A/N: Happy Easter Everyone! I hope you enjoy this chapter, it kinda shows us where Danny is at mentally, more to come soon! Thank you for reading.
Chapter 28: In The Quiet Moments
Danny sat at his desk, with his head rested on his arms. He'd politely asked a group of children to vacate the office, so that he might have some peace and quiet, but once he was alone the fatigue hit him and his brain shouted at him loudly filling what he had hoped would be silence with tumultuous noise. It had been a long stretch of days that seemed to run into each other, with very little rest, and all though he could push his body to continue, his mind was exhausted and lost. He knew he should be helping his friend to find a way to stop this insanity. He knew that Gladys had to be stopped but every time they'd felt like they were catching up she would jump away, ten steps ahead and out of reach. And each time it happened Daniel McMahon would pop into his mind - laughing at him and taunting him. As the days progressed, and fatigue grew even more pressing, Daniel McMahon became more and more of a presence in Danny's world once more.
Never had there been a person who had gotten so under Danny's skin. Never had anyone frightened him as much as Daniel McMahon did when he was hunting him, and then even when he was captured and convicted, and even now that he was dead. When Danny was over worked, pushed to the boundaries of his body and his mind, Daniel McMahon would reappear. Danny felt like the man, himself, was sitting across the desk from him. Staring at him. Judging him. He felt like he'd disappointed the psychopath in some insane way.
Would the insane sister be the same? Would she haunt him just as the brother was now? Danny's own doubts and guilt had personifying itself in the image of a dead man now filling the quiet space around him. Watching him. Taunting him. Pushing Danny further into an episode of psychosis that would wreak havoc on him for years to come.
"Had I not been so determined a young detective, had I not found you and caught you, all those year ago, none of this would be happening to me today." Danny said to the ghost of a man who dwelled in the silence. "I wouldn't be losing my mind to you all over again."
"That is awfully selfish of you." The voiced inside his head answered. "You and I were destined to meet, to know each other, from the very beginning of time itself. Our minds were formed to find each other. We were bound by a matter and spirit that even we cannot understand, and now it is up to you to finish this. Finish this, once and for all Daniel. She is underserving of you."
"Maybe it was destiny, for us, but not this woman. She was not supposed to haunt me."
"No, she is not me and I am not her. I was beaten by you, and justly. She cannot be seen as I was seen. She is not me and I am not her, though we were blood and flesh, and we were formed together. You and I were the ones destine to meet and she is encroaching now. I'll not have her steal you from me. My place is with you, and always will be, but she cannot. She is not worthy. She is not as perfect as you are, my beautiful one."
"I can't catch her the way I caught you."
"No, she is not me, and I am not her. Revenge isn't my style. I did what I did to see if you could be smarter than you think you are. And you are. Beautiful mind crumbling because of her. Stop her, Daniel. Stop her before she crumbles all that I worked so hard to nurture in you. My coming for you may have been secured by someones else's revenge but I came for you and found you with very smart people. She is out for revenge, I was out in search of knowledge, to build you up and show you that you are brilliant. You have surrounded yourself with very smart people. They are worthy of you. She is not. She only wants revenge - for selfish reasons. She is jealous of us. She wants to believe she has a mind as beautiful as ours."
"And revenge clouds our judgement, that's how I will catch her," Danny said out loud as he raised his head off the desk and observed the empty office. "I'm not out for revenge and neither were you, and so I can out smart her."
"Now you're thinking straight." the response, like a whisper, filled his ears. "I'm proud of you, Daniel, my beautiful mind."
Suddenly there was a knock at the office door and Vladimir appeared in the doorway.
"I am sorry, I am disturbing you." He said and moved to leave again.
"No, come in. How can I help you?" Danny asked and motioned for the man to sit down. He straightened in his own chair and waited for the man to respond.
"I wish to apologize for my behaviour." Vladimir stated. "What I have done to you was horrible and yet you are helping me, my family, and the men who abducted you and your partner, all because of some woman's revenge."
"She threatened your children. I would have likely done the same thing, in fact, I shot my ex-wife's new husband because some psycho abducted my daughter and told me to shoot him. We are pushed by love of our families." Danny stated cutting the man off. "The McMahons are known for getting their way. The brother was just the same as the sister in that respect, but they are very different people, and we cannot forget that."
"I have never known evil like that which I have seen in the deceiving eyes of that woman." Vladimir said and his words were chilling. "She has a deep rooted hatred for you. If I didn't know better I would almost call it jealousy."
"It is jealousy, because her brother believed me to be his intellectual equal and I don't think he ever saw his sister, or any of the men in her life, as equal to his intelligence. I almost think Daniel McMahon loved me, and loved me more than he loved his own blood sibling. It's unnerving and very creepy, but it might work to my advantage in this case."
Vladimir nodded. "She was obsessed with proving how smart she was - that she would avenge her brother by being the smarter one. I don't even know if it is vengeance, as much as it is proving that she's smarter than you."
"She is bound to make a mistake because she is seeking revenge, but that was never what her brother wanted. Daniel McMahon saw himself as one in billions, and I believe that it was a very lonely place until we found each other. He was looking for a person of like mind but had never really found that until I came along. He chased after knowledge and although I do not condone what he did to the children he murdered, or to me later in life, I understand his want to find that kind of connection in the world. If he felt alone with a twin sister in the world then Gladys was never of a like mind to satisfy him."
"She believes she is and that she had to prove that to the world, and by doing so, she will prove it to her brother - who is dead. She is truly insane." Vladimir stated. "Maybe she's trying to prove it to you to get to her brother, if what you say is true about your like-minded-ness."
"Yes, driven by jealousy and denial. She was never his favourite, even though he was her's. She's still trying to prove it even after her brother's death and will until she meets her maker. Unfortunately, I have to beat her, or she'll die thinking she was better than me."
"But you are better than her, so much better, because you are good."
"I try to be, but these people have pushed me very far into my own darkness - a darkness I may never be able to escape."
"None of us will ever be free of her."
"No, she'll always be with you because once you've known such evil, you will never be able to exist in a world where she doesn't. You can't erase that kind of evil from you knowledges once it is rooted there. We don't want to believe that this kind of evil can exist in human nature, but that is where we underestimate ourselves and what humanity is capable of. If you want to look for the real monsters in the world, you need only dig deeply into your own psyche. I believe that we all have a great potential to do evil, but most of us have the ability to choose the righteous path."
"It really does seem like a very dark future to look forward to," Vladimir said with a sigh.
"Not necessarily, you have your children, your family and friends, and all though you've known evil and cannot erase it from your mind, you'll always have goodness and love to push it into the darkness. The struggle is to stay out of the darkness. We will end this and you'll be able to get on with your life."
"And what about you?" Vladimir asked.
"There will always be darkness for me because this is the path I've chosen. I see evil every day but none so bad as the McMahons. I hope, once this is over, that I never see this kind of evil again but I am trained to deal with it if I do. You, on the other hand, have choices, better ones, ahead of you and you'll be able to choose goodness over evil and light over darkness."
"Thank you Detective, for your kindness." Vladimir said with a genuine smile. "I will never forget this talk and the choices I know that I will be able to make because of your help."
"You're welcome," Danny said with a nod and a grin, "now go and enjoy your family. It is time for me to get back to work to finally put this whole ordeal to an end."
"Good Luck."
