Authors Note: Thank you so much to all those who have read, reviewed and/or started following this story (and my others). I hope this next chapter is okay.

Chapter 7

Steve was sitting on the side of his bed, legs hanging down but not quite touching the floor. His shoulders were slumped as he gazed out of the window to the storm clouds on the horizon. His mind seemed numb, so much so it had led him into a false sense of security. He was fine. He was over the worst. Had he agreed to this too quickly? Perhaps he was starting to come out from under his own grey cloud?

His body ached more today than it had done since he'd returned but the doctors had explained that, since they were starting to taper off the medications, he would likely start to feel the full extent of his wounds. They weren't wrong. Every inch of his skin felt like it was bruised.

He had been so distracted with his thoughts, he hadn't noticed or heard Danny enter the room. The detective had his hands full. A tray with two large coffees and a bag of something edible. Over his shoulder was a small bag, inside some clothes he had picked up on the way for Steve having lost most of his things.

"You alright?" Danny whispered softly as he studied his best friend's fragile frame.

Steve snapped from his thoughts and looked over, offering a thin smile and a nod. "Hey…" he said quietly.

"I got you a turkey sandwich from that place down in Pearl City you like." Danny said, passing a coffee and the bag over.

Steve grabbed the items, taking a sip of the coffee but setting down the bag with little interest. "Thanks."

Danny sighed before sitting down next to him. "You sleep?"

Steve nodded. He lied.

"I saw Doctor Menendez on the way in… she said she'd be ready to start in about 20 minutes…"

Steve nodded, lowering his head.

Danny studied his friends defeated response, his forlorn expression and how he had arched his back over as if he were shielding himself. "You know you gotta do this, right?" he whispered.

Steve offered no response but appeared to coil in on himself even more.

"You still trust me?" Danny pushed.

"Of course." He replied softly but without a single second of hesitation.

"I will shut this down if I think it's too much or it's causing you more harm than good. You just need to trust me to have your back and when I tell you… this is something you need to try."

Steve's eyes clouded and stung with the tears that had formed. "I'm worried about what she is going to bring up."

"Okay…" Danny answered with hesitation.

"Things I haven't thought about in years… things that I feel a certain way about. Things that you might end up feeling a certain way about." He continued.

"Feel a certain way?" Williams shrugged.

"I mean… she's going to focus on the bad stuff, right?"

"Listen… buddy… if you're worried, and you're having second thoughts over having me in there… I get it." Danny answered with sympathy. "I'll stand down."

"No." he answered desperately. He really didn't think he could do this without Danny in the room. His mind was so fractured at the moment, all he really knew was that he felt safe with Danny in his corner. He sighed. "I know my past… and I know what I thought I'd accepted… but you might hear things that change what you think of me. You might hear things that you don't like."

"That's what you're worried about?"

Steve lowered his head again.

"Steve… listen to me." He answered softly. "I known you for a long time, right? And in that time I have learned more about who you are and where you've come from. It didn't take me that long to realize who you had to be and who you were, to do the job you did… you had to have a dark side."

Steve coughed a bitter laugh. "A dark side… you don't know what I've done."

"No. No, I don't… I have no idea what you had to do in the Navy… but I do know what you have done since the day we met at the house… and there were moments where we had to sink to some depths to get a result, do things that we have to live with… and I have never seen you just brush that weight off like it was nothing… I seen you struggle with your conscience so many times." Danny explained. "I'm not naïve enough to think that you didn't have to make some awful choices in the military… or that you didn't have to follow orders that you weren't morally in line with… I fully understand that there are things in your past that you may feel some kind of shame for.

Steve's jaw tightened.

"But believe me, when I tell you, there is not a single thing that would make me change the way I look and think of you. Nothing. Buddy, you got this. Okay?" Danny added as he reached out, wrapping his arm around his friends' shoulder and pulling him close protectively.

Steve closed his eyes, inhaling a few deep breaths before opening them again. He lifted his head, straightening slightly then nodded gently. "Okay." He said, pushing back as much of his fear that he could.

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The Day the World Crumbled

Within a small, and mostly uninviting office type room, the trio sat. Menendez sat on one of two couches, Steve on the other and Danny was positioned behind his friend as per the agreement. The doctor had explained the plan in great detail and had encouraged Steve to speak of any concerns he may have had. He declined, although she had done everything she possibly could, to ease his nerves, his urge to evade was palpable.

The doctor had told him of a simple way to calm himself if he felt overwhelmed. It was no different to the breathing technique he had been taught as a SEAL, ultimately to reclaim his composure during highly charged situations.

It had been after the first question he found himself doing just that. His eyes closed and his concentration focused only on listening to the sound of his breaths, in turn helping him to clear his mind and push away his anxiety. He found it easier to do when staring down the scope of a weapon than in this kind of setting.

He opened his eyes when he felt he had achieved what he needed to do, now he just had to start. "I'd had football training that afternoon." He began, refusing to give eye contact for now, fixing his sight on the floor. "I had caught the bus home because my dad was supposed to be working." He paused, thinning his eyes. "I saw two cop cars out front… it wasn't unusual… sometimes, if they caught a bad job, my father would round everyone up and bring them back to the house to grab a cup of coffee and talk about the latest game results." He could feel the anxiety bubble inside of him again as he took himself back to the moments that would change everything. "But the minute I walked through the door…" his voice broke. He shook his head and thinned his lips, trying to catch himself before he let his emotions take hold. "The minute I walked through the door… I knew this was different." He said firmly.

Danny listened closely.

"My father was sitting on the couch, with his head in his hands… he wasn't crying but he was obviously upset." He paused. "His partner turned to me… and he just said my name in a tone that I knew… I knew something bad had happened…"

Menendez nodded encouragingly.

"Steve…" Officer Brian Kellar whispered as he stepped closer to the young kid.

"What's happened?" Steve's eyes widened. "Dad?"

The officer turned back to John who lifted his head from his hands. He pushed himself to his feet and walked over. "Take a walk with me, son." He said softly as he wrapped his arm around Steve's shoulder and guided him out to the yard. After they came to a stop, just where the grass met the sand, John shuffled on his feet. "Listen to me… I have to tell you something… and it's going to be hard for you to hear… but I want you to know… we are going to get through this."

"Dad?" Steve hissed like a belligerent teenager.

John's eyes floated down. There was no easy way to do this. No cushioning the impact. "Something has happened to your mom, Steve."

He frowned. Unable to comprehend even a fraction of the situation.

John knew he just had to come out with it, but with that he knew that his son's life would be turned upside down. "Your mom was involved in an accident…"

Steve shook his head, still unable to grasp what his father was saying. At no point, in all the scenarios playing through his head since he had walked into the house, had he imagined it would involve his mother. "What are you talking about?"

His father rested his hand on his son's shoulder and squeezed. "She had a car accident… this afternoon. They tried everything they could to save her but…" he stopped. He just couldn't say the words.

"She what?" Steve asked. His voice panicked and elevated. "Dad!"

"She's not coming home, son." He said softly yet staunchly.

The young boy frowned, struggling to fully understand what his father was actually saying. His dad's demeanor didn't quite fit the gravity. There was little emotion, no real empathy and certainly no real meaningful compassion other than a soft pat on his back before he walked away.

Steve slumped back in the couch as he relived the moment, he knew now that his father was not only wired to suppress his reactions but that he would have also believed that by being stoic he was doing it for his kids. Being the strong one that they could count on. He would have had no honest idea that in that moment, it would have shaped the way Steve would become and how large a part it played into him being in this position today.

"I remember my sister coming into my room that night… and I knew that all she wanted was for someone to hug her and tell her that everything was going to be okay." He shook his head. "But I took dad's lead… and didn't give her anything." He paused. "I figured that dad knew what he was doing… he lost his father, he knew how to handle it. But it didn't really occur to me, at the time, how young he was when that happened and how it really made no physical difference to his life."

"The same sex parent is the most influential. It's would be natural for you would follow him." Menendez whispered.

"I remember being in awe about how strong he was. How he carried himself. Thinking how much I wanted to be like him. He never cried in front of us… not even at the funeral."

"What about you?" Menendez said softly. "Did you ever cry? Ever grieve?"

He finally offered her eye contact. "Maybe… once… the morning after it happened. I swam out on my board, into the ocean at the back of our house, got as far away as I could... and I started punching the surface of the board until my knuckles split open, it was like a release from the anger I felt." He sighed. "To be honest… I don't know if the tears were for my mom or if it was because of the pain in my hand." He whispered; the confusion etched in his expression. "But Mary… she openly suffered… and eventually dad got her some help. I guess, because I pushed it all to the back of my mind, he figured I didn't need it. I was just scared that if I did show anything, I'd have let him down."

Menendez nodded. She now had a better understanding of what had initiated his tendency to close off after experiencing trauma.

"A couple of months after… he decided to send us away." He continued. "We didn't know why… we still didn't know that it was a car bomb, not an accident." He hesitated. "We decided it was us… that he just couldn't or didn't want to deal with us anymore. I was angry, I couldn't understand how he could just push Mary and I away like that. How he could be so cruel to not only move us from everything we knew… and then separate my sister and I up on top of all that. We felt abandoned." He paused again. "That caused a rift between us that was really never fixed. We had no idea that he did it to protect us."

Danny couldn't help but grit his teeth with pure anger, aimed squarely at Doris. It wasn't enough to fake her own death, and have her own kids experience that kind of loss at such an influential age, but her lie literally tore her family apart with fear. For the first time he had an insight into what John must have been feeling. The terror he must have felt, wondering if he and the kids would be next and then having to hold that information back from his children. Shielding them from, what he believed at the time to be, the horrifying truth and costing his relationship with them both.

"What was your mom like? Before she disappeared?" Menendez asked gently.

Steve took a long moment to give it some thought. It was hard to remember. As if life before that day had been a blur. To make things more difficult, he found it hard to reconcile the woman he knew as a child being the woman he got to know when she came back. Almost like they were two completely different people, chalk and cheese. He lowered his head again. "She was warm, softly spoken and loving… the kind of mom people would want." He paused. "She had this energy that drew people in, she could spark up a conversation with complete strangers and you would think they'd been friends for years." He winced with sadness. "She was everything… and I loved her so much."

Danny frowned with sadness. He'd heard Steve talk about Doris in the early days, but never with this kind of sentimentality. He couldn't imagine the pain his friend had endured losing his mother at such an early age and in such horrific circumstances, let alone everything that subsequently happened in the past ten years.

"All I wanted, when she walked back into our lives, was to see just a little piece of the person she used to be. I knew it could never go back to how we were… but it wasn't even close. She was cold… calculating… and deceitful." His face creased with pain and his eyes welled with tears. "And as bad as this sounds, there were times where I even wished that she'd never come back… it was easier to remember her for who she was, and not have to accept what she'd become." He growled as the anger started to seep out and his nerves became frayed once more. His body shook lightly. "What kind of mother… choses her job over her family like that? Acts like her kids are nothing? Protects the man who killed my father, and nearly killed me, like she did?" His voice raised even more. "The positions she put my sister and I in, over and over. Only ever coming back when she wanted something, not because she wanted us."

Danny's back straightened as he threw the doctor a look of concern. This was way more than Steve had ever given before. It was nothing that Danny hadn't asked himself, but for his friend to actually verbalize his disgust, it was almost shocking to him. He was concerned about Steve's level of anger in that moment, although he knew it was the result Menendez was looking for. Still, it made him feel uncomfortable having never really seen Steve this wounded. He had no idea how he was really going to react.

"Did you want a break?" Menendez whispered, taking her lead from Danny's body language.

Steve gave it some thought before he shook his head. "No…" he said softly. The anger seemed to have subsided.

She paused for a moment, ensuring that all that residual anger had a chance to be processed. "I read that your father sent you to Carlsbad, California, to attend the Army and Navy Academy."

Steve sighed impatiently. "That's right."

"You were there around the time that the school faced some serious controversy over bullying, hazing and sexual misconduct by some of the teachers."

His eyes fixed on hers. His expression blank but inside he was nervous about what she knew and where this was going. He swallowed the lump forming in the back of his throat. "It was a challenging environment." He replied calmly.

"And you were good friends with a kid called Andrew Logan…"

There it was. There was the confirmation that she knew more than he'd hoped. He looked down to the floor, inhaling a deep breath and exhaling. He hadn't talked to anyone about this before, he hadn't even thought about it in twenty years.

"Tell me about Andrew, Steve…"

He felt uncomfortable discussing it but at the same time the memories of this kid allowed a smile to cross his lips. "He kind of took me as his pet project when I turned up in the middle of a school year." Steve started. "Showed me around, had my back, we just seemed to instantly connect. He was a really smart kid, had this wicked sense of humor… popular too." He sighed. "His Dad was colonel in the Navy, he had taken a posting in Japan for 18 months, taking Drew's mom with him… they decided that he and his younger brother Dylan, would stay at the Academy."

"You guys became roomies by the second year you were there, right?"

He nodded gently. "I guess he got his father to pull some strings."

"What happened to him?"

Steve glared at the woman, his eyes burning into hers. "I don't want to talk about this…" he whispered, pleading with her gently.

Danny frowned.

"Steve…" she responded. "You know that everything that is brought up in here are things I am certain you have never addressed. What happened to Andrew Logan is one of them. Now, you can skip this part… or any other part for that matter… but you also know that this is important to discuss for your recovery."

Steve thinned his lips with frustration and took a moment. He knew she was right, and he also knew that the minute he made it okay to skip one part it would give him permission to do it in other areas. He leant forward, leaning his elbows against his knees. "It was Thanksgiving… and my dad had just called to say that I wasn't going to be going home for Christmas. I was pissed. The thought of spending another holiday in the school was really getting to me." He paused. "I went back to the room… and Andrew was sitting on his bed… he was upset… I figured he'd also had a father/son phone call special… his relationship with his old man was ten times more contentious than mine. I guessed that something had been going on for a couple of weeks because he'd become more and more distant… whatever was going on, he wouldn't talk to me about it… so I didn't try. I decided I had enough going on and I just didn't want his problems on top of that."

Menendez nodded.

"So, I went to the track and ran for a while, just to work out some of my frustration." He hesitated as his face flickered with sadness. "I was gone, maybe an hour… and when I walked back into the room, he'd removed one of the ceiling tiles, found a pipe… and he was hanging with a piece of rope."

Danny's mouth parted with horror.

"I had nothing to cut him down… so all I could do was hold his weight and call out for help… but it took like five minutes for someone to hear me because most of the kids had gone home. A couple of teachers came in eventually, got him down… they brought him back… but his brain was starved of oxygen for a while… and so he ended up in a vegetative state."

"Did you ever find out why he did it?"

"Yeah…" he whispered. "That night, when I was allowed back into the room to get some of my things… I found a note that he'd put in my boots. He said that he had no other option… and that it was the only way he could think of to stop what was going on."

"Which was?" she encouraged him.

Steve gritted his teeth. "One of the teachers had been taking Andrew off to his classroom, regularly, he was doing all kinds of things. He'd threatened Drew, told him that if he ever told anyone, it would ruin his fathers' career. He also said that he would tell everyone that Drew wanted it." He sighed. "The humiliation was too much… he thought that if he told his father, his dad would blame Drew for allowing it to happen. So he believed he had no other way out."

"You blame yourself?" she nodded.

"Why wouldn't I?" Steve snarled. "He was my best friend… the one who looked out for me when I arrived and ever day after that." He shook his head. "If I had just pushed him to tell me what was going on… I might have been able to do something. I should have protected him… at the very least I should have been there for him." He winced. "I undeniably let him down…"

As much as she wanted to tell him otherwise, she had to let him express his emotions. They were real and valid to him.

"It opened up a whole can of worms within the school… massive investigation was launched and this teacher was found guilty for what he did to Andrew and eight other students." Steve shrugged. As for Drew, his parents put him in a hospice… and just after I graduated… he'd died of pneumonia."

"Did you feel responsible right after it happened?" she asked.

He shook his head as he struggled to recall. "I don't think I fully understood it. So, no. But when I found out that Drew had died, and that the teacher had been found guilty… I felt so much hate and anger for that man… it was the first time I'd ever felt like I could have killed someone."

"So, what did you do with that hate and anger? Now that he was in prison?"

"I don't know… I guess I punished myself for a while." He responded.

"Right. Because as the adult you now were, you were able to look at it in a different way. You could rationalize with the 'what ifs', now you were of an age where you could understand it better. You started processing what happened, that night, when you were older. You were able to resolve it better as an eighteen-year-old, with a little more life experience and a lot more confidence behind you, than the kid you were when it happened. You should have had some kind of help, to work through it all, right after it happened. And the reason why you punished yourself is because you looked back and thought how dumb you were as a kid for not seeing what you saw a few years later." She said bitterly. "But here's the thing… as an adult, in reality, you also have to know that this situation should never have been on a 16 year old boy to solve or to save someone." She explained. "You can't hold responsibility for any of it. It was the teacher's actions that led to this. Not yours. They let you both down, Steve."

He understood what she was saying, but still it felt reasonable to believe he was a factor to this tragedy. He nodded gently, his body slumping with exhaustion.

"Okay… lets take a break." She insisted. "What do you want to do? Have a couple of hours and come back this afternoon? Or wait until the morning?"

Danny fully expected him to choose the latter, or even say he no longer wanted to carry on with this.

"This afternoon." Steve answered.

Menendez smiled softly with pride. "Fourteen hundred, meet you back here." She nodded, then gathered her papers, stood up and exited the room.

Danny sat frozen in his position. He didn't know what to say or how to move on from this naturally.

Steve turned. "I'm tired."

"Let's get you back to the room." Danny answered, appreciating the ice being broken by Steve.