Author's Note: Thank you for the reviews! I take your point about Danny and Sam not looking like a good couple. My interpretations will inevitably be coloured by my own opinions. My OTP has shifted from Gray Ghost to Shallow Sapphire to Phantom Rocker and back to Shallow Sapphire again, but Amethyst Ocean has never appealed to me in the same way. That's probably why I can't get too "fired up" when writing from Sam's point of view. (But I do like seeing the fanart of Danny and Sam together.)

Johnathen, you have a good idea and I'll look into it in more depth once I get the main three (Sam, Valerie and Paulina) out of the way.

Enjoy this next chapter!

Valerie Gray

I have no idea how to answer that question. If you'd asked me that a few months ago, it would have been easy. I would have told you that I hated his guts. I would have called him a putrid poltergeist who brought us nothing but trouble. I would have tried to take him down by any means necessary.

But that was before he saved the world from the Disasteroid.

And now, I don't know what to think.

In the day, I can forget. I can go to school and pull him away from the crowd before he's mobbed by admirers; I can pretend I'm his trusted friend and everything's cool between us.

But at night, I remember. The dreams are always the same. I'm chasing a glowing green ghoul on my hoverboard, I blast it a few times, it falls to the ground – and it turns into Danny Fenton. And even as I'm trying to bandage him up, he keeps shying away from me, crying and begging me not to hurt him.

I've woken up sweating too many times. We used to date. That's the thought that keeps hitting me in the head. We used to date! I'd been aiming at the kid who stayed up late talking to me online and didn't seem to care about falling asleep in class. I'd been firing at the sweetie who smiled like a little kid when I rode the Ferris wheel with him.

I could have killed my boyfriend!

Do you realise now why I'm so confused? On the one hand, I wanted to spend as much time as I could with Danny Fenton. On the other hand, I wanted Danny Phantom out of my life. And now they're the same person? How am I supposed to react? Do I want him to stay or to go?

I still can't fully believe it. I don't look at my ex-boyfriend and see a violent homewrecker. I don't look at that ghost boy and see a dork who wants to be an astronaut.

I never called Danny Phantom a hero. Where other people saw a ghost risking his afterlife to stop an even worse ghost, I just saw a troublemaker. As his popularity rose, I told myself stories to justify the hunt. His good deeds were an act to lull everyone into a false sense of security.

It made him no better than my mother.

Ursula Gray was like Snow White's apple: inviting on the outside, deadly on the inside. In public, she was a glamorous high-flier with a rich husband and a fortune of her own and a daughter she loved, and all our friends thought she was amazing, giving her money away to charity and building a happy home. In private, there was no need for the mask. She only married Daddy on the rebound after the affair with her childhood friend's husband ended. The donations she boasted of never happened; she kept the money to buy more jewellery for herself. And she definitely didn't love her daughter.

If she was a prison guard, she wouldn't be satisfied with locking up the criminals. She'd break their legs to make sure they could never go anywhere again. That's kind of like what she did to me. She pushed me into a corner, telling me I was fat and ugly and good for nothing, that I was lucky to have all my parents' money because I definitely wasn't going to make it out there with just my non-existent looks and brains. And then she turned away – and then she spun back around and plunged the knife into my heart, giving it a few twists just to make absolutely sure I was dead inside.

I know it's an awful thing to say, but part of me was relieved when that pick-up truck ran a red light and slammed into her. I cried at the funeral, and so did Daddy, but it was also a relief not to have her dripping her poison into my ear.

If my mother taught me anything, it's that you're nothing without wealth and that you can't judge a book by its cover.

But I'm starting to wonder if everything happens for a reason – if there was a purpose behind my life being ruined by that ghost dog and his handler. I needed to lose everything to learn that I could be strong without it. I needed to come face-to-face with Danny Phantom to learn that sometimes, what you see really is what you get.

It took me way too long to realise the truth. The trigger was saving that ghost girl, Dani Phantom. With an "i". I only tried to stop her melting because Danny Phantom with a "y" claimed she had a human side. My job may have been to destroy ghosts, but I couldn't take the risk of letting a human being die.

That night, I had a lot to think about. Danny had also told me that Dani was his clone. And I'd seen Mayor Masters turn into a ghost himself. Pieces of memories from months ago started clicking into place. Danny Fenton always ran off, just like me, when news of a ghost attack spread. He had notorious ghost-hunting parents and would have been in their lab for long enough for something to happen to his molecules.

I put two and two together and got four. I shouldn't have been surprised, but it changed everything.

I confronted him the next day. Even then, I didn't want to believe that Danny Fenton was somehow half-ghost, so I blurted out that I thought he was being possessed. The ghost boy was taking over his body and using it for his own ends. Maybe. I said I wanted him to have an exorcism or something. He couldn't deal with all that power on his own. How could he control it? I said he needed to tell somebody and get help. That was why I smiled when he revealed his true self in Antarctica, because he was finally being honest with people about who he was and what was happening.

But in the months since, I've seen the interviews in which he explained how he got his powers, and I've had to throw out my possession theory. Was that human side really his "true" self? If somebody took his powers away, would he still be Danny? Or would he be too far gone?

That's something I don't know.

And there's something else I want to know, something more important to me. Did Danny have any idea that I was the Red Huntress when we were dating? If he did, and he knew that I was the one trying to blast him to smithereens, and he still wanted to be with me … what does that say about him? About me? About us?