Changed Destinies

"A feeling of sadness and longing,
That is not akin to pain,
And resembles sorrow only
As the mist resembles the rain."

-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Day is Done, Stanza 3.

Valerie Gray stood under the awning above the front door to Romano's Italian Eatery. The young woman, her skin barely half a shade lighter than the black leather jacket she clutched to her person, shivered. She shivered both against the fall chill that tried to worm its way past her jacket and the cold sadness that seeped out of her heart. She sighed. You don't have to be out here, you know, she thought to herself. You can just go back to your apartment. She shook her head in irritation. Valerie Ariana Gray has never run from anything in her entire life and she's not going to start now by running away from the stuff I enjoy. She looked through the window at the dark-haired, blue-eyed boy waiting patiently at the same booth near a window they'd eaten at every week for over a year now.

She sighed as she thought of the man who occupied an…interesting place in her thoughts. On the one hand he was very much her best friend and had been for the past year. They owed each other their lives a dozen times over now that they were actually working together as they always should have, instead of fighting each other. On the other, she still regretted how their abortive romance had ended, and her feelings for him in that area were…uncertain at best. Not that she intended to push the issue. Whatever lingering feelings that still existed between them from that era, the fact that he and Sam were in love was obvious, and she was not going to be able to address them anytime soon.

Her stomach rumbled abruptly. And standing here getting increasingly cold isn't putting any food in my belly any faster. She pushed through the glass door into the dimly-lit restaurant.

Her nostrils were immediately assaulted by the smell of freshly-baked focaccia, cooking meat, melted cheese and tomato coming at her from all directions, all of which only served to have her walking down the row of booths lining the window. She came upon Danny sitting in the right-hand seat, gnawing his way through the bread.

"Filling up on bread again, I see?" She said with a smirk. He never could resist freshly baked breads. More to the point though, neither could she so she met Danny's irritated, playful glare with one of her own, grabbed a bit of bread, dipped it in olive oil and sat down.

An hour later Danny was finishing off some chicken with olives while she was eating her way through milk-braised pork when Danny settled back. Despite herself, she found herself saying, "I miss us, what we used to do."

Danny sat forward, a concerned look on his face. "We can build you a new suit you know. It won't be as…advanced as the original, and you can't just make it appear with your mind, but the Red Huntress can fly again if she so chooses."

"I'd like that," she said, a brief smile appearing on her face before disappearing just as quickly. "But I'd be flying solo again and those days are over, and have been for a long time. Besides, you need me to help run this force we're building."

Danny rolled his eyes. "Oh, you mean the force that only exists in our minds. This isn't a TV show, Val, we can't just get together to form some sort of action squad of moody aggressive young people and somehow come on top with zero training formal or otherwise. It's going to have to take the form of at least something vaguely resembling a real-world military or paramilitary organization, or law-enforcement agency, and despite what you see on TV, by its very nature it's going to be ninety percent paperwork and training. I mean we can do it, it's going to be difficult as hell because we're starting from scratch with zero experience and only theoretical knowledge we can glean from books and the experiences of other people, but it can be done."

He leaned forward again. "Doing so requires that we actually decide on some sort of force structure, and whatever else happened topside, that didn't happen. We just…stalled out."

She sighed, remembering the headache that had come around three, and the urge to start punching people in the face that had hit at hour six. The general structure seemed to be to build something from video games, an elite force of ghost hunters that could respond to threats around the world at a moment's notice, possibly from, and this was the wording Tucker had used, "some sort of badass dropship" . Despite appearances…planning hadn't been as easy as it sounded, and eventually they had tabled the issue and everyone had gone home with nothing being really decided.

Maddie though, had looked thoughtful, and when she'd pressed, she'd waved her off, saying she'd discuss it with Jack and get back to them.

"Goddamn the Guys in White," Danny said from across from her. "Goddamn them to hell for forcing us to go through this." He shook his head. "Right before I was knocked out, the last image I had was a woman in GIW armor who kicked Sam in the stomach and tazed her with a smile on her face." His blue eyes darkened in naked fury. "That woman is dog meat if I see her again. Her government agent status won't help her in a dark alley."

Another woman would have quailed at the thought of a man as tall and muscular as him offering physical violence to a woman. They would have assumed that he saw women as beneath him and hit them out of a total lack of respect, and cast worrying glances at Sam to boot. In reality though, probably due to his formidable mother, there wasn't a misogynistic bone in his entire body. He simply didn't believe that people should be treated any different solely because of their reproductive organs, and that extended to fighting. He didn't hit a woman who angered him simply because he didn't go around hitting people in general just because they pissed him off. Finally since he'd never subscribed to the notion that women were "purer" by nature and only engaged in criminal behavior under male influence, taking apart Ember and Kitty with his fists hadn't caused him to lose any sleep.

Pissing him off in general was one thing though. Offering violence to his loved ones however…

Besides, whoever could hit someone after she's down just to get her jollies deserves it. Unfortunately it's not likely we'll encounter her again. Then again though, it's the thought that counts.

She stared at her friend and, with perfect sincerity, said. "We'll smack her around together, Danny."

-------------------------------------------

Valerie sighed she walked, alone down the street back to her apartment, her eyes on the sky above, wishing she was above the rooftops once more. From the looks of it, in this area at least she'd have the skies to herself. Apart from a lone police speeder off in the distance, it was clear.

Come to think of it, I probably wouldn't mind having a suit again for recreational purposes only. I'll probably stick to the ground during most of my fighting now a days. Then she thought of the last time she had a run-in with Skulker. And then again I'll probably eat those words at some point. Though without his powers, Skulker probably won't be too interested in adding Danny's pelt to his collection anytime soon.

"Psst," a voice from the alleyway they were walking across. Valerie stood and stared at the shadowy figure that had the rough figure of an adult female human, "Samantha Manson?"

"Wrong melanin levels in skin, wrong side of town," Valerie said as she folded her arms under her breasts. "I'm Valerie Gray. What do you want?"

She emerged from the shadows to reveal a lanky woman in her mid-twenties, roughly her height, with light brown hair. "Close enough." The woman said, a trace of a Jersey accent on her voice. "My name, Miss Gray, is not important. What's important is that you listen to what I have to tell you."

She cocked her head, her hand going to the sidearm she kept to protect herself from humans, a Desert Eagle. "And that is?" As she sidled closer to the woman in front of her

"I am, or rather I was, an agent of the Ecto-Control Agency, more commonly, and disparagingly, known as the Guys In White. I was assigned to their field office in Albuquerque when you were brought in."

Valerie moved very, very fast. One moment she was standing four feet from her, the next she'd closed the gap between them, knocked her back into the shadows and slammed her back into the wall. Her hand closed in a vice like grip on the older woman's throat.

"You have thirty seconds to convince me you're not luring me into a trap," she said, as she slid her gun out of her holster and thrust it under her chin. "Or I'll just shoot you and take the life in prison."

"You don't have any powers anymore," she said, half gagging due to the hand squeezed around her throat. "Under normal circumstances, we, they would leave you alone, but that's before you were abducted."

She relaxed her grip slightly, but kept the barrel of the gun pressed to her chin, conceding the point, but not the issue. "What I came to tell you is that there's something very wrong inside the ECA, and what happened to you, Mister Fenton, and Miss Fenton is proof of that."

"Yeah," she said darkly. "You're organization exists to begin with."

"There was a time I would have disagreed with you, but now." She shook her head. "What happened to you three was completely irregular, and completely illegal. You should at the very least have been hauled before a judge before what they did to you. Aside from that, an operation of the magnitude of the one that was lost required the approval of both the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security, and neither was informed or aware of an operation that big until after it was already over. It originated entirely from within the ECA without any approval or knowledge of the rest of the government. Have you heard any government spokesmen on the news talking about it either to confirm or deny it?"

"No," she said, as a matter of fact there had been no one from the ECA, Homeland Security or Justice talking about it. The pundits on both sides of the aisle were, perhaps miraculously, united on the issue. Everyone had damn near had heart spasms and were still frothing at the mouth for answers as to why armed and armored ECA agents had raided two towns simultaneously and dragged off three people with absolutely no explanation. Part of that, though certainly not all perhaps was an outgrowth of just how badly the ECA had squandered any goodwill when it had suddenly became a genuine arm of the Federal government and not just a parking orbit where every other law enforcement agency had put its deadbeats with more family connections then competence since the Cold War. This included a fair amount of the "cowboy cops" men and women, who despite their glorification in the media, weren't kept around long in other law enforcement agencies for a reason. Suddenly they found themselves in charge, with a nigh-unlimited budget and advanced weapons. Not a good combination.

"There's a reason for that." She said coldly. "I don't know how precisely deep the rot goes, but you and your friends are still in danger. The fact that you're…encounter in New Mexico happened so soon after you were released from our custody was no accident. We will be in touch Miss Gray."

--------------------------------------------------

Danielle Fenton stared at the form on her desk, illuminated in the harsh tungsten glow of her desk lamp. Tapping her pen on her desk she looked at the words at the very top of the page. State of Hawaii Department of Health, Office of Health Status Monitoring. She swallowed, a revolted shame filling her at what she was about to do: step into a dead woman's shoes, an identity she was going to have to adopt as her own for the rest of her life. The woman who's life she was about to co-opt had been close enough to the same age at her death, six months shy of her eighteenth birthday, and if whatever genealogical information she'd been able to gather was accurate, a very distant niece of Jack. She didn't look much like that other woman. She had jet-black hair and the Danielle Fenton whose car had been sideswiped by a semi in Honolulu, taking her and her entire immediate family with it, had a very mousy shade of brown. Plus, she had been shorter than her by a good three inches, but those details were irrelevant. No state government cross-referenced requests for new birth certificates with death certificates.

And if the states didn't do that normally, the Social Security Administration (represented by the blue-highlighted form off to one side) certainly did not. She could state with near absolute certainty that barring some in-depth criminal investigation, her co-opting that woman's identity would go undetected until the day she died.

Odds are good that I'll never feel clean again until the day I die to. Her bleak musings that a young woman who just happened to share her name just happened to die mere days before the ECA came for her, were interrupted by a loud thumping sound on her door.

"Who is it?"

"Jazz."

"Come in." Her door opened, and she heard the older woman step into her room and the door close behind her.

"I was just about to go get a pizza before everyone starts closing down, want anything?"

She gave a pained sigh as the urge to discuss this situation with someone, anyone, coming upon her. "I'm not sure I can do this, Jasmine."

"Do what?" She said, concern on her voice.

"This," she said, shaking her head even as the tears began to collect behind her eye. "Any of this. By rights I should be three-years-old, and in bed, not a young woman with a body other women would kill for, getting ready to steal the identity of another young woman who died a horrible death along with her entire family, and preparing for a possible war against aliens who's motives we don't have the slightest clue about." She couldn't stop it anymore; the tears began to flow from her eyes. "I mean, I'm not saying I'm not willing and able to do this, and that even at my "official" age I wouldn't be as committed to this as anyone else, but just this once I wish I could be small child."

She heard Jasmine sigh, before seeing the red-head sit down on her bed. "We all feel like that at some point in our lives Danni. When the weight of the world is suddenly dumped on your shoulders, everyone wishes they could crawl back to their toys and let someone else handle the problem."

"Easy for you to say, you actually were a child once. Vlad, and the biologists with the ethics of chainsaws he suborned for this, created me from sperm they stole from Danny while he was unconscious during one of the periods he'd held him captive, and we still don't know where in hell she got her hand on Paulina." She huffed derisively. "And if I was just in vitro I would have been fine, but they grew me from fertilized cell into puberty in a little over ten months. Then they exposed me to the ecto-energies to give me my powers before programming my brain like they were installing a computer's operating system. And I ask you now, what business does a vat-grown freak, who was created for the sole purpose of being a weapon to use against an innocent boy, have even existing, let alone stealing someone else's life."

"I can't imagine what you're feeling right now. Modern humanity has been around for two hundred thousand years, and in all that time you're the first human to have been grown whole cloth rather than born and live to tell about it. I can't imagine what it's like to wish not just that you had a normal childhood, but that you had a childhood at all. I can't help you with that unfortunately. But what I can say is that whatever else you are, you're not a 'vat-grown freak'. You're a wonderful, extremely intelligent, extremely bright young woman. And if the Danielle Fenton who died in Hawaii was any family of ours, she'd want you to… use those documents for a good cause."

"I keep telling myself that," Danielle said. "It's not working though."

"You don't have a choice. You're much more likely to get caught if you try to have an entirely fake birth certificate and SSN created. Once we have these we can 'legally' hire you and we can get on with the business of alien fighting."

Danielle let out a long sigh. You knew she was going to say that, damn it. You just needed to hear her say it, and get those fears off your chest at least. She picked up her pen, clicked it and begin filling out the appropriate information. "Thanks," she said, looking at her with genuine sincerity. "For the talk."

Jazz smiled. "Anytime," and headed for the door.

When she reached the door, Jazz stopped clearly just thinking about something. "Oh, I liked what you said earlier. About how George Washington was only twenty when he was appointed a regimental commander in the Virginia militia."

"It's true. He was a lieutenant colonel at nineteen and a colonel at twenty."

Jazz gave a worried hum. "As I recall he wasn't…particularly good starting out. That business at Fort Necessity comes to mind."

"That…wasn't one of his finer moments," she shuddered. The man forgot you're supposed to fortify high ground, not low ground. But he got better over the course of the French and Indian War."

"He still lost more battles than he won though," Jazz pointed out.

"He won the right battles at the right time," Danielle pointed out. "However, what allowed him to learn how to do that, was his life to date. He'd spent most that life observing and helping to run his family's plantation, and as a county surveyor, so by the time Dimwiddle appointed him a member of the Virginia militia he'd already had quite a few years of leadership experience under his belt. He was able to take his leadership experience and theoretical knowledge, and do what he needed to."

"And you really think we can do the same?"

"I'd stake my life on it," Danielle said, a vicious sort of pride filling her, washing away the self-loathing of the past hour. "I mean think about it. Danny put together a scratch force of people who detested him and with only a few hours of training was able to wipe the floor with Ember and Youngblood and get you and your parents off their ship. Sam commanded the Ops Center without which that plan never would have succeeded. Paulina participated in that action, and from what I can tell was a very effective leader for Casper High's spirit squads throughout her high school career. We have leadership experience, and we have something else he didn't have. Nearly three, nearly four, years of combat experience, any combat experience, below the regimental level. We have a shot in hell of pulling this off. So long as we learn what we need to. The aliens, and our usual enemies, won't know what hit them."

"Well," she said, "we'll certainly give it our all. Now, you wanted pepperoni?"

"Can I come with you?" Danielle said, the thought of that seizing her. "If I'm going to do this, I'm going to do it on a full stomach."

Jazz smiled. "Sure."