Summary: Black and white and shades of gray, all in Danny's world. Tag to Episode 15: "Kai e'e," so spoilers!
BLACK AND WHITE
Danny's man enough to admit that he goes off his nut sometimes if the safety of his baby girl is in question. Okay, all right, he goes off his nut pretty bad. Acts like a little bitch, Steve told him, though he also said he didn't mind because he understood.
Still, Danny hadn't appreciated being called a 'bitch' even so.
What the hell was wrong with him, he was a professional. He prided himself on professional appearance, professional attitude, and professional behavior at all times on the job and hell, even most times off it.
But today of all days, when the tsunami was going to hit, when he'd had to work instead of stay right at his little girl's side to protect her...when he'd had to leave her with someone who, yeah, was a good enough person, but who was nothing if not a shady character just by virtue of everything he was into that he shouldn't be. Not to mention his rap sheet.
The lines were blurring, and they were blurring bad. Danny was…well, he was a black-and-white kind of guy. Everything was black and white, always, in Danny's world, back in New Jersey. He was a good cop, not a bad cop. He was professional, not sloppy. His daughter was his life, he loved his wife and he was going to grow old and die in New Jersey where he'd been born.
Then Rachel. And Stan. And Grace. And fucking Hawaii.
The second his beloved child disappeared into the airport destined for somewhere way too far away to make frequent visits feasible, Danny's black and white world suddenly held a tint of gray. And yet he'd singlehandedly gone and turned that gray right back into the black and white it should've been. Black: stay in Jersey and rarely see his daughter. White: move umpteen thousands of miles away so he could be part of her life more than just over the phone.
So everything had gone back to black and white for Danny again.
He had a job as a detective, which he was good at, but he was an outsider on that godforsaken island. He was getting cases and solving them, not wallowing and beating the shit out of a perp just to take out his frustrations. He was given a high-profile case involving the murder of a former cop, which he knew he would solve like he had every other case he'd been given.
And then he'd met Steve McGarrett. Suddenly, black and white were distant dreams.
Not your case anymore, it's mine, because I have the governor on speed dial. You're going to help me on this case whether you like it or not. I don't give a shit if you don't like me. I do things the SEAL way, not the cop way. I am so not like anyone you have ever met before in your life that I, myself, am one big, gigantic blob of gray just to fuck with you.
Yeah, that was his life now, and his life included things like people falsifying tsunami readings, and stealing money from long-ago drug busts and finding out that somehow all ten million they'd stolen, that had been burned to ashes by Hesse, was all present and accounted for. He'd been ready to face the music with the rest of Five-O; he and Chin and Kono had Steve's back, no matter what.
And see, that right there was the one thing Danny simply could not reconcile. He had been willing to be labeled a dirty cop…willing to be jailed, to be stripped of his badge and gun…willing to have to look Grace in the eye and tell her he'd broken the very law he'd sworn to uphold the day he'd graduated the police academy.
It was the biggest wall of gray Danny had ever run into in his life. There was no more black and white. Those two colors simply didn't exist anymore. Now it was gray in varying shades from almost-black to almost-white and thousands of permutations in between.
So sitting here tonight in his apartment, trying to understand how the hell ten million dollars appeared out of thin air, Danny still felt like being a bitch, even as he watched his daughter sleep soundly on her side of the foldout. Danny felt like tearing the island apart until he dug out all the answers about Steve McGarrett, about his father, about the toolbox contents, about the ten million, about why every single day he was so willing to risk the entire reason he was in Hawaii to begin with for some guy he hadn't even known existed a year ago.
There was a soft knock. Danny rose to his feet and cracked the door open. Looking quickly back at Grace, he stepped outside and whispered, "What are you doing here?"
"Sorry," his partner said, and sincerely looked like he meant it. "I know you have Grace this weekend."
"Yeah, not counting the hours she had to sit with Kamekona and his wack-job friends while we chased down…no, you know what, I don't even want to think about today anymore."
Danny looked up into his partner's eyes and couldn't quite tell in the dim light from the corner of his building what those eyes were saying. He sighed loudly, turned and opened his door, and waved Steve inside. He beckoned him to the tiny hall and gestured for him to enter the small bathroom.
Then Danny entered and shut the door behind them, finishing the whole thing by flicking the light switch on. Steve blinked slowly, both of them allowing the glare to dull enough to where they could actually see again.
"Why are we in your bathroom?" Steve whispered.
"Because it's the only actual 'room' I have in this place, and Grace is asleep out there," Danny whispered back, waving in the general direction of the pull-out. "Now, what's got you here at," Danny checked his watch, "nearly midnight on a Saturday?"
Steve ran a hand through his hair, then pressed the heels of both hands into his eye sockets. "I can't stop thinking about that ten million dollars, Danny."
"I know, I know," Danny said with a sympathetic nod. "I can't either."
Steve rubbed his eyes and refocused on Danny. "Ten mil doesn't just appear out of thin air."
"No shit."
"I'm at a loss. I thought maybe…I don't know. You're so good at seeing things a certain way, like everyting's black and white with no in-between."
Danny's eyebrows rose. Seriously, what was McGarrett, psychic?
"With me, everything is so fucked up, it's all varying shades of gray. I can't mute any of it, can't sort through it well enough to find that one fact, that one little thing that'll tell me hey, here's your answer." Realizing he was rambling, Steve ducked his head in mild embarrassment. "I need you for that."
Steve thought Danny was still black and white. He could hardly wrap his head around that one. "You are so wrong, my friend, you just don't have a clue how wrong you are."
"What?"
"The day I met you, I lost all my black and white. Sure, I can still find the truth, but in the presence of one Lieutenant Commander Steven J. McGarrett, black and white cease to exist entirely."
Steve rolled his eyes, but failed to keep the corners of his mouth from lifting in amusement. "You are such a bitch."
"Yeah," Danny said, reaching out and punching him in the arm, "but I'm your bitch." Steve almost choked on the guffaw that threatened to escape his lips. "You tell anyone else I said that and I'll throw you into an active volcano." He turned to open the bathroom door.
"Your secret's safe with me, but…Danny?"
"Mm?" Danny froze when he felt Steve's hand on his shoulder. But his muscles relaxed when Steve squeezed gently and said, "Thanks for having my back today."
Danny turned, craning his neck to look up at his partner and shrugged the shoulder without Steve's hand on it. "I either have your back or I don't. I'm your partner, so…" His voice trailed off as he shrugged again.
"No shades of gray?"
Suddenly the pieces fell into place for Danny. Gray disappeared. Completely. Gone, just like that. Black was back. White was back. He grinned up at Steve. "Not a single gray in sight."
He left Steve with a lopsided, mystified smile and went out to check on his daughter. Huh. No more gray at all.
Well, bitch or not, Danny wasn't really surprised. He'd always been a black-and-white kind of guy, after all.