There would've been a time when Valerie thought she'd be crazy to ever trust a ghost. Let alone this ghost.
Her and Phantom have had a truce for the past year now. She was fairly reluctant at first, but she did have to admit that her life was much easier when she just let him deal with his share of the ghost attacks. It was also easier to stop the ghost attacks when she wasn't focusing on attacking him instead of the ghost that was causing the problems. They even worked pretty well together.
Most of the ghosts they fought were pretty easy. She's never seen anything really leave a mark on Phantom before.
But this one was different.
She didn't realize how similar ghosts could be when it came to bleeding and injuries. Phantom got hit by a particularly bad blast and Valerie had to finish the fight without him. When she found him afterwards, she was shell shocked.
He'd taken a hit to his stomach and he had one arm pressed against the wound. It was oozing out ectoplasm the way blood would come out of a human wound.
She picked him up and flew as fast as she could. When the hospital came into view, she landed and carried him in through the emergency room doors. She called for help and once they saw who she was carrying, an assortment of doctors and nurses raced over. They started shouting over each other, asking what they were supposed to do to treat someone with ectoplasm instead of blood. No one had treated a patient like him before. They didn't know what to do.
The first thing they settled on was stitching the wound closed. No matter the biology, one thing was clear. If they didn't get that wound closed, he would just keep bleeding out. They had to start there.
The nurses started grabbing the necessary materials and the doctor started stitching him up. It was a slow process because his skin almost seemed to want to go around the stitches to pull them out.
Suddenly, a bright white ring appeared around his waist. The nurses and doctors murmured between them and the room went quiet as the rings split into two and traveled across both halves of his body.
Valerie could see the beginnings of a t-shirt between the two rings and her heart dropped.
The doctors must've noticed the same thing because they started moving even faster. Shouting about how the stitches were holding better. They needed to move.
As the ectoplasm turned red, his wound started bleeding faster. Valerie couldn't move. She was frozen as she watched the transformation as the rings went over his head and feet.
A nurse was talking to her, asking her if she was alright. They were trying to move her, trying to get her out of the way. But she couldn't tear her eyes from the boy laying in the gurnee of the hospital she had carried him to.
As she was finally dragged out, she kept her eyes on him.
Danny Fenton. Danny Fenton was Danny Phantom.