Summary: Danny said he'd always follow Grace, right? The only thing about the Moon, though, worse than even the damn sand in Hawaii, is all that freakin'…
MOONDUST
So they sprinkled moondust in your hair of gold
And starlight in your eyes of blue…
~The Carpenters, "Close To You"
Danny sighed as he ran a hand through his damp hair, nicely tousled from having just been toweled dry. He looked out of the small porthole in the wall of his tin can of a room and sighed at the sheer boring-ness of the landscape beyond.
Where he'd gotten used to lush greens and blood-reds, velvet purples and vibrant oranges and yellows of Hawaiian flora…where once he'd heard nothing but the annoying cacophony of early-morning sounds courtesy of 'Iwa and 'I'iwi and Whistling Ducks and 'Eki'eki birds…where once he'd look up to find a cloudless sun-filled sky and blink to find a darkened sky that told of an impending downpour? Now, Danny Williams saw nothing but the drab gray-white of Moondust against the inky black nothing of space and dead silence beyond.
This was his life now.
It used to be he said, "I'll follow Grace to the ends of the Earth." But once man had finally decided to start colonizing the Moon, once big business and the military and every government on Earth had started trying to hook their claws into the small, dead rock orbiting their home planet to make as much money as possible, well…Danny had had to make a change to that long-uttered statement.
Nowadays it was simply, "I'll follow Grace wherever she goes."
Because Grace had gone to the Moon. Of course she had. Yes, this was Danny's life now. The Moon.
Stan and all his big-money real estate holdings. He'd had enough power and influence to be able to buy a good chunk of real – er…Moon – on the…er…Moon. And so he'd needed to be up on the Moon to oversee how it was going to be parceled out and sold off. To be there in person to greet potential buyers and show them around.
And Rachel, having apparently fallen back in love with him both after the birth of their son and after Danny had shot him to try and save Grace's life, decided she wasn't "bloody well going to be left alone in Hawaii, Stanley Edwards!" and had announced that she and the children would accompany Stan.
To the Moon.
Turning and tossing his now-damp bath towel onto the twin bed, Danny pressed the button that opened the first drawer in the four-drawer dresser built into the wall of his small room. He pulled out socks, underwear, a white V-neck tee shirt. While the Five-0 Moonbase was fairly nice and very well climate-and-gravity controlled, it was on the cool side just enough that Danny no longer wore his button-down work shirts over his bare skin, but instead had to wear them over a cotton tee shirt which meant he'd had to buy a size larger in the shirt department. A whole new wardrobe, dammit, and all because Grace had been taken to the goddamn fucking Moon.
The Edwards family had their own slightly small (read: cottage-like) home on a Moon estate roughly five miles from Five-0's combination living and working quarters. Stan already was paying a fortune for more workmen to come next month to add on to the home and make it much more palatial since Rachel and the kids were pretty well stuck there twenty-four/seven.
Grace attended her school back in Hawaii via satellite and was a hit with all the kids, a star now in her own right not any dimmer than the millions of other stars in space, Danny always assured her. They thought it was "so cool!" that Grace Williams was living on the Moon now, and she reported to them daily about what it was like.
It was boring.
Well, at least, for Danny it was.
Truth be told, it would've been a hell of a lot more boring had not his announcement in the bullpen one unhappy Wednesday morning resulted in – rather than a lot of unhappiness, incredulousness and "No fucking way, Danno!"'s – a fairly quick decision by Governor Denning, Lt. Cmdr. Steve McGarrett, Mr. and Mrs. Chin Ho Kelly, Kono Kalakaua, a big guy named Kamekona and a Medical Examiner named Max to…get this…follow Danny.
Somehow or other, within forty-eight hours of Danny's rather unbelievable announcement that he was leaving Five-0 not to go back to Jersey, but to go to space, McGarrett had convinced everyone from the Governor of Hawaii to the head coroner that Danny's entire ohana should join him up there.
Thus, Moon Five-0 was born.
And oh, boy, did Hawaii get one hell of a boost…which suited Governor Denning, the President of the United States and Hawaiians just fine, thanks much. And all because of the stepfather of the daughter of a guy who liked New Jersey better than Hawaii. Go figure. Hawaii not only now had the Claim to Fame of establishing the one and only police presence on the Moon…which would follow Hawaiian laws no matter who its members might arrest for wrongdoing…it also boasted the one and only Medical Examiner for the entirety of the thing, and also was the first entity to open a fast food joint, appropriately dubbed Kamekona's Out-Of-This-World Cuisine. Which, you know, Shrimp à la Dark Matter in and of itself wasn't all that bad a dish, truth be told.
Danny pulled on his work pants and his nice dark blue button-down shirt, then donned his shoes and hoped like hell today wouldn't be a day Five-0 would have to go outside to investigate something or provide security for something or – God forbid – chase after a bad guy of some sort.
There were plenty of people here on the surface of the Moon, now, with the last count Five-0 had done three weeks earlier marking eighty-nine international souls with eighteen more on various orbiting satellites or space stations. Since that census another eleven had joined the permanent residents with thirty-five workmen arriving a week ago to stay only as long as it took to do their jobs.
So Five-0 kept itself busy helping their home planet run background checks on every single solitary person before they were allowed to step foot (or rocket) anywhere near the Moon. They also patrolled on a twenty-four hour clock, keeping time with Hawaii's, which they forced all the Moon's inhabitants to do. It was kind of like Hawaii Extended which, you know, was weird to Danny but hey, if so far nobody had tried to blow them all up in protest of a United States state having everything their way, so be it.
After all, Hawaii had gotten there first. So why not?
Among the four Five-0 task force members, not much had changed. Steve still wore thigh holsters way more than was strictly necessary given that nobody else lived in or worked in or had access to the Five-0 headquarters/living base that was on the cusp of a nice, two-mile deep crater ("Danny, you can't fall into the crater, not with the way gravity works here!" "Steven, if anyone could fall into to something you shouldn't be able to fall into, it would be you!") except Max, who had an office, a room of his own and an autopsy bay with a small six-drawer freezer for dead bodies.
Max who, God bless his heart, soul and gizzard, was so ridiculously happy to be living out his Star Trek geekdom in Real Life that he was stupidly giddy the majority of the time and thus more difficult to comprehend than he'd ever been in Hawaii.
Kono and Steve kept up seriously scary workout routines together to keep their bodies in shape. Because while their HQ and living area had Earth gravity re-created, the same could not be said of the Moon itself. Nor of the other structures because it was up to each structure's owner whether they wanted the gravity to be altered or not ("No, Max, we are not going for Zero-G in our headquarters.").
Kono still partnered with Chin, whose lovely wife Malia had agreed to accompany him after her hospital had given her a generous grant to study the effects of the decreased gravity on the Moon on various types of cancer cells. She also did some double duty as a triage doctor whenever anyone was injured. In spite of the fact that there was no atmosphere on the Moon, and that the possibility always existed of people dying from compromised space suits and/or helmets, however, not a single solitary injury or death had occurred as yet since the colonization had begun. Steve credited it to Five-0's constant monitoring of Moon residents and their equipment.
Danny chalked it up to human self-preservation instincts.
Ah, Steve. And Danny. Still bickering. Still walking their bromantically-charged line. Still them, simply with a change of location. While Danny bemoaned the loss of his beloved Camaro, Steve attempted to make a Moonbuggy equivalent, enlisting Chevrolet's help to start the first line of Moon-specific (and sexy) vehicles to be sold to Moon residents.
Danny called him a goofball, but was inordinately touched.
And when Steve found out that bullets travel a helluva lot faster out of guns on the Moon due to the decreased gravity, he also began working with weapons manufacturers and the Navy to develop new weapons specifically for use on the Moon.
Danny called him a very frightening and disturbed man, but helped him test them out (of course he did).
But there was one thing…one goddamn thing that seemed to get worse and worse as the months on the Moon went by, and that was Steve's taste in music. Oh, he no longer subjected Danny to Sexy Eyes in the transport that took them from HQ to whatever structure, building, home or company they were visiting at any given moment. No. Now he was subjecting Danny to much much worse.
Like…Air Supply.
Can you imagine?
Air Supply!
Danny did a lot of facepalming early on when McGarrett produced a flash drive filled with mp3s on their first transport trip. But he very nearly tore his hair completely out ("I will be bald before I'm forty, Steven!") when Steve added The Carpenters to his repertoire. Because while Danny could get behind some Bruno Mars and tolerate Celine Dion to a point, The Carpenters was just…oh, God.
He wasn't quite sure why hearing Karen Carpenter sing grated on his nerves even more than Sexy Eyes ever did, but it gave Steve something to give him shit about, which gave Danny something to gripe back at him about, so all in all Danny called it a win.
So when he strode into their little bullpen filled to the brim with all manner of fancy technology in a small-scale re-creation of the one back in Iolani Palace, he had a fantastic quip all ready to go to start the day off right. It was sure to draw at least Aneurism Face from Steve and getting that first thing in the morning before coffee was a beautiful accomplishment for Detective Danny Williams.
"You know how she sings about moondust in that one song, babe?" Danny asked as the double-doors hissed closed behind him. But then he stopped short. Because Steve wasn't alone. Both Chin and Kono – who should've gone back to their rooms by now since they typically took the twelve hundred to twenty-four hundred hours shift – were gathered around the large computer table, and on the screen that filled the entirety of one of the room's walls was a very obviously dead-from-having-been-exposed-to-the-vacuum-of-space body.
Danny's joke about the moondust song died in his throat as his teammates turned sad eyes his way. "Who is it?" Danny whispered…because it was nearly impossible to tell given the puffiness and distorted features of the face in question.
"We don't know," Chin said. "Max ran the DNA against our entire Moon Resident Database and there's no match."
Danny moved closer to the screen, then looked away. Gray. Distended. Practically featureless. The face and body were gross. "Stowaway?" he asked.
"That's what it looks like, and it also looks like he was deliberately shoved out of an airlock without a helmet," Steve replied grimly.
"Our first murder on the Moon," Kono mourned.
"Stand down, guys, you need rest after going at this for over twelve hours. Danno and I will take over from here. Join us at oh-six hundred hours."
Kono and Chin nodded. Normally neither would just leave in the midst of an investigation. But unlike things had been in Honolulu, up here on the Moon there was no backup. They had only themselves, the four of them, and so they needed to be as well-rested as possible at all times, and rarely actually worked together at all anymore.
Danny strolled over to the coffee machine in the tiny kitchenette off one corner of the bullpen. "Where was our vic found?" he threw back over his shoulder as Kono and Chin exited the room.
"Just outside the new Edwards MoonEstate office that's being constructed eight miles from here."
Danny whipped around so fast he nearly spilled his mug of coffee everywhere. "Stan's offices?"
Steve nodded. "So guess who we're going to talk to first?"
Danny sighed. On would go the space suit today, he was sure of it. And he hated those space suits, because no matter what McGarrett said, after bouncing around the surface of the Moon for an hour (which even Danny had to admit was fun), he was convinced they did not keep moondust out of cracks and crevices that even sand feared to go.
"The suits are completely sealed, Danny. You'd be dead if they weren't."
"Then explain how I found this nasty gray stuff—"
"Whoa, whoa, whoa. I don't think I want to know where you found it, do I?"
"No. You probably don't."
"Thank you."
Oh, how he longed for the beaches of Hawaii…