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“Home free, guys,” Danny said into the FentonPhonesTM, soaring above the familiar streets of Amity Park.
“Great,” Tucker replied, tone dragging with exhaustion and full of worry. “Get back here so we can go to bed, then.”
Danny knew the annoyance wasn’t real, so he only grinned. Or, well, rather, it was real – yet another low-sleep school night – but it didn’t matter. Tuck and Sam wouldn’t have gone to sleep for all the riches of Pariah. Messing with Vlad was always a risk, after all, even when the Fruit Loop was out of town.
“10-4,” Danny replied. He meant to say something else, to chatter, maybe, about nothing in particular, help all three of them stay awake, but he didn’t get the chance. A bolt of red plasma struck him in the face, and for a moment the world was nothing but a background blur as he struggled to right himself.
Three things immediately became obvious, once the world stopped spinning.
One, he’d lost the FentonPhonesTM. They’d been dislodged by the shot, fallen somewhere to the ground beneath him, and he didn’t think he had the time at the moment to go looking for them.
Two, the shot had come from the Red Huntress, which was why his ghost sense hadn’t gone off.
Three, if Valerie had actually been trying to kill him (or, well, destroy him; she, like the rest of the world, assumed ghosts couldn’t die twice), then he’d be dead. His face smarted like a bad sunburn, and his vision had crapped out for a moment, but it’d been a tame hit, in the face of things.
Once those thoughts had crossed his head, Danny dropped down to street level before he even spotted Valerie, flew intangibly through a building, and dropped into an alley to give himself a moment.
“Way to go, Danny,” he muttered out loud. If it’d been anyone else, or if Valerie hadn’t been softened by their truce last week, he’d be done for. Of course, if it had been a ghost, he’d have seen them coming, and Valerie had had a late shift at the Nasty Burger that he’d assumed would send her to bed early.
He’d clearly assumed wrong. He should have known better by now, but he was still rattled and recovering from… well, from everything that had led to tonight. From Danielle.
She hadn’t tried to kill him though. His mind was stuck on that. Maybe her mindset had shifted a little. Maybe the truce still held.
Blinking away the last of the spots in his vision, Danny took to the air again, rising above the buildings. It was a matter of seconds to spot Valerie, who seemed to be doing a search grid to track him down. He raised his hands. “Any chance we can talk about this?” he tried asking, as she spotted him a second after he saw her.
Sam would have killed him for even asking. Tuck would have just told him to go invisible and go home. But Danny’d always held a little hope that they could get along someday, maybe even work together.
Except Valerie was already raising her gun as she spun, and she’d always been quick to the trigger.
Maybe coming up from behind her wasn’t the best option, Danny thought, in the split-second before the bolt hit him.
It was much stronger this time.
Head pounding, Danny woke to a similar set-up as the last time Valerie had gotten her hands on him: hands and feet in ghost containment devices, limbs extended. Last time hadn’t been so bad, but Valerie’s choice of knock-out force this time had every bit of him aching, despite his ghost physiology. If he’d had a tail instead of legs, he was willing to bet that’d be aching too.
Not bothering to look for Valerie, he took a moment to properly wake up. Everything hurt, but his chest ached most of all. He was lucky he'd gotten out of the habit of breathing in ghost form years ago (it was a real pain trying to breathe when intangible), otherwise he’d have been wheezing in pain.
When he finally did look up, it was to the sight of Valerie staring at him. Her gaze was uncannily blank, but at least she wasn’t swearing at him, or calling him evil. The setup was uncomfortable, but, well, it could have been worse. The fact that it wasn’t meant something.
“What’s this?”
Danny blinked at Valerie. “What?” He blinked again. Then, he registered what she had in her hands. It was the files he’d stolen from Vlad, the CD case he’d been flying home with.
He strained in his restraints. Crap. No. Tuck had been right, he should have just destroyed the files, but he’d thought there might be something in there that could help Dani, if she ever needed help again.
The chains pulled a bit, but there wasn’t much give, and the effort only tired him out. He sagged back, choosing to conserve his energy and meeting Valerie’s inscrutable eyes again.
Danny looked away first. “Nothing,” he said, probably rather unconvincingly. Why was he always such a shit liar when it really mattered?
“Sure,” Valerie said.
Danny mustered up a smirk, trying to fall back on their old banter (well, his old banter; Valerie just used to shoot at him) and looked back her way. “Home videos.”
Valerie didn’t even so much as scoff, or crack a grin. She studied him for a moment longer. “I saw you leaving the Master mansion.”
Danny swallowed. So that was why the first shot had been so weak, why, when he’d approached her slowly without trying to fight, she’d gone for capture rather than kill. She must have known Vlad was out of town (if he was her, he’d certainly be keeping an eye on the old creep). She was curious, wondering what business he could have had there.
Maybe wondering if the file had anything to do with her.
“Fine,” she said, after a tense moment had passed. “If you won’t tell me, I’ll just watch it.”
She stepped away, and, looking around the room, Danny realized she had a whole setup ready, computer on at a desk in the corner.
He strained against the restraints again without thinking, tried to power up a plasma blast in his hand, and got a small shock for his troubles. It wasn't bad, certainly smaller than Vlad would have made it, but it made him think twice about trying that again. Well, there was still the ice, if he needed it; Valerie didn’t know much about that – but did he need it?
The file was meant to contain all the information Vlad had about his little cloning project – about Dani. And Valerie already knew about Dani. Her looking through the data couldn’t be a bad thing, could it? It wasn’t like she was going to take up cloning anytime soon. He slumped back again to watch.
Valerie had looked over at the small shock, but she hadn’t even smirked the way she usually did when she got one up on him. The CD was already in the computer, and he squinted through the dark room to watch as she clicked open the main folder. He was too far away to see the titles, and he hadn’t had the time to look through anything when he’d grabbed it. He was lucky Vlad kept his computer system so organized – and that Tuck’s program had done it’s thing quickly.
“Let me guess, you’re not going to tell me what any of this means, are you?”
As far as Danny could tell, she hadn’t opened any of the files yet. He took a stab in the dark. “It’s the Frui- It’s Masters' naming system,” he shot back.
She rolled her eyes and turned back to the computer. “We’ll start with a video then. Maybe that’ll be self-explanatory.” She clicked one from the middle of the list, and Danny couldn’t tell if she was choosing at random or if it was just the first video file.
It opened in Vlad’s basement lab, empty at the moment, and his stomach roiled. He didn’t want to see the clones being created.
Again, he considered just telling Valerie the truth of what was on the disc, but honestly, he doubted she’d believe him. And if she did, she’d probably still want to go through it anyway.
“Attempt number 1 to obtain Daniel’s mid-morph DNA.” Vlad’s tinny voice came through Valerie’s small speakers as the video started, destroying any hope of Danny remaining calm about this.
Daniel sounds like Danielle, doesn’t it? It had to be close enough to fool Valerie: she was fast forwarding now, clicking randomly at the play bar as they moved through shots of an empty lab. Vlad must have set the camera up before he’d gone to get Danny.
He hadn’t realized there’d be files on here from the time Dani was created, not just the recent lab experiments from last week, but of course there was. Of course Vlad kept everything in one place.
“Look,” Danny said, a little desperate, because there was no way he could lie to Valerie now and convince her the CD wasn’t important, “the files aren’t for me, okay? They’re for Dani. She asked me to, to, y’know, find out what Vlad has on her. She wouldn’t –”
But he cut himself off, because Valerie wasn’t listening. He cut himself off, because Valerie had accidentally jumped straight past his arrival in the lab and the clone entering his trapped, human body. He cut himself off, because Vlad had set up the camera to point straight at the containment chamber he’d been shackled inside.
He cut himself off because the audio cut back in abruptly, and he could hear himself screaming in agony.
Danny flinched, violently, at the sound. He flinched so hard he just naturally transitioned into pulling at his bonds again, the memory of that chamber, the memory of those shackles around his wrists raw in his head. This time, he didn’t stop when the chains snapped taut. This time, he pulled and pulled, put all his considerable ghostly strength into it, and wrenched so hard that if he’d been human, his joints a little more rigid, he probably would have pulled his shoulder right out of the socket.
The pain didn’t matter though; he needed to shake the memory of that chamber, the phantoms aches of the pain that was haunting him. If a different type of pain helped, that was good enough for him. Pulling tight, ice crystals sprung from his right wrist, coating the metal that held him. Danny wrenched his arm again, tried for another plasma blast on top of the crystals, and though a shock coursed through him at the attempt, the bonds holding his right hand snapped off.
By the time that was done with, in the instant and eternity that it took, the screaming had stopped. When Danny looked up, panting hard, shoulders aching, now slumped lopsided in the chains, it was to see that Valerie had paused the video. His screaming visage was still splayed out across the screen.
Actually, it looked like Valerie’s reaction had been violent too, though whether in response to him or the video he couldn’t tell. Her chair had been toppled backward and she was standing in front of the computer, wide-eyed.
“Danny…” she said, whispered, full of dread and horror.
Right. Right. It was his human self, there, screaming, trapped in Vlad’s lab, overshadowed. He’d slept for two days, after that had all ended. The next day had been a school day, but he’d been so exhausted, so out of it, that his parents had even called him in sick.
Danny forced his mind to take a step back, to compartmentalize. It was his human self there, who’d been screaming. Not this him. Not Phantom. He could still fix this. This was still salvageable, right?
Except, he realized further, as Valerie turned to face him with horror still in her eyes, that she’d listened to the beginning of the video, at least. She’d heard Vlad say “mid-morph DNA”. And she might have – Danny wasn’t entirely sure – but she might have reached the part in the video where he’d really been resisting, where the rings had formed around his midsection, the same way they did for Dani, before he’d forced them back down.
It couldn’t be too hard to connect the dots from there. Not with everything she already knew about Dani.
“Danny?” she said again, and it was a question this time.
Danny shook his free wrist, subtly, shaking out the pain of bursting free. How was he supposed to play this? What was he supposed to tell her?
He was too rattled to come up with a proper lie; too shaken to try and throw her off the scent. But he was too rattled to answer either; too shaken to nod or agree. He just wanted out of here.
In front of him, Valerie hardened. She pointed her blaster at him, wavered, and then lowered it again. “Tell me it’s not true.”
She was giving him an out, but too much had been made obvious already. Danny couldn’t take it. And he was too tired – in too much pain – to try.
He hung his head, unable to look his ex-girlfriend in the eye. “Dani…” he said, weakly, “Dani’s… There are three of us. Dani, and Vlad, and…”
“And you.”
He looked up again, offering a weak smile. “And me.”
Well, Pandora’s box had been opened, and Danny couldn’t close it again. There was no way of knowing how things would go from here, between Danny Phantom and the Red Huntress. Or between Danny and Valerie, two teenagers with too much responsibility on their shoulders, and too much pain in their eyes.
He would just, Danny supposed, have to trust her. And he could do that. Even now, even dangling from shackles with a video of his torture paused on the computer screen, Danny could trust Valerie to do the right thing, in a way Sam never could have and Tucker never had.
Even now, trust came easily.
Danny’s smile softened, as he realized that. “Think you can let me down now?”