Disclaimer: I do not own the characters of this work of fiction and am making no profit through the writing of it.
A/N: This piece is a heavy. I wrote it for the prompt, listening to the rain on the window, from the 365 prompts challenge hosted by Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. While Steve and Danny do end up sharing a bed (Steve comforting Danny) it can be read as platonic, or slash (that is completely up to the reader).
Warning: Features the aftermath of a school shooting in which the shooter takes his own life. Does have graphic depictions of that death as remembered by Danny.
Danny can't sleep.
It's raining.
The sound of the rain as it beats against the window should be soothing.
It isn't.
He can hear Mother Nature's symphony - the tympanic section in particular, a rat-a-tat-tat - and finds no sympathy for his sleepless plight beyond the four walls of his bedroom. There is no sympathy there either; for even the walls are closing in on him, as they often do at night.
The rainwater drips down the windows, Danny can see it even through the blinds, courtesy of the streetlamp that illuminates the walk out front. It makes him think of blood and brain matter. Of children playing hopscotch near a cemetery. Of dodging bullets on the playground.
Shadows creep across the floor every time a car drives by, they cast themselves on the walls, and recreate childhood monsters.
There's nothing lurking under the bed or in the closet, he reminds himself, though his heart races even so and there's the headless horseman; Frankenstein's monster; his dead best friend come back for him as a zombie, arms outstretched, mouth agape leaking briny water and spitting out dead fish, milky white eyes open and unseeing.
A streak of lightning - jagged and forked - paints itself in white and purple against the blinds in his window, lighting up his room for one, two...frozen heartbeats
Thunder booms - a loud clash of cymbals that shake the house; a gunshot shattering a child's femur - and Danny's reaching, pawing, like a blind man, for his phone.
Heart in his throat, fingers thick as sausages, Danny fumbles to unlock his phone and bites his lip when his sigh of relief sounds more like a sob.
Swallowing, Danny sits up and stares at his phone. Steve, Grace and Charlie stare back at him from a recent picture that he'd taken during a visit to the beach.
It's sunny. Steve's got an arm draped over Grace's shoulders and Charlie's clinging to his side like a monkey - arms wrapped around Steve's neck, legs wrapped around his middle.
All three of them are smiling, open and carefree. Palm trees tower above them, and the ocean's to their right.
It's a perfect moment.
A happy slice of life.
A calm before the storm that had been their week of hell at Five-0. The reason for Danny's latest tango with insomnia. The reason he can't sleep. The reason the monsters of his childhood and teen years are coming out of the woodwork, slipping through the cracks in his blinds, hiding in his closet, hunkering beneath the bed.
With fingers that are all thumbs, lightning and thunder punctuating his stilted movements playing like a lightshow orchestra in the background, Danny manages to type out what he hopes is a semi-coherent message to Steve and almost deletes it.
He's an adult. He's a detective. He's dealt with this kind of thing before. He's seen...not worse...but things that have been just as bad. It shouldn't bother him. Shouldn't waken childhood fears and guilt. Shouldn't make him hear monsters and the retorts of gunshots in the thunder and the relentless rain that beats against his window just because this time it's a child whose brains were splattered all over the window panes of a middle school. A child who'd pulled the trigger to end multiple lives before taking his own, wounding dozens. There'd been so much blood. A river of blood.
Just call me if you want me to come over, Steve had said when they'd left work for home. No matter what time it is. Call me and I'll come.
Danny blinks back tears of frustration and deletes half of the message that he hasn't sent before he settles on two simple words, Can't sleep, and presses the send button before he can stop himself.
Holding his breath, Danny closes his eyes and tries to occupy his mind with something that isn't blood or death, something that doesn't bring that child back to life with a gaping, seeping head wound and soulless eyes. It doesn't work, and Danny lets out another sob of relief when he hears a ping.
Me either
And then another ping.
Already on my way
A bark of hysterical laughter escapes him, and Danny scrubs a hand down his face. Super Steve to the rescue, he thinks.
He pulls up the pictures on his phone and scrolls through every photograph that he's got of Grace, Charlie and Steve at the beach the day before his hellish week started. He's not in a single one of the pictures, save for the distorted shape of his shadow in a few of them, but it's almost better that way, seeing the people that he loves smiling back at him. It's almost like being back there. Almost like sitting under the palm trees, basking in the cool breeze that carries the laughter of children and the subtle scent of coconut from tourists lathered in sunscreen.
Danny misses that day. Misses the days before he knew the reality of children killing children. Hearing about it is not the same as seeing it firsthand, of watching it play out in slow motion over and over again, unable to stop it each subsequent time that it replays itself in memories. Danny'd tried to stop it. Tried to sympathize and reason, but the kid, just thirteen, his whole life ahead of him, hadn't listened. He'd smiled at Danny - beautific and filled with peace - and then pulled the trigger, cutting Danny off mid-word.
Danny can still see the spray of blood, the way the boy's head had both exploded and caved in, the way the gun had dropped from the boy's hands a few seconds later, body slumping, eyes still open, mouth lax in death.
"Danny?" Steve's there, sliding into bed, pulling Danny into a warm, solid embrace.
"I'm sorry," Danny says, and he's not sure who it is that he's apologizing to - Steve, for bothering the man at two in the morning, or the kid that he'd not been able to talk down, the boy he'd lost.
"Nothing to be sorry for," Steve says.
Danny buries his face against Steve's chest, and for the first time in a long time, he weeps. It's not a silent, composed sort of crying; it's loud and awful and messy. And when he's regained a few of his faculties an indeterminable amount of time later, Danny realizes that he isn't alone in his weeping, that Steve's tears - quiet, unlike his own - are gathering in his hair and wetting the back of his neck.
When they're both cried out, eyes red and puffy, noses stuffy, Steve lies down, pulling Danny with him. Danny rests his head on Steve's chest, his friend's steady heartbeat a calming tympani that drowns out that of the rain.
"It wasn't your fault," Steve says, knowing what's on Danny's mind without having to ask. He's rubbing Danny's back in hypnotic circles that ease some of the tension that's held Danny in a vice all week long.
"I know," Danny says, though his heart is telling him otherwise and he's still running what-if scenarios in his mind, trying to find one that will end with the kid still alive, that smile on his face caught in a photograph, rather than being shattered by a bullet and trapped forever within Danny's memory. It had taken hours to wash away the blood, the memory of it was still there.
"I just...I keep seeing him, you know, and thinking-"
"Stop thinking," Steve says. "You did everything that you could. It wasn't your fault."
Maybe with enough repetitions, Danny will start to believe Steve's words, but not now, not when it's still a raw wound.
"Sleep," Steve says, hand moving to massage Danny's neck.
And eventually - the steady beat of Steve's heart an anchor that keeps his mind from rewinding the day and returning to the horror of it - he does just that.