Thanks a lot for all the reviews. I appreciate it a lot.
Warning for this chapter: it includes suicidal thoughts, so read at your own risk.
Danny was used to silence when spending time with Steve. Over the years they got used to each other's presence, and sometimes they didn´t really need words to feel comfortable. But the kind of silence that stretched over the air during the ride from the airport was different. Tense. Uncomfortable even.
Except for Steve demanding the keys from Danny´s Camaro, none of the men said a word since Danny picked Steve and Joe up, which had been a while.
"Will you tell me?" Danny asked, no longer able to pretend he didn´t see Steve´s black eye.
"Tell you what?"
"What do you mean, what?" Frustration seeped into Danny´s voice despite his best effort to stay calm and not to push too hard. "Your face. What happened?"
"Nothing," Steve retorted, his grip visibly tightening on the steering wheel.
"Doesn´t look like nothing to me, Steven."
Steve didn´t answer and kept his gaze on the road ahead.
"That´s it?" Danny´s face twisted into a deep frown. "You´re not talking to me now?"
"There´s nothing to talk about."
Unsatisfied with the answer, but not at all surprised, Danny decided not to let Steve off that easily this time. He was tired. Fed up with answers like this one or no answers at all. He was trying to understand, trying to be patient, but it´d been eight months since Steve was back, and it was getting increasingly more and more difficult to deal with the person Steve was slowly turning into.
"You know, last time you got a black eye you got hit in a face by a lady heel during Valentine´s day," he said, hoping to lighten up the mood and maybe even get some of their friendly banter back. "Did that happen again?"
But Steve wasn´t amused at all. In fact, his frown deepened and Danny could almost feel the anger bubbling inside him. He remained quiet, though. He took a turn to his driveway, got out of the car, and walked inside without a single word spoken, slamming the door shut behind him.
"That went well," Danny said mostly to himself, watching the closed door before turning to Joe. "If he was like that the whole time, I guess you enjoyed the trip. Good company and all."
"Something like that," Joe said.
Danny pushed the jokes aside and grew serious. "It must´ve been difficult for him," he said. "I´m glad you were there."
"Yeah, no problem. Not that it did much to help."
"So, what happened, Joe?" Danny tried, hoping for Joe to shed some light on the situation. "I thought you two went there for a funeral. Where did he get that?"
Joe seemed to hesitate, but he decided to speak up eventually. "In a bar," he said with a sigh.
"Wh… Steve? A bar fight? You must be kidding me!"
"It´s not like it sounds," Joe added quickly. "He wasn´t drunk. He wanted to help a friend. Didn´t go as planned."
Danny scrunched his forehead in confusion. "What are you talking about? What friend?"
Sucking in a deep breath before continuing, Joe told him the whole story and Danny couldn´t help the overwhelming feeling of sadness that flooded him with the explanation. It was breaking his heart that both SEALs were obviously hurting, and his worry about Steve´s well-being spiked after that. Like it wasn´t enough Steve blamed himself already. Hearing such hurtful words from someone who he considered a friend and an ally must´ve no doubt caused further damage.
"I´m worried about him, Joe," Danny whispered. "He shuts me off and I… I don´t know how to get through to him. It´s like… like Steve I´ve known is not even there anymore."
It took a few seconds before Joe said, "Give him time. He´ll be fine." Just the fact it took him that long was enough for Danny to see he wasn´t convinced about it anymore. By the look in his eyes, Danny could say he was thinking the same.
Desperately wanting to believe it, though, Danny nodded.
"Come on, let´s get inside," Joe suggested.
Swallowing his emotions, Danny agreed and followed Steve into the house.
Steve wanted his life back.
He wanted the routine. He wanted to wake up in the morning, go for a swim and a quick run, drink a coffee, eat breakfast, go to work, catch some bad guys and make the island a safer place, watch a sunset over the ocean with Danny by his side, or go out with his friends, talk, crack a couple of jokes, and have a good sleep free of ghosts. He wanted to spend the weekends surrounded by his ohana doing the things he loved. He wanted to laugh with them and be able to forget the past.
He wanted to be a friend Danny and others deserved, a fun uncle Grace and Charlie had lost, a confident leader he´d once been. But he had never been further from all that.
Trapped in the darkness, he simply couldn´t see the way out.
He was picking on his food at Kamekona´s shrimp truck, surrounded by the team and trying to enjoy the light and peaceful mood without destroying it when his phone rang. Again. He let it ring without even looking at the caller ID.
"You gonna answer that?" Lou asked after a while, probably voicing everyone else´s thoughts out loud.
"No," he said, not really in a mood to explain. He knew exactly who was the one calling him over and over again. And he simply didn´t want to talk to him. It´s been a month since their little fight in the bar, but Richardson´s words had been stabbing at his heart ever since. He couldn´t get it out of his head, and the longer he was thinking about it, the more he was convinced about the harsh truth it was indeed all his fault. Not that he hadn´t known that before.
Lou shrugged, but Steve noticed the confused side-glances of his friends. "Okay," Lou said and eased back into the conversation.
A few minutes later, his phone buzzed again. He read the text that popped out on the screen.
Hey, you okay? Look, man, I´ve been a jerk. Sorry about that. Call me back when you can?
With a stoic face, Steve´s thumb tapped on "delete". This wasn´t the first message like this. He´d received a couple of them recently, but didn´t feel a need to reply. What would he say, anyway? Except admitting what they all knew already?
So pressing the emotions that threatened to bubble over to the surface into the dark corner of his mind, he focused on here and now. He smiled when he thought it was appropriate, he laughed at the jokes when others did, he talked when he was expected to talk. And he was glad when the hangout ended and he was finally allowed to take the mask off and be himself without worrying others.
He swallowed down the sleeping pills he´d asked for some time ago and opened up another bottle of Longboard before finally settling on the sofa. He managed to down another two bottles until the pills took effect and he finally succumbed to sweet nothingness, not bothering to change or move to the bed.
Time flew by and Steve was still living with a vicious cycle of booze, pain pills, and sleeping pills, that the doctor now handed out to him like Halloween candy to dull the physical pain and help him get some actual sleep.
It wasn´t until late October he returned to work, after promising Danny there would be no jumping off the roofs, no sharks, and no taking unnecessary risks.
Going into work took his mind off the memories that had never stopped haunting him. But he never seemed to be able to relax anymore, no matter where he went. If he went to a bar or a restaurant with the team, he wanted to sit facing the door, and the first thing he did was look for possible escape routes and identify potential weapons. He had done that before, but it had never been his main focus until recently. He was hypervigilant, aware of everything going on around him, constantly doing threat assessments.
He was also strangely tired all the time, which wasn´t helping his attempts of following his old fitness routine. He´d never been one to take naps in the middle of the day, but now they sounded great.
Steve put all his effort into acting normal around his team. Tried not to let his turmoil show. Tried to be his old self as much as possible so they wouldn't have to worry about him. He thought he was handling this okay, at least on the outside. He was decent at faking. But in reality, he wanted to crawl into a hole and fall apart.
But breaking down was a sign of weakness, and just like the Navy, Five-0 wasn´t a place for the weak. His team had to be able to count on him in situations where a moment´s hesitation could be the difference between life and death. So he bottled it up, screwed the lid on good and tight, and pretended that there was nothing wrong with him. Masked the signs suggesting that he was hurting in any way. Tried to always look strong and together.
The only thing that really mattered, at least in Steve´s perspective, was that no one in Five-0 had been injured since he´d been back. His deepest fear of leading his team into another massacre had not come to pass. He still had his inner demons to deal with, but he had done his job, solved cases, arrested the bad guys, and kept his team, his ohana, safe.
But the responsibility he felt for his team was constant and the stress of that took a toll. He was sleeping less and less, battling an increasing level of anxiety, and the nightmares from his past started to resurface even more frequently.
Lying awake, staring at the ceiling at night, he fretted that with each successful arrest, each successful hit from his gun, every time he called "clear", they were closer to something going wrong. He could feel it in his bones, and anticipated it with dread. If the history repeated and something happened to Danny or the rest of his friends under his command, he would never be able to forgive himself.
However, he couldn´t let on to them. It was something he didn´t know how to talk about, so he kept it bottled up and instead he focused on work. But to everyone´s surprise, he wasn´t rushing into dangerous situations without a blink of an eye anymore. He was meticulously planning each move before making it, always checking all the information before actually going into action, trying not to miss even the slightest detail.
Ultimately, it was 20th December, of all days, that something went wrong. Exactly one year since his life had been changed forever. When he woke up that morning, he had no idea it was the day everything would change again.
They finally had a chance to end the reign of a drug cartel that had shown up in Hawaii weeks ago, and been leaving bodies of their competitors behind ever since. They were about to arrest a bunch of top players, but as it turned out, Steve had underestimated the numbers.
As soon as they breached the gate of the house, the occupants opened up the gunfire from every window, door, and roof of the house. The team was pinned down behind the low wall that surrounded the house.
While his teammates returned fire, he raced up to the roof of a building directly across the street from the action in order to see what was going on. He also hoped that the vantage point would allow him to engage the enemy from a better position.
As he took in the scene, he could smell the weapons systems engaging, the barrels getting hot, and the pungent aroma of gunpowder, and it brought back the memories he couldn´t afford to focus on at that moment. So he pressed it down and focused on here and now.
Despite the pummeling the house took from Five-0, every time Steve thought it might be over, the occupants opened fire again. Fewer of them each time but, like vicious cornered animals, they fought savagely and refused to surrender.
At last, the gunfire from the house slowed enough that he decided it was the time to go into the house and finish face-to-face what they had come to do.
Had he known that just a minute or two later two shots would be fired, both hitting Danny square in the chest, he wouldn't have decided to go in. But watching his best friend hit the floor with sheer terror gripping his heart, he knew it was too late to think about what-ifs.
"Danny!" he called out, already sprinting toward his friend, no longer caring about the bad guys. The time stood still as he dropped to his knees beside the blonde man, his eyes quickly searching Danny´s body, desperate to evaluate the situation.
Gasping for breath, Danny held his hand on his chest, and it took Steve a moment to let the obvious sink in. A tac vest. Danny was wearing a tac vest. There was no blood.
"´m fine, Steve," Danny huffed out, grimacing in pain.
His heart still racing, Steve watched him over again, just to be sure. He opened his mouth to say something when he heard Kono scream somewhere in the distance.
"Watch out!" she called out.
It only took a split second for Steve to react and took around. The same man who had shot Danny just seconds ago had his gun pointed in their direction. Without thinking, he sprang forward, a fit of rage consuming him in an instant.
He crashed into the man, and the impact sent them both to the floor, and the attacker´s gun sliding away across the room. They grappled for a few seconds, but Steve came out on top, pinning the man underneath him.
With each hit he delivered, his anger grew. Realizing this son of a bitch had nearly killed his best friend, he kept fighting him even as the guy´s struggles slowed down and then ceased completely. Soon, it seemed he was no longer in control of his own body.
He would swear he heard someone talking to him, saying his name, but he could no longer focus on that. The only thing he knew for sure was that he wanted to hurt this man.
"That´s enough," Danny´s voice echoed somewhere in the back of his skull. "Steve, stop. You´re gonna kill him."
He didn´t care. Not anymore, not after almost being robbed of the only good thing remaining in his fucked up life.
"Steve!"
He couldn´t stop himself from pummeling the man on the ground. His fists rained down on him until someone caught his hand mid-air, and in a fit of rage, Steve punched that someone with all strength he had left in him.
It wasn´t until he felt Chin´s firm hands on him that he realized Danny was down on the floor again, his nose bleeding. Steve froze instantly, horrified. Danny looked up, wiping the blood off his face with the back of his hand without a word.
Wide blue eyes were staring at Steve with concern written all over them, but the anger he had expected to see just wasn´t there. The tension in the room grew by a second, and Steve could feel all his colleagues´ eyes burning a hole into him.
Steve squinted at Danny, trying to slow down his breaths. Then he looked at the unconscious and bleeding man on the floor with sheer terror.
He had done that.
He nearly got his best friend killed, then almost killed their perp, and attacked Danny himself. "Sorry," he whispered after a moment, not even sure what else he could say.
"You all right?" Lou asked Danny, helping him to stand up.
"Yeah," Danny said, gesturing to their perp with a tip of his chin. "But he isn´t. He needs an ambulance."
"It´s on the way," Kono chimed in. The dismay in her voice was hard to miss.
Still trying to regain control of his emotions, Steve barely noticed Danny pulling him aside from the group. "What the hell, Steven?" the Detective snapped as soon as they were far enough. "You could have killed him. You… you…" he shook his head, rubbing his hand over his face in frustration.
"I´m sorry," Steve repeated without thinking. It was the phrase he´d learned to use over and over and over again in the past months. Still fazed by his own reactions, he spilled it out as though on auto-pilot.
The next time Danny spoke, it was gentler. "Talk to me, babe." He approached Steve and brushed his thumb over the bloody knuckles on Steve´s hand.
"I'm sorry," Steve muttered again in a strangled voice. "I don't… I…" I don't know what's wrong with me. Well, he had a guess, but he refused to go there. He didn't want to add another issue to his already-long list. PTSD was a condition that felt so permanent and it was the last thing he needed in his life.
He lost track of how many times he had apologized until the day was over. Envisioning the terror in the eyes of his friends he had been sitting in his office for hours, pretending he had important paperwork to do until a knock on the door brought his mind back to the present.
"Hey." Danny stood there in the doorway, staring at him. "We´re about to head to Arnold´s for a couple of drinks. I think we could all use some. Wanna come?" he asked.
"I don´t think…" Steve began, but Danny didn´t let him finish.
"Come on," the blonde man insisted. "It´ll be good for you too."
Steve sighed in defeat. "You guys go ahead. I´ve got some things to take care of first. I´ll meet you there."
He wasn´t sure why he´d said that. If he was honest with himself, he wasn´t really thinking at that moment. Not anymore. The thoughts were all tangled up in his head.
About an hour later, he was watching a sunset on the beach. Watching the light disappear behind the dark waters of the deep ocean. Watching the end of the day. Fitting for what he had in store.
The last year had been the worst year in his life. But it would be selfish to claim it only sucked for him. No. He kept pulling his friends down with him, hurting them, no matter how hard he kept trying not to.
For the hundredth time, he reflected on today, wondering what he could have done differently to change the course of the day. He had not only failed as a team leader again, getting Danny hurt and almost killed, he had also failed as a friend. The looks in the eyes of his colleagues were proof of that.
As he sat there in the Adirondack chair in his backyard, the gun in his hand, tears in his eyes, he thought about all the things that were wrong with him. He thought of the times he had considered he´d be better off dead but never pulled the trigger. Clearly, now, it would be better for everybody if he was gone. He´d experienced these thoughts for quite a while now, but he didn´t think he really wanted to die. He just didn´t know how to live anymore, didn´t think he deserved it anyway, and after the events of this day he had made up his mind that this was the best solution.
For himself. For Danny. For his team. For everybody who had ever come near him.
He turned the gun over, studying how it fit so naturally in his hand. How many times he had fired it, or one like it, in training and in combat over the years? How many lives had he taken with it? What was one more - his own - in the scheme of things?
He sat there with his hands shaking, yet his mind was now still. Blank. It was time to admit defeat. Time to get it over with.
*to be continued*
I know not all of you will like the ending of this chapter, but it has been where I was heading since the beginning (because PTSD isn´t pretty), so please don´t hate me for that. I´ll be glad if you leave a review. Thanks.