Author's note: You will not touch him. Don't touch my boy. He's what I live for. He's my only joy. I'm warning you: for him, I'll kill. I have no other choice. What I must do, I will. - Miss Saigon
The End of Danny
.:·:.:·:.:·
I've started so many letters to you but threw them all away. I had no words for a long time. For a long time, I could not believe it. Even as I watched him being lowered into the ground, I could not believe it. I had not seen his body, after all. I had purposefully avoided photos from the scene and his autopsy, even avoided the days in court when I knew they'd be showing such photos. I have no idea what exactly you did to him, but Tucker and Jazz strongly urged me to not look at the photos, both of them expressing regret that they had. To this day, my lasting image of him is whole.
I wish I could've been there for him. I wish I hadn't lost contact with him so that I could've protected him from you. I had always known that you had a sick fixation with him. I saw the jealous way you would look at me when he and I were together at your house. And how you kept insisting on him going back to visit you while we were in college was really quite insufferable. But I'll bet he never told you, did he? How so many of our fights were about him not being able to say 'no' to you?
He was afraid of you. Did you know that? Before you found him out, he was afraid of what you'd do to him if you caught him. And after you found him out, his fear only seemed to increase. He spoke highly of you, but he could never convince himself that you weren't waiting for an opportunity to strike. He didn't want to make you angry, kept appeasing your many seemingly insatiable requests for him to return home so as not to upset you. I kept trying to tell him he was being paranoid. I should've taken his concern seriously.
Where am I going with this? I don't even know. I just need to say something to you. I can't stay silent. I want you to know what I think of you.
This letter from Sam goes on and on. I know that she is married, but she signed it with the surname "Manson." Whether she decided to keep her last name or she just wanted to be sure I knew it was her, I do not know. The letter came to me a while ago; I don't remember when exactly. I am not surprised she wrote me, though. Always the outspoken one. Always one to voice her opinions and challenge whatever she deemed to be injustice. Accusations and outrage and questions. Why, why, why had I done this? How, how, how could I?
I didn't reply to her. What would I say if I did?
Dear Sam, do you have any idea what you did to him? That the beginning of his end started with you breaking his heart?
And don't think I've forgotten that you're the one who pushed him to investigate our portal. I will never forgive you for that.
...
I kept the trip I took with Vlad to see Clockwork secret from Danny for years. I didn't want to bring it up to him, not when his mood had lifted so considerably. Not only did he no longer have to hide from me, but he had been feeling so good that he finally asked Sam out on a date. As expected, the two of them hit it off very well. They had had feelings for each other for some time, so their relationship progressed quickly and happily.
Sam was suddenly at our house far more often. Seeing her lounging with Danny on our sofa or sitting on his lap as they surfed the Internet together became a normal image. Sam's parents did not think much of Danny, so the two love-struck teens apparently felt more comfortable at our house.
I smiled. I was cheerful. I told her she was welcome anytime and that I was so happy that Danny had finally gotten out of his own way and asked her out because he had been crushing on her for so long.
But between you and me?
Seeing her on top of Danny, possessing his face and neck and seeing him seize her in kind was never a pleasant sight for me. I now knew that she was the one who encouraged Danny to enter our ghost portal and give himself a life-changing shock. Did she have any idea how irresponsible that was, how dangerous? It seemed she didn't even care, that she was so taken with his ghostly uniqueness that she never stopped to think about the ramifications of it, had no idea of the resultant darkness he had to battle and try to outrun everyday, the waiting arms of fate that were reaching for him as he unknowingly ran toward them.
Simply put, for one, my perception of Sam had changed.
And for two—
Dare I admit this to you?
Yes, I must. I promised I would be candid.
She was stealing Danny away from me. We had started repairing our relationship, but he was already becoming distant again. Not in the way he was before when he didn't trust me, but in the way that meant he had found someone to make up the entirety of his world.
Dreaming, sighing, humming. I could always tell when he was thinking about her. He would constantly look at his cell phone, hoping for a call or text from her. He was in love, madly and deeply.
Jack couldn't be happier. Sam was pretty and intelligent and resourceful. His perception of her hadn't changed at all.
Honestly, I was also happy for Danny. I do not want you to think that I was plagued by jealousy. He seemed over the moon and finally out of the fog that had surrounded him for so long. His grades were improving, his smiles were far more frequent. He was definitely in a better place than before and appeared much healthier.
I think my greatest concern was that I now knew the fierce veracity of Danny's ghostly obsession with stopping his emotional pain.
—or that's what I've told myself—
Love goes hand in hand with hurt. Love is wonderful and magnificent and uplifting and miraculous, but it comes at a price. Anyone who has been in love can attest to this. There is no one in this world who would deny the hardships that come with loving someone, the toils that must be endured in order to keep love strong. But we all know that love is worth it. Love is so glorious that we are more than willing to take the ache that comes with it.
And because there is no greater joy than love, there is certainly no pain worse than the loss of love. Death, separation, betrayal, doesn't matter how it happens. A severance of love shatters us in the most permanent ways possible. We are never the same again even if we somehow manage to glue ourselves back together. Perhaps pieces of us are forever missing, or the pieces do not align perfectly, or the new bonds between the pieces are weaker than before.
Danny was now in a serious relationship and so in love, but would his ghostly obsession allow him to undertake the pain that would undoubtedly come with it?
And what if he ended up losing this love and had to face the most tremendous pain there is in this world?
I didn't want to think about that. I hoped and prayed that he would not be too hurt or that he could overcome the compulsions of his obsession if he was.
You must already know how in vain my hopes and prayers were.
...
He whispered, "Where are you?"
I was right there. Who was he talking to?
...
Danny still battled and captured ghosts. I was very worried about what could possibly happen to him, but he certainly did have an advantage when dealing with these ghosts, and these ghosts needed to be dealt with. It was a risk and a sacrifice, but Danny rose to the challenge well.
I often joined him. I was not only an experienced ghost-fighter myself and a curious scientist who had been studying ghosts for years, but I was his mother. I wanted to be there to help him, to protect him if necessary.
At first, Danny was against my involvement. He gave me a number of reasons: too dangerous, too much of a distraction for him, too many limitations I might impose, too many cooks spoiling the broth. But I persisted. I was not about to let my son risk his life alone now that I knew what he had gotten himself into.
There seemed to be no end to the ghosts invading our town. They were everywhere, an infestation of ectoplasmic entities. And they were as Danny described them. They each had their own compulsive obsessions that gave Danny the information he needed to defeat each one. Some ghosts seemed to have one-track minds with little sentience if any. Others appeared to possess intelligence similar to that of humans.
But they were not human because they could not reason through their obsessions. They were controlled by something that they were not always aware of.
Danny was aware of what took control of him when he was transformed. I could see it as he battled, the care he took in his strategies. Sealing ghosts away at even the smallest opportunity even if it could end up being seen as a cheap move. The use of jocular banter to lighten the mood and prevent it from getting too dark and possibly triggering his obsession.
I could see signs of his struggle with his obsession when he was transformed. Flashes in his eyes, twitches at the corners of his mouth, shivers coursing through him. With some of the more difficult ghosts, I could see his attempts to keep things from escalating, his attempts to restrain himself from going as far as he really wanted to. I could see just how much he wanted to hurt some of these ghosts, to transfer all of his pain to them, to annihilate them completely with the desperate belief that his own pain would disappear completely with them. The presence of these ghosts in our town were his fault, all his fault, and if he could just make them all go away, then he wouldn't have to feel so guilty anymore.
But I think he also knew that the resulting pain he would feel from permanently erasing the existence of these ghosts would be too much for him, so he had worked out this compromise of a catch-and-release, capturing the ghosts and then returning them to the Ghost Zone where he hoped beyond hope that they would finally stay this time, begged them to please not come back, please don't make me go through this with you again, can't you see what this is doing to me?
He was truly remarkable, a sight to behold and admire up close. He was beautiful with his impressive physique, his spectral luminescence, and his glittering eyes. He was stunning with his skillful maneuvers, effortless evasions, and swift reflexes. He had me in awe. My once so small son had become a champion, a god, a force of the most superlative caliber.
Was this in him all along, or was this a side effect of his ghostly essence? I knew what tests I could run to figure this out, fantasized about new equipment and hypotheses. I wanted to know, wanted to see what this all really was.
I admit it I admit it I admit it I admit it I admit it I admit it there are you happy now
I did my best to keep up with him, but at my advancing age, I was already losing my agility and flexibility. Mostly, I took it upon myself to help him out if I could see his obsession taking hold of him. A blast to catch his attention, sealing the ghost in a Thermos before he could cause more injury than he wanted to.
"You're certainly better at this than Jazz," he joked with me the first time I joined him. He seemed relieved, as if having me as part of the team would not be as bad as he had envisioned.
I was relieved, too. He was clearly capable of this, and I didn't have to be too worried about him, not with all of his abilities I had seen firsthand.
He was astounding. Incredible. Let me take just one quick look inside, please, Danny, Danny, Danny?
...
Prison. Alone. Isolated. An extravert confined to a life of no one and nothing. The same images day in and day out. The same faces. The same sounds.
The same memories. I remember too well. I want to write it all down for him, just for him, prove to him that I'm not such a coward that I won't confess all of my wrongs and all of my secrets. But when I am done writing, I will hopefully forget it all. I will beg the doctor to give me something to numb my mind, erase everything. Doctor, doctor, give me my nepenthe.
I remember everything that happened with him, but after that until I finally found myself completely bricked up here, I do not remember much, just some lines and statements here and there that conjured particularly powerful feelings. But the rest is so blurry and hazy. The arrest, the trial, the official proceedings.
The questions? I remember one answer I gave often.
"Did you do it?"
"Did you do it, yes or no?"
"Was it you? Did you do it?"
"Were you the one? Did you do it? Did you know who he was? Did you know it was him?"
"Do you know what you did to him? And you did do it to him, yes? It was you?"
"Did you see him? Did you see what you did to him? Did you know what you were doing? Did you do it?"
"God, yes," I replied over and over and over.
...
"Where are you?"
He was talking to God.
