AN: Apologies to everyone waiting for updates to my longer fics. I am trying to complete them, but at the moment most of my focus is on an original novel. This is just a drabbly one-shot that came to me mid-shift last night and morphed into delicious irony when I tried to write it down. I may subject you to more Danny Phantom stuff eventually, but I'll try to finish at least The Saviour first.

And now, without further ado, the story.

Valerie Grey hates working at the Nasty Burger. She hates it so much, in fact, that if you asked her to give you one reason why she hates it so much, you'd better have a free hour or two to listen to her diatribe. She hates the frumpy, unflattering, unfashionable uniform, she hates the constant smell of grease, she hates most of her co-workers, she hates the drop in social status she's taken since she started working here (not that she had all that far to fall, not after what that ghost-boy did to her family, and she still hasn't forgiven him for that, thank you for asking, yes, she is going to get her revenge one of these days, but she was telling you why she hates working at the Nasty Burger and if you don't mind, she'd like to finish), and she hates the minimum-wage pay. But more than any of this, what Valerie really hates is the customers.

It's the mothers with the screaming babies who try to bribe the kids into silence with sugary treats and promises of ponies. It's the toddlers who do unspeakable things on the floor (which, of course, you know who has to clean it up, and even though there's policies about this sort of thing, somehow Valerie still winds up scrubbing up vomit and worse without gloves or anything). It's the customers who shout their entire order in one breath and then give her the evil eye when she hasn't got it all down yet. It's the people who ask the stupidest questions (how meaty is a Mighty Meaty Melt? How meaty do you think it is?) and don't actually listen to the answers. It's the snotty professionals who talk to her like, just because she's under twenty-five and employed in fast food, she must be mentally inferior. But most of all, it's the people her age, who are just there to have a burger and goof off while Valerie has to work.

It's probably common to every employee of every fast food place everywhere. Force someone to cater to the every whim of entitled, self-absorbed, ungrateful, occasionally well-meaning, but always incredibly annoying people all day, pretty well every day, and that person is bound to start resenting the people who pay their wages. On an almost daily basis, Valerie wants to just accidentally leave a pot of Nasty Sauce on the grill and then push off to sweep the parking lot (another dirty, tiring, unnecessary and pointless and redundant chore that, of course, inevitably falls to her) and only come back to see if the explosion left any interesting carnage.

Or she wishes that some malevolent, powerful ghost (maybe with that ghost-boy hot on its tail; much as she'd like to deny it, Valerie has to admit she hasn't ever actually seen him purposely causing serious and unprovoked damage to anyone or anything since Axion Labs, but he seems to turn up wherever other ghosts do. Usually fighting them. He must have a lot of enemies in the ghost world, and Valerie wonders, sometimes, what he did to them to get them all so ticked off) would come tearing through the restaurant and force her to battle it, unfortunately demolishing the Nasty Burger in the process. Of course, they're nothing but daydreams, but sometimes, when some rich old bat in a fur coat (really? Who comes to eat in the Nasty Burger in a fur coat?) is haranguing Valerie over the counter about why her order isn't ready the moment she ordered it, they seem very, very appealing.

It's just frustrating, having to bow and scrape and smile and not tell the man who's currently shouting at her about there being tomatoes on his burger that he didn't order it without tomatoes, how the hell was Valerie supposed to know that he was allergic to tomatoes, he didn't even ask if there were tomatoes on the burger, and knowing that she'll have to do it again, and again, and keep smiling and apologizing to the people who are making her job a nightmare. And she has to keep them happy, and oblivious to that simple little fact. And she's going to have to come back tomorrow and do it all again. By the end of her shift, her smile is more like a death's-head grimace and she thinks her teeth are stuck together.

She punches out with a sigh of relief, ready to trudge home and attempt to purge the echoes of angry shouts and stupid questions and the constant monotone beeps of the tills from her mind for long enough to do her homework. Her grades have been slipping lately, but whose fault do you think that is, now that she's trying to keep her father and herself afloat and protect the town from ghosts, especially the one that everyone's half-convinced is a hero. Valerie hasn't forgotten, though sometimes she seems to be the only one, what he did to the mayor, what he did to her life, what he could do to a town that blindly places its trust in him. The thought sends chills down her back.

She only glances jealously at Danny, Sam, and Tucker, sitting in one of the booths and chatting like they haven't got a care in the world, for a moment. Sure, she wishes her life were like that. No ghost hunting, no slipping grades, no crappy apartment that they're still struggling to pay the rent on, no stupid Nasty Burger job, just time to hang out with her friends and worry about her schoolwork and social status and whether a boy likes her. Like a normal kid.

Maybe that's what she likes so much about Danny. Despite having the weirdest family a kid could possibly get stuck with, he's just so normal. And being around him makes her feel like, just for a little while, she can escape all the weirdness and difficulty that seem to constantly snap at her heels.

Valerie shakes her head as she pushes open one of the doors and steps out into the sunlight. She only has a moment to enjoy the beautiful day, though, before screams shatter the peace and quiet.

Valerie sighs to herself, checks to see that no one's watching, and dives into the nearest alley, summoning her suit from…wherever it goes when she doesn't need it, before speeding off towards the sounds of screams and wicked laughter in the distance. Yeah, she'd like to be normal. But, as she herself would say, never gonna happen.

Besides, somebody has to protect Amity Park. It might as well be her.