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“It’s beautiful,” she says despite herself.
“Not to say ‘ I told you so’ , but,” Danny replies, doing an odd little twist as he swims around to face her, white hair tinted green by the sea of ectoplasm around them. “Welcome to Kêr-Is, Valerie.”
It stretches out for as far as she can see, a city built of impossibilities in the northeastern most edge of a ghostly sea that Valerie had no hope of pronouncing and that Danny didn’t know how to spell. She wasn’t sure how he’d found it, but he had, and after longer than either of them would admit, she’d agreed to go with him.
And so there they were, Valerie in her suit and Danny somehow breathing through a dense sort of ectoplasm that would send the Fenton parents into scientific hysterics. Ahead of them was the palace of Gralon done in what looked like marble, cedar, gold, rich colors marbled and tinted in thick, vibrant green. Bubbles of lighter ectoplasm rose up through the city, ghost lights caught up and singing up through the shafts.
As they sink down in a pattern that Valerie cannot parse out, the streets begin to clear up into something uncomfortably human in mundanity, market stalls and hurrying ghosts alike, children darting between legs and ghost cats, blinking in and out of existence. Danny snags her hand and drags her forward with a laugh, eyes bright even here.
“Come on,” he says, soft and glitter-brilliant. “There’s a band that plays near Gwénnolé Square most days. It’s the weirdest mix of like, 20s jazz and ancient Britannic and Celtic Women.”
“That doesn’t sound appealing,” she admits but lets him tug her along anyway. “How does that even fit together?”
“I don’t know but it kind of works,” he says, the two of them weaving through the crowd. “Makes you wanna dance.”
“Underwater,” she says, dry but lips twitching up because of course they do.
“Underwater,” he confirms, squeezing her hand through both their respective suits as he hops up into the second level of the street where the crowd is less thick. Gravity means little to ghosts, after all.
“This is so weird,” she says with a breath out. “So weird, Danny, you have no idea.”
“Bad weird?” he asks, glancing back at her. “We can head back if you aren’t comfortable.”
She isn’t comfortable, not really, but she doesn’t think it is a bad kind of discomfort. It isn’t going hungry because SNAP wasn’t approved in time and her dad lost her job and Valerie is only two weeks into a job she isn’t prepared for. It isn’t a burn from a shit fight, broken ribs pressing out against her skin. It isn’t her father pressing, pressing, pressing because Valerie has changed, is angrier, short-tempered, exhausted. It isn’t a teacher asking her if everything is alright at home, isn’t a teacher giving her pamphlets on domestic abuse, isn’t her grades dropping as she tries to figure out how to balance school and work and more work, night patrols and bandages and her dad’s increasingly worried badgering.
She isn’t comfortable, but it is the kind of discomfort that comes with a growth spurt, that comes with standing on the edge of I can’t do this and I can try. She isn’t comfortable but Valerie is three weeks from eighteen and she thinks that maybe it is time to see what the Ghost Zone has to offer outside of fighting and Danny.
“Valerie?” he asks again and she snaps her attention back to him.
“Yeah,” she says, soft. “I mean, yeah, I’m okay. It’s different but it isn’t a bad difference. I want to try.”
He watches her for a long moment, hair floating eerily in the thick ectoplasmic sea. “If you’re sure,” he says, squeezing her hand again.
“I’m sure,” she says, soft, warm. “I’m sure, Danny. Let’s see Kêr-Is.”
He lights up, glowing from within, almost, as he tugs her along with a bright laugh. “Under the sea,” he says, sing-song, and they both dive under an oblivious ghost dragging what looks like the weirdest fucking horse Valerie has ever seen in her life by what almost looks like seaweed ropes.
“Danny what the fuck,” is what she says instead of anything else, like ‘what is that’ or ‘why is that a thing’.
“Kelpie,” he says as if that helps anything.
“I don’t understand this place,” she says in return as the sound of music grows from a faint whisper, as they near the plaza in question.
“Welcome to the ghost zone,” Danny laughs, smiling wide, and she can’t help but smile back just as bright, just as vivid.
“Welcome to the ghost zone,” she echoes, laughing despite herself as they twirl down in a stream of bubbles and join the fray.