Her Own Legend

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Chapter Four

'Past'

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Disclaimer- I do not own Danny Phantom or Eragon. I own Valerie's mom, some characters in Chapter one, and that's it. I think. Possibly. For now.

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I would also like to take this opportunity to announce that this is not, in any way, what-so-ever, not even a-little-bit-in-the-farthest-reaches-of-your-imagination a DV story. Danny feels sorry for her. That's it.

He would have left then, but something made him turn, and when he did, he almost gasped in shock.

A girl lay unconscious on the ground, holding a stone like the one that had just appeared, and which he now carried, except it was orange, not blue. She looked around two years younger than him, and had long black hair.

This is too much, thought Eragon.

-End flashback-

Dani woke to find herself in an unfamiliar forest, sleeping about ten feet away from an unfamiliar boy, also asleep. She examined him for a moment, and then turned away, intending to leave before he could wake, but as she did, a twig snapped under her foot. She winced and froze.

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"Will you just stand still?" Danny bellowed at the toga-wearing-ghost in front of him.

"Um, I think you mean float still? We're only, like, fifty feet off the ground."

"Whatever!" Danny exclaimed. The ghost in front of him was fairly low-powered, but unfortunately he didn't have his thermos with him, and thus needed to actually throw the ancient spirit through the Fenton Portal™ in order to get rid of him- and that moment didn't seem like it could come fast enough.

"You cannot defeat me, for I am Didius, ghost of-"

"Bad attitudes?" Danny suggested, firing an ice ray at Didius, who dodged it- barely.

"Walk- ER! No way man! I am the ghost of pottery!"

Danny looked at him in shock. "Pottery?"

"Yes! I come from the noble country of Greece, home of some of the most beautiful pieces of art in the world! Would you like to see?"

"Um… no?" Danny said hesitantly, and as the ghost looked at him angrily, he quickly suggested, "Why don't you go ask Klemper if he wants to see?"

"Walk-ER! No way! That guy's annoying, clingy…."

While the ghost was distracted rambling, Sam ran up to the place below where they were fighting, "Danny, catch!" she tossed up the thermos, and he caught it in relief. Less than five seconds later, Didius was gone.

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Meanwhile, Dani was having an intense argument with Eragon, who seemed convinced that she should come back with him to his village, while Dani honestly couldn't think of anything worse then being questioned by a bunch of strangers who would want to know who she was, where she came from, and a hundred other questions she didn't want to answer (or couldn't).

"Why won't you just come back with me?"

"Right, like it's perfectly normal for random girls to just appear in the mountains?" Dani said sarcastically.

"It's happened before."

"Oh yea? When?"

Eragon began to pack up his things, at the same time telling a story.

"Fifteen years ago a young woman appeared at the foot of the spine, injured and near death. She was eight months pregnant. She collapsed just after she was found, and people say it looked like she had been in the Spine for a month or more. Someone took her in, and Sheila (She was our town healer then) cared for her. She regained conciseness about a week later, but wouldn't speak. Soon enough the baby was born, a girl, but she vanished- the woman was distraught, crying and sobbing. She almost killed herself, but someone saw her and stopped her."

He heard no response from Dani, so continued with the story, now with a more emotional undertone to his voice.

"Four months before that, my mother came back to Carvahall, after being gone for years. My Uncle says she was finely dressed and wore a net of pearls on her head. Anyway, she was five months pregnant when she first came here, and eventually she gave birth to a son- me. That was less than a week after the woman had her baby. But my mother left, leaving me here. The woman disappeared the same night, and people say it's likely she went with my mother, probably to escape the grief of her child's death."

Eragon stopped and looked over his shoulder, expecting to see Dani listening intently, or at the very least, politely. He cursed and straightened up when he saw instead an empty clearing. Dani had vanished.

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Danny was having another rough day. First he forgot the thermos, then there was the whole 'Didius' issue, and now- Valerie.

Not that she had done anything yet. She was sitting on the ground in Amity Park's cemetery, not even in her ghost hunting suit, slumped against something, which, considering where she was could only be a gravestone.

Danny hesitated. He definitely shouldn't be doing this. Ten to one it was a trap anyway, and even if it wasn't, he was supposed to be on patrol.

He made a decision. 'The ghosts can wait ten minutes.'

This decided, he landed softly in front of Valerie.

She didn't notice him for at least a minute, and when she finally did, she simply glared at him and said in a slightly hoarse and choked voice, "What do you want, ghost?"

"I was just wondering… why you were crying," he said lamely, expecting a reply like 'None of your business, ghost,' or 'Why do you care?'

What she said instead shocked him.

"My mom…" she tried to say more, but couldn't help the tears that rolled down her cheeks, and turned away so he wouldn't see.

Danny waited a tactful amount of time, and then said, "Did she die?" He was genuinely interested in the answer. He had known Valerie since they were five, and he had never heard her talk about her mom.

Valerie shrugged, "I don't know," she told him, "my dad says she disappeared two months before I was born, and then two months after that I showed up again, on the doorstep. He never saw my mom again, and I've never seen anything other than pictures."

She broke down in tears again.

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Dani was crouched on a tree branch as a million fragments of memory that weren't hers rushed through her mind. All of them seemed to feature a red-suited girl some deeply buried fragment of Danny announced was Valerie.

She was dimly aware of Eragon leaving the clearing, but made no attempt to move until later that night when the memories finally faded. She slipped down the tree and crouched down at its base, hugging her knees close to her chest. It was cold and a little bit spooky alone in the mountains at night, and against her better judgment, Dani made a decision.

'Tomorrow I will go down the mountain and find Eragon's village.' She shivered as a wolf howled somewhere in the distance.

'If I can make it down alive.'

Ok then, there we go! A little bit more of a plot! Like I said, this is NOT a DV fic. No offense to people who like that pairing, I just don't like writing it.

On a side note, I do not own Didius. He stems from a very interesting conversation in reading class during a vocab test, in which someone was trying to spell 'Odious' and somehow ended up with 'Didius.' My friend Justine and I agreed Didius sounded like some ancient Grecian person, so I had to put him in. The Walk-ER thing also comes from reading class, this time from A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens. Someone says it on the last page, so everyone in my c lass has been walking around saying 'walk-ER' for about a week and a half. And if that explanation confused you… too bad. I'm confused too. Anyway, sorry for the shortness. I was feeling lazy. At least I updated.

Anyway, please review!