Summary: Grief is the price you pay for love. Or, four times Steve lost someone and one time he didn't.

Word count: ~3500

Disclaimer: Not mine.

THE MAN WHO WOULDN'T BEG

badacts

Denial (Dial Tone)

Hesse hangs up on Steve screaming abuse down the line. It doesn't stop him. For a moment, Steve is afraid that he can't stop. All he can really make out is the thunder of his heart echoing through his body and the jarring insistence of the phone bleeping in his ear.

Steve remembers this part – he remembers the shock of it, the numbness that has to give way eventually. Apparently, this sort of thing doesn't change no matter what age you are.

As a commanding officer, Steven McGarrett has walked people into the line of fire before. He's ordered people to their deaths, effectively – but never like this.

Walking away from Anton Hesse's corpse is like walking through hell itself; bodies strewn everywhere, a silence interrupted only by the dull roar of flames. For the moment, Steve has other things to think about, enough that he can force down everything building in the cavity of his chest. He puts through a distress call to his superiors on the satellite phone, rallies his men, does what he can, because he has enough to worry about without letting that in too.

There's nothing but action until he is sitting in the helo, deaf to the conversation of his team in his ears through the headset. And action is easier, so much easier than this; since he was sixteen, Steve has run to forget. This is no different.

Maybe you can't outrun everything and you sure as shit can't run until you forget the pain, either. But if you don't stop you can at least blitz it from your memory for the time being, replace it with a rapid-fire heart and each indrawn breath. Steve is too good at it, so much that he can't bear right now to be still and deal with this.

All he can think is, no. No, this can't be happening, not again, no, no. There's a limit to how many times you can face a loss of this magnitude and survive it, and if it's really happening – no – then this might be the time that Steve shatters.

Anger (A Hit You Can't Roll With)

At sixteen, Steve is taller than most of the other boys in his year by a few inches. He's slight, though: lean and quick, a runner's build rather than a fighter's.

Apparently that doesn't matter.

What does matter is the fact that his mother is gone. Steve can't deal with that, can't face it. He sat through her funeral between his father and Mary-Ann, and there was such a distance between the three of them that he couldn't even touch them when they cried.

Mary had sat in silence, fat tears dripping down her cheeks and her face dead-set and expressionless like she never is. Their father had sobbed, twice: no tears, just a choking, rough sound. Steve had thought, completely detached, that they must have hurt in his throat. All he could feel was the distant ache of his short breaths, the dulled bite of his nails cutting into his palms to the point of bleeding.

He longs a little for that numbness now, when every fibre of his body is white-hot with rage. He is too aware of every slight, every misstep, every word people say to him. He isn't the kind of kid to shut down – Steve is used to the aloha lifestyle, easy and with no shame of emotional expression. He knows that this isn't same thing, that it isn't right that he feels this way, but that knowledge doesn't make the anger any easier to tamp down.

In the end, what it brings it to a head isn't even to do with him – it's Mary, who has the beauty and the attitude of a girl far older. He can't hurt her, for all it's her fault, because he hasn't even been able to touch her for too long. Instead it turns into punches and kicks, broken bones and blood on the asphalt, when boys Steve's own age would touch his sister instead.

The violence might be alien to him, but that isn't to say he isn't good it. Afterwards, standing in the coach's office with bruises across his kidneys and his hair matted with clotting blood, he doesn't hesitate to accept the man's offer.

He wants to learn to fight, because somehow everything – surfing, football, everything – fails to be as cathartic.

Bargaining (Bring the Ceiling Down)

It's the hardest thing Steve has done in too many years, putting Mary on that plane. For one thing, it makes him the kind of man his father was, the sort that he had sworn he would never be. And maybe he understands why his dad did it, now, but he can't quite find it within himself to forgive the years where he felt pushed aside and unwanted.

It's hard, feeling like that about a man you loved, a man who died because of you. If Danny says that he has daddy issues, then at least Steve can say he has a good reason for them.

Steve has lost enough by anyone's standards – he wouldn't call himself a man who puts a price on lives, but Mary is one thing that he isn't prepared to pay for. His team – they're different, trained and just as dangerous as he is in their own ways, and while he can't afford their loss either, he thinks that he at least might live through it.

Or not. Sometimes he frightens himself, thinking that he wouldn't mind if he didn't.

It's a sacrifice, sending his sister all but out of reach when they've just reconnected, but it's hardly the biggest he has made in his life. He'll take a plane ride, a long-distance phone call, any day over putting his last family member into the ground.

A little pain he can deal with. He has had broken bones, bullet wounds, been all but tortured to death in three excruciating days he'd spent in enemy hands. He won't earn the Purple Heart for this wound, but he won't bleed out from it either.

There have been plenty of times where Steve has thought that he couldn't go on.

He hasn't been right, yet.

Depression (Drowned at Sea)

Betrayal, more than anything else, wears Steve to the bone.

And okay, sure, it's not the first time this has happened to him. It's not even remotely the first. That knowledge doesn't lessen the sting of it, the unsteady ache in his belly along with the fragile burn of the wounds on his body. He's been stitched up, walked the crime scene techies through his house so they could admire the new collection of bullet holes, talked everything out with the powers that be.

Now he's shaking with exhaustion, hands fluttering delicately against his sides. The people in his house will be there for several hours yet and he just needs to sleep, but even the process of checking into a hotel seems impossibly hard.

And it's such a frightening relief when Kono comes down the stairs, takes one look at him and pulls him by the wrist out the front door. She slings one slim arm carefully over his shoulders like he might bolt. "Come on, brah. You can crash at mine tonight, yeah?"

Steve knows that Kono's apartment isn't really made for more than one, but it's a crazy comfort to let her load him into her car, to give over control for a moment when his head won't stop spinning. She doesn't let him drift on the car ride, her voice keeping him away from that single moment on the beach, from the flash of his K-BAR and from the easy dominance of his more wild side. Steve might not speak back, doesn't have the words for it, but he is impossibly grateful.

They end up on her couch together, Kono folded up in one corner with a light blanket draped over her and Steve sprawled at the other. The TV is on but the volume is low, a concession for the adrenaline in Steve's body which even now makes everything seem an overload. He can recognise the state he's in from harder missions than this one – the jitters that will turn into shakes, the slightly-spaced awareness of every single stimulus that will become distant before he fades into exhausted sleep.

Not that he can really call this easy, in any sense of the word. His body is telling him about the strain of fighting someone equal to his skill, who knows him too well. At the same time he's rigid with the – the emotional aspect of all of this. Maybe admitting just that is as far as he'll go towards dealing with it, but it's better than denial.

They've been sitting there for maybe an hour when there is a light knock at the door and Chin lets himself in. Danny is behind him – bitching under his breath, like usual. Something relaxes inside of Steve that he hadn't even realised was taut, now that his team is together in one place.

Danny drops onto the couch between Steve and Kono, pressed against Steve from shoulder to knee. He is warm and welcome there, with all his easy charisma. Chin takes the one other chair, relaxed like you would never imagine when you see him on the job. And Steve knows that he might not sleep tonight. He knows that he might not be right – be alright – for a while, with this weight a chain about his throat. He knows, though, that these people – his people – are all he needs to keep any darkness within the bounds of his body at bay.

Acceptance (All In, All Over)

Steve has been tortured before, more than once. It's not the same when you're the one making yourself bleed, administering the electric shocks to your own flesh, keeping your own head under the water until you can't do anything but breathe it in.

He calls Cath too late a couple of nights after he gets out of Halawa. And maybe they've slept together, but they've been friends for far longer than they've been intimate, so it's not completely out of the question that she can offer him some kind of comfort.

Except her voice is stiff, reminding Steve that everything is different now. One slip and he let his entire Naval career smash like so much fine china, leaving the mess strewn at his feet.

Steve, who has spent his entire life being on the border of care and recklessness – there isn't a grey area, as far as he can tell – took one measured step to the wrong side of the line that night. He is still learning of the repercussions of that action even now, still taking the hits he put himself in the way of in his own bloody-mindedness.

He says, "I get it," over Cat's spiel about some colleague's funny slip on the job, cutting her dead. "I get the message."

"I don't know that you do yet, Steve." Her voice is a shade too soft. "But you will. It's not…it's not personal. I still respect and care for you as much as I always have. But I don't know that we can do this anymore."

Steve realises, with a flash of clarity, that he can accept that. He has already sold it all for his chance, but he can't ask the same of her. Catherine loves her job, lives for it, a feeling that he can relate to. And it's not just that, either – Steve likes Cat, maybe a little more than that, but he can live without knowing her when the cost of the alternative is so great.

Steve met Catherine at a time in his life where loss was all he was familiar with, where loving someone is the same as surrendering your heart to the executioner. He never lost that habit of holding her at arm's length even when they shared a bed, even when he found the people who have made him who he is now and who seem intent on holding him just as tight as he can hold them.

"Okay," he says, equally gentle. Her outward breath sounds relieved even over the phone line. "Good luck, Cat. I mean it."

Her last words to him – the parting shot – are, "stay out of trouble, McGarrett. At least try."

Recovery (Raze and Rebuild Me)

Steve comes awake with his teeth sunk into his bottom lip, split reopened to bleed down his face. That doesn't matter: all that matters is that he stays quiet, silent, because if he makes a noise he'll bring them down on him. The blood doesn't matter, and neither do the tears trickling into his hairline, as long as he doesn't – make – a sound –

Then his logical brain kicks his dream to the curb, the pain overcoming his blind terror, every battered muscle screaming for relief from his adrenaline-fueled rigidity. Steve is out of bed before he can think it through, and then down even faster – he'd forgotten the nasty gash on the sole of his right foot until his weight was on it, the wicked twist to his ankle from where he'd collapsed in the emergency room back in Honolulu.

The indignity is almost more than he can bear right now. There is only so much he can take, which why he stays on the floor with his head ducked. Steve has been through worse than a little torture, has the scars to prove it. It's a real pity that he can't seem to convince his subconscious of that.

"Hey, buddy." Speaking of indignities – Steve had forgotten about Danny. His partner has gone from aggravating, argumentative flatmate to overly-solicitious minder in the space of a few days, and Steve can't even look him in the eye for fear of seeing pity there.

He's a wreck. It's not like he doesn't know that. He just doesn't want to be handled, doesn't want anything from the people he loves when he can only apparently offer them the chance to get themselves killed for him in return. Steve isn't sure that he can forgive himself for that.

"Come on, McGarrett," Danny chides a little. "Up on the bed and let's see what you've done to yourself this time."

"It's nothing," Steve lisps over the lip that is already swelling up again, swiping at the tracks on his cheeks over the blood. Danny slaps his fist away and grabs a warm washcloth instead, and Steve would never in a million years admit how good it feels to close his eyes and let Danny wipe it all away.

It takes the both of them to get him back onto the mattress, like gravity is acknowledging the fact that sleep apparently doesn't agree with Steve right now. Danny is muttering the whole time, specifics all but drowned out by the rebellion of Steve's body, but it says too much about him that the constant sound is a comfort rather than an annoyance.

"I didn't fall hard," Steve supplies in a mutter as Danny gently tests his strapped ribs and stitches, making sure that everything is still where it belongs.

"I figured as much, seeing as you're at least just sickly white, not either grey or green." It's gratifying, really, that his 'faces' now apparently can be categorised by his skin tone. "Either way, if there's any internal bleeding I should worry about, I'd like to know about it now that I'm up."

"You don't have to get up every time I so much as make a noise." Bed rest turns Steve into an asshole, he knows this. Knowledge, however, isn't enough to make him stop. "I survived for thirty-four years before I met you."

Danny lets go of him at that, and Steve, who hadn't even realised the detective had his hands on him, misses the touch immediately. "Gee, I'm so sorry that the idea of leaving you lying on the floor in enough pain to make you cry is unappetising. Next time I hear you hit the decks, I'll make sure to leave you to manfully get yourself upright, possibly damaging yourself even further in the process. In fact, maybe I'll just move out – I'm sure Chin and Kono would appreciate me a lot more, and I would have the advantage of not having to listen to you pretend like you aren't hurting."

"I never said it didn't hurt!" Steve yells, feeling his ribcage protest that breath he has to take to get kind of volume. "Jesus, Danny, just because I don't bitch doesn't mean I'm not in pain!"

"That's not what I mean!" Danny shouts, and Steve has to look at him after that. The shorter man looks ruffled and wild-eyed, as well as so despondent that Steve's heart quivers in sympathy. It isn't a feeling that he is familiar with.

Danny makes himself pause with visible effort, swallowing convulsively before he speaks again. "I'm not talking about how your body hurts, Steve, okay, I mean I don't know that I can stand to stay down the hall and pretend like you aren't tearing yourself apart on the inside over all of this. And I trust you more than anyone, but I feel like we're going to round out this year with you eating a bullet because you can't let any of this shit out."

"Danny," Steve says, helpless, feeling abruptly like all the lights are dimming overhead. It's a sensation he usually associates more with blood loss than yelling, like he might just keel over with too much more of a push. He wants to say, you can't really believe that of me. Not the man who looks at him with so much affection, with such warmth and protectiveness and something more that Steve doesn't dare read into.

Steve wants to say that his demons don't haunt him like that, or he never would have lived this long. He wants to say that he would never be so selfish, that he wouldn't put the people he loves through that. However, what actually emerges from his mouth is, "don't go."

This is too hard. Steve can say with certainty that he has never lost his control like this before, never lost his struggling heart so entirely, and it's all he can do to stop before he is damaged irreparably. He'll take what he can get – if Danny doesn't want him that way, he'll at least have the man under his roof.

Danny turns his head to look into the middle distance, huffing out a pinched breath. Steve doesn't think he has ever seen his partner look so tired, which is saying something in and of itself.

"I don't really intend to leave," he replies after a long, chilling minute. "But I'm hoping that you could at least do the both of us the courtesy of figuring out why you really want me to stay."

His tone and his eyes, when he meets Steve's gaze, are challenging. Steve swallows a little and then opens his mouth, hoping that just this once he can find the right words. He feels sharp-edged and dangerous on the inside – he is a jagged mess of guilt, frustration and misplaced anger. It's no wonder, really, that Danny thinks him an animal gone crazy with the agony of this.

He isn't really wrong.

"I love you," Steve says, raw and rough and honest, because he isn't much to offer: a body that has betrayed him thoroughly, a mind which is mostly tactics and determination, and a heart that even Steve knows is fragile. This is more proof of Steve's recklessness, sure, but he hopes that Da nny will appreciate it this once.

After a long moment, the shorter man smiles. "Sometimes you surprise me, babe. I'm not sure how, but you do."

The relief is bone-melting: Steve can only lie there looking up at his partner, half-stupified. It is a testament to the kind of man he is that Danny shakes his head, his mouth quirking into a soft, unsteady smile.

"Yeah, I know. I know." He sits on the edge of the bed, making Steve slide into him a little. His hand runs warm and gentle along Steve's scalp. "Sleep, 'kay? Even SEALs need a little shut-eye sometimes."

Steve wants to protest that all he has done lately is sleep, but the words never make it out of his mouth. Danny's hands on him are a little too soothing, especially when he cups a palm over Steve's eyes so he can't keep them open. That's all it takes for Steve to fade out , and the fact that he knows Danny will still be there when he wakes.

And the echo of those three words out of Danny's mouth, the last thing he hears? That is just the icing on the cake.

badacts