Changed Destinies

"There are truths that are not for all men, nor for all times."

-Voltaire.



Danny walked into the observation module on FentonWorks orbital station Hephaistos. The circular room was awash in blue light shining in from the large window that dominated the front of the room. He stared out, briefly transfixed by the view from this module just as he always was. Caught in the blue halo that shone up from the edge of the atmosphere, it seemed they were floating above a vast sea of white clouds. He stared at them, taking in every curve, every bulge, every pattern in the vast sea of white. And out beyond the sea, hanging in the sky with them, was their moon, Luna, far larger than anything he'd ever seen just staring up at it from Earth.

Since I was seven years old I've dreamed of this sight, he thought, resisting the urge. Now, ten years later I see it every other day. He smirked. One day, you're on top of the world, you have a friends whom you love and love you in return, you have a girlfriend you adore, the ghost incursions have become more manageable, and to top it all off you're out here. Taking our first steps into a new frontier. And then it all goes to hell.

"Hey honey," a familiar voice said from behind him. He turned to view Sam standing behind him. Despite his mood, he couldn't help but react to her. Sam had definitely changed in the last year. She had...blossomed. She was no longer the scrawny, somewhat boyish young woman she'd been, and his hormones were disrespectfully aware of that. On another note, Sam was dressed somewhat somberly today, forgoing even the dark purples and reds she favored for a plain black t-shirt and black jeans. Her somber mood had been reflected in the look of dark concern on her face. "I take it we both walked in here for the same reason," she said before she walked over and stood next to him, staring out the window It wasn't a question.

"To lose ourselves in this," Danny answered. "At least for a time." He resumed staring out the window. He tried to focus on the cloud bank, on seeking out the myriad of patterns in that sea of white cloud before he gave up. "Damn it," he blurted out. "One moment you think you've got your life under control, that you at least have a handle on the rules of the game and the minute your back is turned, the rules change. While you're trying to come to grips with that, the rules suddenly change again."

"Tell me about it," Sam said. "It's what I said last night, we are out of our element. We're ghost fighters not alien fighters. I have no doubt we could learn to become alien fighters, but in that wealth of physiological information your mom has just got done imparting to us, we have virtually no practical information we can use. I mean, she's suggested ways to kill them, but we know too little about them to countenance that. What happened to you, and Paulina's suggestion aside, we have no way of knowing what kind of threat we're facing."

Danny nodded sympathetically. "And that is not our only problem. Without my powers, our ability to fight ghosts has taken a serious blow."

"We still have our wits, and our intelligence, and our guns," Sam said confidently, the renewed strength in her voice perking him up. "And it's an enemy we still have experience fighting. We'll do fine." Her eyes widened in surprise, as if something had just occurred to her. Though there will be a bit of a PR problem when people realize that Danny Phantom, the Red Huntress," and Dani with an I no longer show up. Anywhere."

It was Danny's eyes turn to widen. "You're right. And we still have Paulina and Starr to deal with. Should we tell them?"

Sam gave a heavy sigh, closing her eyes as if she didn't want to think about it. He understood why. Paulina had a raging crush on her Danny Phantom side. It didn't take much thought to conclude that if she learned he had been Danny Phantom, his feelings would be transferred whole cloth to him.

"My first impulse is no," Sam said finally. "But, as much as I hate to admit it, if she is truly turning over a new leaf, and is willing to use that formidable brain and charisma she wasted on trying to stroke her own ego for good instead of vicious petty attacks, we need her. And she needs us. Tell her, at least before we go home today." She gave another sigh. "And come what may."

"It'll be fine," Danny said in an attempt to reassure her. "She has matured."

"Let's hope you're right," Sam said.

"I will tell her, but after we've given some thought to how we're going to handle this."

She smirked derisively, "On that note, at least for ghost fighting, we should buck up on our training. We wouldn't want your parents to decide to revoke our payroll now that the Phantom part of us is gone."

She meant the last comment in jest, but the word "Payroll" sparked something in his brain. All at once the answer had come to him. Of course, he thought, a smile breaking from ear to ear on his face. Without thinking he grabbed Sam by the shoulders before pressing a hard kiss against her lips.

Sam froze slightly before leaning back into his kiss. He broke it quickly. "Sam, you are a frigging genius." He pulled her towards the door. "Come on."

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Thirty minutes later Danny was sitting in the conference room , watching as Sam (whom he'd dispatched to gather the others while he got what he needed for this) and the rest of their number filed in, sitting at the cherrywood U-shaped conference room that dominated the setting. They quickly resumed sitting in the seats that they had occupied not an hour earlier when her mother had given her briefing. Fifteen chairs black leather upholstered conference chairs had been arranged around that table. Sam and Tucker sat in two of the three chairs in the base of the U, to the right and left, respectively of his center seat. Of the six seats on either side, Valerie sat to Sam's immediate right, while Tucker sat to Jazz's left. Paulina had resumed her seat on Jazz's right while Starr sat down to the left of Valerie.

They were all sitting there now, staring at him expectantly, and, unexpectedly he felt a shudder. During the manic rush to get all the presentation materials over, it had all made perfect sense to him. Now, their eyes were on him. His friends, his sister, and two young women he hoped one day to count among his friends were staring at him. They could all kill his idea. Kill it with one word: No.

Or knowing Sam, Valerie, and Paulina, "NO!" with a stream of swearing.

He sighed. Time to play for all the marbles. "For starters..."

"We should be under no illusion that the government is going to take...effective action to investigate this," Danny said as Sam leaned back in her chair. "They may investigate this fully, or they may pretend this is only an isolated incident and put the corpse and my mother's reports in a wooden box, nail the lid on, and secret it away in a government warehouse next to the Ark of the Covenant."

Sam couldn't help but chuckle along with everyone else at this reference to Indiana Jones. "I mean seriously, it took them a long time to create the Guys in White. Unfortunately they created an organization that seemingly goes out of its way to be more dangerous to us then to the evil ghosts they're supposed to be focusing their efforts on. Between the Guys in White, the constantly shifting Ghost Zone power blocs, and now the possibility of an alien threat, we've reached the end of all the ghost fighting we can do on our own."

Danny took a deep breath, and leaned back in his chair, as if willing himself to say what he was about to say. "What we have to do," he said finally, with all the firmness of a man who'd just decided on the best of a bad lot of options, "is build that organization ourselves."

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Sam felt her eyes widen as silence reigned in the conference room, and everyone else joined her in looking at Danny as if he'd suddenly grown another head that quoted Shakespeare's sonnets.

This is crazy she wanted to say, then she remembered the boarding action against Youngblood and Ember, and the stunning success of that mission. He'd led close to a hundred people in that mission, nearly a full company, and pulled it off. It had helped, no doubt by the fact among their interests had been wargaming, and as a result of a particularly memorable (and meticulously researched) campaign they'd played not a few months before his accident, had run through a similar scenario before.

Knowing about how to hit a ship in a simulated mission and being able to actually do it are two entirely different things however, and wonder of unspeakable wonders they'd managed to pull that off too. It had been even more amazing because the people under them had had absolutely no experience in that kind of fighting and wouldn't have touched a wargame that wasn't on the Xbox with a ten foot pole. People he'd somehow managed to turn, in the limited amount of time available, into the strike force that had managed to cut through Youngblood's defenses.

They had been reminded of that strike apparently, as the half-formed arguments based on their skills and or age died on their lips.

"Wait a minute," Paulina said, brow furrowed in puzzlement. "Why not just leave all the ghost-hunting to Danny Phantom, the Red Huntress and that half-ghost girl that popped up year or so ago?"

The uncomfortable silence that had settled over the room after Danny's announcement returned. She heard Valerie sigh and looked over to see her lean back into her chair and cross her legs, a haunted look settling over her face.

She sighed, her own emotions roiling. Well, this is all happening sooner than I thought. She struggled to clamp down on the fear, the instinctive unreasoning fear that Paulina's affections would transfer whole cloth to Danny upon her learning the truth, and that Danny would reciprocate. There was going to be no omitting of any reference to their powers this time.

She heard Danny sigh, and the scraping of a chair on the deck plating and she turned to around to view him standing up. "Because Danny Phantom, the Red Huntress, and Dani are gone. They died in New Mexico, at the hands of the Guys in White."

Paulina pitched forward in her chair as though Danny had punched her in the gut. "What?" Then her eyes widened as she caught his full meaning. "No." She whispered hoarsely. "You?"

Danny nodded. "Yes."

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Paulina Ortega leaned back in the conference room chair, releasing a heavy sigh as she struggled to bring her emotions under control. She stared at the empty podium in front of her, pointedly refusing to look at the dark-haired young man with blue eyes next to her. At least for the moment. She seethed, her emotions a volatile boil as she still struggled to process the implications of it.

Danny Fenton, she thought. Daniel James Fenton is, was, Danny Phantom. The enraged beyond measure part of her wanted to tackle him to the ground and wail on him. The other part of her wanted to yell at him for not telling her earlier so she could have a shot at him. Still another part of her was disgusted with the other two parts.

God I'm a mess, she thought, her disgust and shame rising. If you were still acting like that would you tell yourself about me or you or- and she shook her head irritated. She was glad that the rest of them had seen the writing on the wall after Danny's admission and promptly cleared out of the room, otherwise she probably would've hit someone, probably her erstwhile chief rival Sam.

"Are we going to talk or not, Paulina?" She heard Danny say. She looked at him, at the mingled pain, shame, pain, and regret that he wore on his face, and felt her anger ebb. The truth was, he had given her no real reason to be angry. Him not telling her was entirely logical and would've been the exact same thing she would've done in his place.

Then why am I angry? She thought as she looked at him at the realization that his handsome features transmuted easily to Danny Phantom's with a minimum of effort, and how thirty seconds of thinking outside the box would've led her, would've led anyone with a functioning brainstem to that conclusion. There's the truth, I'm angry at myself for being so stupid as to not see the bloody fucking obvious staring me in the face, the dozen or so times it tried to get me to go out with him. And that's another thing...

"Why didn't you tell me?"

Danny jolted, no doubt banishing some internal discussion of his own. "What do you mean?"

"Why didn't you tell me?" She repeated. "It was no secret you had a serious crush on me. You could've had me lock, stock, and barrel as soon as you demonstrated who and what you were."

Danny smirked derisvely before fixing her with a sudden cold stare. "And would it have been real? Or would you have coveted the fact that you had Danny Phantom, and cared only for my looks, the ego boost, and securing a dominant position in those ridiculous power struggles it would've given you."

Paulina flinched in shame.

"That answers my question," Danny said hard. "Look," he said, the suddenly softer tone in his voice causing him to look back at him. "Did I consider telling you in order to get you? Of course I did. I'm not perfect, Paulina, of course I did. Not only would I have gained you, I would've at last secured my position out of the nameless rabble of victims. In other words, for all the wrong reasons." He shook his head. "I wanted you, yes, but I wanted you, not that social barracuda bitch that the high school environment seems to foster."

Paulina stared at him in disbelief. He couldn't have thought about me like that. At fourteen to fifteen? And before she could stop herself she blurted out. "Don't bullshit me Danny, you were a fourteen-year-old boy, you really expect me to believe that you wanted more out of a relationship with me than my body. I was...quite developed even then, and then as now, all I have to do was wear the appropriate clothing and every male at that school who wasn't a full time teacher would've been lining up to try to get in my pants."

Danny glared at her again. "I was never that shallow," he said, that hard coldness on his voice again. "It's a myth that young people are incapable of genuine feelings of that nature. All too many people internalize that belief that we only care about screwing in the backseat of the car, but it's just that, a myth. Yes, I genuinely had feelings for you. And do you want to know why?"

Paulina scoffed, and said, sarcasm dripping from her voice. "I would love to hear this."

Danny sighed. "It's because you have all the traits I look for in a woman. You're smart, strong, independent, willing to fight for what she wants. It's what's always attracted me in a woman." He smirked as he apparently realized what he was saying. "Granted, I think I'm just proving the old saw about children looking for elements of the opposite-gender parent in their potential mates, but be that as it may, it's the truth. If you had been one of the simpering shrieking violets who only cared about their looks and had all the personality of a shoelace I wouldn't have looked at you twice. It's why I am in many ways still attracted to you and Valerie, it's part of the reason I love Sam, and it's why I didn't tell you. I mean aside from my secret being as safe with you as a crawdad living in a gumbo shack at the time."

Paulina stood there, stunned into silence. Not at the admission that Danny was still attracted to her. That was human nature: men and women didn't cease sizing up potential mates just because they were in a relationhip, no one's sexuality was focused solely around their current romantic partner. It was that he had genuinely wanted more from her even then that had stunned her to the core, that and a sudden surge of irritation that Sam was sitting on someone who suddenly looked appealing to her.

Oh, no, Paulina snapped to herself. You are not making a play for a man who's in a relationship already. Not again. Unless they decide to adopt an open relationship format, and the odds of Sam signing off on that are about as big as this station being taken down with a pellet gun. No, best put that out of my mind now. She sighed, shamed by her outburst towards Danny.

"I'm sorry, Danny. I had no idea."

Danny nodded, a wan smile appearing on his face. "It's okay."

Paulina sighed and leaned back in her chair again. "And for that matter, I do understand why you couldn't tell me." She smiled despite herself. "And thank you. For trusting me enough to tell me now."

The smile on Danny's face warmed at her words.

Paulina sat back in her chair. "Now I believe we have some sort of armed force to build."