#so like yeah apple pie and ice cream baby hope you got a sweet tooth

[raveyardantics]

Cringe

Summary: In The Ultimate Enemy, Valerie blames Danny (Phantom) for the inciting incident, so I thought we’d look at that a bit more. Further Inspired by the song “Cringe” by Matt Maeson too.

Characters: Valerie Gray, Damon Gray, Dark Danny/ ‘Dan’ Phantom

Word Count: 2,400

[...] She said I’m looking like a bad man, smooth criminal

She said my spirit doesn’t move like it did before

She said that I don’t look like me no more, no more

I said I’m just tired, she said you’re just high lying [...]

It was raining again in Amity Park. These last few weeks it had been a near constant -morning, noon, and night- as if god were trying to either wash away any trace of the city or clean a stubborn spot that no one else was noticing. If you asked Valerie Gray, she’d definitely tell you it was the latter, and she could even point out the blemish; the bombed out ruinscape that had once held the dignified title of “The Nasty Burger.” She stood silent in the crumbling wreckage, her face still despite how much she wanted to scream from just being near the place anymore. It had been three months since the accident, since the explosion. Six dead. Twenty-one injured. Hundreds of thousands in property damage. Zero actual answers as to what happened that night.

She should be thankful, really. She was scheduled to work doubles that entire week, but since the fight a few days before the explosion had ruined the side of the building, she had taken the extra free time to study for the C.A.T exams. Her grandpa had always said that book learning would save her life, and unfortunately, he seemed to hit the nail on the head this time. Shame it didn’t do anything for the others, she thought, kicking a piece of rubble into what used to be the dining area. 

She should be thankful…but once again she just found herself angry and sad.

Valerie told herself she wasn’t going to cry when she finally visited the restaurant. It had actually become a sort of local memorial to the fallen. “The Six” they had been called in the papers, a sick joke that served to give an air of celebrity to the victims of the tragic accident. There’d been after school group trips to The Nasty Burger by the students and faculty to put flowers in the wreckage, reporters trying to get a quote from anyone and everyone with the slightest connection to the victims or the establishment (they almost had a field day after Valerie slammed one to the ground for taking pictures of Mrs. Fenton’s sister when she came to take her home, vultures) and even a surprise appearance from Vlad Masters early on, who - in a state of shock - had offered to pay for all of the funerals. She should have felt more at ease seeing her benefactor in all of this come swooping in to play clean up, but he seemed… off. He was visibly rattled, audible mumbling about changing plans and completely losing the composure he’d had the last time they had seen each other. Even in a town already plagued by ghosts, nothing shook people quite like being too close to the dead.

Thunder rumbled and lightning illuminated the sky as Valerie remembered the last thing Mr. Masters had told her months ago; I- they haven’t seen Daniel in days… if you see him… hear from him, please, do let me know? 

He hadn’t looked at Valerie the entire time he spoke to her and honestly, she could understand why. She remembered him and Mr. Fenton discussing football and loudly laughing as they worked hard together after the town had been sucked into the ghost dimension. Zone, she corrected herself, a minor annoyance in the memory, it’s more of a ghost zone, actually. Regardless of what she or anyone else called it,  when they were stranded there the Fentons had stepped up big time, offering their technology and their home to anyone who needed it, including her and her father.

He was currently holding the umbrella for her while she took the scenery in. An ever calming presence in her life, Damon was holding back his own tears, determined not to give the rain running down his face any more company as he provided strength for his daughter. His selflessness reminded her a lot of both Tucker and Jazz, two people she didn’t get to know as well as she probably could have. Valerie remembered the dozen texts Tucker had sent the night he stood her up, apologizing and explaining that he had to go help Danny with something at the last minute. There was just something about him she couldn’t stay mad at, something genuinely charismatic there; someone who was used to playing peacemaker without a second thought because, as he said, he’s a lover not a fighter.

Well, he was.

She kept going like that for a while, thinking of all the good things about the people who were now gone. Romanticizing them a bit, sure, but not enough to dehumanize them. She thought of how often she’d seen Jazz running study groups afterschool, juggling multiple subjects with a smile on her face as she bounced from student to student. She thought about Mrs. Fenton in the lab, throwing her weight around as effortlessly as her husband while they tried to find a solution to the town invasion but still checking in on the kids to ease any building worry. She even thought about Sam and how for all her edge and venom, she was one of the most protective people Valerie had met in her long fifteen years of life.

Reflecting in grief, Valerie pictured the three of them -Danny, Tucker, and Sam- all, laughing at a booth in the Nasty Burger while she worked the counter, eavesdropping and silently wishing she had even been that close to any of her friends when she was still on top of the world. A small part of her took that thought and ran with it, wondering if there would be flowers for her too if she had met a similar fate.

Fortunately/unfortunately, she didn't have too much time to continue her morbid march down memory lane before she noticed the figure standing in the center of the destruction. He hadn’t been there when she looked up before, and given the way he shimmered in the rain, Valerie knew it wasn’t human either. Racing from the protections of her father’s umbrella, she brandished her weapon and prepared to get an answer from a dead man.

—------------------------

Danny heard the rifle charge up before he noticed anything else. A roar like a car wash vacuum cleaner starting came from behind him, the telltale sign of a weapon specifically designed to hurt things like him. 

“Put your hands up.”

It was a command nearly drowned out by the shaking in Valerie’s voice, her confidence buried under rain and rage. The roar grew closer. As did she.

“I said put your fucking hands up!”

Danny obliged her this time, raising his arms and opening his palms to show his hands were empty. She couldn’t see the smile on his face, she thought she was in control here, that she had any kind of upper hand in the current situation. Cute.

“Turn around… I want you to look at me, Phantom.”

This is where his fun began.

—-------------------------------

This is where her nightmare began. 

Rather than turning his body around to face her, Valerie heard a sound like expanding plastic, a hollow mockery of what something inhuman would imagine bones bending and breaking to sound like. Watching in horror, she saw Phantom twist his head completely around, the skin of his neck binding and piling into coils as he locked eyes with her, his hand still raised as per her previous demands. Something was wrong, and she could see that very clearly now. 

Because of their previous encounters, Valerie had gotten a pretty solid mental image of Danny Phantom, and while the thing in front of her checked a few of those boxes, it was undeniably wrong in others. Starting with the eyes, whereas he used to have eyes the color of irradiated emeralds, he was now sporting red pools of malice, windows into a place far too gone to even be called a soul. His face had warped too. Gone were the cute cherubish features she had secretly appreciated, replaced instead by sunken skin with a sickly green hue and faint red veins branching out from his eyes. Taking a step back, she noticed that the rain wasn’t even touching him, not really. Instead it was boiling and steaming as it came into contact with his hair, a roiling platinum mess of fire burning from his scalp. Valerie knew that ghosts could look bad, but this was a new level. This was bad. 

“Wha-” she began, he finger slightly easing off the trigger in pure horror, “what happened.”

Moving his still rotated head from side to side in further disregard for human anatomy, he smiled at her, enlarged fangs visible for the first time in his mouth. Before she could react further, he was in front of her, a smooth motion the force of which broke through the rain and pushed her back into the wall that was her father. Damon’s stationary mass wasn’t enough to stop their momentum though, the combination of the shockwave and the rain slicked ground sending them sliding against one of the Nasty Burger’s few remaining structures. This was definitely new.

Normally when Phantom fought, there was a floatiness to him that was equal parts whimsical… and annoying. This though, he was too grounded, almost as if he were being defiant and grinding his foot into the earth out of a single-minded hatred, determined to mar the surface of reality in any way he could. He was also laughing too much, enjoying her fear and disorientation in a way that Valerie had never seen in him before. Weapon or not, she felt terrified just being near him anymore.

“Well,” he finally said, hands glowing and sizzling as he towered over the two of them, “I’m looking, Valerie, but I can’t say I'm impressed with anything I’m-”

—------------------

Danny stopped mid taunt as the rain around Valerie and Damon began to shimmer against the outlines of a group of people. He’d been having this issue for days now, avoiding reflective surfaces as much as possible. for this exact reason. Recoiling slightly when one of the mist figures reached out to him, he snarled and hissed as they surrounded him. He recognized their faces of course; his mother and father, his sister, his friends… but they weren’t real, they couldn’t be real, he reasoned, growing more angry and unstable as the images flickered around him.

He watched their faces shift between pity and sadness as they stood between him and Valerie, his eyes flickering between red and green faster than a human eye could see. The whispers had started now, he was hearing their voices in the rainfall that gave them form. His mother offering a seat for him amongst the rubble, his sister telling him it wasn’t too late to turn back, his father standing with open arms as if that could make it all go away like he was still some simple child. There was another figure in the rain, too, a hooded figure holding a staff that seemed to stay at the edge of his vision, he seemed more real than the others, something that infuriated Danny even further. He was grabbing his head now in frustration, fingers burning themselves in the hearth of agony as Valerie and her father watched on in horror, feeling as though time was slowing down as he broke into a screaming fit in front of them.

“Killed you all,” he murmured, pushing through the rain specters to step closer to Valerie and Damon, hands crackling with energy  “again and again and again… long as it takes… killed you all.”

—----------------------

Valerie didn’t understand what was going on, but she didn’t care anymore, she’d heard enough.

Killed them all.

She squared herself to take the shot while Phantom was battling whatever demons had finally caught up to him, confident that she could finally give this town and herself some closure. Unfortunately for her, Danny had regained himself enough to deny her that. Waiting for her to take the shot, he opened  a hole in the side of his head she had aimed -moving the flesh and ectoplasm into an undulating portal like he had done so many times before- before shooting the gun out of her hands and lunging at her...In the space between them, a crack like thunder struck between the two of them, and suddenly Danny found himself on the ground, his scrawny frame pinned under the massive paternal presence of Damon Gray wearing a modified version of the Fenton gauntlets.

“Valerie,” he barked, snapping his daughter out of the shock of such a close call, “go!”

Before she could respond in either way, Danny sunk his fingers into the flesh of Damon’s  left arm, a roar of pain echoing the explosion that set all of this off. Glowing red eyes bored into his own the elder Gray felt the ground began to soften and bits of rubble sunk into the concrete. 

“Sorry, Mr. Gray,” Danny sneered, his own body now halfway sunk into the portal he’d just begun to open, “if you wanna teach me a lesson then you’ll need to be a bit more hands. On!”

Sadistically digging in further and eliciting another scream of pain, Danny didn’t notice that Valerie had picked up the gun again. With the sound of a rotting watermelon slamming into the pavement, the two separated in a cloud of dark red mist and luminescent green slime, with Damon falling back out of Danny’s area of effect and Danny holding up his freshly destroyed hands in a pantomime of clapping; laughing with maniacal glee while he finally sunk all the way into his portal with a smile.

Scrambling to reach her father in the downpour, Valerie looked at the mess around her and began to sob, careful not to touch the bleeding stump of his arm as she hugged him until she felt herself stop shaking. Relying on each other for support, the two of them stood and began to make their way to the car, more on edge than ever before and flinching at every noise they couldn’t find a source for. Helping her father into the passenger seat -his arm now freshly tourniqueted with the shirt he was wearing- Valerie took one last look at the Nasty Burger before wiping the remaining tears from her eyes and sliding herself in the driver’s seat.

“I always fucking hated this place.”