Danny hated waiting. He hated waiting at the mechanic to get his car serviced, he hated waiting at a restaurant to get his food….

But more than anything in this world, he hated waiting at a hospital to hear how the man he loved made it through surgery.

"Hey, brah."

Danny turned to see a pair of familiar faces coming into the waiting room. Chin and Kono, both still in the same clothes they'd been in at the docks, were walking up to him, both with matching expressions of worry on their faces.

"How is he?" Kono asked.

"He's in surgery now for his leg. The bullet missed his femoral, but it managed to nick the…." Danny wracked his brain for a second for what the doctor had said when he was explaining all this, but he came up short. "Lateral something."

"Lateral femoral circumflex?" Chin suggested.

Danny snapped and pointed. "That's the one." In his defense, it had been more than a decade since his last anatomy class. Not to mention the two long, heart-palpitating hours since he and the good doctor had spoken that he was pretty sure had bumped down his life expectancy by a good five, ten percent.

He'd been alright in the ambulance, all things considered. The first few minutes of the ride, especially once Steve settled down, hadn't been that bad. But then about five, ten minutes out from the hospital, Steve had started getting restless and even more disoriented than he had been. The alerts on the monitors had started going off around that time, and Tanya had mentioned something about a 'bleeder' as Steve's blood pressure took a dive.

Danny's heart had taken a dive right there with it.

He must've given something away with his face, because Chin's frown deepened. "Did something happen?"

"Yeah." Danny sighed deeply, running his hands through his hair. "Yeah, something definitely happened." And it kept happening, every time Danny closed his eyes. The blood seeping into the blanket, the chill of Steve's hand in his, the frantic beeping of the monitor alarms…yeah, that'd give him some good nightmare fodder for weeks to come.

"He'll be okay, brah," Chin said. He clapped a firm hand on Danny's shoulder and then, to Danny's surprise, held out a keychain. "I drove the Camaro over for you."

It was times like this that Danny was reminded how lucky he was to have an ohana like this one. He pocketed the keys and clasped Chin's hand, pulling him in for a brief, yet heartfelt hug. "Thanks, brother."

"Anytime."

Nodding and doing his level best not to do that whole 'crying like his twelve-year-old daughter' thing he'd sworn off in the ambulance, Danny cleared his throat and turned to Kono. "What about Emma? Is she okay?" Knowing Steve, that'd be the first thing he'd ask when he came to, and Danny wanted to be able to tell him.

"She's with her parents," Kono said. Her voice was a little shaky, and her eyes were a little misty, but she was holding it together about as well as Danny was. "She has a couple of cuts and bruises, but once HPD's got her statement, they're taking her home."

"That's—that's good. That's really good." One less thing to worry about.

Kono's brows furrowed. "What about you?" she asked.

"What about me?"

"I think she means, are you good?" Chin chimed in.

Danny raised an eyebrow. He opened his mouth, closed it again – a few false starts later, his brain actually remembered how to words. "Am I good?" He rubbed his face and took a deep breath. What he wanted to say was that he'd get back to her. As soon as he saw Steve McGarrett's smiling, conscious, both-feet-squarely-out-of-the-grave face, he would definitely get back to her.

What ended up coming out of his mouth, though, was, "Yeah, I'm good." It was a lie. He knew it; hell, they all knew it. But what else was he gonna do? He had to keep it together, at least until he had a chance to find a dark corner to crawl into. "But I gotta say, I'll be doing better when I hear something."

"Looks like that'll be sooner rather than later," Chin said. He nodded over Danny's shoulder, and Danny turned to see an older-looking gentleman with glasses and a little extra padding in scrubs and a lab coat making his way over.

"Are you here for Commander McGarrett?" the man said.

"Yeah, that's us." Danny turned and offered his hand. "Detective Danny Williams."

The doctor shook his hand briefly, yet firmly. "Doctor Walshe. I'm Commander McGarrett's surgeon."

"He's out of surgery, then?" Chin chimed in, which was probably for the best, because Danny had heard the word 'surgeon' and his brain had petered out. When Walshe turned to Chin with a curious look, Chin introduced himself. "Lieutenant Chin Ho Kelly, Five-0."

"Officer Kono Kalakaua," Kono offered when his gaze turned on her.

With introductions all made, Doctor Walshe seemed content to continue. "Yes, Commander McGarrett is out of surgery."

"How is he?" The words came out in a rush as Danny's mind got going again.

If Doctor Walshe noticed his clipped, urgent tone, he didn't seem to mind. The guy probably got it a lot, to be fair. "He's doing fine," the man said.

Danny could've collapsed from relief right then and there. However, his more curious – some would say more cynical – side got the best of him, and he kept listening.

"We managed to repair most of the damage in his leg. Luckily, the bullet avoided the bone and any major arteries. There is some soft tissue damage, but I'm afraid at this point, we can't say how severe it is."

"Are we talking permanent damage?" He knew the guy had just said they couldn't say, but he figured they might at least know that.

The doctor's face didn't change. "As I said, we can't be certain for now," he began, and Danny felt his hands clench at his sides. "But," Walshe continued, and maybe the day he'd had was starting to get to him, but Danny could've sworn he saw a bit of a smile on the man's thin lips, "I would feel confident in saying that, barring complications and with the proper physiotherapy, Commander McGarrett should make a full recovery."

Again, it was only by sheer force of will that Danny didn't collapse into a boneless heap on the floor. Fuck dignity; Steve was alive. But, for the sake of his pride and Kono and Chin not having to scrape his sorry ass up off the floor, he managed.

Besides, he remembered something else. "What about his breathing?" It was kind of hard to forget the blue-tinged lips and panicked look in Steve's eyes – because as stony as Steve could be, Danny had learned to read his eyes – when he was gasping for breath out on the docks.

Doctor Walshe nodded. "Commander McGarrett had a collapsed lung, presumably as a result of blunt force trauma to the chest."

"Meaning…what, exactly?"

"When Commander McGarrett was brought in, he had three broken ribs."

Danny winced. Shot-up leg, a punctured lung, and broken ribs – Steve was in for a long series of not-so-fun days.

But Walshe wasn't finished. "However, the injuries were…curious."

"Curious?" Chin asked.

Walshe nodded again. "The gunshot wound and pneumothorax both appeared to be very recent injuries, sustained within hours of treatment."

"But?" Danny crossed his arms, his lips pulling down into a frown. "I'm sensing a 'but' here."

"But, given the stage of the swelling, it seems likely that the breaks – or, at least, the cracks that preceded them – were sustained several hours prior to his arrival here. It's the same with a number of contusions and abrasions, including the wound on his cheek."

Danny furrowed his brows, but Kono was the first to speak. "Several hours?" she said. "But that doesn't make any—"

"Oh yes it does," Danny interrupted. His face was drawn, and he raised a hand to scratch at his temple, just willing himself not to do something stupid like lose his temper in a waiting room full of kind and innocent people. "It makes perfect sense."

"What are you talking about?" Kono asked.

Danny gritted his teeth in what he hoped was a peaceful-looking smile. "What I am talking about, Kono, is how my partner is an idiot, and how, as soon as he's awake enough to maybe understand it, he and I are going to have a long, long talk about the finer points of self-preservation."

For his part, Doctor Walshe looked completely lost. Chin, however, seemed to catch on. "The warehouse this morning," he said.

Danny nodded stiffly. "The warehouse." And that was all he was going to say on the matter, for the sake of his blood pressure. At least until Steve was awake enough to pretend to listen to him. So, instead, he turned to the doctor, pressing his hands together and resting his chin on the points of his fingers. His smile felt like it was going to split his face in half. "Is there anything else I should know about?" At Walshe's confused-slash-uneasy expression, he explained, "I'm just compiling a list of all the things, you know, that I need to yell at him for later." Because for fuck's sake, he'd been in the back of an ambulance and hadn't seen fit to mention any broken – or cracked, or whatever the hell they'd been at the time – ribs and assorted other injuries. No, he'd decided it would be a much better idea to go leaping onto a moving boat and joining in on not one, but two shootouts.

And to think, there was a time he'd thought Rachel was crazy. At least with her, he usually knew about when to expect it.

And, he had about a month to prepare.

With Steve, though, there was no telling when the crazy would spring up. The only thing he could predict about Steve's particular brand of insane was that it would spring up, and chances were, he was gonna get dragged into it.

Case and point.

"I believe that's all of Commander McGarrett's injuries," said Doctor Walshe.

Well, at the very least, there was that.

Forcing himself to take a calming breath – as much as he wanted to kill his partner sometimes, he'd come too close to seeing him really die that day for anger to be the top priority – he rubbed his sore, tired eyes and asked, "Can we see him?"

"He's being moved to a private room as we speak. A nurse will be down to show you to it in a few minutes." He held out his hand to Danny, and Danny took it. "It was a pleasure to meet you."

"You, too," Danny said automatically. Walshe exchanged similar shakes with Chin and Kono, and then he was off again. Danny didn't blame him. His world might stop when Steve went down, but everyone else's didn't. A man like Walshe probably had a full docket, and he could understand him needing to get back to it.

True to his word, a few minutes later, a perky blonde nurse that Danny pegged somewhere in her late twenties came out and led them up to the third floor, through the maze of hallways, and eventually to the door of the room belonging to a one Commander Steve McGarrett.

"We just got him settled in," she said as they stopped by the door. "Don't let all the wires and tubes scare you – his IV is just fluids and pain medication. He was a little dehydrated when he came in, and it should help get his blood pressure up."

Danny could definitely handle that. To be honest, after all the blood he'd seen in the ambulance, he'd been half expecting Steve to be getting a transfusion.

"Visitors are one at a time," she said. She stepped a bit away, then, presumably to give them a little bit of privacy to hash out who was going in first. "I'll show the rest of you to the waiting room."

"You go ahead, brah," Chin said, but Danny shook his head.

"You and Kono go ahead and visit him. I'm probably going to see if I can coerce the nurses into letting me hang around." It wouldn't be the first time one of them had broken usual hospital visiting hours for the other. He remembered when he'd gotten hit with that sarin poison, waking up at two in the damn morning to see Steve still keeping watch from the chair in the corner.

Of course, he hadn't stayed in the corner very long. Hospital beds could be oddly accommodating with the right amount of motivation and determination. That is, provided one had a very flexible idea of personal space and, well, a very flexible boyfriend. You wouldn't know if from looking at the tower of sleek muscle and hard lines that was Steve McGarrett, but he could be pretty bendable when he wanted to be.

Danny felt his lips twitch upward at the thought: the two of them packed onto one of those beds like sardines. Strange as it sounded, it was thanks to that he couldn't watch Titanic anymore. Seriously, a grown ass man, and Steve, a grown ass sasquatch could fit together on a tiny little hospital bed, and they couldn't fit together on that whole damn raft? He called bullshit.

But he digressed.

"I'll be out to you guys in ten, okay?" Kono said. Apparently, sometime during Danny's little mental stroll, she and Chin had decided who was going first. She was lucky number one.

"Take your time," Danny said.

The nurse seemed to think that was an alright time to chime in. "He's still probably got another few hours before he comes out of the anesthesia," she told them.

They nodded, and with a wave to Kono, Danny and Chin followed the nurse down to the waiting room. This one was much smaller than the other one, with a few less ficus trees and what looked alarmingly like pineapple-printed borders.

As soon as the nurse took her leave and they were alone, Danny turned to Chin.

"I'm going to kill him," he said. "I am literally going to take his bootlaces and strangle him with them."

Rather than concern or confusion or any other sensible reaction from Chin, though, the lieutenant just smiled. "Happy he's okay, huh?"

"Like you wouldn't believe." And as if to prove his point, that imminent relief-crash finally caught up with him and he dropped like a sack of potatoes into one of the mass-produced chairs with a sigh that rattled straight from his very bones. "He's gonna be the death of me, Chin. I face down killers and psychopaths every day, and that man," he gestured vaguely in the direction of the hallway, "is going to send me to my grave."

"Probably," Chin agreed, coming to sit down a little more gracefully in the seat across from him. "But then, he wouldn't be Steve if he didn't keep us on our toes."

Danny couldn't help chuckling at that, as he ran a hand through his hair for what felt like the umpteenth time that day. "That he most certainly wouldn't."

And as stressful as Steve could be sometimes – well, most times – Danny found that he wouldn't have him any other way.