This is sorta a big one and I was this close to forgetting to upload it today. I've been hearing the circus theme playing for the past week with all of my family in town.
Shout out to Phoebe Miller for beta reading!
Fact #35: The smallest thing can take down anything in its path. Dragons included.
Season: Midway through Season 3
At first, Steve didn't respond to his partner's out of breath huff. They had just been hauling butt down the Hau'ula Loop Trail in pursuit of their suspect and even as a reserve Navy SEAL his heart was thundering and his legs tingled with the extra rush of blood being pumped to them. The heat and humidity that were unusual for a quarter after six in the morning in the beginning of March made it that much more of a task and his shirt stuck to his sweaty back. They were all out of breath and uncomfortable.
He only responded when Danny grabbed his arm.
"Danny?" he pivoted and shined his flashlight at him. He was caught off guard by what he saw. "Danny, are you okay? What's wrong?"
"I don't know," Danny swallowed. The alarmed look on his face that the beam of the flashlight illuminated unnerved Steve. "Something's not right, something…something's–"
Steve held onto his elbow as he swayed on his feet and helped lower him to the ground before he fell. His truck was only fifty yards from them on the other side of the parking lot at the trailhead.
"Think you can make it to the truck?"
Danny shook his head and put a hand over his eyes, rocking back and forth like a buoy in the water. "Not unless I want to taste dinner for a second time."
Steve nodded in understanding and peeled off his over shirt, wadded it up, and placed it under his partner's head while he pulled out his cell phone.
"Hang on, bud, I'm calling EMS," he patted his shoulder and frowned. He moved the back of his fingers up higher to his neck. "Jeez, you're burning up. Is it your stoking chamber?"
Danny removed his hand from his face, eyes locking onto his partner nervously. "No. It's something else."
With that, Steve dialed and waited.
Two balls of light came flying down the trail at them. Chin and Kono pulled to a stop, panting and darting their lights over the scene. On edge at having this dropped in their laps out of nowhere, Chin opted to relay to HPD that they'd lost their suspect and Kono took her Cruze down to the end of the trailhead road to flag down the ambulance when it came.
Steve gently shook his partner's arm as his eyes closed again and didn't reopen right away. "Danny, you've got to stay awake. Don't check out on me."
He smirked when pale blue eyes opened to half-mast, but promptly sobered as Danny sat up on one elbow and leaned over to the side, reeling for a few seconds. At first, Steve was expecting vomit or molten slag or ashes and charcoal. Was it a bad thing that he had become accustomed to that? Maybe more importantly, was it a bad thing when his concern ratcheted up a notch when neither vomit nor slag came out of his partner's mouth?
Steve furrowed his brows up at Chin as Danny drooled a copious amount of saliva. That was a totally new one on him, and he looked to the older cop in hopes that he had an idea of what this was.
"Danny, you havin' trouble swallowing?" Chin crouched next to him, keeping his light pointed at the ground so he didn't blind him.
"No," Danny spit. A grimace pinched his face and a tremor traveled down his body. "Can't stop drooling and I feel like the ground's doing a teeter totter thing."
"You aren't allergic to anything, are you?" Chin asked.
"According to my ma I was allergic to vegetables when I was little," Danny joked weakly, heaving for air as more drool dripped off his bottom lip. "I keep telling Grace I'm allergic to spam to get out of eating it with eggs after somebody made her breakfast with it in it one time, Steven. But no, to my knowledge I'm not allergic to anything. And yes, I can breathe fine."
"You're thinking it could be anaphylaxis," Steve said.
Chin held a hand up helplessly. "I don't know. If he's not having trouble breathing, then it's probably not."
Kono's little red Cruze heralded the ambulance's arrival with a cloud of dust. The sun was painting the sky at their backs in grays and yellows as it made its way towards the horizon, sprinkling enough soft light on the parking lot that they could mostly see. In another twenty minutes or so it would be up. But for now, both of the medics exited their vehicle swiftly with flashlights and trotted towards where the three men were on the gravel.
"You guys are sure out early this morning," the woman of the two said in friendly greeting. She squatted down amongst them. "I'm Ramona. What happened?"
"I don't know," Steve wiped a hand down his face and looked at her. "We were pursuing a suspect that had been spotted near the trail by a few hikers at four thirty this morning and when we got back down here, Danny said something was wrong."
Ramona nodded and shuffled closer to his partner. "Danny, can you tell me what's wrong?"
"What's wrong is that no human being should be running up and down and around hiking trails this early in the morning," Danny grunted.
Ramona glanced at Steve who shook his head.
"Not much of an outdoorsmen?" she asked as she shined her light at him, avoiding his face and instead getting a general impression of his condition.
"I prefer the concrete jungle," Danny said.
"Airway's clear," Ramona noted mostly to herself. "How's your breathing? Are you struggling or having any difficulty?"
"Only the kind that comes with not knowing why I suddenly collapsed," Danny said. He lifted his head slightly and met her eyes. "Just anxiety. Nothing like that whole fiasco with the sarin."
Ramona shot a look at her partner and then at Steve. "Sounds like you get to meet a lot of paramedics. I'm going to take your pulse, okay?"
She circled her fingers around the wrist of the arm he wasn't leaning on while her partner continued her line of questioning, "Are you dizzy? Any nausea or abdominal pain?"
"Dizzy, yes. Nauseas, yes. Pain, not really? Feels like pins and needles everywhere and spasming muscles," Danny exhaled heavily as he laid on his back again, eyes slipping closed.
"Need to take his temperature in the ambulance," Ramona said lowly. "Go grab the gurney."
Steve had his focus on the paramedic and his partner, ignoring Chin offering to help the EMT unload the gurney. His control freak nature, as Danny called it, made him want to hover closer than he was, but he knew that he needed to give the paramedic space to finish evaluating his partner. She shined the annoyingly bright penlight in Danny's eyes to check for concussion and in his nose and ears looking for discharge before doing a clean sweep of prodding and poking, searching for any kind of injury.
He forwent keeping his distance as Danny struggled upright again despite the paramedic's warning to stay still. Securing one of his hands in his and letting his partner use his shoulder as a support, he helped him into a hunched over sitting position so he could let another fountain of saliva run from his mouth.
Ramona's light flickered over the lower half of his partner's face and then down to the ground. "Over salivation. How long has that been going on?"
"Started when everything else did," Steve said.
She reached out and delicately set her hand on Danny's shoulder. "Don't worry. You're in good hands."
The ride to the ER was too long and he didn't like how warm his partner had started to feel.
He had tossed his keys to Chin and told the cousins to meet him at King's since he was riding with his partner. Ramona and her partner accompanied Danny back to an exam room and left Steve standing there by the nurses' station, feeling like someone had pulled the rug out from under him. At least this time his partner wasn't convulsing and his lips weren't turning blue. Though this one had been as sudden as the sarin incident had been, it wasn't as terrifying.
He paced and rubbed the back of his neck and then scrubbed one hand through his hair. With his hair being short as it was it didn't matter if the action turned it into a disaster, he hadn't even looked twice in the mirror before running out of his house this morning. He didn't even bother shaving as the tiny stubbles on his jaw reminded him.
"Sir, there are seats over there," one of the nurses behind the station pointed over her shoulder to where he knew the waiting room was. It was a bad sign when one was as acquainted with the hospital's layout as he was.
"I'd rather stand," he said.
"Steve, what gives? Did they say anything?"
Chin and Kono swept up behind him. Chin was calm and collected as usual while Kono's eyes were wide and questioning.
"He had a fever of 101 when we got here, and was still drooling," Steve snaked his arms across his chest, tapping his fingers against his ribcage. "Started to go in and out of it."
"He go unconscious?" Chin asked.
"No, he was just acting really lethargic."
"Where is he?" Kono looked around.
Steve nodded towards the back of the ER where Ramona and her partner were walking away from. He intercepted them before they could leave. "How is he?"
"Doctor Hale's taking a look at him right now. He'll be able to talk to you when he knows more," Ramona gave him a small smile and nod. "Might want to go get a cup of coffee or breakfast or something."
The trio reluctantly wandered off to the waiting room, Chin offering to go see if he could scrounge up a few cups of a decent brew. That left Steve and Kono to sit in uncomfortable chairs, crossing and uncrossing their legs, browsing through old magazines, wondering if they should sanitize their hands after browsing through said magazines, checking their phones, counting tiles, debating whether or not a bug in the corner of the room was a fly or a spider.
Chin finally returned, giving them a perplexed look since they were both pointing at a black dot meandering around the upper corner of the room.
"How long was I gone?" he checked his watch while balancing the tray of coffee. "An hour and a half. You guys got bored enough to be entertained by a bug within the span of ninety minutes."
"Well, does that look like a spider or a fly to you?" Kono pointed at the subject of their attention and accepted her coffee gratefully. "And really, cuz? Who takes an hour and a half to get coffee?"
Chin handed Steve his cup and then sat down across from them. "Duke called. He said that one of the responding units he sent to pick up where we left off found our guy running down the side of the road. I had to update him on the case and on what we were doing."
"He was running down the road?" Steve furrowed his brows.
"Didn't think anyone would be out so early to spot him," Chin sipped his coffee. "Welcome to Hawaii, where the tourists get up early and the locals even earlier."
"Commander McGarrett?"
Steve looked up at the man in his late forties with ear length salt and pepper hair. He pushed out of the chair and walked towards him. The man had been staring at him the whole time and didn't act like he was asking to figure out who was who, so he must have already known him.
"You must be Doctor Hale," Steve extended a hand.
Hale shook his hand. "I suppose you don't remember meeting me the first time. I was one of the attending physicians when you were brought in with burns to your chest and shoulder."
That explained why the man's face didn't register with him. "Don't exactly remember a whole lot from during that time span, but thanks for working on me."
"As my coworker said, you're a lucky man. But about Detective Williams," Hale glanced at Chin and Kono before raising a brow at Steve.
"They can hear anything you have to say," Steve said.
"Unfortunately, I don't have much to say," Hale sighed. He rubbed his hands together and motioned for them to sit again. "Can you tell me exactly what happened? What you guys were doing? If you noticed anything off with Danny?"
"Why? Is he okay?" Steve hesitantly sat on the edge of the chair, ready to spring back up at any moment.
"He's awake, but drowsy. I want to hear your side of the story to see if anything stands out," Hale explained.
Steve started from the beginning when he had gotten a call at four thirty and then roused his team from their slumbers, picking up Danny on his way out and meeting the cousins at the Hau'ula Loop Trail. They split up, the cousins going up one side and Steve and Danny going up the other. Movement on the trail behind them sent him and his partner running back down and that's when it all started.
Hale massaged his palm with his thumb while nodding along. "That matches up with what Danny told me, except I must say he has a much more colorful way of describing things."
"That's Danny," Kono laughed lightly.
"So, what's wrong with him?" Steve asked.
"Honestly, I'm not entirely sure, and I know that's not something you want to hear from the doctor looking after a friend. I'm having blood drawn to check his white blood cell count and I have him on a saline drip to keep him hydrated. At this point, I can only treat the symptoms until I find the cause," Hale said.
"Can we see him?" Kono asked.
Hale stood up and gestured for them to follow. "I had him admitted and moved to a private room on the floor above. He should be settled in by now."
He led them to an elevator where they had to wait for it to come down from a higher floor. King's was always a busy place, though it slowed somewhat during the off season when there weren't so many tourists coming in with heatstroke, sunburns, concussions from getting smacked upside the head with a surfboard, things like that. It was still bustling with nurses going back and forth around them, some trudging and others sprinting. One of the speed walking ones in particular paused as the elevator dinged.
"I had hoped that I wouldn't see you back here again so soon," a smoky, stern voice called after them as they loaded into the elevator car.
Steve poked his head out and spotted the very tall woman. "What're you doing down here? I thought you were a burn specialist?"
"Finishing up an ER shift I picked up," Mauna said. "Which one of you numbskulls got hurt this time?"
"Danny," Steve pulled back in as the elevator doors shut.
The ride up was silent and short, as was the walk to their friend's room. Two nurses, one they recognized as Kori and the other as an unknown man, were on either side of the bed performing different tasks. Danny was sitting upright in the bed, now dressed in a fashionable hospital gown and quietly chatting with Kori who was holding his hand.
"You flirting with the nurses, bud? You can't be that sick," Steve said.
Danny and Kori both looked up at them. Kori curled two fingers at Hale in a 'come here' gesture while Steve and the cousins needed no invitation to gather at the foot of the bed.
To Steve's dismay his partner was still drooling and had a washcloth in his hand to wipe the spit away from his lips and chin. He was flushed with tiny droplets of sweat clinging to his forehead and peered at them from under heavily lidded eyes. Despite the fact that his partner was actually conscious and aware while being in the hospital, which was a change of pace, he appeared worse than when he had been brought in.
"How're you feeling, brah?" Chin asked.
"Like Grace when she was cutting teeth and slobbering like a Saint Bernard," Danny emphasized his point by wiping his mouth with the cloth. "Still feels like the room's tilted and my stomach's roiling like I was driving with Steve in rush hour."
Steve frowned at the jab, but his attention was drawn to Kori and Hale. Kori still had his partner's hand in her grasp. Now that he was closer, though, he could see it wasn't a flirtatious grasp. She was showing something about his hand to the doctor.
"What's up?" Kono, too, had taken notice of the odd interaction. Her face contorted into confusion as she looked on.
"Fasciculations," Hale muttered. He caught their uncomprehending looks. "Muscle twitches. Danny, do you still have pins and needles in your limbs?"
"Yeah," Danny confirmed, swallowing thickly and laying his head back on his pillow. "Did you guys crank up the heat in here or is it just me?"
Steve glanced at the cousins. The room felt fine.
Hale pulled a thermometer out of his pocket and slid a plastic cover on it before placing the tip in Danny's ear. The way his eyes narrowed was not comforting.
"His fever's climbing," Hale looked across at the other nurse that had just finished drawing blood. "Get that down to the lab."
The dark haired man nodded once and left without so much as a word.
"Commander, I'm going to ask that you and your friends give us some privacy. I'm going to do a second examination and try to cool him down," Hale said.
"But–"
"Commander," Hale gave him an exasperated look. "I promise I'll come talk to you as soon as I know something."
Chin set a gentle hand on his shoulder and guided him out of the room. Kono shut the door behind them. Steve crossed his arms over his chest again, pacing back over by the elevator doors. He almost preferred a gunshot wound to this. At least the cause of the problem was obvious. He didn't like this not knowing.
Danny let out a breath in relief as Kori replaced the cloth on his forehead with a cooler one. She dabbed at his arms and chest with another cool cloth, all business and no smiles this time around. Beneath the spunky short cropped hair and bubbly attitude was a trained nurse, something that he appreciated right now.
"Are you sure you didn't turn the temperature up in here? It feels like I've been trying to keep up with my animal of a partner on a foot chase through the streets in the summer," he complained quietly to Kori, frowning and bringing the cloth to his face to wipe off the drool. How embarrassing. Here he was, a grown man drooling down his face while a nurse tried in vain to cool him down.
"You boys keep active, don't you?" Kori flashed him a tiny grin. "What do you do when you're not on the job?"
"Not on the job? I think I work 24/7," he snorted. "I have a daughter that I like to spend time with. When I have her, anyway."
"Divorced?" Kori asked softly. She set the cloth down and poked the thermometer in his ear again.
He grunted in affirmation. "When her mother remarried and moved half way across the world to this rock floating in the ocean, I thought I was going to fall apart then and there. Then my brother told me that, hey, they have cops in Hawaii, why not move to paradise?"
Kori's brows lowered at the reading on the thermometer.
"Some kind of paradise, huh? I've been shot, stabbed, and have almost died more times in my three years here than I did with over a decade of being a cop in New Jersey," he inhaled deeply and closed his eyes. Heat radiated off of his skin, the combined efforts of his sweating and of Kori barely taking the edge off.
"Your temp is 102.9 degrees, but your heartrate isn't as fast as I'd think it would be at that temperature," Kori squinted across at the monitor on the other side of the bed. "And you don't feel cold?"
"Cold? Babe, I feel like I'm one of those slow roasted pigs at one of the Luau things," he raised his hand to his forehead, breathing out slowly and steadily. He could feel the iron grip of anxiety moving in on him. Stay calm, stay calm.
"I'll be right back, Danny. I'm going to go get Doctor Hale," Kori dashed out of the room.
Danny laid there, feeling his limbs continue to tingle and fire start to spread through his veins.
Mauna stared at Steve as he finished telling her why the team was in the hospital again. They had bumped into her on the ground floor and she was curious as to why Danny had been brought in. An uneasy sensation pricked at Steve's skin at the look the tall doctor had on her face.
"What did Hale say?" she enquired.
"He was having bloodwork done and was treating the symptoms," Steve said.
Without another word, Mauna turned on her heel and smacked the up button for the elevator. Gesturing for the cousins to hang back, he followed and slipped in through the doors right behind her.
"Do you know what this is?" he questioned.
She laced her fingers behind her neck and pulled back her shoulders. "Where did you say you guys were at?"
"Hau'ula."
"If I didn't know better…." She trailed off and hurried out of the doors onto the second floor. She came to a halt after two steps and then looked back at him somewhat sheepishly. "Which room is he in?"
Steve pointed and the stern mask reappeared on Mauna's face as they pushed through the slightly open door. His eyes widened at the state of his partner. The thin sheets were tugged down to his waist and the gown left open, leaving his bare chest uncovered, and he was covered in a sheen of sweat. He looked absolutely miserable.
"Danny," he took up his post beside the bed, gripping his partner's wrist.
Mauna was more intrigued by his chart. Her amber eyes flicked over the scribbled notes and times, the crease between her brows becoming deeper by the second.
"Steve? Back so soon? And you brought company, huh?" Danny cracked his eyes open tiredly and watched the doctor at the foot of his bed with a frown.
"You're burning up, man," Steve forced a grin as his partner's eyes darted up to him.
"Oh god, I'm so hot, it's insane. I must've died and gone to Hell," Danny muttered. "I swear, if I'm dead it's your fault because you dragged me out of my bed to go running around in the jungle before the crack of dawn."
"You're not dead, Danno," he said. His jaw clenched. Why had Hale not taken care of this? Given him something to lower the fever? Then again, he wasn't cold or shivering despite being uncovered. He had said he was hot. That was more like hyperthermia, not fever. Everything was so weird. What was going on?
"Mauna? What're you doing snooping around up here?" Hale asked as he walked in followed by Kori.
"Being nosy. Sue me," Mauna snapped. She held up the clipboard with his chart. "No meds for the fever?"
"I want to wait until the bloodwork comes back," Hale intertwined his fingers and rubbed the heels of his palms against each other.
"Why?"
"It looks like a currently unidentified toxin and I don't want to give him something that's going to react badly," Hale sighed. "Why? Do you have a better idea?"
"If I was on the mainland, I know what I would say," Mauna hooked his chart back on the foot of the bed. "But here in Hawaii? It doesn't make any sense."
"You're thinking something biological, aren't you?"
Mauna scratched at the back of her neck and then stilled suddenly. "Where are his clothes?"
Steve had pulled up a chair to sit by Danny's bed and was assisting Kori with patting him down with cool cloths when Mauna returned with a sealed plastic bag, a clear plastic storage tub, and what appeared to be chopsticks in a paper package. Strange.
"Hale go down to the lab?" she asked.
"Yep," Kori nodded.
Mauna glanced at the nurse. "What's his temp?"
"Was 103.7 when I took it a minute ago," Kori said.
Mauna observed the partners for a moment. "Kori, could you give us three a minute?"
Kori made a face at her, but got up from her chair and pulled the door shut behind her.
Steve switched from looking at the door to looking at Mauna as she tore into the plastic bag and emptied it into the storage tub. "Why'd you kick her out?"
Mauna tilted her head up at them from her crouched position, pulling the paper off the chopsticks as she spoke, "Figured we needed some privacy. Danny, you're a stoker, right?"
Danny blinked and grimaced as he shifted uncomfortably. Steve had had to figure out his partner was a fire breather on his own after working with him for two months, and then it took over another two years to know his type. It wasn't a long shot to guess correctly that he was not going to easily divulge that information to even a doctor, and her eyes narrowed at that fact.
"Hey, are you a stoker or not? I already know McGarrett is some kind of Arboreal crossbreed and I know that you're either a Drake or a Cliff with those jaw muscles. I was standing right there when you dropped the elevator car on the Wyvern, remember?"
Swallowing, Danny nodded. "Yeah, but this isn't my stoking chamber, is it? I've had it act up on me before and this doesn't feel the same."
Mauna shook her head and turned her attention to the tub. "It's not. I just wanted to make sure that you weren't going to start seizing from such a high temp."
"So you're not worried about a temp of a 104?" Steve asked.
"On a human? Hell yeah, I'd be," Mauna said. "On a stoking class fire breather? No. Not really."
"Not really? If I get any hotter I may burst into flames," Danny's fingers jerked as he flicked one hand out limply at the doctor.
Mauna grunted as she used the chopsticks to prod through the clothing he had been in when he'd arrived. "I'll find a fire extinguisher."
The door creaked open and Mauna's head bobbed up. Steve turned to look, but whoever had peeked in was gone. He wondered if it had been Kori stopping by to see if she was allowed back in.
"Ha."
He looked back at Mauna.
"I knew it," she jabbed her chopsticks down into the tub and then lifted them up for him to see. A writhing green shoelace was pinched between the two wooden sticks.
"That looks like a–"
"Snake."
It was a green juvenile snake with big round eyes that had an appearance more closely resembling a vine than a reptile. Mauna had stuffed the seven inch long snake into a specimen jar and proceeded to bolt from the room, nearly running over Kori and Hale as she did. She exchanged a fierce and whispered conversation with them before Steve got his feet under him and followed her out.
"It's a snake bite?" he dodged into the elevator with her.
"Snake bite."
"Start administering the antivenin, then. What was with telling Hale to just try and keep him cool?"
Mauna inhaled deeply as they arrived on the ground floor. "Hawaii doesn't stock elapid antivenin."
Steve's brows furrowed. "How do you know that's what it is?"
"Over salivation, muscle twitches, tingling, dizziness, nausea, drowsiness, and then combine that with Danny's nature and you get a high temperature," Mauna said. "All the common symptoms of an elapid bite, but it's progressing slower because of his nature. If he wasn't what he is, he probably would've dropped from respiratory arrest by now."
"Hold on," Steve caught her by the shoulder and made her face him. They were eye level, which was a new one on him. "If Hawaii doesn't have the antivenin, what do we do for Danny?"
"Do what? What's happened?"
The cousins, who Steve had forgotten to update, met them by the waiting room of the ER. Apparently, they had been close enough to have gotten the tail end of the conversation.
"It's a snake bite," Steve said.
"A snake? In Hawaii?" Chin raised a brow at him and then Mauna.
"What was it? One of those brown tree snakes?" Kono asked.
"Not a colubrid. Elapid," Mauna said and held up the specimen jar. "Coral snakes, cobras, sea snakes, other exotic ones. Definitely not native."
"You think it was someone's illegal pet that got out?" Kono glanced at her cousin. "There was that bull snake in Brooklyn's basement a while back."
Mauna walked past them. "That's your problem, not mine."
"Where're you going?" Steve called after her.
"To go get the antivenin."
"But you just said–"
"I know what I said."
Steve growled. "Chin, Kono, go upstairs and stay with Danny. I'm going with her."
He guided the Silverado through the nine o'clock traffic, heading west towards the warehouse district. He shot a look at the passenger seat. Mauna was on the phone in the middle of a somewhat heated conversation in what sounded like Portuguese. She balanced the specimen jar on her knee, bringing it close to her face every so often when he heard an uptick in the other speaker's voice. He may not have known the language, but he knew speech patterns.
"Obrigada," she finally said as she pinched the bridge of her nose. "Como? Sim, sim. Não se preocupe. Tchau."
Steve waited a beat after she had hung up. "Portuguese?"
Mauna nodded. "A friend from Brazil who's a herpetologist."
"Doesn't the zoo carry antivenins for exotic snakes?" he asked. He had been mulling that over in his mind for a while and was sure that any professional handlers carried antivenin for exotic snakes just in case.
"For the ones they have in the zoo, yeah," she said. "But, as I suspected, this is not something they're going to have in the zoo."
"What is it?" he eyed the bug-eyed shoelace coiled up in the clear jar.
"Amazonian Tree Whip."
"Your friend tell you that?"
"I was confident that it was a Tree Whip, but I wanted to be sure it was an Amazonian one and not an Asian one. Both are elapids, but require different antivenins."
"Why do you know so much about snakes? I thought you were a burn specialist?" he said for a second time that day. This time he was genuinely interested in the answer.
She hummed lowly and bit at her thumb nail. "Did a lot of abroad kind of stuff in my younger years. Met a lot of people, learned just enough of a few languages to get myself in trouble, ate a lot of weird food, treated a lot of people that couldn't afford a doctor. Played with a lot of strange and venomous animals."
"Your younger years?" he smirked at her slightly. "You're only around my age, aren't you?"
"McGarrett, your partner's right. You are a Neanderthal, asking my age," she said with a straight face, but the corners of her eyes crinkled. "Forty."
"You're kidding."
"What can I say. I moisturize."
"So, what'd you do?" Kori asked.
The nurse had once again taken up her seat on one side of the bed, but Kono sat in the seat Steve had previously occupied. She pressed a cool cloth against Danny's forehead and continued her story.
"I hauled butt back to shore, that's what I did," she said.
"Didn't punch it?" Danny asked quietly.
Kono gave him a small grin and brushed her fingers over his hair, putting errant strands back in their place. "Nah brah, didn't need to punch it. I'm Water Woman, remember?"
"Is it a boy thing?" Kori asked. "Because my nephew keeps telling me that he's going to punch a shark one day."
"Steve didn't want to punch the tiger shark, wanted to become man sushi instead," Danny yawned and gagged, pushing himself up on his elbows. He pressed the cloth in his hand to his mouth and took a few steadying breaths in.
Kono rubbed tiny circles on his shoulder with her thumb and glanced at Kori. It killed her to see her teammate and friend like this, and it was only worsened by the fact that she couldn't do anything to help him. All she could do was try and make him comfortable and keep him calm.
"Man sushi, huh?" she said.
Danny nodded and sat back against the pillows slowly. "Neanderthal. Said that he was the bigger predator in the water, why would he need to punch a shark?"
"Only Steve would think that he's the bigger predator," Kono joked in an effort to cover the slip and glanced at the nurse.
Kori held her eyes for a moment. "It's okay. I know. My lips are sealed and bound by many confidentiality agreements and moral codes, so don't worry."
"How…." Danny swallowed and rolled his head to look at Kori. "How long before a snake bite eventually kills you?"
"Danny, you're not going to die," Kono clasped her fingers around his hand, feeling the spasms that made his muscles twitch. "Steve won't let you get out of your partnership that easy."
"I'm going to tell you something right now," Kori rested her cloth across his chest. "Mauna is an absolutely terrifying doctor at times and can be meaner than snot, but she will move heaven and earth to save a patient. Her paired up with Steve? You're going to be fine."
Kono nodded her thanks for the assurance as Danny's eyes closed and he sighed, so unnaturally still and gradually starting to burn from the inside out.
Steve inhaled until his lungs were full. Salty sea air and pungent fish smell filled his nostrils. It smelled like any other fish market in the warehouse district. The fresh catches that had been hauled in during the wee hours of the morning sat on beds of ice and hung by their tailfins. It was all a perfect disguise to keep people from looking too closely, he thought as him and Mauna wound their way through the fish sellers towards the back of the warehouse.
The big Hawaiian man that was always back there stood up as they approached.
"ID?"
Steve flashed the dark mottled teal scales on his arm, watching the doctor intensely out of the corner of his eye. Mauna raised her arm up and rugged blood red scales leapt to the fore. They quickly disappeared once the guard had nodded and waved them through.
"What are we doing at the dragon market?" Steve questioned as they dumped their cell phones and he left his gun and badge at the lockers with the Hawaiian woman.
Mauna pushed through the curtain and jogged down the steps. "Tree Whips aren't just snakes."
He let that settle in. They weren't just snakes. His brows dropped as it clicked. They weren't just snakes like Black Dragon Eels weren't just leeches or eels.
"They're dragon specific," he said.
"Not as specific as a Fire Wyrm Snake, which is why Danny's not dead yet," Mauna explained as she strode purposefully through the narrow paths between the vendors and stalls. "But enough that the bite from a juvenile would be extremely hard to survive for a human and the bite from an adult would outright drop a human in thirty minutes. We need to grab some Columbian Water Claw extract before we leave, too."
Once again, Steve was thankful that his team was full of dragon blood. It may have complicated things at times, but they'd been able to survive a lot more things that had been thrown their way, like the Black Dragon Eels that would have killed him and Danny had they been humans.
"Danny's probably only hung on as long as he has because he's a stoker," Mauna added, taking a sharp left between two stalls based out of Central America.
He kept on her heels. "He's tough. A lot tougher than people give him credit for."
He nearly ran into her as she stopped in front of a stall with brightly colored blankets and wraparounds with Mesoamerican designs framing the front and blocking the view of vials, jars, and other glass containers at the back.
"Cal, what do you need now? Or did you just come back to see my pretty face?" a man in his early thirties with an accent leaned against the counter at the front of the stall. He stroked the neatly trimmed beard covering his jaw and smiled charmingly at the doctor, latte colored scales glittering on his arms and highlighting his chiseled facial features.
"Shut up, Bruno," Mauna shot down his attempt at flirting like a duck out of the sky during hunting season. "I just talked to Mayara, so don't even play stupid. I need Amazonian Tree Whip antivenin."
Bruno glanced at her and then up at Steve. "Tree Whip antivenin? Here in Hawaii? Are you louco? You know those things aren't native, right?"
Mauna stared him down steadily. "You carry the antivenin to almost everything from South America and sell it to exotic pet owners for ridiculous prices. I know you have it."
"Sorry, Cal, I don't have it," Bruno shrugged and held up his hands.
If almost three years of being a cop had taught Steve anything, it was how to spot a liar. He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned into Bruno's personal space. "Where is it?"
"You deaf?" Bruno asked. "I just said I don't have it."
"I will give you until the count of five to find it," Steve said. "One."
Bruno laughed and then looked at Mauna, who wasn't laughing.
"You know who this is, right?" she pointed at Steve. "Commander McGarrett of the Five-0 Taskforce."
The color drained from Bruno's tanned face. "He tossed a guy in a shark cage and hung another one off a building, didn't he?"
"Two," Steve glared at him, channeling every ounce of Navy SEAL into a look that his partner often told him could peel paint.
Mauna braced her hands on the wooden counter. "He also survived a Wyvern attack."
"Three."
Bruno wrung one wrist nervously. "So? We're in the market. Five-0 has no jurisdiction here."
"Four."
"You've made two mistakes so far," Mauna held up her fore and middle fingers. "One, it's his partner that needs it."
"And two?" Bruno squeaked as he waited for the last number to drop.
"Five," Steve snarled.
Mauna hopped over the counter. "And two is you've managed to piss us both off."
Chin tucked the ice that was wrapped up in a towel against Danny's chest under his arm. Hale had decided that the cool cloths were not helping much and went for the ice, even if he didn't prefer that route of cooling down a patient. Kori and the doctor conferred off in the corner of the room while the cousins tended to their friend.
Kono pressed the back of her fingers against his cheek and frowned at Chin. "He's still so hot."
"I knew my good looks would eventually get the better of you," Danny mumbled.
Chin was having a difficult time wrapping his head around the fact that Danny was so miserable and yet was able to keep quipping despite the raging temperature, the drooling, and the jerking muscles. Jersey tough must have been a whole lot tougher than he had always assumed.
"Careful what you say, brah, I'm sitting right here," Chin warned with a warm and playful undertone. "She is my cousin, you know."
"How could I forget?" Danny's face pinched in a grimace as one leg jumped of its own accord. Sweat matted his hair to his head and glistened on his skin, rippling in the light every time a tremor went through a muscle group. "I remember the warning from the first time we met her on the beach."
"Did you really give them a warning, cuz?" Kono questioned.
"For their own safety. They both saw the love tap you gave that guy," Chin smiled softly. "If you did something to them my hands were clean. They had been warned."
"I don't like this," Hale murmured once he and Kori were done speaking and approached the bed again.
"Me and you both, Doc," Danny lolled his head on the pillows and licked his lips, sucking a breath in harshly.
"What am I supposed to write in my notes? That the patient had a temperature of 106.1 degrees Fahrenheit and his doctor gave him nothing for it? And despite that, no damage was done?" Kori's wide eyes swept from Danny back up to Hale.
"We'll have to file him under John Doe and site the Dragons Privacy Act," Hale rubbed his hands together, cracking his knuckles as he did so. He looked at the cousins and nodded subtly. "He'll be protected and no one will be the wiser. But, snake bites still need to be reported, especially since this is a non-native species."
Danny groaned and then gasped, his eyes shooting open. "Doc, can't get enough air."
Hale cursed unintelligibly under his breath. "Kori, get an oxygen mask and I'll get an intubation kit ready just in case."
Chin shared a look with Kono. Danny was going downhill.
"Are you sure it's only going to take six vials?" Steve threw the truck into park outside of the hospital.
"No," Mauna flung open her door and sprinted for the entrance. "Should only take three, but better safe than sorry."
Steve pounded after her. The call from Chin had sent him into panic mode. Mauna quite bluntly stated that if Danny went into full respiratory arrest, there was a good chance the antivenin would be useless as the venom would have progressed too far. The pair of them even bypassed the elevator in favor of hurtling up the stairs to the second floor.
Gulping through the adrenaline pulsing in his veins and fearing what he would see on the other side of the door, he turned the handle and opened it. Relief flooded him when he saw that Danny was breathing on his own without a ventilator and with only an oxygen mask, but man did he look like death warmed over. Figuratively and literally.
"Zoo?" Hale asked as Mauna ordered Kori to fetch a 500ml bag of saline.
"Couldn't be fortunate enough to get an FDA approved antivenin," Mauna muttered.
Hale combed his hair back roughly. "You do realize you, we, could lose our licenses for using a backwater antivenin, right?"
Mauna's lips pressed into a firm line. "You do realize that I wouldn't use it unless I was sure, right?"
"This is the only way to save him?" Kono asked, blinking away the unbidden tears gathering in the corners of her eyes.
"If he doesn't get this within the next half hour, I'll be calling out time of death," Mauna said. It was an insensitive statement, but it got her point across rather coarsely.
Steve only needed to take in the image of his partner overheating for a second more for him to decide. "Do it."
Steve dropped the bag of takeout on the tray table next to his partner's bed. Ten hours, four vials of antivenin, and two doses of Columbian Water Claw extract later, Danny had quit drooling and his temperature had decreased down to 99.3 degrees, a temperature that the doctors were comfortable with. He was also not twitching and jerking like a dying spider anymore.
"What's this?" Danny gestured with a full wave of his hand to the white plastic bag.
"Kamekona sends his love," Steve smirked, pulling out the two boxes and a set of forks. "Garlic shrimp for you and sweet chili shrimp for me."
"Remind me to thank the big guy when we stop by to get lunch next time," Danny swiveled the tray table over his bed and popped the lid on the box.
"What? Not a big fan of the mystery flavored jello?" Steve asked.
Danny swallowed down his first bite of heavenly shrimp. "Also remind me to forgive Kono for poking fun at her for liking grape or thinking that purple is a flavor. What being in their right mind would create such a neon green gelatinous blob with such a weird, unidentifiable flavor that it might as well have been grass flavored?"
"I don't know, bud," Steve grinned as he ate.
It was good to hear his partner's voice back at full strength and to see him much more animated. The whole slowly dying thing was something that he didn't want to repeat. He had the Columbian Water Claw extract that Mauna had given him to thank for the speedy recovery. From what he could understand, it had potent healing properties that worked alongside a dragon's naturally quick healing systems and it may have had a bit of caffeine in it, too.
"Hey, boys."
They turned and looked at Kori peering in the doorway.
"You look much better," she stepped inside. "And I see you got some food smuggled in."
"What can I say, even the turkey and cheese can't compare to this," Danny gestured to the shrimp on his fork.
"I'm wounded," Kori put her hands over her heart. "I was just checking up on you. I'm sure Mauna and Hale will be back around to do a more thorough check later. And Steve, visiting hours are almost over. You're going to have to go home."
Had his partner still been roasting and drooling and twitching and gasping, Steve would have argued. However, with Danny looking like himself and acting like himself, he felt that he could grab a hot shower and sleep without too much trouble.
"Don't worry, I won't keep the child up past his bedtime," Steve said.
"Child? Excuse me, Steven, but I have never seen someone act like a five year old more than you do."
Kori smiled brightly as she shut the door.
The sun was already casting its gloriously warm golden rays on the city when Steve stepped out of his truck at the hospital the next morning. He had a bag with a fresh pair of clothes for his partner, as per the insistence that he was refusing to leave in a gown and that he was going to promptly burn his clothes from the previous day. The fact that the snake had been hidden in his pant leg cuff had been enough for him to write the slacks off as no longer wearable.
Steve hadn't eaten yet. He wondered if Danny would like to stop by one of the pancake houses before heading to his place. Standard procedure was for him to stay in the hospital for forty-eight hours for observation, but Hale had reluctantly agreed that he could leave after twenty-four hours so long as he was under someone's watch for the rest of the day and night.
He didn't see Kori upstairs and thought that it was probably because her shift had ended at some time during the night or early morning. He did briefly glimpse Hale in the ER, but didn't spot Mauna anywhere.
"Okay, I grabbed you a pair of sweats and a tee," Steve said as he opened the door to his partner's room. "And I didn't know you had slippers, bud–"
Steve froze. The sheets on the bed were folded over and Danny was gone.
To to be continued...
Ooooo...gotcha. ;)
Next week on "Dragons", we find out where Danny's gone to and see the dark nature of those that don't see dragons as people.
Remember, I'm only going to be posting once a week on Tuesdays starting next week! Thanks so much for reading, reviewing, faving, and following!