Chapter Text
When he was 9, he spent 2 weeks with his father, traveling to California to visit a few relatives. They’d spent 3 days with his Grandfather’s brother, Uncle Jim. He’d had a small piece of land in Michigan. So different from his home. It was glassily cold; his first real experience with it.
His great uncle didn’t have any children of his own, and he’d had a hard time finding much to say to Steve. He was a good man who died a few months after their visit. He left Steve a signed Hank Greenberg card, and he regrets to this day that he sold it before he left for Annapolis. This isn’t about that.
When he remembers that 3 days he doesn’t think about their halting conversations, or the way Jim had showed him the small lake with the little fish under the ice.
He remembers the foxes.
He’d had nightmares about it for a while, when he was a kid. Until those nightmares were replaced with exploding cars and empty hallways. He’d think about it, every few years. When he was 26, he’d had an extended fever dream about it, in a desert outpost, Russian pop music playing on a tinny stereo.
Always the same.
Two bodies.
Little foxes. Bright fur, matted down, with blood, but that’s murky and shadowed in his memory. The blood on the ground and soaked into the grass is always clearer.
Two traps. Big and rusted, it had seemed like a horribly cruel thing. The bigger fox’s back leg is broken, in at least one place.
As a 9 year old, it was very hard to look at that, but in his memory, that’s the image he can dwell on when he shudders awake, because it’s not as bad. Pain, he can do. He’s been doing it for years.
It’s the way the fox moves. Still alive, still moving, slowly. Pulling its body away from the trap. Eyes wide, flickering from he and his uncle, to the trap, back to them. Towards the other body.
As he’s gotten older, that’s the part of the dream that jerks him awake. One time with a wet face and not enough air in his lungs.
His uncle had gripped his shoulder, breathed jerkily.
“Best thing to do, really…put it down.”
In that moment, he loved that man, who he’d only spent a handful of hours with, because he sounded like he’d rather do anything else. Uncle Jim desperately did not want to kill the fox, but he still leaned down and picked a heavy rock up off the frozen ground.
He had known, in his heart, that he is supposed to be able to do things like that. That men should face things like that and do what needed to be done. If you didn’t, you weren’t really being a real man.
The old man told Steve to turn around, not to look, and Steve was only a kid, but he still understood that if his father were there instead of Jim, he wouldn’t have let him do that.
He looks one more time at the fox, pulling at the trap, at its leg. At the smaller fox that’s not moving at all, just a few feet away. The other trap closed around its chest. Eyes closed.
If he turned around, he was being a coward.
Steve had turned around and squeezed his own eyes shut until pink shapes bloomed behind his eyelids and his cheeks had hurt. He’d still heard the sound the rock had made against the little skull.
Steve likes animals, just like anyone else. He likes cats. He understands cats. He admires dolphins. He’s slipped into the dolphin pool a few times with Gracie, when her father had crossed his arms and planted himself at the side. He spends almost an hour once a week cleaning the tank for Charlie’s little goldfish, Ken.
So, he likes animals okay. He just hasn’t spent a lot of time around animals, not really. His parents didn’t want pets in the house, and then he didn’t really have time, as an adult. Didn’t really go to zoos, or see many wild animals. No animals on base. Danny has a few long stories about keeping raccoons and other little animals out of the garbage, but Steve doesn’t.
So he’s surprised he thinks about the foxes. He’s used to the nightmares, but not when he’s awake. He scans his memory for the last time he’s thought about them at all during the day.
He’s thinking about the foxes while Danny stands in his kitchen, looking at him, with that expression on his face. He can’t be surprised, not really.
He never said he was something he wasn’t. He never promised anything.
There’s nothing really left to do. Danny takes his phone charger, his extra shirts.
He just doesn’t think he’s ever thought about them, not since that trip.
He goes out the back door, stands with his back to the noises Danny makes while he shoves his things into a duffel bag.
He looks at the ocean, and tries to not listen for the sound of the front door closing. He looks so long his eyes start to water, and he has to wipe at them when he finally goes back inside.
They don’t live together, not really. There’s nothing to move, nothing to sign. No one they have to tell, although he assumes Danny will have to say something to Grace. He’s not sure if Charlie will understand yet.
He spends the rest of the weekend alone. Running and swimming; preparing himself for Monday. For the first time in months, he doesn’t see Gracie and Charlie on Sunday. He won’t really be seeing them at all anymore. Is that what happens?
Yeah, must be. You can’t break up with someone and expect to still hang out with their kids.
You can’t call them up and say, “Hey, I know I was a generally shitty boyfriend or whatever, but can I still coach your kids’ soccer team? I was really looking forward to it.”
Going back to what it was before. It would be enough. He could do that for another few decades. It was enough, more than what he’d ever thought he’d have.
You have to manage expectations, son. Be realistic.
He stands in his father’s kitchen, because it would always be his father’s kitchen, and wonders if that’s what he would say. The same thing he used to say to his younger self. At 9, 10, 11, and into his teenage years, until Steve learned to stop. Stop asking whether he’d make it to see his game, if he’d take him hiking. If he’d let Steve come home.
He stands in his father’s kitchen and stares at nothing until he can climb in his truck and drive in to work.
Monday is not the worst day, because Danny is in the office. They don’t talk, and Steve can’t bring himself to make eye contact, but he’s there.
Tuesday and Wednesday are not great.
Thursday is the worst day, because Danny talks to him, and that part’s painful and wonderful, at the beginning, but he’s holding forms, and he’s asking Steve to send an email.
He types out the email he’d composed in his head a hundred times.
He’s even saved a version of it in his drafts folder. When he checks, it’s 3 years, 7 months old.
Daniel Williams is an exceptional police officer, and as his commanding officer, I have had the privilege…
He sends the email, and then sits and stares at his blank screen for twenty minutes.
Danny is gone by the next Wednesday, back to HPD. A promotion, even. He tries not to feel bitter about that.
Danny had told him. He’d warned him. And he wasn’t coming back.
The truth is that Danny had stood in front of him, and asked him, and Steve hadn’t had it in him. He’d turned away. He knew what a man should be able to do, but it wasn’t in him. He’d turned away.
He doesn’t know what Danny thinks now. If he lets himself examine it, it’ll tear him up. So, he doesn’t. He’s not stupid. He waits, and he has his rules.
It’s fine. He doesn’t let any thought stay in his head for more than a few seconds. It’s like running a mission; you don’t let yourself waste mental energy on it. It’s a luxury.
He has a little bad patch, at the beginning. There are a few weeks that are a bit rough. He wakes up fuzzy, reaching for a warm body. In his whole adult life, he’s never done that before.
He can’t keep anything down for a few days, and has to chug protein shakes in the shower, just in case they come back up. He buys them all new, because the ones he has in his fridge are all strawberry flavor, from Danny’s root canal.
He just isn’t sure if he’s doing this right. He’d ask Danny, normally. Did it feel like dying when Rachel left you? Is that what it feels like for you?
How can it feel like this? How can it feel this bad?
It doesn’t matter, in the end.
He smartens up, gets back to basics.
He swims a lot.
When that stops working the way he needs it to, he has little tricks, to keep from thinking about it. He’s always been good at this. Even before the Navy, he’d sit in his bedroom and do push ups until he was too tired to think about his family.
Here he is, again.
The thing is, he has made a mistake. Mistakes.
One of the newer tricks is drinking. He never starts before 7pm. He has spent a few nights staring down the clock. But, he’s good at this. He’s never slipped. He doesn’t even do beers after work anymore. Lou had invited him, yesterday, and he’d turned him down, because it was only 5.
So he’s sitting in the kitchen, where there’s no one to see him measure out the drinks, except for Ken, who’s doubled in size over the last few weeks. He taps his glass lightly against the side of Ken’s tank.
Rules are necessary. If you don’t have rules, what do you have?
Not family, or someone to share a bed with.
He sighs. It’s 11, and he’s probably too drunk right now, but if he doesn’t stand up to test his balance, it doesn’t count. So, he stays, slumped over his father’s table.
He thought, for years, that not following the rules are what got him sent away. Not being the kind of man he was supposed to be. Too shy, too scared.
Now, he knows. There wasn’t anything he could’ve done to not be sent away, not really. It was inevitable. Chain of events. Mother gets blown up, get sent away by father.
Maybe it was inevitable with Danny.
He’s never been with anyone properly. Why would being with Danny be any different?
So maybe it’s just not in him.
It’s been 20 minutes, so he pours himself his next drink. He pauses, but then drinks the whiskey down in one go. No one here to see him do it.
Lou had asked him to have a beer with him, and he’d said no, because he couldn’t sit there and sip at a single beer, or even two beers, and act like a normal person.
He pushes up from the table and goes to lean against the back doors. He slowly lowers himself into the hammock.
He’s got a headache, right at the front. He can feel the throb every time he moves. He sets up beside the hose in the grass. He places Ken in his water glass to watch him while he wipes down the sides of his tank.
He’s not alone, not really. He still has his team, people he loves. They love him, even if they don’t like him much right now. Kono and Chin’ll come around.
He measures out the vinegar mixture, pours it into the tank, lets it slosh around. It stings his sinuses.
He lets it sit for a few minutes. He picks up Ken and walks them down to the beach.
He still loves Danny, jesus, he does. That’s the worst thing.
It’s just a constant, crushing sensation. Too tight, closing around him. He’s not sure if this is the worst of it yet. There’s no one to tell him.
He wades into the water, holding Ken up high. The water closes around his legs, his waist. He lets it buffer him.
He’s fine. He’s doing this.
Later, when he tips Ken back into his tank, he swims around in tight circles for a few minutes, then goes back to his little pirate ship in the corner.
Before he goes to work, he prays.
In his driveway, he prays.
It’s for nothing, now, if he can’t keep it together. He prays, he prays like he hasn’t since he was a teenager, to please, jesus,
please anyone
let this end.
Steve is not a good person. He has done the things a good person might do. He has defended his country, and protected innocent people. He did it because it was his job, he was good at it, and he used it for years.
Danny thought he was a good person, and it was the happiest he’d ever been. Knowing a good man thought he was also a good man.
Danny had been wrong. He knew that now.
Danny had left him, so how good could he really be?
There’s pictures of him, later. The papers and major blogs don’t print or post most of them, because they’re too graphic, but they come up as the second hit when you search “Honolulu credit union”, and the first hit when you search “Hawaii cop”
Someone with a pretty good camera had been on the scene outside the bank, so there’s 4 photos of Steve, right there. Really clear, excellent resolution. All before he goes in. It’s like looking at pictures of someone else.
He doesn’t recognize himself.
It happens on a Thursday.
HPD dispatch calls them to the bank to assist with an armed robbery. They jog to the parking lot. He remembers doing this with Danny, the buzz he’d get. He doesn’t feel much now.
He hasn’t talked to Danny in 4 months.
Steve is driving with both hands on the wheel when Chin hangs up and tells him Danny was first on the scene. He tightens his grip, stays in the lines and grits his teeth. They cross King Street, and Chin gets a second call. Steve accelerates, but not too fast, because that’s one of the rules. He glances at Chin’s face while he listens, and he knows.
They didn’t call him, they called Chin.
So he knows.
He feels stupid, useless panic in his throat, and tries to swallow it down.
They’ve set up a perimeter, so he parks as close as he can. He doesn’t wait for Chin to get out of the truck, he doesn’t grab his vest from the lockbox in the back. He pushes through to the SWAT van.
He was stuck in a trap, that’s what all this was. The last few months. But he’d been expecting relief, in some form. He thought it would get better. It hadn’t, and now he’s going to see Danny.
Danny’s in danger.
He was a Navy SEAL, so he could feel like a scared animal and still do his job. No problem. He’d go in and die, maybe, but Danny would be there, and he could save him, and see him, one last time. It would be some kind of relief. So he was going to be very careful and do this right. Follow all the rules, and Danny would be fine.
Instead, the 2nd photo Google returns is a SWAT commander telling him.
He tells Steve that Lieutenant Williams had been shot, approximately 12 minutes previously. While they’d still been in the truck, driving to the scene.
That there had been no breath sounds on his comm for 8 minutes.
That they had visuals on his vest, useless on the ground, covered in blood, and drag tracks, leading away.
It’s worse, so much worse.
This wasn’t just a leg in a trap. It was those eyes. Rolling in the sockets. Ready to chew through the leg with it’s own teeth.
Ready to do anything.
Inching towards the still body a dozen feet away.
It’s just too late.
His brain will catch up in a second.
A wild animal, it’s mate already dead in the grass.
The SWAT commander knows the Lieutenant used to work for Five-0, but maybe he didn’t listen to gossip, had other things on his mind, or maybe Steve was better at hiding things than he thought, but he believes Steve when he says he’s going to check in with the others. Steve holds up his phone like he’s going to call someone. He mimes intense purpose. Feels his face freeze into an expression of concern. Sane concern.
A sane man, a good man. The commander of a special task force, striding towards something, in control.
Danny was a good person, the best person.
They’d shot him. He’d gone in to that building to protect people, and they’d shot him.
He acts his way through the crowd, frowning into his phone.
It’s cold. He’s cold.
He climbs the stairs of the building next door, immediately dropping the phone once he turns into the doorway. It bounces down the steps, no one on the other end.
He forces the door, climbs quickly, without any sound, listening to his breathing, measured, in his head. He only has a few minutes left.
If he concentrates, he can feel the teeth.
From the roof, he can jump, probably, so he does. He makes it, barely. Scraped elbows. He uses his momentum to roll to his feet.
There’s a sniper, across the street, lying across a concrete ledge. His rifle dips, and that’s how Steve knows he won’t shoot him, probably won’t accidently shoot him.
The sniper doesn’t move, but he must report it, because there’s a shout from below, before it cuts off, abruptly. All their faces are looking up at him, standing near the edge, prying at the air conditioning shaft.
Terrible pain, but he can’t feel it. Not yet.
He uses his knife, then his nails, leaving bloody fingerprints on the metal. He lifts it away, lowers it down.
They should shoot him. He’s not going in there to save the hostages. He’s going in there because in his head he can only see that patch of blood smeared frozen grass.
He’s not a good man, not really.
Danny was good.
The thing is, he’d been waiting to feel good his whole life, and Danny had done it so easily. Like it was nothing.
His fingers aren’t getting traction, so he reaches into his back pocket, shoves his gloves on. He braces himself against the side of the vent, and estimates his drop.
He closes his eyes and lets himself remember a few things, just for a second.
His mother’s face when she’d read to him. His father showing him how to hold the ball. Mary holding her daughter. Gracie and Charlie.
Jesus, Grace, Charlie.
Blond hairs, brushing against his knuckles, warm. His voice in the car. Even his face that last time, in the kitchen. Looking at him, so disappointed.
He drops.
He doesn’t land right. Calculated risk. The smaller bones in his ankle snap on impact, compound. He almost passes out.
It’s all light and sound, so much of it, for a few seconds. But he’s been trained for this. There’s no point if he if he can’t stay awake for a few more minutes.
All that expensive training.
Someone is grabbing at him, so he shakes his head, once, and grabs a throat, pushes his gun into a body, and pulls the trigger. The hand comes off him. He flops back on the ground, lets the body fall. He concentrates on staying conscious.
Screaming.
There was screaming before he dropped, but it got louder. He’s on the cold floor, behind a cubicle. He can see the surface of the desk he’s landed next to, covered in pieces of the drop ceiling. He grips the corner of the desk and pulls himself up to a sitting position. It’s awful pain, hot awful pain that’s crawling up his body. He shakes his head again.
Pain is temporary, shame is forever. Get up.
Dead is forever.
He gets up.
It’s dim inside. The cubicle is at the edge of the open floor. Across the room is the bank of windows, shades pulled. The door is plate glass. There’s a bunch of desks and a copier piled against the door. Nothing that would stand up to a real assault. Doesn’t matter.
The screaming is coming from the chest height teller counter to the right, against the wall. People. Maybe ten; employees, customers, bank robbers. It smells like blood.
But not there.
Danny is by himself.
The information desk is wide, but not as tall as the teller counters. There’s a single chair, overturned, and dozens of pamphlets scattered on the floor. Some of them have gone pinkish, others are deep red, almost brown.
Danny is propped up, facing the covered windows, one shoulder resting against the side of the desk. There’s blood smeared above him, like he’s slipped down. He’s not moving.
He feels cut loose. Synapses not firing like they should. He grips the edge of the desk again, this time he pulls himself all the way up, feels something else in his leg collapse. It’s so fucking slow.
That’s photo number 3. The photographer must have had some kind of long range lens, and shot on top of a car or truck. Half his face is blocked by the edge of a broken window shade. He still looks like it’s possible he’s planning something. Maybe his strategy wasn’t great, but he’s in the bank, with the hostages. He looks like he’s concentrating.
He was. He can’t pass out. He ignores the shouting from the teller counter, the movement from the ones in the body armor.
But, there’s no strategy.
No thought beyond seeing Danny slumped there.
A bullet hits the marble near him. Hot pain in his bad leg. Doesn’t matter.
He’s burning.
What is he going to do if he touches Danny and there’s no pulse.
What’s he going to do.
He gets close enough to grab his sleeve, unbuttoned around his wrist. He pulls Danny against him, feels the wet of the blood. He’s so tired. This is so close to being over. They’ll shoot him again, and this’ll be over. He’s failed, but it’s over.
He rips at his glove, the velcro loud in his ears. It takes a while, but he gets it off. He palms Danny’s neck.
He’s a shell really, he’s just a ghost, expecting to feel nothing. Worried his fingers are already too numb to touch him one last time.
He blinks because he can’t see properly. Doesn’t remember when he started, just that he’s doing it now, shaking and holding Danny’s against him, trying to feel a pulse.
“Stop.”
Slurred, soft against him, muttered.
Steve died, maybe on impact, maybe before he even crawled across the floor. He didn’t pull the trigger on the first guy fast enough. Maybe he shot himself 4 months ago, and this is all happening to him as he hemorrhages on his bathroom floor. He’s dead, and so is Danny, and Danny’s talking to him.
“Stupid.”
“Yeah, I-.”
He can’t think anymore, pushes in against Danny’s too cold body, shares his own heat.
Crowding in against Danny like this in his bed, wrapping himself around his body, pretending he couldn’t hear him, trapped up in sheets and blankets.
There’s something else happening, near the plate glass door, but he doesn’t bother to check. He pulls Danny’s shirt apart with hands that are still mostly working. Blood all down his white undershirt.
I bought that undershirt.
He can’t tell where the bullet went. He covers his chest with both hands, trying to move his bad leg enough to lay Danny down across him.
He’s done this, variations of this before, a hundred different ways, in drills and in the field. He bunches up his dress shirt, but it’s already soaked. He pulls his own off, pressing back down.
Danny doesn’t flinch. His chest hair is all matted down.
He’d teased Danny about his Chewbacca chest. Run his fingers across his lighter hair, lying in bed with him.
“Please-Danny. Don’t.”
He swallows any other stupid thing he might say.
He looks at his own fingers flex and clench around the soaked mess he’s pressing on. His vision starts to blur again, so he ducks his head down, tries to wipe at his eyes with his wrist.
This is the picture that they can’t publish anywhere that doesn’t want to get complaints. There’s too much blood. They don’t put that in the paper or in movies, how messy it is, and how hard it is to get a grip on anything when it’s all covered in blood. They put it behind a NSFW cut. Surreal, to think that people might be at work, browsing through pictures of him, crying into his dying ex-boyfriend’s neck. He looks awful. Danny looks like a corpse, eyes closed, face slack. Steve remembers his low exhales, remembers the way his hand had still been able to wrap around his forearm. He remembers how he promised, anything.
Take anything.
He doesn’t care how it ends. Not any of it past Danny being loaded into the ambulance. They run the siren, and he’s so, so glad. They don’t run the siren for dead men.
He lets his head drop, covers his face with his less bloody hand, and shakes.
Danny has surgery. Two separate surgeries, almost back to back. They place him in a private room.
He sits in the wheelchair, obediently, because there’s no point resisting. He gets pushed into Danny’s room on day 2, because he’d done everything they told him to.
“I love you, very much.”
The ventilator heaves another sigh at him. Danny is still.
“I want to, I always did. I’ll be sorry the rest of my life that I didn’t say it when you asked.”
A nurse wants to check Danny’s stitches. She doesn’t tell him that she also wants to check his stimuli responses.
“When you’re up, we’ll go back to the house. There was a storm a few weeks ago. I really didn’t shore up the garden like I should’ve; there’s shit all over the path. We’re going to have to pull up the stones and raise the bed. That’s a two person job.”
He traces the veins on Danny’s hand as he talks, unloading 4 months worth of the kind of things he never realized he’d want to say to another person. Never realizing that he’d be buying groceries, or watching tv, or driving, and turn to someone who wasn’t there anymore to comment on something completely boring, and be absolutely devastated that they weren't there to hear it. He’d trained himself out of that instinct more than twenty years ago. He thought he had.
Gracie and Charlie come. Charlie immediately climbs into his lap, and Steve wraps his arms around him, tight. He breathes in, deep.
Gracie starts by sitting in the chair on Danny’s left, and Steve gives her some room. She frowns down at her father’s face, and Steve feels his stomach churn. He runs his hand down Charlie’s back, lets him babble his toddler talk to fill up the silence.
By the time Rachel comes back to get them, he’s asleep, slumped against Steve’s good side. His leg is aching, throbbing at him, but he can’t bear to shift his warm weight against him, in case he wakes up. He breathes in shallow, times his exhales to his, trying to keep him as long as possible.
Rachel raises her eyebrows at him, but he doesn’t have the energy to do anything but lift Charlie to the ground. Grace gathers her bag, stands to follow her mother and brother out.
He levers his weight, lurches to his feet. Fumbling, he reaches out, then drops his hand again.
“Gracie.”
She turns to look at him, looks back at her father, and doesn’t say anything.
He shudders, feels how much he needs Danny, to tell him what to do. How to get Gracie to love him again. To forgive him.
They leave.
He’s still standing, awkwardly. He lets himself drop back into the chair.
He’s going to fix things.
He has to fix things, or else he’s going to spend the rest of his life following Danny around.
He would do whatever, just.
He leans forward, combs Danny’s hair away from his face, re-adjusts the strap.
He lets his hand rest next to his cheek. Feeling for any change in his breathing pattern.
He waits.
He’s dragging himself towards that other animal in the grass. Always.