8O8O8O8O8O8O8O8O88O8
When it finally started to rain, water came down from the heavens with a vengeance. Within minutes everything was soaked through and the city's colours had been washed away in to the drains, turning the landscape black and grey. The night had slowly sipped through, but no one had noticed the difference.
The first thing that made Danny realize that he wasn't dead was the sound of rain, hitting mercilessly against the window. It was a sound that he'd always found smoothing.
It reminded him of cold winters spent in his grandma's kitchen, keeping warm by the oven, watching her cook. He would seat on the table, legs dangling above the floor, carefully memorizing her every move, waiting, knowing that she would let him have the first taste, ask him what he think of it. It always tasted deliciously.
Danny licked his lips, hopping to find a trace of his grandma's lasagne in them. The only thing he could taste in his mouth was blood.
The hour or two that the doctors had said it would take for Danny to slip out of the anaesthesia effects had turned in to six.
A number of policemen and lab techs had stopped by, worried about the wounded man's condition. They never stayed long. No one liked hospitals that much.
Flack had finally gone home to change his clothes. Mac had returned to the lab, to check on the investigation and Stella had gone out to get them something to eat.
Aiden had stayed, keeping to her vow that they would be there when Danny finally opened his eyes… eye, she corrected herself, looking at the bandage covering his left eye.
Deeming him stable enough, the doctors had decided to move Danny in to a private room, away from the stressful sight that an ICU's paraphernalia could offer to those waking up there.
The new room still had hospital written all over it, from the too clear walls supporting different machinery and monitors, to the aseptic smell that hung in the air. But at least it had a window with a view.
Aiden was seating next to Danny's bed, her hand holding his so that he would know that he wasn't alone. Her thumb was doing gentle circular motions on the back of his hand, enjoying the feeling of warm flesh underneath. Her eyes, however, were fixed on the rain outside, although all that she could see was the room's reflection staring back at her.
It was easier than looking at the face of the man lying on the bed. Something about seeing someone so independent and so full of life, looking so beaten and fragile, made her feel angry inside. A deep sense that things like these didn't happened to people like Danny. Or maybe they did happen. But not to those she knew and loved.
The surgeon had given them a very detailed report of what she had fixed, but all the rest she had left out.
Danny's face, at least the portion that Aiden could see, was bruised. She imagined that the hidden part wasn't looking much better. His lower lip was split and swollen. The hand that she was holding had a bandage covering his knuckles and the higher portion of his torso, the only one not hidden by the bed covers, was also bruised and covered in tiny cuts. How many times had she seen similar injuries in the crime scenes that she'd worked?
Lost inside her thoughts, Aiden almost missed it when Danny finally stirred. His tongue licked his lower lip and his face squeezed in a grimace. His eye popped open suddenly, looking around, lost.
"Hey, Messer," she whispered, one hand pushing the call button, the other rubbing his arm before holding his hand. "Welcome back."
She saw him blinking furiously, the blue orb trying to focus on her face as tears started to bloom underneath it. His voice came only as a whisper.
"Are you real?"
She had heard Mac's description of what had went through in Danny's apartment, up to the part when Donauh had pushed the bomb's button.
She had readied herself for a confused Danny, even a distress Danny when he woke up.
She hadn't been ready for the lost-boy's look that overcame him, making her friend look like he was five years old. It made her want to forget all about his bandages and just hug him tight.
"I'm real, and I'm ok," she reassured him, cleaning the tears off his face. "Mac and Stella are fine too… the bomb never went off."
He tried to nod, swallowing against the roughness in his throat. He failed on both.
A nurse came to the door, answering Aiden's call. When she saw the patient moving and alert, she left, saying the doctor would be there soon.
Neither was listening. Danny was already half asleep and Aiden was sniffing, her eyes fixed on the ceiling. Her friend had just woken… her teary face was not the way she wanted to greet him.
He squeezed her hand, demanding her attention again.
"It was Donauh… he's the killer," he whispered, eyelid struggling to stay open. "You have to catch him."
Before Aiden could get over her sense of confusion over what he was saying, Danny was already sleeping.
O8O88OO88O8O8O8O8
"And that was it?" Stella asked, holding a sandwich out to Aiden.
"That was it. Some doctor came in next and shoo-ed me out of the room," the other woman explained.
Stella nodded, leaning back against the plastic chair.
"He'd just waken up… between surgery and the pain killers, he'll probably be a bit confused for a while."
"Or maybe he just doesn't remember," Flack's voice joined them. Mac was beside him.
Out of the blue scrubs and back to one of his suits, the detective looked more like himself now.
"Anything new?" Stella asked the arriving men.
"The team working Danny's case was able to recreate pretty much all of what happened, between Donauh's video tape and the evidence they found in his place," Flack answered. "The only thing missing is Danny's version of events."
"And Donauh?"
"Donauh was a ghost. Joined the FBI ten years ago. Two years after that John Donauh, the person, disappears. No family, no home address, no car, no bank account number, no rented spaces, no place where he could've hidden any signs of his double life. The ID he used to rent a car here in NYC was a fake, trace is still trying to get somewhere with it," Mac explained.
"And the stuff that was found with him?"
"No prints, no trace, no nothing," Flack said. "The man lived in gloves."
"The only thing we could find was on the evidence recovered at Jackson Heights," Mac said. "One print, found inside Margaret Stuton's cell phone. Donauh changed it to detonate the first bomb upon receiving a call from a specific number. His print was lift on the chip he had added for that effect. There was also small traces of saliva, found splattered over the envelop containing Danny's pictures."
"Over? Not on the sealing?" Stella asked, knowing that some people still had the habit of licking their envelops shut.
"No, this was most likely from a sneeze. DNA came back to an unknown female."
"So, no clue on who might've paid Donauh to do this?" Aiden asked between bites. "Other than it's a woman with a cold?"
Mac nodded his head.
"Well, that narrows it down," she mumbled sarcastically.
8O8O8O8O8O8OO88O8
"… and the last thing I remember was Donauh pushing that button," Danny concluded, closing his eye. He couldn't remember of ever being this tired in his life.
The team, plus Flack, were gathered around Danny's bed. The hour was late, but the detectives had been allowed to stay a while longer. The lights had been dimmed down, giving the room and its occupants a dark, grave tone.
"Do you want us to go, let you rest for a bit?" Stella asked, seating by his left side. She could tell, just by looking at his face, that the young man was exhausted.
"Nah… I'm good," he mumbled, half asleep. "What happened next, Flack?"
The detective, seating on the other side, exchange a quick look with the others, wandering if it would be wise to tell him. More than that, Flack wandered if he could trust his voice to tell his friend that he'd found him as dead as Donauh.
Stella saw the haunted look in Flack's eyes.
"Maybe we should wait till morning," she said, grabbing Danny's hand. "It's late and the doctors will kill us if we overtire you, so…"
Danny turned his head to the sound of her voice, trying to catch a glimpse of her face beyond his blind spot. Stella, seeing his struggle, left the chair and sat on the bed instead. "Better?"
He looked at her, seeming more alert, his hand squeezing hers in return.
"I want to remember, Stella… I just want to remember."
It wasn't easy for any of them to put themselves in Danny's shoes. Each had had their fair share of dangerous situations, but, one way of the other, they had managed to find some closure to their experiences.
With his mind shielding him from part of his memories, Danny was lacking that feeling, that cork that would bottle all that he'd experienced inside a dark bottle from which he would never drink again. In his mind, the last image he had of Donauh was that of a killer who had succeeded in killing his friends.
"Give it time, Danny," Mac broke the silence with his reassuring voice. "It will come back to you."
Danny just nodded, not because he agreed with Mac, but because he didn't felt strong enough to keep up the argument.
The others watched as his face relaxed as his eye drifted close.
Thinking that he'd finally fallen asleep, the detectives started to quietly leave the room. Mac silently offered to stay. Danny's parents would be there in the morning, and he wanted to be present to answer any questions that they might have.
The older man leaned back on the uncomfortable plastic chair and readied himself to do something he'd swore never to do again since his wife had died. Bedside watch.
"You don't have to stay, you know."
Danny's voice startled the always alert marine.
"You should be asleep," Mac answered.
Seating as he was, in the dark, not really being able to see Danny's face and sure that Danny couldn't see his, Mac felt like he was in church, confessing. "Want me to leave?"
Sometime passed before he heard the whispered 'no'.
"Do you need me to get you something?"
Another long silence followed and Mac figured that the young man had gone back to sleep.
"I owe you and the others an apology," Danny finally said. "I had promised myself that I would never let my reactions put others at risk ever again and I know I promise you tha…"
Mac's hand on his arm made him stop.
"What are you talking about?" Mac asked. He could see Danny's heart beat, glowing in spiked green lines on the monitor above the bed. From the way it had accelerated, Mac could tell how important and stressful this was to Danny. "You can't possibly be blaming yourself for Donauh's actions."
"I'm not," Danny whispered, clearing his throat. "I'm blaming myself for my own actions. If you hadn't found out the bomb when you did, me attacking Donauh would've only resulted in blowing you guys up… I put you all in danger."
Since the moment he had watched and heard what had happened in those few minutes after Danny attacked Donauh, Mac was sure this moment would be happening at some point soon.
"Donauh was going to detonate that bomb no matter what you did, Danny," Mac informed the other man. "When I saw the amount of evidence that he'd left behind in that bunker, at first I thought he'd been sloppy. But then I realized that he left it there to keep us busy, to keep our attention away from the hidden bomb. That bomb was his safe guard, his way to destroy the evidence he was forced to leave behind. There was nothing you could've done to stop that."
The silence between them was only broken by the soft beeping coming from the monitors. The sound was quieter now, almost relaxed.
"So, we're good then?"
Mac had no idea if Danny's choice of words had been intentional or pure chance.
He could still remember the young man's face the last time he'd asked him the exact same question, less than a week ago. Mac had been trying to teach a lesson to the younger CSI, but he hadn't missed the hurt and shame that crossed Danny's eyes then. He'd come to see him, looking for approval for his actions and he had been met with coldness.
Only then had Mac truly felt the weight of having someone looking up to you. He could feel the same weight baring him down again. It felt like a warm blanket over his shoulders.
Mac smile, squeezing Danny's hand.
"We'll be having a conversation about the many reasons why we don't jump towards guns," he said, half serious, half joking. "But we're good, Danny, everything's good."
Mac could feel the young man's hand relaxing inside his, allowing his body finally back in to sleep.
"Just don't do anything like this again, ok?" Mac added.
Danny smiled in his sleep.
"Never again, Mac, never again."
8O88O8O8O8O8O8O8O8O8O8O
It was hard to believe that a little over 24 hours had gone by. People had complained about their uneventful lives, people had lost theirs without even realizing why.
The world had turned around itself, leaving some lives exactly the same. Others had been changed forever.
Either way, no one had taken notice.
Central Park was mostly deserted. The rain might've looked romantic in the movies, but in there, at that hour, it was cold and it left little desire in people's hearts to go strolling down the Park's soaked paths.
In a city where everyone minded their own business, no one took notice of the woman making her way through the Park's green avenues. At a distance, she was nothing more than the grey blur of her overcoat. Her eyes were covered with dark glasses even though the sun's light was so hidden that it couldn't possible reach her and the rest of her head was partially hidden by her blue umbrella.
She was moving slowly, making time. The man that was supposed to meet her there was running late. Inside her purse was an envelop filled with money. His last payment.
And if a man moved only by his own greed wouldn't show up to collect his money, then there was only one assumption that she could make. The killer had failed. Her revenge had gone unserved.
Making her decision, the woman left the Park in hurried steps and hauled a cab, losing herself in the streets of NYC.
The end.
8O8O88O8O8O8O88O8O8
Well, this officially the longest and the last chapter of this story. I just have a one confession and a few thank you-s to make.
Confession: I've never been to NYC, I've never even set foot in the USA, so if any of the streets, places and distances I've described in NYC don't match, don't blame me, blame Wikipedia. If they do match, blame them all the same.
Thank you, to all of you who've reviewed in such a kind manner this story and its author: This was my first try at CSI:NY fanfiction and you guys made it worth it, so thank you!
And I do have to say, this is a personal record for me… one story, one month :D