker of silver metal.

A handcuff.

And then he heard the sharp, unimpressed voice of one Valerie Gray echo from the corner of the room. "Yeah, don't even think of snapping that," she said, voice hard. She was leaning against the wall, her arms crossed.

His bleary eyes slid to her, his dark hair partially obstructing his view of her. He blinked as he dared to twitch his other hand, only to discover it was handcuffed as well to the bedrails.

And for all his suffering and exhaustion and sickness, he managed a weak twitch of his lips, his white teeth gleaming with a sharpness that belied something not quite human about him. "Ah." His baritone voice was hoarse from disuse, but an exhausted relief thrummed through him, bleeding into his tone. He never thought he would be so happy to wake up chained to a bed before. "Valerie. The ghost slayer."

He watched her fingers tighten in the material of her own shirt. Her dark curls glimmered in the morning light from the window, catching in an array of black and browns—her clothing an otherwise drab military outfit.

His lips stretched further. "You saved me after all," he confessed, his voice hoarse raising in a proud declaration. He weakly jerked against the handcuffs holding his arms down by the bedrails. "But what is this."

The woman was for a time unreadable. And then she blurred toward him, the only knife in the room in her hand. She lowered it to the skin of his neck, above his carotid. Her eyes were hard. "Don't play games with me," she said quietly with a hard, warning edge. "I know who you are, so you can skip any lie you were planning to tell." She pressed the sharp of the knife gently against his skin. "I want to know what you're doing here."

The man's blue eyes had widened at the feeling of the blade against him, and at Valerie's close proximity. Like this, the smallest fraction of a fever still dazed his eyes and made his cheeks seem more flushed than natural.

And then his voice smoothed out with a huff of amusement. His blue eyes—so dancing, so mocking, even from within his beaten and worn body—narrowed. "Such derision," he said hoarsely. His voice was weak, with a whine. He seemed particularly unconcerned about the knife at his throat. "I had hoped for a…happier welcome."

"Oh, if you try anything," she promised, "I'll be happy to put you six feet under. You got that, Phantom?"

The worn man preened, his lips splitting wide in a lazy way. "Oh, I missed you," he moaned in delight of her threat. "You could—use these handcuffs for a better purpose, though." His eyes were growing increasingly more intelligent and aware as the seconds passed. He was looking at his surroundings from the peripherals of his eye. He reveled in the feeling of great hesitance from Valerie's hand, which held the blade at his neck but did not shake.

Valerie Gray, the Red Huntress, was a steady hand. An immovable object.

Her beautiful face twisted at him. One of her dark curls came to slip over her shoulder, hanging between them, brushing against her cheek. "Don't say you missed me," she retorted. "And I swear, if you ever make one more handcuff joke, I'm leaving you for dead in a rattlesnake pit. I get so tired of that shit."

That earned a light, hoarse huff from him. His strange, blue eyes searched her own.

"I missed you," he repeated, freely. There was a genuine vulnerability in him as he stared up at her from the bed. Despite the insanity that so often tinged his eyes, he carried a greater expression with him. A haunting stayed his usual darkness. "Valerie."

Her name sounded soft, cradled by his hoarse voice.

Her eyes hardened. "What the hell happened to you?" she whispered harshly. "You leave for weeks—and now you look human?"

The man swallowed hard, and then he closed his eyes. "Do not make me relive unhappy thoughts."

Valerie grabbed for his chin and somewhat roughly turned his face to hers, her bare fingers digging into his scruff and the elegant line of his jaw. "I'll make you relive whatever I want you to. I wanna know what the fuck you're doing here like this. Why don't you even have a signature, huh?"

Dan cracked open one eye, which narrowed upon her. "If you are so unhappy to see me," he retorted hoarsely, "then kill me and be done with it. I could die by your hand right now, as weak as I am." His breath shuddered a bit with a small chill that worked through him from his latent sickness. An old spark of himself shadowed his face with insanity. "Do it. I despise—this new form."

Her teal eyes searched his own, her face tight. The blade at his neck glimmered in the morning sun.

As exhausted as he was, his lips suddenly twitched up, and he challenged her softly. "Or can you not kill a human?"

Her jaw set hard.

And then she lowered the blade in silent defeat, her heart pounding.

His gaze narrowed in play. "How predictable you are, anymore." He gently yanked against the handcuffs once more. "Perhaps even your threat to toss me into a rattlesnake pit is a lie." He gently tried to move his legs, even as an edge of irritation worked into his tired voice. "You are too fond of your humans, Valerie, if you cannot keep your blade raised at me."

The Red Huntress huffed at that. "Yeah? Well, don't try to play judge here," she snapped, snapping the blade back into its case and slipping it back into her pocket. "You say you want me to kill you and you hate this form, but I get the feeling you don't."

From the bed, the human visage of Dan watched her, his blue eyes a strange haunt compared to the red wine she had come to know, his handsome face distorted by the streaks of mud still upon him. "I would die by your hand," he declared, as if in argument. "And by no one else's."

The weakness in his voice, coupled with the passion of his words, made Valerie pause for a moment. Her dark cheeks flushed in an odd way. This was not the first time she had heard him speak such things, and in the language of Dan, it took on peculiar meanings.

Deep things.

She pressed her lips together. "You're gonna tell me everything, about how the hell you got this way, and why you were gone for so long, and how the fuck you're registering as a full human." She hesitated. "And then I'll go from there, on what to do."

The man inhaled deeply, searching her. "Very well, but...have you told no one about who I am? For you knew me before now, it seems."

Valerie fell silent.

His face stretched with a smile that, even with the mud upon him and his cold sweat, made him appear terribly handsome. "Ah. So, you missed me too."


A/N: Hey, all. I hope you're doing well! I'm just over here playing around with human Dan because he's been in my thoughts lately. Sorry if anything feels rushed! A lot going on in real life.

I'm still planning on an update to Karma soon, and maybe a blooper reel? But if you like this new universe here, I will expand on it. I know some people have requested an update to Aftermath. I'm still feeling pretty done with it after what all happened last year, but I'm also thinking about my deleted Dark Gray fic, The Exchange, and maybe how to combine various elements from these stories together to make a better, happier standalone fic. So forgive me as I'm noodling in the background on those stories and what to do with them, haha.

Please let me know your thoughts, constructive criticisms, and requests! Thanks!