Pairing: Steve McGarrett/Danny Williams
Originally published (on ao3): April 2013
He was only a kid.
He couldn't have been more than 17 or 18 years old.
Danny had done the math in his head so many times, and in so many different ways. He was around the age of his nephew. He was double Grace's age. He could only be ten years younger than Kono, maybe less. When Danny had been that age he'd really only cared about skateboarding, going to the arcade with friends, action movies and girls. The boy should have been at school, or college. He should have been learning or having harmless fun.
Now he was lying in the morgue and it was Danny's bullet that had put him there.
It was on days like this that Danny hated being a cop. He didn't have to feel the guilt. He could reason everything away. He had been doing his job, he needed to protect himself and the team from being shot by the little punk. He had to stop himself from dying, whether by instinct or conscious desire.
With Danny's experience, he would be the one to get the shot off first, no matter if he raised the gun second. Everything was easily reasoned away as being part of the job.
But he still felt the guilt of taking a life.
He felt it every time, though he could cover it with attitude and paperwork. It didn't matter if he was taking down a mob boss, an experienced gun runner, a drug lord, or a punk kid on the street who made some wrong decisions - he was still taking someone's life. A life that had purpose and meaning. Someone who was a son or daughter, with maybe a child of their own. And that gave him guilt.
He'd had nightmares in the past. He'd been haunted by his first kill for a long time. It wasn't that he'd got over it, he just ended up piling more on top of it and the faces merged together and over time he couldn't make them out so clearly anymore.
He knew he was doing right. He knew he was taking dangerous people off the street. These were people who could go hurt a kid, or a mother, or a veteran. He was making the streets safer for his little girl.
He stared at his phone after he hung up. Talking to Grace was something, but it didn't match up to hugging her, holding her, seeing her smile at him like he was superman.
He dropped onto Steve's couch with a thud. Letting his head fall back on the cushions, he stared at the ceiling and barely moved as the seat dipped next to him.
"You okay?" Steve asked, a hand reaching out to touch Danny's knee.
"No," Danny sighed. "But I will be."
"You talk to Grace?"
"Yeah, she's excited about visiting Stan in Las Vegas over school break. And I love that she's excited, but I'm gonna miss her."
"I know, buddy."
"On days like today, it reminds me how much I need my daughter." Danny finally raised his head and looked at Steve, seeing the understanding in the other man's eyes. "I mean, I love my little girl, of course I do, and I'd love her no matter what. But I need her because she reminds me why I do this job. She reminds me of the good in the world that I'm fighting to protect. When I'm with her, I forget about the crap and the bad things I've seen and how much the fight costs us."
Steve turned to face Danny, bringing a knee up and under himself. "Danny, today wasn't your fault. He had a gun, he was going to shoot you, he wanted to take Grace's father away from her. You did the right thing."
Danny remembered what he'd seen as they finished clearing the area, as he pushed the gun away from the body with his foot, still keeping his eyes trained on the boy in case he tried anything. But the look of emptiness in the eyes told him all he needed to know. The fact that when this kid was being born, Danny would have been the age he was now, didn't mean a thing anymore. Because the kid was dead on the ground.
"You know, I don't even know how many people I've killed in these situations. I mean, sure, at first, I knew. I didn't set out to keep track but I knew. Now? Now I have no clue and that's scary, Steve."
"If it makes you feel any better, I don't either. I don't think any of us really do."
"You know it doesn't." Danny sighed again, an ran a hand over his face. "I dunno, sometimes, I guess, you just need to stop for a moment and consider the fact that we do this. That the ordinary, every day people on this island place their trust in us to keep it safe and if that means killing to do so, then we do it. When I was younger, I never realized it would be such a burden."
"Like you said, you have Grace. She makes things better. You've got your family and you've got the team at your back, we're here for you."
"I also had Meka. Grace. Hell, even Peterson. I'm sick of losing partners."
"You've not lost me."
"Yeah, but I might."
Steve's eyes widened. "Is that why you yell at me all the time?"
Danny shook his head. He smiled despite himself. "You only just realizing this now? There's a reason I need you to be careful, Steve. I can't lose another partner. Death follows us in this job, and as much as we do the right thing and try to make sure it's the bad guys who get dead? Sometimes it's the people we love who wind up getting killed and that is not acceptable. Okay? Sure, I feel bad for what I do, when a kid like the one today leaves me no choice but to shoot him and I know there's a mother out there right now crying for her kid. But what gets me through it at the end of the day is knowing that I stopped him from killing one of us because that, Steve, that is unacceptable."
Steve pulled Danny's head onto his shoulder, a hand curled at the nape of his neck, fingers tangling in the back of his hair. Steve didn't say anything, he couldn't. Danny knew that inside, Steve was itching to tell him that it would never happen but that wasn't something anyone could promise, so Steve stayed silent.
"This job has a hell of a heavy burden with it," Danny said, his hand resting on Steve's thigh, feeling the warmth through his cargo pants. "I think people forget that sometimes."