Title: Dog Tags
Summary: It may not be a dog tag, but it still meant the same thing.
Disclaimer: Hawaii Five-0 is not mine. I'm just borrowing the concepts and characters for a little while.
Spoilers: 2.10 Ki'ilua
A/N: A missing scene from ep 2.10. I'm pretty sure I'm going to need you to suspend your disbelief a little for some parts of this story…
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Thankfully he's not had to do this too many times during all his years in the Navy. Each time he has had to do it, he knows it means another family has lost a spouse, sibling, or parent. That he's lost a teammate and friend.
This time though, he knows the circumstances are different, but the act still feels the same and the result is still the same. A teammate is dead and a loved one is not coming home to their family and friends.
ooooooo
The first time he'd had to do it, it was in a desert country that he's barely even allowed to think the name of anymore. It had been a black ops-type mission, the kind where your dog tags only included a number and a blood group. The kind of mission where if you died, the family was informed it was due to a training accident and an empty casket was buried.
As they were retreating, an IED had taken out LTJG Hunt. All that had been left of him was the ragged and bloodied mess of the upper half of his body. Due to the nature of the mission, all Steve had time to do was shut Morgan's eyes and take one of the two dog tags still miraculously around his neck.
Maybe someday the Navy would be able to get his teammate's body back home to his family, but he highly doubted it.
ooooooo
The next time had been in some jungle. He's not positive what his team's location had been at the time so he wasn't exactly sure which country they'd been in at that moment. He just knew how long and in what direction they'd been retreating from the kidnappers' camp.
This mission had been a fully sanctioned rescue op. When they'd finally reached their target, Steve had been surprised to find more civilians than they'd originally been briefed about. There were five extra civilians, including three very young children. It would be a tight fit on the extraction helo, and Steve worried about the added weight versus the amount of fuel on board. He hoped that his team wouldn't have to be left behind to fend for themselves until another helicopter could come for them, if it could come for them.
His team had gotten the civilians out safely, but as they'd retreated to their extraction point, PO2 Matteson, who had been covering their six, had been gunned down in a hail of bullets – one of which had managed to find its way through his flak vest.
Steve and his lieutenant, Rodgers, had managed to grab their injured teammate and carry him away, but Matteson had died before their way out could arrive. The pilot had regretfully said that they needed to leave their fallen comrade behind or they wouldn't make it back to base due to the unexpected additional weight.
It was a tough decision, but Steve knew for a fact that Jerry would rather have all the civilians rescued and all his team make it back than his corpse be brought back home. He'd done his best to hide the body so the enemy wouldn't desecrate it, taken one of the tags, and hopped onto to the helicopter.
He had been deployed on another mission when another SEAL team had gone to recover the body.
ooooooo
This time wasn't the third time nor even, he was sure, the last time he would ever have to do this.
The circumstances were different, yet the action itself felt all too familiar.
This time it was not a fellow sailor or soldier, but someone he had once considered a friend and teammate. A friend who'd betrayed him in order to save her fiancé.
He couldn't blame her – he'd do anything to save Danny, Chin, Kono, Grace or anyone else he considered family – but he knew forgiveness would take much longer.
What he didn't understand was why she hadn't come to him for help before things had gotten so out of hand. And maybe, just maybe, things could've ended differently if she had come to him. That Jenna and her fiancé, Josh, wouldn't both be dead and lying abandoned in some concrete bunker right now.
After he'd freed himself from his chains, he'd gone over to Jenna, knowing she was dead before he'd even approached, but checking anyway.
Her last words ('Not for nothing.') and the subsequent gunfire from Wo Fat's gun reverberated through his aching head as he painfully crouched down.
He lifted a throbbing arm towards Jenna's face and closed her eyes. Then, just as he was about to lever himself up from the ground, his eyes catch sight of the cross she'd been wearing around her neck this entire time. He was surprised one of Wo Fat's men hadn't taken it away from her.
Steve didn't even think about what he was doing. He simply grasped the tiny cross and its chain in his still slightly numbed hand and pulled. The chain easily broke and the cross glittered in the dim light of the room as it lay in his filthy hand.
As he carefully, but quickly stood up, he shoved Jenna's cross into one of this cargo pants pockets and headed out of the room.
He couldn't remember for sure right now because of all the blows he'd recently had to his head, but Steve thought he recalled Jenna mentioning some family (a sibling?) somewhere on the Mainland.
It wasn't a dog tag, but it still symbolized the same thing.
Someone's loved one was not coming home.
ooooooo
The end.
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A/N: As I finished typing this, I thought – Wow, that's really depressing… My apologies for that.
Thanks for reading!