"Do you really think this'll work?" Danny asked, raising a skeptical eyebrow at his friends.

"Dude, chill!" Tucker tried to calm him down.

"Yeah. Just relax, Danny. This will work." Sam said confidently. The three best friends were currently a couple blocks away from the Nasty Burger, hiding in an alleyway. Danny was currently Phantom, hovering nervously just a couple inches off the ground. He was not wearing his normal hazmat suit, however; instead wearing some jeans and old boots of his, a worn baggy black hoodie of Sam's and one of Tucker's old hats, black as well. It was pulled down low over his face, and the hood was up covering the back of his hair and head.

"You just have to stay on the ground." Tucker pushed on his shoulders until Danny was standing on the ground again.

"You know how hard that is for me!" He gulped, hands covering his mouth. "And my voice. I can't control the echo."

"It's not like your going to have to talk to anyone except Valerie. And then it'll be too quiet for anyone else to hear." Sam rolled her eyes at him before handing him a ghost detector. Tucker had ingeniously combined one of his parents standard ghost detectors (it looked to be modeled after an old Geiger counter) with the Phantom D-Tector (his Mom thought he didn't know about it. He found the blueprints for it several days ago when they were in the lab together). Tucker had managed to flip the coding, so to speak. It now detected any ghost but him. And it worked for either form. Valerie would never be able to track him down with it. Tucker had encrypted the machine so that she couldn't undo the lock out on Phantom's ecto-signature either.

"Yeah. Just go in there and give her this and tell her you'll be on vacation tomorrow. This'll be a piece of cake for you!" Tucker's confidence made Danny smile, just a little.

"And you can always vanish if she does try to get violent." Sam added with a shrug. Danny took a deep breath, trying to steady himself.

"If I get shot, I'm blaming you two." Danny glared at the other two teens, who just smiled back at him.

"We'll be waiting for you at the corner over there." And with that, they ran off, leaving Phantom alone.

"You got this, Phantom." He tried to psych himself up as he slipped the equipment into his hoodie pocket. "Just don't float." Danny, just due to his mostly ectoplasmic nature, naturally floated whenever he was Phantom. Stepping out of the alleyway onto the sidewalk, Danny nervously set off towards the burger joint. With a mantra of 'Don't float' on repeat in his mind, he kept his head down, trying to keep people from noticing his bright green eyes. Hopefully no one would.

He made it to the building without incident, which he was grateful for. Now, how to approach Valerie? He looked cautiously into a window and saw her sitting in a back booth, tray on the table in front of her. So she was on lunch. This could work.

Danny walked inside, head still down. He bypassed the counter and decided to be bold. He slid into the seat across from Valerie, and put both his hands on the edge of the table. Valerie didn't even bother to look up.

"I'm on lunch. Not interested." She shut him down quickly. Valerie was used to it. Older boys hitting on her, or classmates coming to make fun of her.

"Oh that's good. I'm not either." She paused, french fry halfway to her mouth. She knew that voice, didn't she? "I just wanted to chat, Red." And that's when it hit her. She slowly raised her eyes to the boy across from her and locked onto a pair of ectoplasmic green eyes, partially hidden behind snow white hair and the brim of a black hat.

"Phantom." She hissed out venomously. Luckily, she knew to keep her voice down.

"I'm not here to fight." He held both his hands up at shoulder height. Valerie noticed he was wearing one black finger-less glove on his left hand. "I swear, Val. And you know I don't go back on my word." Phantom watched as she visibly relaxed, just a hair.

"What do you want?" She spat at him before she poked the momentarily forgotten fry in her mouth. "I got ten minutes before I have to be back on shift." Phantom smiled just a little.

"I won't take that long. I came to tell you I'm taking the day off tomorrow. No ghost fighting for me. I'll be out of town." He lied. He hated lying to Valerie, but he couldn't very well tell her the truth.

"And what's it to me?" He let one hand drop to his hoodie pocket where he pulled the ghost detector out slowly and set it on the table. Valerie eyed it suspiciously.

"I know your off work tomorrow here, so I wanted to give you something to make your other job a little easier." She raised an eyebrow at him but didn't interrupt. "It's a ghost detector. One of the newest builds from FentonWorks."

"Did you steal this?" Phantom looked offended.

"No, I didn't steal it." He looked pensive for a moment. "Someone chucked it into the Portal. I found it in the Ghost Zone about a week ago. I couldn't risk getting caught with it on me over there, so I figured you could use it. I don't need a ghost detector, I have one built in." He smiled cheekily at her.

"Who would catch you with something like this? Why worry over it."

"Walker. I don't want to go to prison for two-hundred years for having a Material World item on me." Valerie looked confused but didn't ask any more questions on that. She picked up the equipment and stashed it in her purse quickly.

"Fine. I'll take your word on this, Phantom. But if that thing blows up in my face I will hunt you down, no matter where you are on vacation." Phantom smiled at her.

"Thanks, Val. I owe you one." He went to stand up.

"What's with the glove?" She shot before he could get out of the booth. His eyes dropped down to his left hand before he sighed and sat back down completely.

"I don't like talking about it, but maybe if I show you, you'll understand me a bit better." Danny should have known better than to wear just the one glove. But he couldn't find the other one, and he definitely did not want to walk around without it covered up. He pulled the glove off easily, hand clenching automatically to hide. He glanced up at Valerie, who had all her attention on the appendage. "You realize what makes a ghost, right? That I died?" She flinched at that. It had taken Danny himself a long time to come to terms with the fact he did die in that accident, even if just for a moment. He opened his hand and splayed out his fingers before turning his palm over towards Valerie. She gasped.

It was a scar unlike any she had ever personally seen, but she knew what it was immediately. A Lichtenberg scar, from lightning or some other dangerous amount of electricity. There was an epicenter in the middle of his palm, then the scars branched out over the rest of his palm and fingertips. They ran down the heel of his hand and, presumably, down the rest of his arm. They glowed slightly green against Phantom's dark tan skin. Valerie glanced up to Phantom's face, where he was staring back at her intensely.

"Lightning scars." He cocked a grin.

"Not quite, but close enough. It was an accident." Phantom slipped the glove back on and stood quickly.

"Do you remember it?" She asked quietly. Honestly, she didn't know why she did. She didn't expect him to answer.

"It hurt, more than I can describe. I wouldn't wish that kind of pain on anyone, not even my worst enemies." She could see the haunted look in his eyes as he spoke, for just a moment. He then grinned at her, hiding behind the superhero bravado she had come to expect from him. "See ya later, Val." He vanished before Valerie could say anything else. She just sat there, in stunned silence. She had seen through a chink in his armor, and she found someone not too different from herself staring back.

"Hey Val!" A voice called from behind the counter.

"Frick." Valerie stood in a rush, dumping her tray as she made her way back behind the counter, trying not to be late to clock back in.

"Think he's alright?" Tucker asked quietly as he stared down at his PDA. Sam was leaning against a fence, eyes pointedly not looking towards the Nasty Burger.

"Well, I haven't heard any shouts or weapons fired yet." She said with a shrug.

"Valerie wouldn't risk her her secret. Not with the way her Dad came down on her last time."

"I still don't see why Danny doesn't out her again." Sam mumbled under her breath. "It'd make his life a lot easier with one less competent hunter around."

"Yeah, but his parents are gonna know everything tomorrow. You don't think that'll help?"

"I don't trust them. I can't trust them, Tuck. Not after everything they've put him through." Tucker stared at her but then shrugged.

"Whatever. It's up to Danny, now, what happens next." There was silence between the two as they waited on their friend.

"That went better than I thought it would."

"Ah!"

"Stop doing that!" Both Sam and Tucker jumped as Danny appeared between the two, as Fenton. He shrugged out of the hoodie and handed it to Sam, revealing one of his NASA shirts underneath.

"Sorry." He had the decency to at least look sheepish as the trio took off walking together. "But I think she'll do okay tomorrow." He pulled the glove off and pocketed it, flexing his now unblemished hand a couple times.

"At least you didn't get shot." Tucker supplied helpfully. Danny rolled his eyes.

"Are you sure you don't want us there tomorrow?" Sam asked hesitantly. Danny sighed just a little.

"I think it'd be easier with you there, but there's no way I could talk Dad into letting you come." He shrugged. "Jazz will be there, at least, so it's not like I'll be completely alone with them. They shouldn't have any weapons on them, at least."

"When has that stopped your Dad before?" Danny shrugged again.

"He usually takes the Fenton Family Picnic pretty seriously. Besides, I can get away easily if it does go wrong and come hang out at one of your houses till everything calms down." Sam frowned deeply at the boy.

"I'm really worried, Danny." He barked out a small laugh.

"Me too, Sam, but I can't let that stop me this time." He looked down at his left hand and clenched his fist. "I need this."

Thanks to Potkanka on AO3 for giving me the idea to expand upon this! It was honestly a throw away line from The Annual Fenton Family Picnic, but when they mentioned it in the comments this idea came to me! I hope you enjoyed and thanks for reading! Up next in the series will be dealing with the emotional fallout of Danny's reveal to his parents!