Title: Slipping
Summary: Steve wakes up in a reality that's not his own. And then it happens again. And again. And—well, you get the point.
Disclaimer: This was written for entertainment purposes only.
A/N: The majority of this story is already written. I just need to do a thorough edit before posting. As always, constructive criticism (or any comments really :p) are appreciated.
Chapter 1
000
(Alt.1)
Steve woke up suddenly, realizing before he was fully conscious that he'd never made it home the night before. Might have to do with the imprint of his desk across half his face, the outline of a file folder a right angle across his cheek.
He got up, planning to stretch his legs, rotate sleep-sore shoulders, and ease the tension in his stiff neck, but he didn't get any further than staring groggily at his faint reflection in the glass when Danny distracted him by walking into HQ.
Danny did double-take when he saw Steve, instantly diverted his course and made a beeline for him. Steve tried not to eye the steaming coffee in his hand too hungrily as he walked in.
Apparently he failed, because Danny pressed the cup into his hand without a word, fingers brushing far longer than was absolutely necessary. Steve took a sip and repressed the urge to moan wantonly as the delicious nectar of the gods passed his lips. Then he noticed Danny was being quiet. Never a good sign.
"What's wrong?" Steve asked, taking in the pissy hands-on-hips posture and the annoyed tilt to his lips that meant Danny was gearing up for ultimate bitch-out mode. He set down the coffee deliberately.
"What are you doing here?"
"Working?" Steve wasn't sure why he was phrasing it as a question.
"Working, he says," Danny muttered, shaking his head. He slipped into Steve's personal space, nothing odd there. But then he leaned close, chests pressed together and Dany's hand on the small of his back close, and Steve felt like he'd missing something very important. The feeling only grew stronger when his neck was tugged down and...yes, that had definitely been a kiss.
"Woah," Steve said because he'd apparently forgotten every real word in existence.
Danny tilted his head. "What, bad breath?" He tested, hand to his mouth, then shrugged. "I just smell coffee, babe."
"No, it's—uh."
"Now are you going to tell me why you didn't come home last night?" Danny pulled away slowly, going from warmly affectionate to irritated without any rational transition in between, as far as Steve could tell.
"I didn't make it that far."
Danny huffed. "You go out of town for a week, and then head straight here when you get back. I see how it is."
"I haven't been anywhere," Steve said, more lost by the minute. He'd stayed late the night before to finish up the paperwork on their last case and...
"Right, right. I guess Mr. Super-SEAL just turned himself invisible and hid out for five entire days just for the sheer hell of it, and didn't actually go on some BS secret op to save the planet from annihilation or some damn thing."
"It's not BS," Steve snapped reflexively, realizing belatedly that he hadn't been gone anywhere.
"Of course not," Danny said, turning on his heel and heading for the door. He stopped, hand on handle, then turned back around. "You know what your problem is?"
"Here we go," Steve muttered. "No. What is my problem?" And why the hell did you kiss me and then start with all the yelling?
"You, my dear heart, are a workaholic."
"So are you." Steve shrugged, a little thrown by the endearment but taking it in stride.
"I am not."
"You really are."
"But that's totally different, and has absolutely nothing to do with this disc—"
Kono poked her head through the door. "I take it the honeymoon's over?" she asked, lips quirked.
Steve hadn't even noticed her walk in. He must've been more tired than he thought. He opened his mouth to say...something, but she beat him.
"We've got a case," she said, ducking back out.
Danny was staring at him shrewdly. "Are you okay?"
Steve nodded. "No."
Danny cocked his head, lips quirking.
"I'm fine," Steve tried again, "go ahead. I—I'll catch up in a minute."
"Alright," Danny said, but not like he believed him, and walked out, throwing a glance over his shoulder before catching up with Kono.
Steve felt a liddle odd, dizzy, and sank heavily back into his chair and let his head drop back onto the desk with a resounding thunk. He tried to think back over what had just happened, but his mind was an uncooperative, whirring blank. He closed his eyes and took a few deep breaths, desk cool against his flushed face.
000
(Home)
Steve woke up with an undignified snort and rubbed at the sleep-lines on his face. He stared down at his desk for a long time. He didn't even look up when his door creaked quietly open.
"Earth to Steve, Earth to Steve, hello."
Steve finally looked up when a cup of coffee was set right in front of his face. He blinked blearily up at Danny, who studied him, warmth warring with exasperation in his expression.
"You never made it home last night, did you?" He asked, taking a sip of his own coffee.
"Didn't we already do this?" Steve asked, unable to shake the memory of the too-real dream that he wasn't sure was a dream. He licked his lips and tasted coffee (along with something else that was hard to define), though his cup still sat untouched on the desk.
"What, say hello? Yes, yesterday, but I enjoyed it so much I thought I'd try it again today."
"No, this exactly." Well, not exactly, but... "I'm getting a major deja vu thing here." But that wasn't quite right either. He caught himself licking his lips again and stopped.
"Unless I did some sleepwalking, followed by some sleep-driving and a negligible amount of sleep-buying coffee, I highly doubt it, babe." Danny was one part amused and two parts worried.
"But you brought me a coffee and-" and kissed me "-started yelling at me."
"I don't yell. I speak passionately." Danny crossed his arms.
"No, you yell." Steve picked up his coffee.
Kono poked her head through the door. "We've got a case."
Steve lowered his coffee back to the desk untasted. Again, he'd apparently been too absorbed in his own stuff to notice her come in.
She walked out, expecting them to follow.
What the hell?
...
"Four victims in little over a month; we've got a serial killer on our hands." Kono said brusquely, opening the case file and showing the victims. Sandra, a middle-aged brunette with prematurely graying hair. Joey, a sandy-haired twenty-something guy with a spiderweb tat on his neck. A Jane Doe, a young woman with bobbed hair and high cheekbones. An older man, a local by the look of it, with a frown like slashing his brow, even in death. Faces all slack and gray and lifeless.
"I may be missing something," Chin said, frowning at the vics, "namely a connection. Normally serial killers have a type."
Kono pursed her lips, then schooled her face into blankness. "All four were found in remote sections of beach around the island, riddled full of holes." She paused, pulled up map with marked locales on the computer.
"That still doesn't explain the serial killer angle," Steve said.
"The only thing that we've found to connect them so far," Kono said slowly, finding a different file folder on the computer, "is that they're all missing their left maxillary lateral incisor." She pulled up four images of their victims, mouths gaping indecently, all with the same gap in their teeth.
"Huh," Steve said eloquently, "so, trophies, obviously."
Kono quickly closed the images.
"Who does this guy think he is, the tooth fairy?" Danny asked, going for levity but missing his mark.
"If so, I think he's doing it wrong," Chin said dryly.
"What else do we know about these people; what connects them?" Steve asked, "There has to be some method here. Some reason."
"On it," Kono said, already in research mode.
"I'll go find out what Max can glean from the bodies," Chin said, halfway to the door.
"I guess that leaves us to talk to the families," Steve said, leading Danny out.
"Fucking tooth fairy bastard," Danny muttered, barely loud enough for Steve to hear.
Given the situation, it was obscenely hard for Steve to suppress his grin. He was going to Hell, and it was all Danny's fault.
...
The first two families were a bust. Trying to navigate hostile waters through an invisible minefield of grief and loss. On days like today, Steve would almost rather walk a literal minefield that look helplessly on the faces of families wooden with shock or twisted in grief. It was Hell, but it wasn't a thing compared to what they were feeling. Times like those, times like today, he had to fight to keep control. To keep from giving in and letting Danny take the reins and using his soft-sincere voice to offer condolences and make promises he hoped they could keep. Some days, like today, it was like fighting a losing battle.
Steve shook himself out of his own head when his phone rang. He pulled one hand from the wheel of the Camero to answer.
"Chin." He put the phone on speaker, and Danny twisted in his seat, as if that'd help him hear better.
"Max found trace fragments of wood in the wounds of all our vics; he says its from local flora. Based on that and the impact trajectory, we're looking at a homemade bow and arrows used at close range as the main weapon, though the death was, obviously, the jagged slash to the jugular."
"So, we're looking for a Hunter-Tooth Fairy killing machine," Danny said, "Great, that's great. This day keeps getting better and better."
"It gets even better," Chin said dryly, "Toxicology came back; our vics show traces of a strong sedative, used more commonly on animals than humans."
Steve filed away that information, thanked Chin, hung up, and didn't say anything else. They pulled up to the most recent victim's house. The twenty-something guy with the neck tat. Joey, that was his name. He still lived with his parents, and Steve briefly wondered if he'd misjudged the kid's age.
Turned out, yeah he did. He had still been a teenager, poor kid (tattoo must've been got with parental permission). But lucky for them, the parents had been paranoid (just not paranoid enough). When Joey—Steve's heart went out to the mother when her voice broke, just saying his name—didn't come home the night before last, they'd tracked the GPS on his cellphone.
He mutely questioned their judgment in going to the location alone, but that couldn't be helped now. It was in the middle of the woods, around a twenty minute drive away, and the mother—Mandy, Steve corrected himself, Mandy had went out looking for her son.
When she'd found the cell and not the son, that's when her husband had called the cops. Too little too late. His body was found a few hours later. This tooth fairy bastard worked fast.
Steve doubted it would come to anything, but he wanted to go to the location and do a quick sweep. Just in case HPD had missed something.
...
Steve let Danny's incessant ranting about disease-infested biting insects and ferocious predators fade to white noise, constant and faintly irritating in the background.
"You know," he said eventually, distracted by a set of fresh boot tracks in the dirt. He knelt to study them. "If there are any 'ferocious man-eating beasts' out here, as you said, your bitching is probably just as good as a dinner bell." He turned, grinning, and waited for Danny to explode into another laundry-list of complaints about his sanity and their current situation.
But he was met by silence, and no Danny in sight, just brush and brambles and tree trunks. Steve got to his feet, looking around; he thought Danny was just behind him. He hadn't been that distracted, had he?
Steve jumped, felt a sharp sting at his neck, and jerked the thin metal dart out of his skin. He stared at the ridiculous green fuzzy thing on the end of it for a long moment before staggering around a step, hearing a triumphant whoop over his head, and looking up. His vision blurred, almost doubled, but he saw a distinct set of pearly white teeth in a tanned face. The owner of the teeth and the face scrambled down out of the tree.
"Thought I might get lucky, find some good game poking round here; preying on the weak's getting boring." Shiny-teeth said, "You look like a challenge."
Steve stumbled a few more steps and leaned, trying to prop on a tree, but he misjudged the distance and grabbed at thin air. Steve got the breath knocked out of him as the ground rushed up to meet him. A leaf crackled in his ear as he shifted his head, but it sounded distant.
Shiny-teeth snorted, and Steve blacked out.
"Or maybe not."
...