Disclaimer: Hawaii Five-0 and its characters do not belong to me.
...
"It's not time for you to be here yet, son. You've still got things to do. You've still got people who need you back there. I'll be waiting here..for when it's time. But now, you need to return, Steve. You need to fight."
"Da..d..Dad?!" Fight? Fight what? Return? Where to? He was lost, wandering without and nothing around him.
But right then, like a miracle waiting to happen, there it was. He could barely make it out in the distance. An anchor, his compass of life, his guiding light that would never leave him stranded for long.
"Steve..buddy? You gotta fight this, okay? Take all the time you need. I'll wait..But you got to promise that you'll come back. The team still needs you...and me. I..I need you, buddy. Just.. come back to us..please..come back, alright?" He felt the hushed voice caress his hairline.
Then nothing.
It frustrated him. This constant tease, where he could just about grasp consciousness right before it was pulled right under him and he was again plunged into a never-ending void.
Just like the previous two times, his descent into consciousness this time was accompanied by a dark, hazy fog. A fog so thick, he didn't quite know where he was nor what was happening around him. He had managed to open his eyes on two other occasions but they had slid shut almost immediately. He hadn't remembered much from those two fleeting moments of awareness aside from a figure bent over next to him and a hand warmly resting against his. He had willingly embraced the fog which brought him back to endless nothingness where he didn't feel anything. Not tired, not in pain like he did in the brief moment that he was conscious. He should want to stay there where it no longer hurt, like he was floating in warm, fluffy cotton candy. But the whispered words in his ear and the memory of the familiar hand tightly wrapped over his made him want nothing but to return to the surface. There was something, someone desperately clinging onto him and waiting for him on the other side. And he had to return.
So even through the boundless agony tearing through his body, he had tried his hardest to crack his eyes open. He fought the haze looming over him. It was akin to a very long swim up from the bottom of the ocean. Darkness surrounded him and he didn't know when he would ever reach the surface or if there even was a surface to breach. Was there an end to this? Or would he be forever drowning, no way out of this infinite, lonesome exile. His head began to throb with exertion, the ache in his muscles intensifying with every second that he fought. If that was any indication, he had to be close..
Just a little more, he couldn't succumb now.
He could feel it. He was reaching the top. He could feel air filling his lungs, the myriad of sounds resonating in his ears where there had been nothing but silence before, the light that slipped through the gap beneath his closed lids where there had only been blinding nothingness previously. The pain eating into his flesh threatened to pull him back under, but he wouldn't let it win this time. There was someone who still needed him, still waiting for him.
His eyelids fluttered, and finally his eyes opened and against all odds, remained that way.
"Commander. Are you with me?" A voice that held equal parts gentleness and firmness, one he didn't recognize called out to him almost immediately. As though whoever it was had been waiting for this very moment. But it wasn't the voice he had heard in his dreamy haze, to his massive disappointment. He blinked slowly, the light was overwhelming, the pain even more so. He was enticed to shut his eyes and to give up the fight entirely, his resolve to stay awake dissolving in mere seconds.
"Commander McGarrett? Can you hear me?" The voice persisted, forcing him to pry open his eyes. Steve looked at the man hovering over him, a surgical mask obscuring half his face, but his forehead seemed oddly familiar.
He tried to speak. Tried being the key word because nothing came out of his mouth. He could feel his lips moving, the oxygen mask over his face shifting in tandem, but he couldn't hear his own voice. He figured that had something to do with the soreness in his throat. To be really honest, sore didn't begin to describe it, his throat felt like hot burning coal had been shoved into it and left to burn. He swallowed in an attempt to soothe the ache.
"Commander?"
He nodded in answer, which he was soon aware was a big mistake because he was pretty sure he could feel his brain dancing offensively in his thick skull, sending intense flashes of nausea through his stomach while at it. God, was he dying?
"Commander, it's good to see your eyes open for a change. You've kept us waiting on our toes for quite a while." The guy (presumably his doctor) said. Steve shuddered internally as the cool diaphragm of a stethoscope rested on his chest, mapping its way across his torso. The mask on his face was removed, replaced with a nasal cannula instead. "How are you feeling? You must be pretty sore all over."
Knowing now that nodding was a bad idea, he tried again to speak even if that was a different agony in and of itself. "Wh..a..ha..pen'd?" He barely managed to carve the words out of his lips.
"Well, a lot of things happened." He could tell the doctor was frowning from the new lines appearing on his forehead. Scratching the top of his eyebrow with the back of his gloved hand, the doctor continued, "What is the last thing you remember?"
Steve inhaled, somehow even that hurt. Everything he did was introducing new aches that weren't there before. He tried to ignore them all. What did he remember? His eyebrows furrowed, as he tried his hardest to recall what it was that could have landed him in this unforgiving state. Funny how even in that pain- and likely drug-induced haze, the first thing he could think of was that Danny would be hella pissed at whatever he had done to result in this. He would probably never hear the end of it from his beloved curmudgeon. He needed to prepare himself for Danny's... Hold up.. Danny...
The memory hit him like a sudden bolt of lightning on a clear day. He had been with Danny. They had gone undercover for a case, everything was going just according to plan until.. well, until it hadn't. He had been shot, he remembered way too clearly. That had hurt like a b***h. How many bullets did he even take? Ugh.. that explains why he felt like he was dying. He was actually surprised he made it out alive to the hospital. He was convinced he had died on that pla...
PLANE! That's right.. He had been on a plane when he was shot. A plane he was controlling! And Danny was on the plane too! Did they crash? He didn't remember crashing but he sure didn't remember landing it safely either, there was no way he could have in his state. But no one else on the plane knew how to control one, definitely not Danny.. They must have crashed.. Sh*t, sh*t, sh*t.. Saying that Danny would be pissed would be an understatement.. He would be absolutely livid. Danny was going to kill him for his brilliant idea to go undercover, he was 100% sure of that.
But uhh.. where was his partner? Where was Danny? Why wasn't Danny here, fully equipped with enough rant that would make him want to go into a coma instead of being awake? Maybe it was the fact that he had just woken up from a life-threatening injury, or maybe he was an idiot like Danny always so kindly reminded him on an almost daily basis, but it took an awfully long time for it to finally dawn on him. For it to dawn on him that if their plane had indeed crashed, Danny was in the crash too.. Which meant his partner could have been seriously wounded as well..
"..'NY?" Neither he nor his erratic heart rate could hide the panic that was coursing through his bloodstream. He was breathing a little too fast yet the air wasn't reaching his lungs.
"Commander, I need you to calm down." The doctor remained stoic. "You are alright now."
No...NO! It wasn't him he was worried about. He needed to know about his partner. Danny! Why wasn't the doctor saying anything about Danny? Where was he?
"D..aa.."
"Commander, you need to calm down, I don't want to have to sedate you."
"What's going on?" He heard another voice. This one he recognised. He would never not recognise Danny's voice, complete with the subtle tremor in it that revealed his anxiety. Steve always hated to hear that in Danny's voice because it always meant he or someone he loved was in danger. "Is he okay?" Danny's words were spoken with a similar softness as the one he had heard in his haze. The one that had called out his name repeatedly, beckoning him to return. Now he was slightly more convinced that that hadn't been his mere imagination.
Danny's voice washed him with relief. "..'nno" Steve remembered how to breathe again, his heart rate slowly evening out with the knowledge that his partner was nearby. Shutting his eyes momentarily, he drank in the oxygen his body thirsted.
"Commander, are you still with me?"
"Hmm." Steve looked at the doctor. "Dd..a..nny..o..k?"
"Detective Williams?"
Steve blinked.
"He will be fine. And so will you."
Steve didn't quite like the answer because it suggested to him that Danny wasn't currently fine. "Wh..at hap..ened?" He asked again, needing to fill the gaps in his memory. All he remembered was getting shot, the intense pain he had never felt before convincing him that he was dying. Then nothing. There was only pure white nothingness afterwards.
"Do you remember being shot?"
Having forgotten the consequence of nodding, that was exactly what he did. But his brain had probably returned to its original position as he didn't feel half as bad as the first time.
"Good." The doctor said. "You took three rounds, Commander. One on your abdomen, another on your shoulder and the last one on your thigh. Fortunately, the ones on your shoulder and thigh were not too much of a problem. I would say you were extremely lucky that they hadn't hit any major arteries so we were able to repair those fairly easily."
Steve again swallowed the dryness in his throat. Would it kill for someone to actually hand him some water?
"The one on your torso however...that was a bit of a problem. There was severe bleeding from that particular wound and the bullet had lodged itself in your liver, completely damaging it. The entire organ was inoperable and we had to remove it."
He blinked wearily. Now, the fire burning in his insides made complete and total sense. He understood now why he was in such pain. Being shot had never hurt this much, maybe because he had never mangled his internal organs before.
"It was a close call, Commander. Without a new liver, you would have died." The doctor said firmly, his brows knitted together.
He had come real close to dying this time, huh? "Li...ver?"
"That's right. The only way to save your life was with a liver transplant." The doctor continued. "Fortunately, we got a match for you just in time."
Fortunately? Yeah.. Maybe for him, it was a fortunate thing. Not for whoever had died for him to conveniently become the recipient of their once vital liver. It was a little morbid, he thought to be happy about having survived at the expense of another person...
"Detective Williams' liver turned out to be a good match for you and he volunteered for the surgery. He went through a partial liver resection and the liver was transplanted into you.." The voice trailed off, but Steve could hear nothing beyond that.
He knows it is impossible for time to stop but that's exactly what it felt like. On hindsight, probably his brain had stopped processing for a while. What was he hearing? What did the doctor just say? His brain was jammed up. He couldn't understand what the doctor had just said.. or rather, more accurately he refused to comprehend.
Danny? He had Danny's liver in him? Was that true? It couldn't be true. Why would Danny.. No, it didn't make any sense. This had to be a joke. His partner should appear right about now and reveal that it was just a sick joke. After all, this sounded just like Danny's brand of humour. But nothing of the sort happened.
"...The surgery was a success. Recovery will take some time but without any complications, the liver would grow to its original size and both you and Detective Williams will be fine." He caught the end of the doctor's sentence.
"Wh..wh..ere's.. he?" He asked when the gears in his head finally began functioning again.
"He's right outside, commander. Like I said, you've kept us waiting for some time. Let me just finish up here and you will be up for a few visitors." The doctor said.
The ten minutes it took for the doctor to finish up examining him felt a lot longer. He was getting tired, so damn close to giving in to the overwhelming fatigue. But he needed to see his partner. He needed to know for sure that what the doctor had said was true. Not that the doctor had any reason to lie. But he had to know from Danny himself. That his partner had given him a part of himself. When the doctor was finally done about an eternity later and the curtain was opened, his eyes immediately searched for his partner. His heart lurched as he saw Danny lying on a bed similar to the one he was on, a soft smile carved on his pasty face. No words were needed. He knew it was true.
"Hey, buddy.." Danny's cerulean eyes locked onto his.
And that was it. That was the moment when it finally got too much for him. He clawed his way back to the darkness because it was way easier that way. Because he couldn't handle it. That thing that was glistening in Danny Williams' eyes, pouring out of them without restrain. He couldn't handle that. So he had shut his eyes and taken the cowardly way out to unconsciousness.
…
When Steve woke up, the first thing he noticed was the clear view he had of his partner, the curtain that had created a rift between them last night was now wide open. A soft sigh escaped his lips as his eyes landed on his partner's sleeping form, huddled in the corner of the bed, face turned away from him and wrapped in a blanket like a burrito. Steve adjusted his bed, raising it so that he was in a slightly more upright position to assist in his morning routine of quietly watching his partner like a creepy stalker. In the past few days that they had been forced to share a room, Steve was always awake way before Danny due to his daily competition with the sun. That was a good thing because in the calmness and solitude of the early morning, he was allowed a moment of unadulterated honesty and vulnerability which he wasn't allowed when there were others around.
The truth was that he felt compelled to pretend everything was okay in front of everyone else. He was after all Steve McGarrett, the former Navy SEAL and current leader of the Governor's Task Force. Everyone had celebrated his life, the fact that he had once again defied death and come back on top. They were waiting for him to return stronger than ever, expecting him to bounce back right away. He had smiled, laughed, promised that yeah, he would definitely come back stronger. But, who was he kidding? He had seen death up close this time around. In fact, he hadn't defied death. Death had come knocking right on his door, sitting quietly in his lanai. And he would have willingly opened the door and walked right into its cold embrace if it hadn't been for the one person that prevented it. His partner had slammed the door on death's face, keeping it firmly shut while pulling him back into life's warm touch.
He had every reason to be grateful to his friend. Yet, not once had he thanked Danny. They had more than enough time together for him to say two words that he meant from the bottom of his heart. But time and again, he had avoided the topic, he had complained about Danny's rants, he had joked that he feared picking up Danny's laundry list of quirks, including but not limited to wearing patent leather loafers and button-up shirts on the daily. Who even does that in Hawaii? He had told Danny there had been no need for his life-saving sacrifice. But he hadn't once thanked his friend for doing it.
Why?
There really was only one answer, wasn't there? 'Thank you' hardly seemed sufficient in exchange for what he had received from his partner. And he wasn't just talking about 3/5 of Danny's liver which was now his. He had received more than that. There was something so extremely priceless, something that resided in Danny's eyes, something that poured out unconditionally. Something too large to be contained in 4 simple letters. Love.
The thing was Steve had always known the dedication with which his partner loved, so really he shouldn't have been surprised at all. Danny loved vehemently and maybe even recklessly. Danny's love was never half-hearted, it was always full, giving more than required. And it was loud, just like everything else about Danny, raucously declaring itself without reserve. Danny didn't keep his love locked up in some small corner of his heart the way that most people did. Danny pompously flaunted it on his sleeve, wearing it like an honorary medal. It always made him wonder how Danny made it seem so easy to love and to show it?
Without question, Danny's love for his daughter was surpassed by absolutely nothing. Everyone who knew Danny would know that. And Steve had seen that love radiating from his partner from the very day they met. When his partner's face had morphed into an uncharacteristic grin as he heard his daughter's voice over the phone. His love had spilled out as a soft chuckle that seemed alien coming from the hot-tempered man next to him. It had thawed his heart frozen by vengeance, that was the power of Danny's love as he would keep learning. But he had really seen the rawness of Danny's love for his daughter a little while later, when they had sat in his lanai, having their first beer together.
"So what's the third?" He had asked.
"Well, even if I tell myself this isn't permanent, it's Grace's home now. It's my job to keep it safe." Two simple sentences.
But they had told Steve that Danny's love held promise and commitment. It was unyielding.
His respect for the man had grown ten-fold well before he even really knew Danny (beyond the fact that he was a grumpy old man stuck in a young body). This man had uprooted his whole life as he knew it and moved to a place thousands of miles away which he clearly, clearly hated, just so he could be close to his daughter and to keep her safe. He had to be a good guy, right? No doubt about it. And Steve knew then, with 100% certainty, that he had chosen the right guy as his partner.
As it turned out, that was nowhere near the last time he got to witness Danny's love. There were too many times to list. Steve saw it on those fleeting weekends when Danny's mood was lifted because he finally got to see his daughter. He saw it each time Danny slapped on a pain relief patch and a smile on his face, driving off at top speed (legal top speed that was) to see his daughter after a particularly taxing day at work. He saw it when Danny tucked away his dislike for the ocean and any form of sports just to see the pure joy on Grace's face when they surfed together. And he definitely saw it (and incurred its wrath too) each time Danny was in a mopey mood when he had to miss a weekend with Grace because a case had cropped up at the last minute. Steve saw Danny's love almost too often that sometimes he forgot how extraordinary that love was.
But it never took long for Danny to remind him the lengths with which he would go to for the people he loved. And when he did, it came crashing back into Steve's chest, knocking the breath out of him.
That was what had happened when the unabashed, unrestrained, Danny Williams trademark love had reverberated the musty underground lair in Colombia. The pain that Danny's immense love had brought him was something Steve had witnessed first hand and would never forget. He remembered how Danny had ranted nervously throughout their journey to Colombia in an honestly poor attempt at taking his mind off things. He had afforded a joke, while fidgeting endlessly in his seat, that he would kill Matty himself once their whole ordeal was over. A joke he had promptly regretted, blaming himself for jinxing his brother and leading to his death. Which was absurd because Matthew was dead long before that. Steve had seen Danny's love roar into life, unleashing itself as a hail of bullets before it quietly bled into the earth as Danny knelt, almost catatonic, in front of his brother's remains. His love flowed out as untamed tears on his face, while he asked over and over again, to no one in particular, what he was going to do.
That was when Steve first saw Danny's love mourn and he never wanted to see it again. Ever.
But as with many things in Steve's life, that didn't go according to plan. He had had to bear witness to Danny's love grieve yet again. This time his love grieved for the time he had lost with his son. Three years of Charlie's life that he had forever lost only because his ex-wife had held it against him that he had dedicated his life towards keeping their daughter's home safe. He had seen the love as unshed tears hidden in Danny's eyes as he admitted how he had barely spared a glance to the little boy in those three years because he had thought Charlie belonged to another man. Steve saw the love in Danny's self-reproach, that maybe, just maybe if he had looked at Charlie, if he had once held the boy's hand, he would have known that Charlie was really his. He had seen that love in Danny's blatant admittance that he craved hearing the word 'Daddy' from Charlie directed towards him instead of another man. Danny's love had oozed out in his zero hesitation to donate his bone marrow to a son he never knew he had till a week ago. And Steve had seen that love tracing out the lines on Danny's forehead as he gently comforted the small replica of himself who was curled comfortably in his lap as they awaited their surgery.
He learnt then, that Danny's love was innate. It neither took time nor was it conditional. It just was.
He had always recognised Danny's love which was clear as day when it was directed to his kids and family. But he had failed to see it when that same love was shown towards him. Whether it was his inability to admit that someone in this world cared about him or his insecurity that told him he was undeserving of being loved, who knew? All he knew was that he had completely and intentionally misread the love in Danny's eyes that he had seen all those years ago in North Korea and then again in Afghanistan. He had told himself, that it wasn't love that had compelled Danny to travel across oceans to save him. It was loyalty. His partner was the most loyal guy he knew, his most trusted back-up after all. It made sense that Danny would be there for him, right?
But this time around, even he wasn't such a dense fool to believe the lie he was telling himself. The look in his partner's eyes wasn't loyalty or compulsion. It was most definitely love. The figure hunched next to him, the memory of the soft voice beckoning him, the ghost of the touch on his arm, those were the evidence of that love. So was the liver in his body and the blood pumping through his veins. Every breath he was allowed to take now was a testament of Danny's love which he had become the unwitting recipient of. Danny's love which was for him. Danny's love which he feared he would never match up to.
And so instead of attempting to show his partner his love, he had manifested it in anger. After all, love and anger were merely different shades of the same colour. He hid behind a wall of words he didn't quite mean yet had managed to hurt his partner all the same. He regretted the anger every morning, when the quietude of the room made the words he uttered in haste ring louder than ever. Especially the still fresh words he had told his partner a few hours ago.
"Danny?" He called gently, as he saw Danny stir in his bed, squirming under the blankets. "You awake?" He looked at his partner, waiting for some form of reply, maybe even a full-on rant that he rightfully deserved.
"You still mad at me?" He asked when his friend remained silent. "Look, I.." Steve stopped mid-sentence.
"Ste..ve."
A crippling sense of uneasiness crept up his neck the longer his eyes rested on his partner. He wasn't sure what it was. But something was wrong.. something about the way Danny's back bent awkwardly into his torso, the way his partner's breath seemed a little too shallow and the way Danny squeaked his name out with a little too much effort. Something was definitely wrong and if Steve didn't know fear before, now he definitely did.
...
A/N: Hey everyone! First of all, thank you so much to all you awesome people who left a review and made my day! Secondly, I'm really sorry for the longer wait for this chapter (ended up sick from my booster vaccine and creating a backlog of work so I had no time to write). In any case, here's the next chapter. It's a little (a lot) long, but I really didn't want to break the chapter up. I hope it's okay and that it wasn't too boring or confusing and that you guys liked it. A little bit of Danny whump coming because you know I had to. Really hope you guys enjoyed this chapter and look forward to the next one! :)