Hi! This was supposed to be a simple tag to Mai Ka Wa Kahiko (2.15) but then I just had to harvest all of the seeds of angst the show sowed. I tried not to make it soap-opera ish, but I may have failed. Let me know what you think. Aloha!
Attack of the Heart
Grace's crying had amplified into near hysterics.
Danny and Rachel flanked their daughter, who was swaddled in a jauntily polka dotted hospital gown, issuing useless coos of comfort and reassurance. Rachel smiled at her daughter, the picture of the calm maternal force she could be but even her reserves were faltering as Grace struggled and twisted on gurney.
"Darling, your body needs water and the IV will help."
Grace looked at her father with huge, sunken eyes and ruddy cheeks. "Danno, please. I don't want a shot. I want to go home. If you take me home, I'll drink a lot, I swear."
Danny itched closer to her on the hospital gurney, and nestled Grace into his arms. "Monkey, all I want to do is wrap you up and take you home. I know you've had the worst day in the history of days—and I'm sorry, but this will help. I promise it'll help."
Grace sobbed against him, limp in his grasp and weaker than Danny had realized. It was the first time in her life that his assurances hadn't worked. She didn't trust him and after he'd gotten her kidnapped and locked in a hot, dank, dark storage locker—Rick's improvised version of her own personal prison—Danny didn't blame her.
He glanced at Dr. Savannah Jensen, who'd saved his life twice and the only one he'd trust with his little girl, and rolled up his sleeve. "Can you give me an IV, so she can see that it's nothing to worry about?"
Dr. Jensen smiled at his ingenuity, whisking her black, straight hair behind her ear. "Of course, Danny." She collected the supplies, and rolled her stool over to Danny's side of the bed.
"Grace," she called invitingly. "You want to watch me, so you can see how it works?"
Grace peeked meekly over her father's ribs to watch Dr. Jensen sanitize the crook of Danny's arm with alcohol, and insert the needle and the empty port with practiced hands with distraught distaste. Danny looked down at Grace with a soft frankness. "Have I ever lied to you, Grace?"
She shook her head immediately.
"Good girl. So you have to believe me when I hurts for a second, just a second. It feels like a hard pinch and then it's okay, over? So if you're still and patient, you'll start feeling better before you know it."
"Hold my hand?"
Danny took his daughter's trembling hand without a word. "Anything else?"
"No."
"Really? We need to work on your negotiation skills, monkey. I think you could have gotten another dog out of this one, maybe a pony. A spaceship, even."
Grace just whimpered.
"Close your eyes, Monkey, and think of a happy day, your favorite one. One far away from this one, like when you're baby brother was born…or when we got stuck in Manhattan because of the blizzard, remember?"
Dr. Jensen worked quickly, retrieving a smaller gauge of needle and the bags of saline.
"We stayed in the hotel in Times Square…and you took me outside when it was really late. The city was quiet and…empty. The snow was sparky…" Grace said.
Danny swelled with pride at his daughter as she managed a dazzling smile even through she'd been kidnapped and was feverish and weak from the heat and dehydration. Her eyes locked on his and she squeezed his hand. "And they left the lights on in Times Square lights were on and it made…"
"Rainbow snow," Grace finished, flinching with a sad little squeak as the needle slid in.
Rachel kissed the top of her daughter's head, shushing her. "All done, sweetheart."
When Grace quieted, Danny continued. "We need to have another magic day to make up for this one. You think of something for me, let me know what you want to do."
But Grace was limp beside him, head slumped to the side. Danny's heart hammered in alarm and he shook her gently. "Grace…hey, open your eyes?"
Savannah shook her head and placed a hand on Danny's arm. "She's just sleeping, Danny. She's exhausted. It's okay."
Danny felt his head rattle as he shook it frantically. "Check her again, just to be sure."
Dr. Jensen acquiesced without a word, listening to Grace's heart and lungs with her stethoscope. Danny wrung his hands together. "I'm being insane, right? I mean this kid falls asleep faster than my old man. She's slightly narcoleptic."
"After what you both have been through today, you're being a parent." She assured him. "Once Grace is rehydrated, you'll be able to take her home. I called in a favor with a friend and Margie, one of the best pediatric nurses we have will be observing Grace while she's here. I'll sign off on her myself before she leaves."
"Thank you so much…" Rachel added.
"Yeah, Savannah, thank you."
Dr. Jensen shrugged. "Try spending a month out of my ER, and we're even, okay?"
Danny laughed, but it sounded crazed to his ears. "You've met my partner, right?"
-H50-
He could feel his heart beating, rapid and tight in his chest, churning out adrenaline that made it impossible for him to sit still or even try to sleep. Danny marveled that it'd managed to survive the day's stress and blinding terror. He stood up again, wiping his sweaty palms on his pants, wanting nothing more than the take Grace home—their cozy house in New Jersey with the finicky garage door, old school radiators and a love that had emanated there. He wanted this erase this entire day from Grace's mind. He wanted to rewind it all so that he'd never testified, never moved to Hawaii, never pulled the trigger.
Shooting someone in the shoulder wasn't as safe as it appeared in movies. The shoulder was a joint of complicated bones and arteries and Danny had seen victims bleed out in a matter of minutes. But it was better than the chest, where the bullet could have punched through Stan's lungs or his heart or could've hit the spine. It was Stan's only chance. Danny hadn't hesitated to take it.
And that made him sick to his stomach, made him just as dirty and twisted Rick.
He altered the figure-eight pattern he'd been pacing in and left Grace's observation room. His gaze moved unerringly to where Steve was sitting in the narrow row of chairs in the hallway, even though it was nearly 3 AM, and the rest of the team had gone home hours ago. He walked out, pulled away from his daughter by a flash of fleeting courage.
Steve leapt to his feet. "Hey...is she okay?"
"Nothing a decade of therapy won't fix. I need to step away." Danny said, giving Steve a pointed look. "Watch my kid."
"Sure."
"Let me be clear: I don't want Steve McGarrett, my friend who likes beers and football games and drags out his Navy uniform to impress the ladies. I don't want Uncle Steve, the fun guy who collects and paints seashells with Grace. I want the Navy SEAL who leaps off buildings and uses grenades to move along interrogations. I want the guy who sent like 43 people to GitMo and would kill an old woman with a basket of puppies if it meant protecting my kid."
"Done." Steve's posture changed, tightened at the shoulders and his eyes darkened with danger. He was still wearing his vest and gun and turned without a word, stepping just inside the door, guarding and protecting.
Danny left before nerve was overpowered by the ever-growing urge to run until he hit water, and headed to the ICU, where Stan was residing after surgery. Intensive care was nothing more than a glassed in ward of beds flanked by buzzing machines and whirring monitors and clicking IVs. The patients looked like the unfortunate failure of some kind of sinister science experiment, bloated and ashen, bandaged and sedated and Stan, the regal businessman with the sophistication and the Prince Charming jaw, was laid out in one of those beds. His face was puffy and his hair was a matted mess. The entire right side of his chest was bulky with gauze and Danny could make out a bloody tube snaking from his chest.
Rachel sat by his bedside, one hand intertwined with Stan's, the other holding their newborn son.
He inched closer to the doorway, shoving his hands in his pockets and jerked as the doors whooshed open on pneumatic hinges. Rachel's head snapped to him fiercely, and there were tears on her cheeks and strangled, pitiable sounds pouring out of her mouth. Danny couldn't remember when she wasn't crying.
She didn't speak, merely narrowed her eyes at him, and clutched her son tighter as if Danny was the threat. If that didn't make him feel like a piece of filthy, moldering trash, nothing did.
He cleared his throat and stood his ground. No matter how long they'd been divorced or the fact that she'd remarried and had an entirely new family, Rachel still effected him and intimidated him more than terrorists and murders. "Grace's still asleep. Steve's with her. I just…I wanted. How's he doing?"
She scoffed and turned back to her husband. "You should know, Daniel, you shot him."
"Under duress." Danny insisted. "If there was any other out, you know I would have taken it."
"The bullet…the one from you gun, shattered his clavicle…there's pins in it now. It shattered a rib on the way in, which torn a hole in his lung. The bullet from your gun," she continued in a ferocious whisper, "is resting against his shoulder blade, and his surgeon isn't in a particular hurry to remove it. So as it looks now, if Stan lives, he'll be carrying around that little souvenir for the rest of his life."
Rachel shuddered from the ugliness of his wounds and probably from the fact that they were Danny-inflicted. The detective gazed at Stan again and he couldn't help but feel guilty and slighted. Stan had been able to save Grace in a way Danny couldn't. And Rachel couldn't even bear to look at him. Instead she started at her son, tracing a finger down his face that looked a lot like Stan's.
"I'm so sorry, Rachel."
"Stop, Daniel. I can't…I can't even process any of this right now. Can you just go?"
"Both of you need to leave if you're going to be arguing on the ward." A nurse interjected leaning into the room. "The patients need quiet."
Rachel stood up and placed a slumbering Charlie in his designer stroller. "Would you mind looking after him for just a few moments? I'd like to check on my daughter."
The nurse, a stocky, older woman with a freckled face, nodded in her agreement. "Take your time."
Rachel ventured out of the room and the ICU with Daniel trailing behind her. In the elevator, they stood side by side. "I know this isn't your fault. Logically, I know you didn't have a choice."
Danny had spent the past nine hours trying to convince himself of the very same thing. "But…"
"I understand how much you loathed Stanley and our marriage…and that Charles isn't yours. I know how much you hate me after what I did to you. And I can't help but think that you enjoyed it…that you didn't hesitate to shoot him—"
"Except I did. I took a chance with our daughter's life not to kill him. If I wanted him dead, if I did what I was told to do, he'd be dead!"
Rachel slapped him, hard and fast across the cheek. Danny's vision shorted out win a flash of reddish-white as she hit him again. Idly, he was proud that she still attacked the way he'd taught her, but it outraged him that he was considered the the threat. He stumbled back, the railing jutting uncomfortably in his lower back as she pressed forward, hitting him with a closed fist. Rachel had never been a damsel in need of rescue, she was a fighter, and she was fighting for her family.
"I hate you, Daniel. I hate what you brought to my family. I hate what you've become."
Daniel snatched Rachel's wrist as gently as he could, restraining without causing anymore pain. His face throbbed in time with his cantering heart. "Your family? Just a few months ago, I was your family. That baby was OUR family. You could barely spend two days alone with him…in Maui—the holy grail of tropical paradises. And now, what? He's the love of your life? He's your husband? Who was he when you were sleeping with me? When you said you loved me?"
Rachel looked like she was a breath away from clawing his eyes out. She held her index finger that was topped with a perfectly manicured nail, her face glinting with appalled rage. "The second he took that bloody bullet for Grace. The second he did for her what you wouldn't. That's when, Daniel."
His knees wobbled and he sank back against the wall of the elevator. He'd prided himself on making the island safer for Grace. He wore the badge with honor because he was protecting his daughter's home.
The doors opened with a ding and Rachel stalked off with an off-putting click of her expensive shoes.
Danny trailed behind her, choking under the realization that everything he'd done, all of the chances he took, Rick still won.