Chapter Text
If asked later, Valerie will insist that she didn’t mean to give Wes Weston an emotional breakdown on a Monday morning. It’s just that after learning she had died, learning the boy she liked had also died, learning said boy’s alter ego was the same ghost she’d been shooting at for six months straight, and then having to explain everything to her father, well.
You really can’t blame a girl for still being kind of on edge, right?
It’s weird enough that Wes pulls her around the side of the school, out of earshot of just about everyone (even Danny, mostly because he’s currently five city blocks away chasing his hellhound back into the afterlife). It’s weirder that he has this harried look on his face.
Then he opens with “I know about you and Phantom”, and Valerie’s ears threaten to fill with that godawful static ringing again. Tinnitus, her dad called it when she described it to him. It never really fades all the way, but it’s generally manageable, unless her emotional state spikes. Hearing that out of Wes’ mouth is enough that she has to strain to listen to what he says next over the sound.
Well, the sound and the immediate impulse to either knock him over the head and make him a team problem, or to just fucking book it, because how does he know, what does he think he knows, why can’t I catch a fucking break?
Wes goes impossibly pale, and she tries to force a breath into her lungs that she doesn’t need when he steps back. Her dad had told her that her staring could be kind of, uh, intense now, and she didn’t really want to make him think she was going to hurt him.
“Did he, like, convert you into a ghost when he carried you away from the field?”
What? How does he even know that was me?
“Is he controlling you or something?”
What???
“Do you need help?”
What?????
God. Wes sounds really earnest, but all she can think is that this is bad. He talks like he knows they’re both not human and if she gives him any reason to believe he’s in danger it is fucking over. The cool flow of ectoplasm quickens under her skin, and she can feel it pool behind her eyes, desperate to flood them and scare off this possible threat with its glow. She clenches her jaw- the ache in her gums has been worse today, which isn’t helping her think clearly- and tries to sort her panicked thoughts into figuring out a plan.
Well, there’s always one thing she can pull out, even if it makes her kind of want to throw herself off a bridge now that she knows better.
She quirks her eyebrow at him and cocks her hip just so, putting a hand on it like she’s resting it on a holstered gun. She shoves her panic and the grinding metal and magma of her ghost’s voice down as hard as she can and takes a cold, tight tone. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Weston, but if that ghost tried to pull anything on me I’d kick its ass. No, of course I don’t need help with something that isn’t happening anyway.”
He looks like he’s stunned. Maybe she’s laying it on too thick? But she can’t worry about that. She can’t let him know he’s got any of this right, because if she does, and he doesn’t know about Danny, then her rekindled relationship with him will immediately give away his secret, too. She’s already had to deal with her father figuring him out simply by him being a boy she trusts, and Wes is far more unpredictable right now.
He looked like hell even before , but these secrets feel too important to back down now. Even if he just wants to help, even if it’s making both her heart and her ghostly center ache a bit to throw this back in his face this way, he needs to think he’s wrong.
“Wh-” He starts to say, and she- she can’t take the look in his eyes. She has no beef with Wes. Wes is fine, if a little obsessive, and she had zero room to talk about other people being obsessive even before it was a biological need of hers. She turns on her heels and starts power-walking away, trying not to let the ectoplasm’s cold burn in her muscles push her unnaturally fast.
Val chokes on her words, makes it sound kind of like the disaffected scoff that Paulina teaches every member of the A-Listers, and blurts a “Get some sleep, Wes! You look like shit and you’re talking crazy!”
As soon as she’s around the corner she breaks into a frantic run, and she tries not to make herself sick with guilt when Wes shows up ten minutes late for their shared first period class looking like he just found out someone died.
Well. Maybe he did. Val refuses to meet the glances he throws her way and focuses on making it to lunchtime. She needs to talk to Danny, in private, and she needs to do it as soon as possible.
She hasn’t accounted for Wes being the most tenacious living creature in the building, apparently, because on her way to Mr. Lancer’s classroom for second period he tails her doggedly through the halls. He’s just watching, at least, but she kind of hates it. It’s not just the way he stares, although she’s not fond of feeling so examined. It’s that unlike everyone else around him with their cocktail of teenage angst and boredom, Wes’ emotions are pumping the savory-salt of curiosity into the air along with the oily sweetness of fear, and they’re so strong that it’s.
Hm.
It’s making her hungry. She doesn’t like that one bit. She grabs her books from her locker, manages not to shoot Wes the scowl she wants to, and rushes toward the classroom like he doesn’t have the same schedule for the first half of the day. At least Danny and his friends (who are maybe not quite her friends yet, admittedly) will be there. Maybe she can slip him a note to ask how to shut out strong emotions, why they’re making her mouth water- hoping she doesn’t already know the answer to that one- and that they need to talk about Wes at lunch.
She opens the door and slips inside, eyes habitually tracing over the windows, and doesn’t catch a glimpse of the article Mr. Lancer’s reading when she passes his desk on the way to her own. Admittedly, she hasn’t had time to keep up with the news. She and Danny were busy the night before, chasing a money-eating, thieving raccoon-shaped ghost halfway across Amity and into Elmerton before they finally cornered it. It’d been a long night, and she hadn’t done her customary skim of the newspaper for anything of note.
If she had, she’d be concerned about the fucking obituary with her armor as the photo lurking on the next page of the paper. But she heads to her desk with a nod to Danny, unaware for now, and ducks her head to avoid looking at Wes when he comes in only a minute later.
She barely manages to get the note written and into Sam’s hand before Mr. Lancer turns the page, and in time with the bell ringing she and Danny both gasp softly at the bitterness of grief assaulting them seemingly out of nowhere.
Then the bell rings, and with both halfas reeling, Wes staring a hole in their heads, and Sam and Tucker shooting them worried glances, class begins.