Hey! This is my Holiday Truce fic for @spookberry on Tumblr! Just realized I never posted it here. Hope you guys like it!
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She was so close! She just had to go a little faster! Almost there, almost there... Dang it!
The giant glowing green dog managed to evade the Red Huntress once again by diving through the wall of an alley intangibly. Red's new suit may have been advanced, but it wasn't advanced enough to phase through things.
The Red Huntress immediately pulled up her ghost tracker and followed after the dog. It was staying in buildings for the most part, only leaving long enough to dive out and into the next building, but it would stop eventually, or hit a gap big enough for her to get to it, and it would finally be over. She catch the big stupid dog who ruined her life once and for all, and she didn't plan on just letting it go in the Ghost Zone as she knew Phantom did.
She saw the dot on her tracker begin to slow down and started to enter the next gap between buildings in preparation for the dog to likely stop in that alley thinking it lost her. It never showed up, however, and she decided to check her tracker again.
Turns out the ghost had actually stopped inside the building and was moving around inside it. She watched as the dot darted around in what almost seemed to be a frantic or excited way before finally halting. It seemed she would have to go inside the building to catch it, and she hoped it wasn't a home she was about to have to invade.
She got to the front of the building and almost face-palmed at the irony. Of course it was a pet shop. She could just imagine the stupid look on the Phantom's face as it made an annoying pun. She just knew it couldn't resist making a joke about something like this.
Red decided to start looking around for an entrance to the building as it was after closing hours and already pretty dark outside. The streets of Amity Park were practically deserted at this point and she was glad she didn't have an audience. After checking the front doors to make sure they weren't unlocked, though she knew they wouldn't be, she circled around the building checking every window and door she came across. As she finished her circle and rounded the corner back to the front, she resigned herself to having to break into the store.
She went around the back where she had seen a door that she knew wasn't visible from the streets and checked for cameras. She wasn't gonna get caught for breaking and entering if she could help it, and she didn't want people to know that her hunter persona was technically about to be a criminal. Seeing no camera, she quickly shot her quietest gun at the lock on the door and entered the building when the lock broke off and fell to the ground.
She noticed quickly that she had entered a back store room and searched for the giant glowing green ghost, but she knew if she hadn't seen it yet she probably wouldn't. It was so big and bright there was no way she wouldn't have seen it already in this dark room, so she headed for a door she assumed led out to the shopping area and looked through the window to see if she could get a look at it before her element of surprise wore off.
All she could see from behind the door was a slight green glow that came from the left, as well as a bunch of dog, cat, and various other animal toys scattered around the room. The shelves actually looked like they'd been crashed into, which wouldn't surprise her considering her own personal history with the ghost and how often it managed to crash into stuff.
She quietly eased through the door, walking low as she got closer to the end of the aisle the door opened out into. She peeked around the corner to see the ghost and...
Wait...
What?
The glow from around the corner was not coming from a giant green dog but instead from a small green puppy. She's sure the dog she saw earlier did not look like the one in front of her now. This one was not causing a ruckus and just generally ruining lives and was instead innocently chewing on a toy it must've found on a shelf.
Valerie went to step closer but accidentally kicked a ball near her feet and it went rolling in front of the green puppy. The moment it entered the ghost's line of vision it immediately jumped up and turned around to face her, snarling when it saw her standing a few feet.
And then it grew.
Now standing in front of her was the giant dog she was used to seeing running around carelessly. She immediately went to raise her gun against the ghost but stopped when it growled louder and looked ready to pounce at her next move. She lowered the gun and it seemed to relax a little, though was still wary of her.
It was jarring to see it like this, like it was actually scared of her instead of trying to destroy whatever was around it. She decided to see if she could get it to calm back down completely and turn back into the puppy.
She started by putting away the gun in her hand, slowly so as not to startle it. It relaxed a lot more now that she wasn't being actively hostile, but still not enough for him to revert back to its smaller form. She had an idea to relax him even more, but was hesitant to actually try it. It would leave her much more vulnerable to attack should it choose to take advantage of the opportunity. Her intuition, however, told her that her idea would work and that it was at least worth a try. She let her suit fade away and sink back into her skin, and watched the ghost for its reaction.
It tilted its head at seeing her without her suit and the rest of its wariness seemed to fade away at its curiosity. It shrunk to the size of the puppy she saw before and slowly got closer to her, sniffing the ground by her feet before deciding she was no longer a threat and going back to its chew toy.
It seemed the shift seemed to be triggered by negative emotions then, and otherwise, it stayed in its puppy form. Which brought on a lot of questions she didn't know the answers to. She had read all of the Fenton's research, and it said that ghosts had no ability to feel emotions at all. But then what could've triggered the ghost's transformation? She couldn't find another explanation for what she had seen, and as she realized this her whole worldview tilted off its axis.
If the Fentons were wrong about this fact that she noticed after observing a ghost dog for only a few minutes, what else could they be wrong about? They always said ghosts couldn't feel emotions or pain, that they couldn't even think for themselves, but what if they were wrong about all of it? And if they were wrong about everything, did that mean she had been hunting, hurting, sentient creatures?
Valerie started having trouble breathing, getting dizzy and stumbling over her own feet. The puppy turned around and started looking agitated again, not knowing why she was acting erratically and wondering whether or not she was a threat after all. She needed to calm down before she caused him to grow into his bigger form again and became the threat she had always thought he was, and she had an idea that she thought might calm both of them down.
She kneeled down and beckoned him over to her, and he started to approach her cautiously, but ultimately decided she could be trusted and trotted over to her arms. She started petting him and stroking her, which was surprisingly soft considering he was a ghost, but it helped to calm the both of them down.
She felt something rougher against her hand and remembered that she had seen a collar on him before. She glanced at the tag and snorted suddenly when she saw the name on it, convinced Phantom must've named the dog himself with how punny the name was.
"Well Cujo, it's nice to finally meet you."
