Trust
Summary: Things between Steve and Catherine end in a bad way after he finds out that she's been withholding information on his mother. That should have been it, but neither had counted on fate to keep dragging them back.
Pairings: Steve/Catherine, some OCs mixed in for a little (or a lot of) drama and misunderstandings, maybe some Danny/Gabby, Kono/Adam
Chapter 2: Broken
They'd had the place surrounded for a while now. Everyone was in position waiting for a signal from Five-0 to rush the residents, and get the kids held inside to safety. Unfortunately, their Intel was mediocre at best, and the team was hesitant to have cops storm in as that could put the victims into harm's way. They'd requested infrared cameras, but the imagery wasn't exactly helpful as it consisted merely of an indistinguishable mass of mostly red and yellow. It was simply impossible to distinguish singular persons from a ground view. They needed eagle-eye perspective imagery, and they knew it.
Which is why Danny had been watching Steve staring at his phone for the last couple of minutes without touching a single key. His friend's normally stoic face displayed a myriad of emotions in that short time that washed over it so quickly that Danny was starting to get whiplash, even though he couldn't manage to follow them all. He raised an eyebrow at the man who debated calling his not-girlfriend for minutes on end, and wondered not for the first time what he'd done to screw up so badly that he couldn't even type in her number.
"What's it with you lately?", he finally asked, unable to hold it in any longer. Steve's gaze raised to meet his. "Any other time you would have called Ramboette ages ago, so what's the big fuss now? What have you done? It can't be that your weekend with her got blown up by a case again, 'cause she must be used to that by now."
"Danny..."
"Come to think of it, you've been off for a while now. Ever since she got that surprise call back to the Enterprise, and left in the middle of her leave. Don't tell me you can't stand it when duty calls her for a change?!"
Steve's gaze slid back down to the phone in his hand, and he caressed his thumb over it carefully. Danny's other eyebrow joined its partner near his hairline. The expression on SuperSEAL's face was somewhere between anger and guilt, an expression he'd seen on the man's face quite a lot recently, but had never been able to place. Figured it had something to do with his Navy lady, and Danny was suddenly overcome by suspicion. Not only had Steve not called her to get Intel for this case, he'd not talked about her at all. That wouldn't have been all that concerning as his friend was a very private person, but he'd also been even more focused on his work lately, more willing to take risks, more reckless. Danny had simply assumed he was upset about Catherine having to leave before her vacation was over, but...
"That is why she left, right? Right?!", Danny asked almost desperately. When Steve didn't answer, he felt like cursing. What had the Neanderthal done now?! Just as Danny opened his mouth to ask exactly that, Steve finally decided to brave whatever storm he knew was coming, and dialed. Danny's breath got stuck in his throat, but he scrambled for the phone, and put it on speaker anyway. This he needed to hear, no matter how much SuperSEAL glared at him. Said man was about to turn the telephone loudspeaker off again when the connection clicked, and Catherine's voice reached them through the line.
"No."
Danny closed his eyes. One word from her was enough to tell him how bad things had gone between Steve and Catherine.
"Cath, I need thermal imagery of a warehouse. I wouldn't call if it weren't important," Steve told her quietly.
"Are you trying to get me court-martialed?", she retorted with a snort. "Anyway, I already said no. Naval Intelligence is not your personal source of information, and I'm not your secretary."
Steve closed his eyes.
"Cath, please..."
"And don't call me 'Cath', we're not that close anymore. Or at all; you made that perfectly clear the last time we spoke," she chided coldly. "You showed me the door without even giving me a chance to answer to your accusations. As justified as your anger was, I don't think I deserved to have to force you to listen to me before being thrown out, and I don't think I deserved to be manhandled either. No news from you afterward, you wouldn't even answer my calls, and now you want a favor. You don't get to call me for favors."
She didn't hang up after her rant, which Steve thought very lucky. He sighed loudly, and ran a hand over his face, and through his hair in frustration. He could feel Danny's gaze burning into him full of concern, anger and questions. Mostly questions. They were definitely talking about this later, but right now the children were more important. He had to convince Catherine to do him one last favor to save the kids.
"Catherine, listen, please... We've surrounded a warehouse where an auction is about to go off. A human auction. They're selling girls and young women to rich business men from overseas. We've got infrared cameras, but we can't distinguish bidders and kidnappers from the victims. They just appear as one big lump of color. Please, we need satellite imagery."
He inhaled deeply, waiting for her answer. As the silence stretched he could almost see her bite her lip in contemplation. The thought of kids being sold as slaves would make anyone pause and think twice, but he also knew that he was asking her a lot. Even leaving out their recent history, every time she accessed military equipment for him, she put her career at risk. At worst she could be court-martialed, and lose everything she had worked so hard to achieve. No dinner could make up for that, no matter whether they had made it to dinner or not. They never had, and she knew it, too. He wondered if she thought that was the only reason he ever called her, the only reason he owed her 'favors'. He contemplated that for a second, but after everything they'd gone through before... well, before, Catherine had to know that she meant something to him. She had to know.
"Catherine...", he spoke up again. It was out of his mouth before he realized it. A part of him wanted to ask her, but was unsure of what to say.
"You're such a bastard, McGarrett," she said, and hung up.
He let his head fall. This was it. Seven years of friendship, and he'd managed to destroy it all in one night. Her lie aside, this was a mess of his own creation. Seven years of friendship, and this was what it amounted to after he let his anger go unchecked one evening. He still didn't understand what had happened that night, or why he had snapped, but he couldn't blame her for being mad as hell at him. His trust had been abused, and so he'd abused her in return, destroying what trust she had held in him for so many years. She was right; he was a bastard, and he couldn't fault her for wanting nothing to do with him anymore.
"What was that?" Danny's words and his sharp tone brought him out of his reverie.
Steve shook his head to clear it completely. He had a job to do, and needed to focus.
"Not now, Danny. We can't wait anymore. If we don't act now, the sales will be over, and they'll disperse and relocate somewhere else. Any chance those girls have is now. We're moving in."
That shut Danny up, though the terse nod he gave Steve indicated clearly that they would be talking about it later. Steve was about to give the sign to act when the beeping of his phone distracted him. He looked down, and found that he had a new message from Catherine Rollins. Opening it, he relocated the attached files to his tablet, and opened them to reveal excellent thermal satellite imagery of the warehouse they were about to storm into. His eyes flicked back to the text she's send him. It made his heart clench with gratitude and regret.
'Don't ask again.'
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Steve and Danny overlooked the final clean-up of the mission. Young women and girls were being escorted to medical facilities by police officers who were both relieved and proud that they had been able to save them. Others shoved cuffed abductors and richly dressed foreign buyers into the back of police cars none to gently. The raid had been a complete success. The girls were traumatized of course, and a few showed some bruising, but none had been killed or severely hurt, so Five-0 and HPD counted it as a success.
Abruptly, Steve turned away from the scene, and walked toward Danny's car, the Jersey detective hot on his heels. The former Navy SEAL knew that he wasn't getting out of the discussion Danny had promised him, but they didn't need to have it in the middle of the last vestiges of a police raid where all their colleagues and quite a few bad guys could overhear it. Steve had parked Danny's car a bit out of the way of the other police cars, so he went over there, and leaned against the door waiting for his partner to catch up with him.
"I'm assuming you want an explanation now," he said when Danny reached him.
Making a face, and spreading his arms, Danny nodded. "Yeah, I mean, that would be nice. I mean, it didn't sound like an endearment when she called you a bastard, and Catherine doesn't strike me as someone who'd normally insult her not-boyfriends for asking for a favor. She's never done it before now, so in blatant self-interest regarding my chances of survival an explanation would be appreciated."
Steve looked away.
"We had a fight."
"You don't say!", Danny retorted. "I figured that one out by myself already."
"Danno, will you shut up, so I can tell you, please?!", Steve pleaded emphatically. Since Steve was not one to truly ask for anything, especially when the sentence involved the word 'please', Danny decided to give him the time to explain in his own words, symbolically zipping his mouth. At his nod of encouragement, Steve rolled his eyes, and continued. "I... You know I don't trust my mother. I think she's hiding something, so I set an old friend from my SEAL days on my her case. He's become a private investigator, and I asked him to follow her around. She made him as a tail, but he managed to get into her good graces anyway, and found out that my mother had... tortured Mangosta when he thought he'd caught up with her. Catherine had apparently found her doing that, and stopped it. My mother asked her not to tell me, and she agreed."
Danny could see Steve's hands clench into fists. Retelling this episode clearly angered and pained him still. When Steve continued about how he had found out that Catherine had betrayed him, every muscle in his body seemed to tense up, and Danny could see a cold fury burning in his eyes, before all of a sudden it was washed away by guilt and desperation. He'd seen his partner go through similar stages while staring at his phone, but now they seemed much more intense. He'd trusted Catherine more than anyone, probably more than himself, and finding out that she'd worked together with his mother to withhold the truth from him must have hurt immensely. Especially when he'd asked her to help him on his mother's case.
"Why did she say she did that?", Danny asked once Steve was done.
"Some BS about protecting me from darker aspects of my mother's character. She didn't want me to know the woman could happily torture someone. As if I didn't know that already. She's a former intelligence officer, after all."
"So is Catherine," slipped out of Danny's mouth before he could stop it. Afterward he wanted to bite his tongue off. Steve's gaze darted to him, then away again.
"That's different," he said, but it didn't sound very convincing. Also, Danny didn't think Catherine trying to protect him was BS. Sure, logically Steve must have known that his mother was capable of quite a few unpleasant things – between killing Wo Fat's father, and faking her own death through a car bombing, she was bound to be cold-blooded – but to witness it first hand, or hear about it actually happening from someone you trusted?! Those were two very different things. Deep down Steve probably knew that, too, Danny was sure of it. He just didn't see it through the cloud of his anger. Danny thought about pointing it out at him, but he had more important matters to attend to as he recalled another part of the conversation.
"What exactly did she mean when she said you manhandled her?", he asked, his blood running cold. He'd seen Steve fight several times, and knew that he had absolutely no problem with breaking a bone here and there in their suspects, and he's certainly done a number on Danny's finger when they first met, but he hadn't known Danny for more than five minutes then. It was completely out of the ballpark that he would hurt Catherine or anyone of the people he cared about. He watched Steve close his eyes forcefully, and his head hung a little lower on his neck when he answered.
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Aboard the USS Enterprise, Catherine was done with her shift, and ready to get some sleep. The last couple of days had been stressful enough as they searched for what's-his-name, number five on the black list, so that their special ops could take him in, or take him out. She'd had blasted little sleep this week, and Steve calling her today had put the icing on the cake, making her day even more emotionally draining than it would have been anyway. Ever since that night she felt drained anyway. She felt empty when she was at work, and she was just going through the moves.
When work was done, and she had nothing to distract her with, she felt like she was bleeding from a wound that wouldn't close. She was losing herself in the pain of a limb that wasn't even their anymore, their relationship. She wondered sometimes if it had ever been there in the first place, wondered if theirs had even been a relationship at all. They'd started out as ships passing in the night, and maybe they'd never moved too far away from that despite all the laughter, and the cuddles, and the caring. She shook her head. It was idle to contemplate the state of a former relationship, and she couldn't go another night without sleep.
Her roommate, LT Sanders, would probably skin and behead her if she kept her up with her tossing and turning again. She couldn't help it, though. She couldn't stop thinking, couldn't stop hurting, and it kept her awake. That she barely ate didn't help either. Navy food wasn't as bad as its reputation, but these days she could barely look at it without feeling an instant revulsion. Maybe she had gotten too used to Kamekona's excellent shrimp dishes on her extended leave. She couldn't seem to find her appetite as if she'd forgotten it ashore when she'd tried to pick up the pieces of her heart, and glue them back together sufficiently to be able to concentrate on her job, before it turned out that work was the glue that kept them together, only to let them fall apart every time she stopped.
There was a knock on her door. She got up from her cot as she told the visitor to enter. A young ensign made his way into the room, and stood at attention. Surprised by his visit, because she certainly didn't know him, and Laura Sanders looked at him strangely, too, she guessed that hew as here with them on some official business. Before she could contemplate what might have happened, the ensign spoke up.
"LT Rollins, Commander Clarke wants to see you in the infirmary immediately."
She dismissed the ensign, and turned to her roommate.
"Is there a reason, the surgeon wants to see me?", she asked.
"I was worried about you, Rollins. You haven't slept properly since you got aboard, and kept me awake the first couple of nights with your sobbing, too. When you do sleep, it's restless, and has you tossing around on your cot enough to wake both of us, and I have yet to see you eat a full meal. You're a mess, and I'm worried, so I told him – in confidence."
"You know he can't help me. This isn't a medical problem."
"Maybe, maybe not, but he's the closest thing we have on board to a psychologist. Maybe he can talk some sense into you, so you'll at least eat and sleep when you're supposed to. Prescribing sleeping pills would not hurt either. Maybe he can at least help you with that."
End of chapter 2!
A/N: In case you're wondering, yes, I intend to make them very miserable before I start patching them back up ( i.e. together) because I think that it had to get worse/hit the bottom before it can get better.
These chapters were inspired - in style - by the snapshots we are shown at the beginning of NCIS episodes. The way my first drafts for future chapters are developing, there will be four or five of these snapshots in total.