Work Text:
He didn’t even think it was a possibility. Why would it be?
He and Chin were the ones that were out facing off against the smugglers.
Kono and Danny were just supposed to be talking to their money launderers.
Danny doesn’t answer his texts, but he was mad at Steve, so that was hardly a new tactic.
It didn’t even occur to him. He’s sitting on a bed, getting a few stitches in his arm. He’s holding his phone, thinking about texting Danny a picture of his bruised cheek and busted lip when it rings.
He doesn’t understand, because he’s in the hospital, and the hospital is calling him.
He gets it. He understands, as soon as the voice says, “Sir?”
His whole body goes hot, his mouth slams shut.
They ask him if Daniel Williams had a wife or family they could contact. For a second, all the sick tension goes out of him, and he slumps forward, squeezes his eyes shut.
The first time he ever calls Danny his boyfriend outside of his own head, he’s saying it to someone he’s never even met before, an assistant M.E. on his cell phone while they tell him they need him to come downstairs.
He ends the call and stands up. His elbow hits the tray and supplies scatter. He starts a jerky walk to the hallway. He can’t quite think clearly.
He’ll straighten this out. It’s not what it sounds like.
He remembers his phone, still in his hand. He pushes the elevator button and dials Kono. It goes straight to voicemail. Chin should be somewhere around here, getting some paperwork for him. It doesn’t go to voicemail, just rings and rings. He jabs his thumb at the end call button, too hard, and almost drops the phone.
Fuck.
His jaw aches and his mouth is full of sour spit from the adrenaline flood. He pushes his wrist against his lips, and feels his heart pound. Like he was never trained for any of this.
He mashes the elevator button again, listens for the sound of the motor, and turns to the stairs instead.
The stairwell is quiet, in that way only hospital stairwells ever seem to be after standing around in the ER. Just the echoes of his feet hitting the stairs.
He hits the door with both hands, and feels his phone buzz.
He turns the corner and sees a crowd of uniforms facing the double doors into the sub-basement.
He stops. Looks at his phone, Sgt. Duke Lukela flashing on his screen, and suddenly Steve does not want to answer it.
He has a few seconds, at most, before any of the uniforms hear him and turn, and they’ll recognize him.
Their faces will tell him. He’s got a few seconds left.
This morning, they didn’t have time, so he didn’t say it. They’d stood in his kitchen, and Danny had put his hand on Steve’s chest, waiting for his coffee to brew, and- He opens his eyes, because he’s got to.
They’re silent, 5 of them and a detective he recognizes. It’s just their radios buzzing, a traffic accident in front of the Hyatt.
They look at him, down, away, at the detective. Iona. Detective Iona. They put her on the news more than any of the others. She was nice, and Danny said- She looks at him. She’s gone white.
He knows.
he knows he knows he knows he knows
He doesn’t make a goddamn sound. His head is pounding, but he keeps it in. All of it stays in.
He walks the final few steps to the doors.
The uniforms step back and keep their eyes down. They don’t try to touch him or speak to him. Iona watches his face, opens her mouth, but he shakes his head, too quickly. It makes him dizzy. More dizzy.
He pushes through the doors, and stands outside the room with the blinds.
There’s a middle-aged man in a badly wrinkled scrub shirt standing in front of the door to the room. He clears his throat and makes a move to put his hand out. He’s going to shake Steve’s hand.
He pushes past him, grips the stainless steel door knob. Iona’s followed him, which means she’s better at this than he ever was. This was what Danny did, when they had to. He’s always so loud, but he’s good at this, he knows- Fuck.
It’s not a huge room, but for the first time in almost 20 years, he doesn’t bother assessing the space, noting the exits, judging the walls. He can’t.
There’s a body there.
It’s Danny.
Danny.
He looks through the M.E when he talks about exit trajectories. He doesn’t flinch. They cleaned him, they must have. No gunshot is that clean. He ignores the M.E. and scans Danny’s body, all of it he can see. They wouldn’t have had enough time to get everything. He can see brown under his nails. He’d tried to stop his own bleeding. He stares at that, letting the image build in his head.
Iona interrupts the M.E. and says quietly, “They were in the basement of a check cashing place on Third. No ID, weapons gone, two other unidentified bod-people were in the store itself. We think that’s why they went in so fast, they were visible from the front door, if you were close enough.”
Steve feels himself grunt, his body responding automatically to the end of sentence, to someone talking to him and expecting a response. He feels his phone vibrate again in his hand. He ignores it.
“Officer Kalakaua was still conscious at the scene, and provided us with information we are following up on right now. She’s upstairs, she’s in surgery.”
He cares, of course he cares. He cares about his team.
His voice is a croak, it sounds like he hasn’t spoken in a week.
“Is she okay? Surgery-” “Yes, sorry, she’s going to be okay, they said she was lucky-“ She shuts her mouth and looks at the body of the man Steve loves laid out in front of them. She knows, then, the M.E. told her, or she talked to Duke, or Kono.
“I’m so sorry, Commander, but we have to ask you-“
“Yeah, yes. It’s Danny. Daniel Williams.”
Everything he’s made of is screaming at him to pull Danny to him, against his chest, and take him away. Take him somewhere else. His time has run out, and there will never be any time ever again when he’ll be able to-
He doesn’t speak, even though they ask him a few more questions. It might all come out, and he can’t
He can nod though, because the next name on their list is probably Rachel, and he’s not a fucking monster.
Gracie.
He keeps his hands clenched.
He feels his body spasm into attention. He’s falling apart, but he jerks himself into perfect military attention.
The M.E. jumps a little, pulls the sheet back down in three little motions, catching on blonde hair. He closes his eyes and turns away.
He gets home in Danny’s car. From this day, it will always smell a little less like him.
The plan he’s always had at the back of his mind.
He’s had it for years. If things fell apart, if Danny left him, he’d re-activate, take whatever they gave him.
In his dark house, he can admit what it’s always been, because Danny didn’t leave him, he isn’t mad at him, he didn’t move out. Danny’s dead.
And that’s it.
So this is how he’ll deal with it. It’s always been a way out.
So he doesn’t feel dramatic when he thinks about dying in a desert somewhere.
He feels fucking rational.
He thinks about it for 2 days.
He thinks about it during painful calls to New Jersey. Feeling his fingers go numb and listening to his heart beat in his ears while his mother cries.
He thinks about when he and Chin sit in silence, listening to Kono breathe through a ventilator, thinking at least you’re alive.
He’s not, but you are.
He feels that familiar black shame fill him, same as when he was 16 and staring at the other kids with their mothers.
I would trade, he thinks, later that night.
He knocks the top off another beer and pours it down his throat. He grabs the next one, takes two deep breaths, and grips the edge of the sink while he chugs it.
He’s been saving this up. If he’s honest, since the beginning.
He thinks about it when he has to buy food. In the checkout line, he thinks about it, holding milk. He ends up dumping the milk in his fridge, because he didn’t drink regular milk, Danny did.
The best hours are when he is numb. The worst ones are when he thinks this wasn’t worth it. He should have known better.
He brings Danny home, across the ocean. He bullies the Navy into getting him a jump seat in the cargo hold. He sits with Danny in the cold. Keeps a hand on his coffin. His parents want him buried in New Jersey. So, he sits, shivering in the cold.
He can’t say much to them. They have red eyes and chapped lips. His eyes are dry and he knows what he looks like with his healing face. They wrap their arms around him and he closes his eyes. The other passengers stream around them. Water around a bunch of rocks. He doesn’t have any family, not really. Why is he the one that’s left? Why was the bright, funny, kind one gone, and the emotionally wrecked loner still here? What the fuck kind of sense did that make? Why does he have to stand in front of that good man’s parents, and say nothing.
I’m sorry, I wasn’t there. I didn’t know
They bring him to their home. He sleeps in a small guestroom off the bathroom. He sees the pin holes in the wall, four corners for posters long gone. Blue sheets and a faded Yankees decal on the glass of the window. He breathes into the pillow and doesn’t cry.
He steals quietly into the small bathroom at a quarter past five. He shaves in the dark, by touch, unwilling to see what his face is doing in any kind of light. He feels the blade catch his jaw, and thinks, good.
His hands shake when he buttons his shirt. He’d had to stand there for a full minute before his fingers would work properly. He’s brought Danny’s watch, to give to his father. He’d spent 40 minutes the night before he left carefully cleaning blood out of the grooves of the band. He slips it in the pocket of his coat. He sits on the bed for 2 hours until he hears enough noise downstairs that he knows they’ll be leaving soon.
He comes down the stairs into the kitchen. The Williams family is there in force. Danny’s sisters are talking, low, but stop when they see him. Half a foot taller than everyone else in the room, with a beat face, and in his Navy dress uniform, he couldn’t look more different from the rest of them.
“Jesus”, he hears one cousin mutter.
He climbs into the back of Danny’s father’s car and curls his hands over his knees to keep them away from the backs of the seats. He watches the trees and buildings pass, and thinks, Danny was such a fucking liar about Jersey being beautiful.
He stands in the funeral home basement and straps his own diver watch carefully around Danny’s cold wrist. He lays his hands over his still chest. He smooths down Danny’s dress tie. He checks to make sure Grace’s letter is tucked into his pocket.
He pulls the gold ring out of his own pocket, where’d he’d kept it since boarding the plane. Transferring it from his jeans to his dress blues. It’s warm from his body heat, and he runs his thumb over the edge. His father’s. It’s a little big, but Danny’s knuckles are swollen, so it fits.
You’ve done this in the wrong order Steven.
Yeah, yes. He has.
He stands on Grace’s other side. Rachel’s given her some Benadryl or something, he can smell it, faintly, when he puts his stiff arms around her. She looks exhausted. If Rachel sees the ring, she doesn’t mention it to him, but what the hell would she say, anyway? “I see you’re as fucking insane as Danny always said you were.”
He doesn’t really track what they’re saying during the service. He stares at the wall behind the priest. Stares at the stained glass apostles standing around a blank looking Jesus.
He feels Grace start to sob, the kind of sobbing you do when you know everyone in the room is waiting for it, but you still can’t help it. He reaches one hand up and pats her back. He thinks about the black hole where the memory of his mother’s funeral should be, and lets his hand rest over her shoulders. Rachel holds her other elbow, and they look at each other across the top of her head. Some kind of hymn starts playing, with the people around them starting to mumble along to it, but Rachel doesn’t. She just straightens her back even more, and if he sees her blink back tears, no one else will. His eyes stay dry.
They put him in the ground.
Steve tenses every muscle he has and looks away.
He folds himself into the car again, for the drive back to the house. His phone buzzes, and he ignores the 4th call from Kono’s number since this morning. He types out a text, erases it all almost immediately. He slides the phone back into his pocket.
They all squeeze into the house. Old cops, younger cops, family. And him.
How did you know Danny?
He feels like he’s been pumped full of interrogation drugs, making him slow and dumb with hurt. Their sympathy is making him edgy.
Jesus Christ, he’s a shock, isn’t he?
They don’t know what to do with it. They don’t know how much they can hurt him with it; he’s walking around holding his guts in with his hands.
How do you tell a bunch of people, after the fact, that you were living with their friend, utterly in love with their cousin; that’s how he knew Danny.
Oh yeah, he knew Danny from their house, where they’d spent last Sunday laying down new paving stones, where they’d watched tv on the couch, had sex in their bed.
Everyone’s just unsure enough to pause when he says “Partners”.
They lived together, I know Marina said that.
Like, ‘lived together’, together?
I guess so. I don’t know how we’d ask now.
No one outside the Danny’s immediate family knows how to act around him.
Danny never shut his mouth, so everyone’s heard he was Danny’s partner in Hawaii, but they don’t know why he’s here now, looking like a broken robot, while Danny’s mother stands beside him and accepts everyone’s condolences.
So, he’s the widow?
Widower, when it’s a man.
I thought he was married to that British woman.
He finds Grace again, sitting halfway up the stairs. He lowers himself jerkily to sit on the step below her. He has nothing to say that will help her, and she knows it. She doesn’t want to hear it anyway. She’s going to be fine. He lets this run on repeat through his overheated brain.
They sit together for another 10 minutes before anyone finds them.
The priest from the service pauses at the bottom of the stairs, coat half on, clearly about to leave. He quickly realizes the mess he’s looking at slumped on the stairs, because his face flickers with something. He starts to pull the coat back off, turning to climb towards them. Steve feels such helpless rage at that moment that it completely replaces the weariness and exhaustion that’s been the only thing he’s felt in days. He knows with perfect clarity, that if that man opens his fucking mouth and says one single thing about Danny to him or to Danny’s daughter, who’s tensing up at his back, he will hurt him.
He will rise up off these stairs and fucking clock that perfectly nice priest so hard he will dent the drywall.
He feels his leg muscles tense to stand, but the priest is already lowering himself back down the one step, his eyes flying away from Steve’s face, as though what he saw there horrified him.
He slumps back down, and has to bring his hand up to cover his face. He’s shaking again. He tries to get himself under control, pressing his fingers against his eyes and breathing through his mouth. There is a hand on his back, patting him.
Selfish asshole.
He realizes he can’t. He can’t do what he was planning on doing. Because she is her father’s daughter, and she would know.
Rachel would have to tell her, and she’d know what he’d done, and that he’d loved her father, but that he’d done this anyway.
Any reassurance he’d had at the back of his mind drains away in one horrible instant, and he’s slumped in his dead boyfriend’s parents’ house, shaking like a fucking crazy person because he’s just realized this is it, for the rest of his life. He feels his stomach churn, and he gags. He’s seen people do this before, lose control of their bodies in hospital waiting rooms, roadsides. Passing out or throwing up, falling down. Not able to absorb.
Whatever it is they’re being asked to live with.
Isn’t this the same as it was before? Before Danny, wasn’t he doing this anyway?
You’re a real piece of work.
He’s not alone now, though. He’s not 16 years old.
What the fuck were you thinking, asshole?
He drags his hands through his hair, down his wet face. He turns to catch her hand, holds it in both his own. He looks at her, her sweet face, opens his mouth to try and say something, anything.
It’s okay.
It’s okay.