Ahem. *straps on flak jacket and helmet* Okay. We're good now.
Shout out to Phoebe Miller for assisting me!
Fact #130: The mind is desperate to make sense of things.
The eerie feeling of being detached from reality had been sitting with him for a while now. Not knowing, not understanding, not remembering. General confusion. The one thing he could hold on to was his name. Danny. Daniel Scott Williams. Danno. And another name. Grace. Someone very important to him. There were others surrounding him, but every time he reached out to grasp them they slipped through his fingers like sand. He didn't understand. There had to be more than just Danny and Grace.
Through the darkness, tethers to the real world had started to become visible the longer he floated in no-man's land.
A twinge of pain. A familiar smell. A soft touch.
A sound. A squeak. A tennis shoe on a tile floor.
Shoe. I know what a shoe is. That's a good sign.
Images of lots of shoes breezed by him.
Converse. He wore those a lot as a teen. They were in fashion. Had been in fashion. Were coming back into fashion? He didn't understand the constant ebb and flow of today's world. Or yesterday's world. When had he been a teen? Was he still a teen?
Dig deep, Daniel.
Slightly startled by the echoing sound of a voice he knew to be his own, he concentrated hard. It was like digging a hand down into the mud. He wasn't sure where he was digging nor what he would find.
A memory began to come into focus.
Unfortunately, though he could see himself as a young man wearing the black and white shoes, he couldn't see his surroundings. Faces were obscured by a thick fog. His school. His home. Everything else he was missing. All unidentifiable.
His younger self grew into an adult with broader shoulders and a thicker build. Clothes went from jeans and t-shirts to slacks and collared button downs. Another shoe appeared.
Loafers.
He grinned. He liked leather loafers. They completed the look with his slacks and collared shirts. They looked professional. What kind of profession they looked, he didn't know, but they looked professional.
Another shoe came hurling out of the dark, almost smacking him in the back of the head.
Combat boots. The kind for kicking down doors. Covered in mud and snapping twigs in the jungle. Climbing on top of houses like Santa Claus. He didn't wear combat boots. Who wore combat boots?
A big oaf, that's who.
Only a caveman with a shoot first, ask questions later personality would wear those shoes. If only he could look up past the ankle to see who was wearing those boots. There was a nagging feeling that he should know this person's name and face like the back of his own hand.
And those teeth. Long, sharp, curved teeth.
He shuddered. That didn't seem right. Something in his brain didn't like that.
Thankfully, another shoe interrupted the vague sense of awe and fear.
Flip flops.
No, slippers. They call them slippers for some reason.
Why were they slippers? They weren't fuzzy nor did they keep his feet warm. They were beach shoes. Full of sand and all the grit between his toes was annoying. Puttering around the yard shoes because it was always so hot and wet. Barbeque at a friend's house shoes. Kicking them off and going barefoot in said friend's backyard. Soft, cool grass beneath his feet, flip flops forgotten by the lanai door. Except someone called them slippers.
Hawaii. That's where they were called slippers.
I live on Oahu. It's too hot, it's too humid, I live on a miserable chunk of rock in the middle of the ocean.
It was like he'd just finished a corner of a puzzle. It wasn't much, but it was a starting place.
He eagerly caught more shoes as they came his way.
Small shoes. Kid shoes. Grace's shoes.
He placed a few more puzzle pieces together.
He had followed Grace, his daughter, out to Oahu to be near her. He was a father. He was her father. He would never leave her. Could never leave her. Could never forget her. Would rather be dead than forget her. And now that he remembered her, a bolt of horror went through him that he hadn't only moments ago. He'd forgotten who she was for a few minutes. Or hours. Or days?
Time was meaningless in this haze in its own separate dimension.
Danny and Grace. Grace and Danny. Danny and Grace. Grace and Danny.
With newfound strength and determination, he reached out for one of those other names again. There was more than just Grace and Danny in his world. He could see people. Not quite their faces, but he could see them. Men, women, and children. And blurry blobs bigger than the others. Colorful. Scaly. Definitely not human. Some gave him a sense of comfort, others a sense of amazement, still others a sense of terror.
He left the unidentified blobs alone and grabbed at a name.
Mathew Franklin Williams. Matty.
Brother. That was his brother. Something had happened to his brother. He could recall an airstrip, a chain link fence, and a…a gun in his hands? Why did he have a gun in his hands?
He needed more information. He snagged at another name that seemed linked to the gun.
Chief Doyle Callahan.
Chief of his precinct in Newark, New Jersey. His hometown. Where he'd become a cop. Patrol officer, beat cop, detective. He was a detective. Or he had been a detective. Was he still a detective?
He winced as a few memories came zipping through. Flashing a badge. Yelling. Shooting. Getting shot. Something big. Wouldn't go down with bullets.
Maybe he had quit being a detective, because those memories didn't give him anything but anxiety. And a bit of a thrill.
Huh. Weird. I must be a numbskull if that thrills me.
But it was satisfying. Slapping cuffs on a bad guy. Saving the day. Even if he got shot.
Or lost people.
Grace Tilwell.
Grief overwhelmed him. His partner. He'd lost his partner back in Jersey as a young detective. Warehouse, drugs, cleavers, towers on fire. The Twin Towers. No one could help because there was a much bigger disaster at hand. He had to leave her. Had to leave her for longer than he should have. Couldn't get help. Couldn't save her. Blamed himself.
There were other partners after that. Didn't get along with the first, the second retired after a year, and then there was the third. Third time was the charm.
Mags.
He chuckled. He remembered Mags. Remembered she hated her full name. He remembered her smelling of cinnamon all the time. There was something blue and gold about her, on her hands. Her forearms. Her face. Shiny. Off-putting.
Warily he grabbed another name, not understanding what it meant.
Meka Hanamoa.
Also dead. Not his fault this time, but there was still guilt. Wasn't at HPD when it happened. If he hadn't been at HPD, where had he been? He wasn't sure. He'd helped bring his killer to justice, though, he remembered that much, which meant he was still a detective. He remembered his wife Amy coming to him in tears. His son Billy. He remembered fighting to clear his name. Fighting against IA, against the cartel, and fighting against other people. Not the gangs. Not IA. Not HPD. Different coworkers. Friends?
"Where there's smoke…"
"Where there's smoke? Is that how we convict now? Your Honor, there was smoke."
Frustration. The urge to punch that faceless man. The one in the combat boots. Combat Boot Man.
He swatted at his name, angry and desperate to remember it. He grabbed a handful of emotions instead.
Irritation, homesickness, helplessness, fragility, astonishment, hatred.
Hatred.
He paused.
Hatred burned like a coal in his hand. He'd been so mad, so angry, so hateful towards Combat Boot Man. He didn't like it. He dropped it like a hot cinder, another emotion moving in to take its place as soon as he did.
Regret.
What did he regret? He couldn't remember enough to regret anything. He regretted not trying harder to keep his brother Matty on the island. He regretted not trying harder in his marriage to Rachel.
Rachel. Grace's mother. His ex-wife.
Remembered I had a wife and got divorced all in the span of two seconds. Fantastic.
Slowly, the names began to come to him easier. Eddie and Clara, his parents. Bridget and Stella, his sisters. Eric, his nephew. Jessa, the girlfriend he didn't particularly like. Shamrock, the crime lord.
Tangles of red hair wisped around him like tendrils of smoke, the scent of whiskey and honey following in their wake. The strands slid through his fingers, intangible. She was the wind. Always felt but never captured. He was pretty sure he had seen her fairly recently. On the island. Or maybe it had been one of her favorite bottles of whiskey. On the counter. In his crappy apartment. Or his house. No, his apartment. No, wait, his house. No, it was his apartment, he didn't have a house.
Why can't I remember such a stupid detail like where I live?
Aggravated and tired of sorting through these memories by himself, of semi-successfully trying to connect the dots of his recent past, he sighed and waved away the echo of Shamrock. The darkness rose to buoy him up, suspending him in a state of nothingness. Alone in his mind, cut off from reality.
But, he didn't feel alone. He didn't know what it was, he just knew there was someone lingering close by. It was a familiar presence. A comforting one.
Combat Boot Man.
The lightbulb flicked on.
He was partners with Combat Boot Man.
Still a detective, still fighting crime. He worked on a taskforce that watched over all the islands. How long had been away from HPD on the taskforce? A month? Two? Long enough to become good friends with his teammates. Long enough to draw close to Combat Boot Man. Long enough for them to become brothers closer than even he and Matty had been.
There were others, too.
At first, he could've sworn he saw a creature slithering out of the water, covered in scales and fins, before it morphed into a human.
Tall. Lanky. Hair fluffy from dried saltwater. A warm and mischievous grin. Friendly teasing. Teasing him. Teasing him about surfing. He was learning to surf. Or had learned to surf.
Kono.
He could see her face now. Her grin turned upside down. She was mad. Mad at him. No, not mad. Angry. Pissed. And he was making a face back at her. A heat was in his chest, a foreign yet familiar feeling. Like something was itching to come out.
Kono stalked away from him. He wanted her to stay. Didn't want to be alone.
Why? What did I say? What did I do? I'm sorry, babe, I don't know why I made you so angry.
The hazy memory continued.
He dragged his eyes away from her, saw another man standing in the background giving him a look of surprise mixed with protective fury. Kono's cousin. A stalwart man. Loyal. A friend. A dear friend. The calm in the storm.
Chin.
I've never seen Chin look at me that way.
Chin had been there for him during the dark time after Meka's death. He was in his corner one thousand percent. To be on the receiving end of such a stony glare made him flinch.
Someone called his name.
Combat Boot Man.
Inch by inch, he turned to look at him. Combat boots, cargo pants, t-shirt, tattooed arms, scruffy face, dark hair ticked with silver at the temples. A frown on his face. His face. It sharpened into startling clarity and a name descended from the shadowy corners of his mind.
Steve. Steven McGarrett. Lieutenant Commander Steven John McGarrett.
Combat Boot Man.
His partner.
His best friend.
His brother.
He hardly knew the guy and yet he had somehow been sucked into an unbreakable bond with him. There was something not right, here. Two months was not a long enough time to forge a bond like that.
There were gaps. Big ones.
In his hands he held several more puzzle pieces. Possibly hundreds. Maybe even thousands.
Remembering Steve's name had brought forth a tidal wave of disjointed memories, some of which were like he was looking through frosted glass at them. Indiscernible. Vague.
Getting shanghaied into joining forces with Steve. Getting shot. Collapsed tunnels. Monsters in the dark jungle. Fires burning. Car chases. Helicopter chases. Kidnappings. Getting shot again. Grace hugging his newfound old friends. Them laughing. Them crying. Good days. Bad days. Joy. Terror. Contentment. Fear. Nightmares. Anxiety.
Anxiety.
Black fingers grasped his ribcage, happy that he had finally remembered their existence. They wrapped around his heart and clenched at his throat. A shackle held onto his ankle with a crushing weight. His abstract darkness closed in around him.
The rocking of a ship. The hum of its engines. A detached soft lilting voice. A woman whose eyes were cold and merciless. Children scattered across the globe. A stomach turning scare that some could be his.
The itching returned, like something was trying to escape. Something powerful.
The creature that had turned into Kono. The blue and gold on Mags. The sharp teeth on Steve. It all meant something. All pointed at something.
Creatures. Monsters. Animals. Beasts.
No. They were something else. Something that was on the tip of his tongue.
Dragons.
A squeak penetrated his confusion. His darkness shifted.
The tennis shoe again.
On the outside world. Not in his head.
His darkness began to fade. The floaty nature of the reality he'd been inhabiting for who knew how long dropped out from under him. The ethereal patterns of thought disappeared as new sensations invaded. Returned.
Eyes. He needed to open his eyes.
With the return of more tangible sensations came a heaviness in his limbs. The panic rose anew. He had to get out of his fog. Had to shake it off before it was too late. Before he wasn't able to anymore.
Fighting the anxiety tooth and nail didn't come easy, but it came with a feeling that he had had plenty of practice at fighting it off before. He didn't want to be stuck in his head anymore. Needed to find out what was going on. Needed to talk to Steve. Needed to apologize for something. Needed to wake up before something inside him did.
When he came to, it was like after having driven for a long time and the car finally came to a stop. He didn't know if he was moving or not. He was awake. The pain told him that. And the grittiness as he opened his eyes was too real to be a fiction of his imagination.
He stared through slits in his eyelids.
Oh god, I'm blind.
His heart skipped a beat.
No. No. He could see shapes, blobby as they may be. He wasn't blind. Not completely, anyway.
He twitched his hand. Felt the sheets beneath his fingertips. Not his comfy sheets. Not a blanket on a couch. Inhaling as deeply as he could, he smelled it. A familiar smell. Pure oxygen from the nasal canula under his nose, sterile air, antiseptic, bad coffee.
Hospital.
He huffed inwardly. Of course, that would be something he did remember.
Movement at the foot of the bed caught his eye.
Though blurry, he could make out a person in purple scrubs. A nurse. He was a little surprised at the disappointment it wasn't someone he knew. He was an okay people person. Meeting new people didn't scare him.
Get his attention before he leaves, you putz. You might not wake up next time to ask.
No sound came from his mouth. His throat was raw and covered in sawdust. His lips were cracked. His tongue was cotton.
The small grunt he made must have been enough.
Purple Scrubs stiffened, and then walked closer to him. He didn't have the strength to lift his head to track them properly. Instead, he sensed their warmth near his arm.
"Danny? Can you hear me?"
At least I'm not deaf. Now if only I didn't feel like I had eaten a cactus and washed it down with a handful of sand.
Fingers slipped into his hand. "Squeeze my hand if you can hear me."
Plan B. Squeeze. Come on, fingers, work. Okay, okay, three out of five fingers are good enough.
"Hold on," Purple Scrubs said.
Suddenly there was a coolness on his lips. An ice chip. He eagerly accepted it and let it melt in his mouth. It trickled down his throat, a blessed rain on parched ground. After two more chips, he felt he was in a better state to try talking again.
"…'m I?" he mumbled.
Wouldn't Steve get a kick out of this. The man with a thousand words can barely say one. I mean, I guess he would think it's funny. Wish I could remember more about the Neanderthal.
"Where are you?" Purple Scrubs repeated. "You're at King's Medical Center."
"Ha'ii?"
"Yes, in Hawaii."
"Ice?"
"Sure," Purple Scrubs said and tipped the spoon into his mouth.
Despite the fact he was waking up more, his vision wasn't clearing. That was disturbing. At first, he'd thought it was from his eyes being closed for too long, but no matter how much he blinked, it remained the same. He wanted to know what was happening. And where Steve was.
After sucking a few more ice chips into nothing, he asked, "Why 'm I here?"
Purple Scrubs sighed and set the cup of ice chips aside. "I should really go get the doctor."
"No," he said. He scooted his hands across the sheets, finding the nurse's hand. The touch helped ground him. This person didn't disappear like smoke when touched. He was solid and warm. With great effort, he tilted his head to look up at the blurry mess of a face. "Tell me."
Purple Scrubs, a younger man by the rough features he could discern, started to shake his head.
"Please."
Purple Scrubs sighed again. He glanced over his shoulder towards where he guessed the door was. "You've been in a coma."
His grip on the nurse's hand tightened fractionally. "How long?"
Purple Scrubs placed his other hand over his. "A month."
At least I'm in a hospital, because I think I'm having a heart attack.
One month was a long time. A very long time. A lance of panic stabbed through his ribcage. Grace. He'd been asleep for one whole month of her life. And his team. Steve. Was that why he wasn't here? Was he okay? Was he working? Had he replaced him?
No, that was ridiculous. He didn't know Steve that well, but he didn't think he'd replace him. At least, not as a friend. Maybe he'd fill the position with another officer. One of the ones from HPD that had been irritated that a haole had gotten the esteemed job as second in command of a state taskforce.
"Calm down, Sir," Purple Scrubs said, twisting away to look at the heart monitor. "Unless you want the entire staff descending on you."
Fat lot of good that'll do me. Once the doctor shows up, it'll be them asking me questions and shining lights in my eyes and poking and prodding and then I'll never figure out what the hell's going on.
A few shuddering breaths later, the nurse seemed pleased.
"What do you remember?" Purple Scrubs asked.
"Not much," he mumbled. He wanted to ask him a million questions, but his body was being uncooperative. It wanted to go back to sleep.
Purple Scrubs nodded. "What's the date?"
He closed his eyes. Question marks popped up. He remembered getting coffee not too long ago and seeing a big calendar on the wall in the shop. That was the best and only reference to a date he could get.
"December, 2010," he said. He cracked his eyes open again and sought out the blurry face.
Purple Scrubs shook his head. "Almost February, 2011."
Factoring in that he had been out for a month, he supposed he wasn't actually missing that much time. Three weeks give or take.
"Why?" he asked, hoping Purple Scrubs would interpret what he meant.
Purple Scrubs tilted his head. "Why are you in here?"
He nodded minutely.
"Honestly, they don't know," Purple Scrubs said.
"Great," he muttered.
Sluggishly, he glanced around the room. It was like he was looking through frosted glass again. Shapes were ill defined, colors were patchy and blobby, his sense of depth was way off. There were walls. A dark rectangle may have been a bathroom. A black square hanging. Possibly a TV. A gray blob with legs. Probably a chair.
There was no Steve. No team.
A small ache spread under his ribs.
With nothing else to focus on, he turned towards himself.
He was hot. Sweat dripped off his forehead, ran down his neck. Muscles ached and throbbed. A headache thudded steadily in his right temple. And a general unease stirred within.
His blurred gaze went to his forearm. The heat in his chest and the internal itch brought back the memories that had started to recede back into the darkness already.
"Scales," he whispered.
Purple Scrubs shifted, lifting his hand. "Come again?"
Teeth. Tails. Wings. Claws. Fire. Horns. Venom. Scales.
"Thought I had scales," he said. He rolled his head back.
Sensing more than seeing Purple Scrubs' expression sent off alarm bells.
"Scales, huh?" Purple Scales asked.
He chuckled. Or at least, tried. It sounded more like a cough to his ears. "Yeah. Thought I saw dragons."
"Really?"
"Thought I was one," he said. The memories didn't seem as reliable now. Like fiction had been smashed together with reality. "Like a Rock or Mesa type, or something."
Purple Scrubs hummed pityingly. "Hate to break it to you, but dragons only exist in fairytales."
But it felt so real. Looked so real.
"Cliff. That's it."
Purple Scrubs put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. "I've never heard of a coma patient having that wild of fantasies. It's pretty cool. At least you didn't get bored."
He sighed, feeling lost and confused. "But not real."
"But not real. Sorry, Sir. I'm going to go get the doctor now, okay?"
Once Purple Scrubs left the room, he stared forlornly at the indistinct foot of the bed. Alone. His reality crumbling around him. Precious moments in time missing. Dreamt up years, decades, worth of nonsense swirling in his head.
Dragons didn't exist.
They didn't.
He closed his eyes. He kind of wished he lived in a reality where they did.
Well. That's it. I was never sure how I was going to wrap up this massive series, but this is the path I went with.
I figured with the show wrapping up, it was high time this fic did, too. I've got other stuff on my plate, some other things in the works. I hate to let this one go, but sometimes if you love it, you let it go.
Thanks for sticking with me for two and a half years and almost 500k words!
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Just kidding. April Fools and all that jazz. I've got too many ideas and things to tell you to end this fic yet. I'm gonna crack 500k words. Maybe 600k.
Steve punched the wall.
Hard.
The unforgiving plaster redirected all his anger and frustration back up his arm in a jolt of pain that rattled his bones from his wrist to his shoulder. He breathed out deeply, the shock to his system giving him something else to focus on for a few seconds.
Then the pain died down and he was left with the current state of affairs all over again.
Shaking out his hand, he turned back to the coffee machine and grabbed his full paper cup. He took a sip. Warm brown water. Just like always. What he wouldn't give for a strong local brew with a drizzle of cream and a pinch of sugar from the coffee shop down the street from the Palace. The one Danny had introduced him to.
The urge to pick up the machine and tip it over on its side resurfaced. That had been his first inclination, but a couple of nurses had been not so subtly eyeing him from their station. They had flinched when he punched the wall, one making a move to come towards him. His flinty glare put a stop to that before she could get close.
Now, those same nurses watched him with concern as he paced away down the hallway.
He should have known something was wrong with Danny much earlier. The way Danny had apprehended Perez had impressed him and not sent up as many red flags as it should have. His grumpy attitude had seemed normal at the time. They'd all been up late and up early, running on not much food and not many leads. He should have caught on sooner. Maybe if he had, he wouldn't be walking the halls of a hospital while waiting for his partner to wake up.
He'd circled around again. Back to where he'd started. Staring down the hall Danny's room was on.
It was eleven o'clock, the minute hand crawling its way closer to midnight with every heartbeat. Danny had been unconscious for almost seven hours now. He still couldn't get the eerie sight of his clouded eyes out of his head. A living corpse.
He jumped as his phone vibrated against his leg.
"McGarrett," he answered gruffly.
"Hey, Steve. How's Danny doing?"
He deflated a little at Chin's question.
"Holding on. They still don't know what's causing it. They're just treating the symptoms," he said. He drained the rest of his crappy coffee and scrunched up the paper cup. "What's going on with the case?"
"That's what I actually called to tell you."
Chin wouldn't call if they were still at a dead end, so something must have happened since Steve had been at the hospital.
"Fong just called and said that they tested the drugs we seized from the Columbians' stash house. It's tainted MDMA."
His brows pinched together in thought. "If Agata was moving tainted MDMA for them, that's probably what was in that duffle bag at one point."
"I thought the same thing."
"Danny could have come in contact with it when he apprehended Agata at the theater."
"And Steve, I got a call from Duke saying that Agata started talking."
His jaw clenched, his molars creaking against each other. As head of Five-0, he should get over to HPD to question Agata while she was feeling chatty. As Danny's friend, however, he couldn't bring himself to leave without knowing his partner was out of the woods.
"What's she saying?" he asked tightly.
"Don't know. Catherine headed over there five minutes ago to translate."
He rubbed his forehead. "No one at HPD speaks Japanese?"
"No one speaks enough Japanese and Mandarin to decipher her, apparently. Something doesn't feel right about the timing of this, brah. Danny collapses and then she starts talking in tongues?"
"What if she's being affected by the tainted ecstasy, too?" he said. He spied someone walking into Danny's room. "Let Duke know. Keep me updated. I'm going to go talk to Danny's doctor."
He dropped his phone back into his pocket and tossed the crumpled paper cup into a trashcan as he jogged back to his partner's room. Mood swings, seizures, high fever, he knew those could be linked to an overdose or possibly a tainted batch of ecstasy. He needed to let the doctor know.
He paused by the door and peeked in.
"Either come in or go away. I don't like lurkers," Mauna said, standing with her back towards him.
He stepped inside.
Danny looked the same. Motionless except for the rise and fall of his chest. Pale. Sweaty. Sickly.
Sighing, he approached the bed and sat heavily in his chair, keeping out of the doctor's way as she performed her checks.
"We busted a Columbian stash house this morning. They were moving tainted MDMA," he said, trying to read her face as she worked. It remained her usual neutral frown. "Danny might have been exposed to it last night while apprehending a suspect."
That made her look up. "Great. His lab results didn't show he had ecstasy in his system, but dragons metabolize drugs faster than humans."
Danny huffed.
Steve and Mauna both zeroed in on him. Steve sat forward in his chair and gripped Danny's slack hand. The hand gripped back.
"Danny? Bud, are you with us?" he asked, letting himself have a bit of hope this time. There had been a moment earlier in the evening where he had thought Danny was waking up, but it had been a false alarm.
"Only in fairytales," Danny murmured.
Steve's brows furrowed and he made a confused face at Mauna. She ignored him and proceeded to shine her penlight in Danny's eyes, evoking another irritated huff and a weak swat at her arms.
"What about fairytales, Danno?" he asked cautiously.
"Dragons," Danny said, as if that explained everything.
He couldn't figure out where his partner was coming from or why he was talking about dragons.
"I've seen patients on ecstasy have some interesting hallucinations," Mauna said. She made a note on her iPad. "Should've been here for the clown debacle of 2008. But, I'd be surprised if he's still having them twenty-four hours after being exposed to the ecstasy."
Danny's head rolled on the pillow and his clouded eyes swiveled around uncertainly. Steve grasped his shoulder with his other hand. Guilt gnawed fiercely at his stomach. He should have noticed earlier. Should have noticed he wasn't in his right mind. If Danny was permanently injured because they hadn't caught this soon enough, he didn't know how or if he'd be able to face him again.
"I'm sorry."
At first, Steve thought he'd said those words, but then he realized it had been Danny.
"You have nothing to be sorry for, Danno. I'm sorry. I'm sorry I didn't notice until…"
Until it was almost too late. Had he waited a little longer, or not called Rachel, or not followed the trail all the way to the stream, it might have been too late. He thought he'd lost Danny out there in the jungle. Both of them soaked from the rain, Danny unconscious after his seizure, Steve pleading with him to hold on.
"Left you a man down for a month," Danny whispered.
Steve started. Even Mauna's expression went from passive to concerned.
"Danny, you've been in the hospital for seven hours," Steve said slowly.
Danny shook his head, his eyes clenching shut. "No. No. Been here a month."
Steve looked to Mauna helplessly.
"Danny. Daniel. Look at me." She jabbed his thigh when he didn't respond. "Detective Williams."
That caught his attention. He tilted his head her direction.
"What is the date?"
Danny rolled his eyes, but the vague way he gave Steve a side glance didn't bode well. A cold chill went up Steve's back.
"Dunno. February something. Maybe March."
Blood rushed through his ears, creating a ringing and almost drowning out his partner when he repeated himself. This couldn't be happening. This was bad. This had better not be long term.
He swallowed dryly. "Bud. It's July."
"No." Danny pulled his hand from his and started shaking his head again.
Steve scrubbed his hands over his face. He took a deep breath in. They would work through this. "What's the last case you remember?"
Danny licked his lips. His eyelids fluttered. His heartrate was lowering like he was falling asleep again. "Um. Meka. Where there's smoke."
The energy drained out of Steve. His shoulders sagged, his heart sank, and if he hadn't been sitting already his knees would have buckled under him. Meka. His death had been in November of 2010. Danny wasn't just missing months, he was missing years.
"What year is it?" he asked.
"2010, or 2011."
Mauna tapped at her iPad. Her warm amber eyes drew into narrow slits. "We need to find out what that ecstasy was tainted with. I've never heard of it causing amnesia this bad."
"I'll call Fong and tell him the lab needs to prioritize it. We think one of our suspects may have been exposed, too," Steve said. He leaned away to pull his phone out of his pocket.
Danny said something under his breath.
Steve leaned back in to hear him.
"Always leave me, anyway," Danny was saying at a volume that barely qualified as a whisper. "Always leave."
Steve shook his head with a sad smile. "I'm not going anywhere, bud. Not until the lab can tell me what the hell kind of drug can do this to a dragon."
A smirk flitted across Danny's face. "No such thing as dragons. Only in fairytales."
Steve froze. Stared. So that's what he'd been talking about earlier. Danny continued to mutter about dragons not being real, about decades of his life having been dreamt up. He turned to look at Mauna. Her brows were very nearly at her hairline, her iPad close to dropping from her hand.
"Oh, this is not going to be fun," she grunted.
Steve looked back down at Danny. Sweat dripped off his face, shiny on his pale skin.
"Danny, who told you dragons weren't real?" he asked.
Of all the things to forget, that was a giant one. It was a fact that would have been present with Danny from birth. He was one. His father was one. His sister. His own daughter was a mixed blood. His team were all dragon blooded. They had physical and mental scars from dragons. Someone would have had to have lived in total isolation for the majority of their life to think dragons didn't exist.
"Purple Scrubs," Danny said. His brow wrinkled in pain. "No scales. No teeth. I'm sorry, Steve. I'm sorry."
And he still didn't know what he was sorry for. "Danny–"
Danny went limp.
Steve glanced at the flatline on the heart monitor and jumped up from the chair. The abruptness seemed to have caught even Mauna off guard. She tossed her iPad on the tray table and shoved it away, stabbing at the call button as she laid the bed flat.
"Get a crash cart in here!" She yelled at the first nurse to appear. She pulled the stethoscope from around her neck and stuck the buds in her ears. "McGarrett, out."
He stiffened. "No!"
"Yes. Get out. Now!"
He tried to keep himself rooted to the spot, but found he didn't have much of a choice as nurses crowded in and shoved him to the outer edge of the fray. Still clutching his phone in one hand, he braced himself against the doorway. His knuckles turned white and his breaths came raggedly.
As a SEAL, he'd been taught that when everything was falling apart, he needed to keep it together. He'd remained calmer when he had watched one of his men bleed out on the battlefield than he was feeling at this very moment. Danny wasn't the only one that had let his walls down and formed close relationships since the birth of the taskforce.
He rubbed his thumb under his eye, erasing a lone tear. He forced a deep breath down into his lungs. The fear and terror at possibly losing his partner, at hearing Mauna ordering nurses around, started to channel into his veins as adrenaline. Everything turned into anger. A drive to fix the problem.
Now more than ever, he needed something or someone to vent his emotions on.
Because of his intense effort to funnel everything he was feeling into something useful, he failed to notice his phone was vibrating until the call was almost done.
He held it up to his ear. "What?"
"Steve? Are you okay, brah?"
He pressed his forehead against the cool wall. "Danny's not doing good. He flatlined."
There was stunned silence.
"I'm coming down there right now. I'll call Chin and Catherine. They're at HPD and should be headed there, anyway."
He pushed off the wall and put a few feet of distance between him and the sound of nurses trying to bring his partner back to life. His walls went up to shield the pain in his heart. Stone cold on the outside, all emotions shut off, yet inside was a tumultuous storm of agony and fear, blocking out even Kono trying to talk to him.
His mother's apparent death. His father's murder. The deaths of other officers. Various SEAL team members. He'd lost them all. And it had hurt. Hurt bad. He would be haunted by their deaths for the rest of his life, remembering every horrid moment in detail. They had destroyed and rebuilt him into the man he was today. Losing Danny would only do one of those things, and it wasn't the latter.
"Got a sinus rhythm," Mauna said, her head popping up above the other shorter nurses. She caught Steve's eye across the hallway.
The nurses, proficient and knowledgeable enough to function without a doctor's oversight, continued to bustle around Danny as Mauna peeled away and walked out to face him.
"Is he okay?" he questioned. He already knew the answer. The heart didn't just stop and restart without some issues. "What happened?"
"Is he okay? No, obviously not. But he will be for now," Mauna said. She rubbed the back of her neck, chewing on her lower lip. Her mouth curled in frustration. "What happened? I don't know. His heart just stopped. Didn't go into ventricular fibrillation, it just stopped. I've never seen anything like it."
"How'd you get him back?" he asked, looking around her to see into the room.
"I didn't. I was about to inject him with epinephrine, but he brought himself back to life before I could," she said. She followed his line of sight back into the room with an expression that might have been worry before it was masked over by a frown. "Your partner's a stubborn bastard."
Cupping his face in his shaking hands, he sighed and then realized he was still on the line with Kono. "I know he is. Kono, Danny's back."
"I heard. Is he gonna be okay?"
"Mauna doesn't know. Can you call Fong, tell him we really need to know what that MDMA was tainted with?" he asked, feeling too weary to do it himself. He may have been McGarrett the Navy SEAL, the monster of bad guys' dreams as Danny liked to say, cold and emotionless by his own design, but even he could barely keep himself standing after almost losing his partner twice in one day. It was through pure self discipline and determination that he was upright.
"On it, Boss."
"Wait," he said before she could hang up. "You said Chin and Catherine are already on their way to the hospital?"
"Yeah. Agata had a seizure in lockup. They're transporting her to the dragon wing at King's. You think she's having a reaction to the ecstasy, too?"
"It's our only lead at the moment," he said. Honestly, he couldn't care less about Agata. Not when his best friend was taking a nosedive.
"It'll be okay. Danny's tough. He'll pull through."
He nodded to himself, unconvinced. Then he blurted, "He doesn't remember."
"Doesn't remember what?"
"The last three and a half years."
"Brah, you for real? What does Mauna say?"
He glanced at the copper haired doctor now standing at Danny's bedside. She was a tall, stern woman of iron at the moment, yet her hands were gentle and deft in their ministrations.
"She doesn't know. I'll tell you more when you get here," he said.
He walked into the room and took his place next to the bed. His partner looked worse than before. The monitor showed a heartrate in the seventies, low for someone with a fever of one hundred and two. His oxygen saturation sat in the mid eighties. His blood pressure was on the higher end, but not by much. For all intents and purposes, the tests showed he shouldn't be that bad off.
"You're about to get another patient with ecstasy exposure," he said flatly.
"Looks like I've got a long night ahead of me." Mauna paused by him as she headed out of the room. "Let me know if he wakes up again."
He nodded.
"And don't obstruct any of the nurses. They're just doing their jobs."
He looked up at her. The cracks in her strong and impassive façade were showing after the scare. She did have a soft spot for Danny.
"Do any of the nurses wear purple scrubs?" he asked.
She glanced at her own teal scrubs. "Most of us have on teal. But the guys in pediatrics wear whatever they want."
"He said that Purple Scrubs told him dragons didn't exist," he said. He reached out and hesitantly set his hand on Danny's limp one, afraid to find it cold and stiff.
It wasn't.
"I'll ask around for a nurse in purple scrubs," she said. She exhaled noisily. "But, it could have been a hallucination. I don't know what kind of case you're working, but whatever drugs your bad guys were moving, it's a good thing they were seized before they hit the streets."
"We should have busted the operation a long time ago, before Danny got exposed," he said.
"Woulda, shoulda, coulda doesn't fix anything." Mauna patted his shoulder as she walked out. "I've got better coffee in the breakroom. Has my name on the bag. If anyone asks, tell them I sent you."
He snorted. "And what? The nurses will part like the Red Sea?"
"Damn right they will."
When she was gone, he was left to hold vigil over his partner by himself until the rest of his team arrived. Watching the heart monitor like a hawk, holding onto his partner's wrist for his own assurance, he processed the events of the day all over again.
He didn't care if Danny remembered the last few years or not, so long as he pulled through.
Next week on "Dragons", Steve focuses his energy into catching bad guys and knocks heads with a familiar face.
I am so sorry I did that to you guys. Okay, maybe not sorry, but sorry it landed on a bad week. I've been planning on pulling this specific prank since the first year I worked on this fic, but the last two April 1st came and went and I never got around to it. Finally decided to do it this year.
Anyway, I've been playing with Procreate on my iPad and have been working on some art to get up on the page here soon. What're your thoughts on me redoing the cover pic digitally? It'd probably look similar to what it is now, but with an updated art style.
Hey. Seriously, guys. I'm not gonna end this fic without warning. If I ever get to a point where I either have to slow down Posting or end the fic, I will let you know in advance. I'm not that mean.
On a side note, if I ever do stop posting randomly with no warning, I'm probably not among the living anymore.
