Warning – maybe triggering if you're that way inclined, contains graphic description of methods of self harm
Meka. It was Meka's murder at the hands of a dirty cop that had put an end to Danny's almost eighteen month streak of no cutting.
Meka, who had been his first friend on this sun-baked godforsaken rock, who had teased him about his haole ways but in his next breath had invited him home to meet his lovely young wife and child within a week of meeting him. Who had stopped him from beating the living crap out of a group of cops that had been on Danny's back since the moment he had arrived. Only to take out the leader of their little group himself while his new mainlander partner held off the others.
And it would be Meka himself who would be kicking his ass right now if he knew what Danny was preparing to do.
Detective Daniel Williams, father, brother, son, good cop, was also a self confessed self harmer, a bit like an alcoholic – once a slasher, always a slasher. The urges to cut were always there, in the background of his psyche, sometimes much stronger than he was.
Like now.
So he sat on the john in his tiny bathroom, in his tiny apartment on this tiny speck of pumice and stared at the cheap razor in his right hand.
He had been fighting with himself all day, hell, all the time since Amy had turned up at his place last week, but the anger, loss and tidal wave of loneliness had beaten him into submission, so much so he had even decided by the time he had returned home where he was going to do this, on which extremity, and the position. The only thing he hadn't decided was how deep and how big, he could never control that anyway, always cutting until he had to stop.
He couldn't put it off any longer, beating Kaleo had been great, but not enough, never enough, so he took a deep breath and pressed the razor to the skin of his left arm. The blades were cold and sharp against his skin and he clenched his left hand and locked his left elbow to make the muscles harder, giving the metal something to press against. And then started to scrape away at the skin of his upper left arm, just above his elbow.
As usual the first scrapes didn't do much, just took the hair off, and then the top layers of skin. So he let his anger and pain dictate the movement of his right hand, digging the razor further into his flesh. Soon his blood was streaming down his arm into the sink as he sliced patches of skin away, but he only turned the tap on to wash the razor blades under the stream so it didn't lose it's effectiveness.
He used cheap razors because they don't have any protection to stop cuts like this unlike more expensive ones, but they also got blunt and ineffective really easily. Because of this he always kept a lot, and he had pulled out another one from the silver jar he kept them in. As soon as he felt the blades stop taking as much skin off he dropped it into the sink and reached for the next one.
The wound got bigger and deeper the more he worked on it, the pain making him swear and his eyes tear up. He let the tears stream down his face, mixing with the blood in the sink, crying for his lost friend and his own self loathing that he hadn't been able to protect him from his enemies.
Eventually the pain in his arm was enough, he was shaking, the fingers of his right hand were cramped around the plastic handle and he forced them to stretch out so he could drop that razor into the sink too. For a while he just sat there, almost mesmerized at his blood – mixed with water – washing away, feeling nothing but the throb in his arm and a sense of relief that he might be able to move on from this now.
But that feeling didn't last long, it never did. It was soon replaced by a mixture of guilt and worry – guilt that he had failed to stop himself, that he was just not strong enough, and worry that someone would find out about his wound (his weakness) and demand answers that he just could not give.
And it was that that spurned him on to move, to clear up. He stood and spent some time washing his arm, luckily the blood flow had already slowed and started to congeal, but the cold water on his exposed flesh hurt even more and he squeezed his eyes shut and hissed as he did it. There was one advantage of having a tiny bathroom though – all the supplies he had arranged beforehand were in easy reach and he was well-used to dealing with this one handed. He arranged a large absorbent dressing imbued with activated silver over the area to stop infection and taped it down. He then pulled on a gauze-net sleeve thing that he had bought on a whim to make sure the dressing stayed in place, and then worked on cleaning up the mess in the bathroom.
By the time that was done he was tired, cold too, and needed to lie down, so he chucked the cleaning cloths in the trash with a plan to check his cleaning tomorrow to make sure he hadn't missed anything, changed into his sleep shorts and crawled into his bed. It took a few moments to sort out a position that didn't hurt his arm too much, but after that he was out like a light and he slept like a log.
The next day, a non-Grace Saturday, had him making sure he had cleaned every last speck of what he had done out of his bathroom. He couldn't trust McGarrett not to burst in at any time and he was like a bloodhound if he thought anything was wrong. So he cleaned his bathroom, threw the razors (both securely wrapped up), the disposable cloths and any dressing wrappers away into the trash dumpsters in one side of the complex's car park and tried to get on with his day.
The guilt was there though, like a thunderstorm in the distance, making his neck and shoulders ache with it. He felt guilty for Meka, for Amy and their son, for betraying his mother's trust (he had promised her he would call whatever the time if he had these urges again after one such episode had landed him in hospital), and perversely he felt guilty for not causing himself more damage. Surely Meka deserved more, much more than a ten centimetre squared (ish) patch of flesh on his useless partner's arm? His life must be worth more than that?
Yes, Danny agreed to his own argument, he did deserve more, but not yet, not today, maybe when that wound started to heal a bit more.
So he kept busy, tidying up his apartment, sorting thing out, putting stuff away or making homes for items that he had dumped on any free surface, anything to stop him from taking more razors to his other arm, or anywhere else on his body.
By the time Steve turned up he had made the space much more tidy and organised, had a shower, changed the dressing (painful) and dressed in a dark-coloured tee shirt with sleeves that covered his arms to the elbows, and a pair of well-worn jeans. And if he covered his injury by not moving his arms so much when he spoke, or making sure he was not standing left side on to his partner, Steve didn't say anything, putting it down to him still grieving for his friend.
Danny could map the failures of his life in the scars on his body. The first time he had cut himself deliberately was when he had yelled at a seven year old Matty and made him cry, and had gotten 'the talk' from his father about responsibilities. "You're the oldest, Daniel." his father had said firmly to him after he had slapped him, hard, across the legs. "You know more than your little brother and sisters, you should be using that to look after them, not shout at them. You're strong than they are, Danny, you need to protect them."
Danny, eleven, was still angry, Matty had taken his favourite Superman toy and broken it, and Danny was the one getting punished for it. It was so unfair! He had stormed out of the house, slamming the door as he had left, and simply walked. His nails were rough from playing outside and while he walked he had scratched the back of his hand and kept doing it until he had calmed down enough to turn round and walk home. He had created a small wound on the back of his hand, about the size of a one cent piece, and he had watched it heal over the next few days and calmed down at the same rate.
That small scar had been replaced/removed over the years by more, at first small wounds in the same place, then more at the sides of his hands where his thumbs joined on. Then his arms and legs. He used anything he could lay his hands on, knew when he was desperate enough where he could go to vent his anger or frustration, humiliation etc.
He'd never been able to deal with his anger properly – his parents had been busy people and relied more and more on their eldest to look after his siblings before and after school until they came home from work. Danny had raged about it, he'd wanted to go with his friends after school but had had to pick up his annoying kid brother and then his sissy sisters and take them home. Matty would rat on him for everything and anything, especially when he figured out that Danny would get punished as well if he did anything wrong, the girls wanted him to do everything for them, and if he complained he was likely to get more 'talks' and the occasional slap because he was bad at taking care of his responsibilities. AKA he was a bad son and brother and his Mom and Dad were disappointed because he was just not good enough.
It hurt, but a cut here and there seemed to help – if he couldn't vent his pain at the people who were causing it, the least he could do was make them see how badly they were hurting him. But he had begun to hide the wounds – cuts, scrapes, the odd burn or two – he didn't want to get punished for it too and found it difficult to keep coming up with excuses and explanations, there weren't that many dogs in the neighbourhood he could blame. It was a secret too, something he didn't have to share with his siblings, that he could keep all to himself. And he found that cutting a furrow into his skin calmed him down, gave him a very real sense of achievement. Watching it heal made him feel better too; it was as if seeing, feeling the pain of his wound go away made his mental pain go away too. For a while at least.
So he kept it secret, hid his skin under clothes until the wounds had healed and the scars faded enough, and created bigger, deeper wounds to correspond with his bigger, deeper fuck ups. He had a large, now very faded scar, on his right forearm when he had found Trey Hill had told people about the kiss they shared. Another on his left arm when his Dad had been so disappointed when he had failed math on the first try, and yet another when his first girlfriend had dumped him because he was too short for her.
The scars visible on both arms were the result of his marriage to Rachel, both during and after. So much so when he had killed his first person because of his job he had had to resort to a penknife on his calf to get any relief. That scar was visible when he allowed himself to tan, just a thin white line now.
The mother of all of his scars was on his other leg, a patch of puckered skin on the inside of his right leg, above his ankle. That was when he had caught Rachel in bed with her boss. He remembered it vividly – they had argued, again, when he had called to explain he was going to be late home, he had his partner had caught a case and had to chase after the perp. She had yelled in his ear that he never gave her any attention, that he only had eyes for Grace and Cam, his partner at the time. She'd hung up on him before he could deny anything, and Cam had slipped an arm around his shoulder in a conciliatory hug. "Let's go get the bad Guy." he had suggested. "Then you can go home and be with her."
Which was exactly what they had done. Cam had taken over the booking and paperwork and virtually shooed him out of the office to go home.
Danny had stopped off at a florist on the way, frowned at the big, expensive car parked on the road outside his house, and walked in to surprise his wife and make it up to her. Only to find someone else was doing it for him.
Rachel had the good grace to be very apologetic, at first, but she had soon reverted to type and started blaming him for it, that at least Stan was giving her some attention.
He hadn't said anything in reply, too shocked, angry and upset to think of anything to say. Instead he had packed a bag, grabbed his supplies and found a cheap motel where he could hide away for a couple of days. He'd made a mess of his leg, both slices and scrapes, and had left it to heal on it's own. But it hadn't, like his heart it became infected, and only his mother's quick thinking had saved his leg and his life. He had gone round to see her, to explain what had happened, and she had noticed he was feverish as well as soul sick. He had spent the next week in hospital, had been forced to speak to a therapist, but the one and only visit his wife had made was to tell him it was a piss poor stunt to get him to feel sorry for him and she wanted a divorce.
He only had one self inflicted scar on his torso, on his waist, when Rachel's lawyer had called him to inform him Rachel was moving with Grace to Hawaii and there was absolutely nothing he could do to stop it. That one had also been difficult to explain, but he had been stabbed by a doped up meth head in the same place a few days later which had covered that one up.
Danny had been able to ignore his urges when he was on Hawaii – he'd just had too many other things to do. First getting here, then finding somewhere to live, settling into his new job and the entirely different culture here. If he had felt the need to cut he had simply walked into the canteen at work and sat on a table with some native officers – their barbs at his skin colour, dress code, accent and habit of talking a lot were pointed enough to hurt.
Even Lieutenant Commander Steve McGarrett barging into his life and taking it over hadn't caused him a problem, with cutting anyway.
Until Meka had turned up as a charred corpse in a pig pit and everyone thought he had deserved it.
They had sorted it out though, found the culprit, reinstated Meka's reputation and gotten his widow all the benefits he had worked so hard to give her. But he was still dead, and Danny still felt guilty about it.
As Danny's wound healed, so did his pain, and he could continue on as the best father, partner, friend, cop he could be.
And then Matty turned up to shatter the illusion of self-control Danny had woven around himself.
By that time he had replenished his stock of razors and dressings and had bought a craft knife and some extra blades from a store Grace had taken him to. He had managed to leave them all alone after Gracie and Rachel had been car jacked, mainly because his partner had lurched them all from one crisis to another, but this? This was too much for him to fight against.
Steve, a man Danny was steadily falling for, whatever he tried to do to stop it, had lied to the FBI for his useless younger brother who was far too stupid to realise what he was getting himself, and his family in to. Danny had stood at the airport, unable to stop him from getting on a plane with millions of dollars of drug money because again, and as usual, he was just not strong enough, not good enough to look after his responsibilities. He couldn't shoot his brother, despite what the cop side of his brain had screamed at him to do. But he could shoulder the responsibility of Matty's escape with the FBI; he wasn't going to let Steve take the fall for him. They had finally let him go after almost 30 hours of interrogation, stuck in a room at the FBI office in Honolulu while the agents asked him the same things over and over and over again.
In the end he had avoided a charge of obstruction by the skin of his teeth, because he had told them everything he knew and let them go through his finances, private laptop, car and apartment. He didn't hide anything from them, it wasn't worth it to hide, and eventually, a bit disgruntled, the agents let him go. Steve, who had been stalking the FBI office since Danny had managed to get a call to him an hour previously took one look at his exhausted face and didn't hold back. His fist got up close and personal with the shirt of Kipton, the volume of his yelling put any self respecting boot camp instructor, and Danny, to shame, and he was just about to introduce the agent to the middle of next week with his other fist when Danny caught hold of it and stopped him.
"It's not worth it." he said tiredly to Steve when his partner looked over at him. "He's doing his job, same as you or I have done before. Matthew, and this guy." he nodded at Kipton. "Aren't worth it."
"You are, Danny." Steve replied firmly but dropped the agent anyway. "I don't care who they are, or who they think they are." he added and completely ignored the roomful of agents his outburst had drawn. "You're better than all of these people. You are so worth it."
Danny knew he was wrong and shook his head. "Matty was my responsibility, Steve." he replied, mirroring his father's words from years before. "I should have stopped him, but I wasn't strong enough. I have to take the consequences of that. Please just let's get out of here. Is my car outside?" he asked anyone who would listen.
Kipton nodded and stepped up to the Detective with the keys in his hand, ignoring the man who had been choking him only moments before. "It's parked out front." he told him, and didn't flinch when Steve snatched the keys from his hand. "If we need anything else we'll be in touch, Detective."
Steve glared at him and shook his head. "If you need anything else, agent." he sneered the word as an insult. "You'll come through me." Then he ignored him for his partner. "Come on, Danny, let's get out of this rancid place."
Danny let him usher him out of the office, out of the building and into the passenger seat of his Camaro. He didn't take note of everything that had been moved around in it, he let Steve grumble about untrained hands on all of his stash of weapons moved around but at least not confiscated, he would have marched straight back into that office and demanded them back if that had happened. He didn't even query about where Steve's own transport was, (Chin had dropped him off), he spent the entire trip home deciding what tool he was going to use and how much he was going to have to cut to even start to alleviate this amount of pain and guilt.
But Steve, bless his controlling heart, drove straight past Danny's place to his own house and ignored his partner's muted complaint. "Are you hungry, Danno?" he asked him instead as he drove onto the driveway. "I can make you something light before you go to bed. You're going to crash in my old room, I got a new bed."
"What, no asking me? No making a suggestion? Just an order, Steven?" Danny managed to comment as his partner stopped his car and turned off the engine. "I have a perfectly good bed at my place." And a nice new sharp knife to try out in my cutting stash.
Steve smiled at him and shook his head. "No, you don't." he retorted fondly. "That thing just makes our backs ache. The mattress upstairs has a memory foam topper with your name on it, Danno. You'll be asleep before you know it."
Danny was too tired to argue with him, too numb to really care, but the memory foam sounded good. So with a long-suffering sigh he climbed out of the car and followed his force of nature partner to the house. "I just need to shower." he told him as he walked past the kitchen to the stairs. "Can I do that?"
Steve nodded. "Fresh towels for you in the main bathroom." he replied, and watched him make his tired way upstairs. If Matthew Williams turned up on his islands any time soon, Steve was going to make sure he suffered, a lot, for what he had put his brother through. He was going to suffer a hell of a lot before Steve would be ready to hand over what was left of him to the FBI, he had plans and the means to follow them through. No one, not even family, was going to hurt the man Steve was rapidly falling in love with and get away with it.
It had been two days later when the Detective managed to escape Steve's ever vigilant presence long enough to go home, and only on the pretence of having to get more clothes and Grace's things from his apartment before picking her up and taking them both back to his partner's house again. And Steve was probably waiting for him, counting the minutes he was gone.
But he couldn't fight the urges any longer, he'd spent the last day or two at Steve's walking around, checking everything to see what he could use. He'd found a couple of things, and one of his partner's extensive first aid kits too, but had not gone any further. He had never cut anywhere he didn't live in (family home, college dorm or his apartment) and he wasn't going to start now. Steve would probably never forgive him for giving in to his urges. He was sure his partner would get rid of him the moment he found out about this, because Danny wasn't strong enough to cope with the shit in his life when Steve himself seemed to be handling his losses a whole lot better.
So he waited until he got home and grabbed his stuff from where he had kept it hidden from his daughter, she didn't need to know about his particular bad habit. This one had to be quick, he only had a few minutes, and so he quickly found the craft knife, clipped in a new blade and unravelled his left sleeve. He pressed the blade to the skin of the top of his arm, closed his eyes and pulled sharply across. It hurt like hell; anyone who thought self-harmers got into some sort of 'zone' when they were cutting were delusional. He hissed in pain, dropped the knife in his trusty sink and slapped a dressing over his bleeding arm to absorb anything straight away.
The cut wasn't as deep or as wide as he wanted it to be, but he had no time. All he could do was press the dressing there for a few moments to try and stop the bleeding, then stretch over a few steri strips to hold it closed. He covered it with a couple more dressings and strapped them down before changing into another dark shirt and getting back to grabbing his stuff for his and Gracie's weekend with Steve.
She was waiting for him at the steps of her expensive school, all beautiful grins and pigtails bouncing when he got out of the car and crouched in front of her. "Danno!" she crowed and threw her arms around him in a tight hug – right over his newest, throbbing wound. He tried to bury his groan in her shoulder and moved it from under hers, and she noticed. "Danno?" she queried. "Are you all right?"
Danny paused a moment before he looked up to school his face into, what he hoped, was a reassuring smile. "I'm fine, Monkey." he assured her, and kissed her cheek. "So much better now. You ready to go spend the weekend with Uncle Steve at the beach?"
Diverted, she grinned and nodded. "Can we swim? Go surfing? Have pineapple pizza?"
"Ho, no!" he protested and stood, his giggling daughter still in his arms. "No way, Monkey! No way are we, including you, gonna have pineapple on pizza! Who told you that?"
She was still telling him about Tommy and her other friends and their exploits as he drove into the driveway of her mother's house a few minutes later. Rachel was waiting for them on the doorstep with a smile and Gracie's packed bag. He didn't really know what to say to her –he had gone to her when Matt had left and ended up doing the only thing they did well and he didn't know how he felt about it. He was tired of all the crap, his arm hurt, his soul hurt, and he realised then as he watched Grace say goodbye to her mother he wanted to apologise to Steve for sleeping with Rachel. So he smiled at her, took the backpack she offered and shook his head at the questioning look in her eyes. "I'm sorry." he murmured as Grace walked back to the car. "I shouldn't have come here a few days ago. I'm sorry." And he left her there, frowning at him as he got back in his car and drove away.
Watching Grace and Steve play together in the sea behind his house was calming to Danny, and he found himself settled down in one of the chairs on the beach, relaxed enough to watch them.
Steve had hugged Grace a lot when they had arrived, teased his partner about his mid length sleeves, and informed him that Kono and Chin were coming over for dinner. All of which allowed Danny to hope they would all be distracted enough to not notice his melancholy, or his wound. He didn't normally slice like that, bit he had been in a hurry, and he was a bit concerned about how long it would take to heal and how he could hide it, he was going to be around trained detectives after all. Just before he had sat down here with a beer in one hand he had gone into a bathroom to check it and was relieved to find it had stopped bleeding, but it still hurt, throbbing with every beat of his heart. A normal (for him anyway) scrape only tended to hurt when he changed the dressings so this was a little different. The only thing he could really do was wait and see what it would do, he had only ever sought medical help for anything self inflicted once, and he wasn't going to waste a doctor's or nurse's precious time on something he had caused himself. All he really needed to do was keep it clean, covered and hidden, and it was only the last thing that was going to be really difficult.
Talking of which, he could hear the unmistakeable sound of Chin's bike headed up the driveway in front of the house, followed by another vehicle, probably Kono's, so he stood and indicated with a hand to Steve and walked back in the building to the front door. As he had thought it was the other two members of their team, who greeted him warmly, as if they hadn't seen him in days, rather than the mere two hours it had been. They arrived loaded with food too, making Danny very pleased he had bought a couple of cases of beer with him – the evening was shaping up to be a pretty good one.
The weekend had been great actually, his team had obviously decided to rally around him and make him forget, as much as he could, about his treacherous brother. Danny had slept well in Steve's old room, Gracie tucked up in Mary's, and when he had woken in the mornings he had made sure to get to the bathroom without his two housemates noticing his arm.
It had been a close thing though – Grace had almost walked in on him in the shower when she woke up on Saturday and he had twisted away from her, trying to hide his arm and his junk from her behind the shower curtain, hoping she'd not seen anything untoward. She was sleepy after all, had simply yawned and said "Morning Danno" and turned round and walked out, going to the small bathroom on the ground floor. If she noticed his arm she didn't say anything, to him anyway.
Later Kono had inadvertently punched him on his cut later in the day when the five of them had stopped at Kamekona's for shave ice, and all of them noticed his wince of pain, sudden and sharp. He had tried to make light of it, telling Kono that she had got him on a sore spot he'd gotten from their last fire fight a couple of days ago. Kono had taken that, but Danny saw the same calculating expression on Steve and Chin's faces and the look they shared with each other. He knew them, without a shadow of a doubt, his charade was over, it was only a matter of time before one or both of them would interrogate him about it. With Steve AND Chin on his case, he was screwed.
If Grace joined in with any observations she had made either that morning or previously, he was well and truly fucked.