Thermodynamics
The third chapter in an attempt to give Valerie the respect canon never did, just in time for Christmas. After the events of No Man’s Land, Danny and Valerie meet to discuss where things go from there and how they got to this point. ((3.6k words, Gray Ghost with a heavy focus on Valerie and Danny’s mental states post revelation) Ao3)
Danny could have easily just flown to Elmerton to see Valerie, but given the gravity of the upcoming conversation, he was relieved when Tucker offered to drive him there in his new ride. Hopping into the clean black chevy, Danny let out an anxious breath and nodded to Tucker that he was ready to go.
“Am I taking sir to his execution,” he said, putting on his worst british accent as he shifted into first and started towards the town line, “you look terrible, man.”
“Thanks dude that’s really what I needed right now.”
“I’m just sayin, I’ve seen you less shaken after getting sideswiped by a dragon, you sure this is a good idea?”
“No,” Danny began, his mind racing with possibilities, “but she figured it out, Tuck. I mean, yeah she was cool about it in the moment but now she wants to talk and I just… I don’t know what to say to her.”
“Just do what you did with Jazz-”
Beaming, Danny slapped his knee like an old cartoon prospector. “Have clockwork send me back in time to fix my mistakes and catch her off guard with the fact that I know that she knows, it could work, man, I could do it!”
“Wow ok no, I meant just talk to her, you weirdo,” Tucker said, hooking a left that sent Danny flying against the window, “you guys dated just pretend like she never broke up with you and now you’re at least somewhat normal.”
“And if that doesn’t work?”
“… I’ll put some nice flowers on your grave.”
Throwing his face into his hands, Danny screamed. “Why don’t we just keep driving? I’ve got gas money, we could do it, Tuck, just you, me and the open road, a good ol’ fashioned road trip! Leave our worries behind us, live off the land, yeah?”
“You had me up until ‘live off the land,’ TF don’t do foraging, Mr. Fenton.”
Smiling at the normalcy of a hypothetical road trip, Danny watched as they passed over the bridge that lead into Elmerton, drawing him closer to his meeting with Valerie. In an effort to give the town some sort of levity in spite of its…questionable reputation, the city council had a habit of changing the welcome sign from week to week, this week it read; Elmerton! We Don’t Know How To Quit!
While he assumed it was probably meant to be inspiring, he couldn’t help but see it as vaguely threatening to outsiders.
“So, really,” Tucker said, eyes glued to the road “on a scale of one to ten how badly do you think this could possibly go?”
“Which is the one where she kicks me in the head and possibly breaks my arm?”
“Hmm, an eight huh?”
“THAT’S ONLY AN EIGHT?!”
Stopping the car in front of Valerie’s building, Tucker smiled as he unlocked the door and saw Danny off. “You kids have fun! See you in a few hours.”
“You’re the actual devil, Tucker,” he yelled back, shoving his hands into his pockets before turning to press the buzzer, “you’re the devil and I am-
---------------
That was Danny’s only thought as he stepped into the sweltering heat of Valerie’s apartment. He’d been expecting a slight temperature jump from the outside, but the difference between the chill of winter and the indoor sauna he had unknowingly entered was almost more than he could handle.
...In hell
“Uh, hi” he said, offering her an awkward wave as she ushered him in.
“Hey… so you expecting a firing squad or something?”
“No, no it’s just I’ve never done… this… before, I’m not really sure what to do.”
“You could start by unclenching your fists,” Valerie said, “you look like there’s a sniper targeting you.”
“Well not yet, but it’s still early give it time”
Visibly relaxing as Valerie gave him a half smile, Danny awkwardly followed her into her room where she flopped comfortably onto the bed, leaving him standing in the door. Looking around like a deer lost in the woods, he found himself taking stock of the assorted ghost information decorating her walls and waiting for her to begin the conversation for him, the blasting heat of the apartment compounding on his already tense psyche.
“So…”
“So…”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
And there it was, Danny thought, the beginning of the end. No turning back now.
“I mean in my defense, we had evidence that you were pretty anti-ghost… it just… it never felt like the right time.”
Shrugging, Valerie picked up a half assembled ectogun and began playing with the innards, her face a neutral mask.
“We were friends, Danny,” she said, not looking up at him from her work, “after the ghost king after Skulker, after Technus…why didn’t you just talk to me? I mean yeah I wasn’t Danny Phantom’s biggest fan but I really liked Danny Fenton, more than enough to hear him out at least.”
Danny’s paranoia made sure to take stock of the way she used like in the past tense.
Racking his brain for the correct response, his mouth and his brain experienced a severe disconnect which resulted in him going, “Aren’t you hot? It’s like ninety in here?”
Staring at him incredulously, Valerie rolled her eyes and gave a small laugh. “After November my dad always turns up the heat like crazy, he can’t stand being cold for more than a few minutes, but like I was saying-”
“Right, I’m sorry but…jeez it’s like an oven in here, I’m not trying to change the subject though I promise.”
“I’d probably help if you took off your jacket then.”
Quickly following her suggestion, Danny stripped his jacket off and folded it over the back of her desk chair before feeling immediately exposed having removed a layer.
“Better?”
“Totally,” he lied, now more sure than ever that the heat was more in his head than in the room, “and… I’m sorry, again. I know I’ve said that a lot in the last few days but I mean it, I really do. I was going to tell you, I swear I was but then with the breakup and all the stuff with Vlad and school I just… I pushed you out.”
Arching her eyebrow at him, Valerie waited for him to continue.
“It’s like… in my head I knew, ‘hey, maybe talk to Val, see how she’s handling all this too’ but then some new stupid thing would happen and I’d get wrapped up stopping it.” Danny paused to swing his legs around the chair holding his jacket before continuing. “Tucker tells me I gotta give myself time to breathe but I just… it’s like… y’know?!”
Saying nothing, Valerie put the gun aside and met his eyes across the room, urging him to continue, because while she did in fact “know” the feeling he was describing, she felt like it was important for him to finish.
“I think I didn’t tell you because I was being selfish. Sure, I wanted to tell you, I heard you say you would give up ghost hunting for me and I was sure I could tell you then; like 'hey Val, before you do all that, I’m a ghost, not just a ghost but the ghost you hate the most, hope we can still be cool.’ But I didn’t, did I? Because we were normal, and that’s what I wanted. You didn’t see me as Fenton the freak or Danny Phantom the menace when we were together… I was just Danny and you were just Valerie, that’s how you thought it was right?”
“Sometimes,” she said, shoving her work into a box and pushing it under the bed, “it was fun though, even if your friends did hate me.”
“They didn’t hate you,” Danny said, giving a lazy smile and mussing his hair, “Sam’s naturally distrustful and Tucker’s just a really good friend so he’s protective of me.”
“Oh I know,” Valerie said, giving him a smile that was mostly sad, “he told me that when he cancelled on me the first time, said he was doing you a favor and that you’d owe him until you both died… then he laughed.”
In a burst of clarity, Danny remembered the incident in question, cringing as he thought back to possessing Tucker and forcing him to bring Sam to the dance freshman year while he dealt with Paulina.
Watching him carefully, Valerie broke the silence. “I’m guessing there’s more to that story too?”
Groaning, he planted his head in his hands and nodded.
“Okay, and the ghost dog? Any more about that I should know?”
Suddenly getting very serious, Danny lifted his head just enough to meet her eyes. “Good news there at least, Cujo’s gone, maybe for good, we haven’t seen him since that night at Axion Labs. He just kinda…faded away after he got his ball.”
There was a bittersweet tone to his words. “You miss em?”
“He was a good dog, just put a in a bad place, still, sorry he kinda…”
“Ruined my life?”
Nodding, Danny let the silence wash over them again as they both thought of what to say next.
“It’s- I’m not gonna lie and say it’s fine, but I’m dealing with it, besides you still haven’t told me what happened to YOU. Were you born like this or did someone…do this to you? Was it Vlad? People don’t just wake up half ghost as far as I know, but then again there’s apparently a lot I’m out of the loop on.”
Taking a deep breath, Danny transformed, exhaling just as the last bits of color drained from his hair and his eyes shifted from blue to green.
“Believe it or not Vlad had nothing to do with this,” he said, gesturing to his deathly white face, “my parents, when they first finished our ghost portal, the blueprints got mixed up and they put the ‘on’ switch inside the thing, and so they gave up on getting it working for a while. Well, cut to a few weeks later, Tucker, Sam and I were fooling around in the basement and she goes, 'hey, why don’t you go inside the portal, you know, look around.’”
“Look around the experimental project designed to punch a hole in reality,” Valerie cut in, “that was your bright idea?”
“Anyway, I slapped on this jumpsuit and stepped inside… next thing I knew there was a great big flash and it felt like someone had strapped me to a lightning rod, when I woke up I looked like this and I could do… a lot more than Danny Fenton ever did.”
“So… you died then?”
“Sort of,” he responded, tapping his foot in anticipation, “I got better.”
“And your parents?”
“They… I’m working my way up to that. My folks love me and I know they’d accept me no matter what, but this is a lot to take in. Jazz says it’d be easier to just be honest with them 'in a controlled setting’ but if I had any sense of control over my life I wouldn’t be getting two hours of sleep a day… you’re taking all of this way better than I expected by the way.”
“I’m still too sore from the other day to use any energy on you, I got a job to keep remember?”
Looking her over, Danny noticed the faint brown lines decorating her arms and legs, thin dips in her skin that were telltale marks of a hardfought few months.
“Hey, eyes up here, dude.”
Suddenly aware that he’d been staring at her without saying anything, he felt his face warm up with embarrassment and quickly averted his eyes to look at almost anything else in the room. “Sorry, sorry, I wasn’t being creepy I promise,” he began, his cheeks still light green with blush, “I was just looking at your scars! Not your… your uh… anyway yeah that’s about everything! I got powers from the ghost portal and I’ve been like this ever since. Dani’s my clone-sister-cousin-ish and she can do almost anything I can do and Vlad’s like me except carrying twenty years of crazy and a Lugosi fashion sense, he also wants my to bang my mom so there’s that.”
“It’s…weird that you know about that last part,” she said, offering him a small, genuinely warm smile once he finally brought his eyes back to her direction, “but I guess if you’re gonna have bad blood with a guy might as well go all out.”
“The guy wasn’t exactly subtle about it, Valerie.”
Shrugging, she closed her eyes and took a deep breath, going silent for so long that for a minute Danny thought she had fallen asleep and was filled with dread about what to do next if she had.
“Uh, Val?”
“Shhh…”
Okay she wasn’t sleeping, but that just made her silence even more nerve wracking for him. After awhile, he realized that he was inadvertently dropping the temperature of her room in his anticipation, so he reverted back to human while the heat crept back in the room to fill the space where words had gone unused. This is torture, Danny thought, trapped by the confines of his own guilt and politeness to wait for her to say anything to move this session along.
“Okay.”
Hearing that word was like being electrocuted all over again for him. “Okay?”
“Okay, I can see why you wouldn’t exactly tell me everything on a first date, and I’m not going to throw you out the window so you can relax.”
“How did you-”
“It was Tucker’s one request, he’s really into keeping things non violent and chucking you out a seventh story window would cause a scene. And I’m not as mad as I thought I would be, you thought you were doing the right thing by keeping me in the dark and again, this is… a lot, thinking back to everything that’s happened around town in the last two years.”
Before Danny could open his mouth, Valerie held up a solitary finger, cutting him off.
“ But-”
Oh no…
“I don’t like being lied to, Danny. And like you said, you were being selfish by keeping things to yourself. I cared about you, I was going to give up ghost hunting and try to be normal with you, stop being angry and just let something good play out after a shitty year took everything from me, but instead of sitting me down and talking to me you let me go… you let me keep on exhausting myself, thinking I was alone, when you knew; you knew how much I hated doing this, you knew how much my dad was scared for me after you outed me during that invasion. Yes, I ended things and no, I’m not blaming you for me being angry, that’s on me, I told you my dad says I got it from my mom when we were hanging out but… but you knew how much I was struggling to just hold on to something.”
The room was suffocating now, with the heat seeming to increase exponentially as they sat staring at each other. In a moment of clarity, Danny realized that Valerie was the one causing the heat, and as he focused he could see red lines forming a circuit pattern crossing her forearms. The suit, he thought, remembering the whirring heat of his laptop after running too many programs at once, she’s been trying to stay calm for me but the suit is overcompensating for her anger and turning it into actual heat.
“You stopped talking to me at school, you almost never noticed that I was gone, it’s like you shut me out and that hurt danny. Then I find out about Danielle and the mayor and everything I thought I had was gone, I couldn’t get my dad involved, he doesn’t deserve that knife at his throat with all the pressure he’s already under trying to keep us above water, but I guess you knew that too. So it was just me. Again. With a bunch of pieces to sort out for a puzzle I didn’t know I was supposed to be putting together. You said it yourself, you have Tucker, you have Sam, you have your sisters, you even said yourself that you know if it really came down to it you’d have your parents too. Me? My ‘friends’ mostly ditched me after we lost everything and Star has her own issues to deal with, my ‘boss’ turned out to be a manipulative creep using me to settle a grudge, and my dad is so close to getting his life back to something resembling normal that, to be honest, I’d have to be a real bitch to drop all this on him now, especially after how I treated him before…”
She stopped just long enough for Danny to see that she was almost crying, her stubborn determination the only thing seeming to hold back the tears, but her next sentence was such a damnation that he wished she’d have just shot him.
“You didn’t even try.” She said in a soft voice, seemingly defeated. “I meant it when I said we should stay friends but… friends talk to each other, friends do more that stand in the background keeping secrets from each other. Friends try, Danny, but what did you do? You just-”
A sad smile appeared on her face, one matched only by Danny’s as he knew they’d reached the same word for their mutual disappearance from each other’s lives.
“You ghosted me, and I let it happen.”
Before his brain could stop the words his mouth was forming, Danny spoke. “I hear three dates is usually when that happens.”
Much to his surprise, she laughed at that. A genuine warm laughter that weakened her enough to let a few tears slip out and made him simultaneously feel better and worse about how they had left things.
“Seriously though, you’re right… and I am sorry this is the way you had to hear things but if it makes you feel better, it wasn’t you, it was me. And no I’m not being cliche, I’m serious. After everything with Technus and Vlad and just, everything, the only take away was that it was too easy to hurt you. Don’t get me wrong I have no doubt that you could- and would- kick my ass six ways to Sunday in a fair fight but…”
Standing for the first time, Danny crossed the room and joined Valerie on the edge of the bed. “Wrecking your suit, being hunted like rabbits through the ghost zone, accidentally shooting you when we were in space, that look on your face when Dani was destabilizing and you thought you’d turned into a killer, every time I thought about getting close to you there was another reminder thrown in my face that at the end of the day, it seemed like I was made to haunt you, you know? And if I could just push you far enough out of my circle of weirdness after we split, maybe things could go back to normal for you.”
“You tried that with Tucker and Sam? Or Jazz”
“I’m pretty sure those two will be stuck with me until the day they die, I accepted this years ago. And Jazz is just…Jazz. To her I’m the same annoying little brother I’ve always been, only now I can walk through walls and don’t scream when I see the teletubbies.”
Accepting his company as the temperature started dropping again, she smiled. “So don’t try to force your normal on me then. We’re both going through a lot, and I don’t think anyone else can understand how uniquely terrible things are for us. You don’t have to be my best friend and start telling me your deepest darkest fears all of a sudden, just… don’t shut me out again alright? Otherwise I’ll hire a Dipsy impersonator to stand outside your window until you stop being dumb.”
“…I hate that yellow bastard.”
“That’s Lala, Dipsy’s the green one.”
“Bastards a bastard, Val.”
Sitting together, Danny found himself grateful they had entered a comfortable silence for the first time since he had arrived. Of course he knew she still had some issues she would want to discuss later, but for now it was good that they’d gotten as far as they had today, even if if was mostly just clearing up old air. Adjusting himself as Valerie leaned her head on his shoulder, he tried to regulate the heat she was still putting off by subtly dropping his own body temperature to slightly above what he considered a death chill.
“Danny,” Valerie began, her anger and fatigue finally polymerizing into full fledged exhaustion as the previous day caught up with her.
“Yeah Val?”
“I liked Dipsy as a kid.”
Fully asleep now, she dropped slightly off his shoulder and found herself on the edge of her bed, leaving Danny alone with nothing but his thoughts, the sound of the heater kicking on, and the pounding of the rain as company. Slowly standing up to avoid making any noise, he looked at her with a small smile and turned to go, positive that Damon Gray would be less than enthusiastic about a teenage boy loitering in his daughter’s room while he was at work and especially while she was asleep. “Yeah, well,” he said, locking the deadbolt for her before stepping through the door as a specter, “you liked me too… you might just have bad taste.”