Synopsis: The road to recovery isn't as easy as Danny Williams thought it would be. Steve McGarrett is hiding inside his mile-high emotional wall and, without meaning to; he has started blocking Danny out. But when gun smugglers come searching for payback, will Steve be there for Danny? Or will his Jersey partner be forever silenced. DANNY!WHUMP and STEVE!ANGST. NO SLASH. Friendship only.

Disclaimer: I don't own Hawaii Five-0 and am not getting any monetary gain for this story, just playing in CBS's sandbox for a while. These characters and storylines remain the property of CBS. No disrespect intended, just great characters that inspire their own stories.

Rated: T for violence and injuries. Not a Death-Fic.

Notes: Angst and Hurt/Comfort are kinda my thing and I opened a can of worms in the first story, 'Words can Kill'. Here's the sequel.

Chapter Two:

Without a Trace

Detective Daniel "Danno" Williams 'hated' to be knocked out by artificial means more than he hated pineapples…and that was saying something…because he absolutely despised pineapples. But getting knocked out? It was the worst. He'd spent his childhood fighting anyone and everyone that had tried to pick on either his sisters, or his baby brother, Mattie. And in the process, the feisty Jersey native had taken some pretty nasty blows. There had been stitches and frozen packs of peas on his face over the years. Hell, he'd even had a cold cut of steak on there at one point. Danny had lost count of the numerous times his father had picked him up from the principal's office, or his mother had taken him in for said stitches. But he'd been a scrapper. Danny very rarely lost a fight, mostly because he'd never learned to 'just stay down,kid'. He'd always told himself that if someone was going to hit him, they better hit him hard enough he couldn't get back up. Sometimes that had actually been the case. Once he'd become a cop, that hadn't changed. He had been shot a couple times, yes it happened even before he met the super-ninja-SEAL, Steve McGarrett, and those times had left him with a different type of pain or unconsciousness. Getting punched in the face and going down for the count had never left him as disoriented or sick as medicated unconsciousness did.

The first sensation Danny felt was nausea, which is never a good thing…the second was pain, also not a good thing, as his head bounced against the steel frame of what Danny eventually recognized as the bed of a pickup. He was completely shrouded in darkness and his body was barely obeying any of his commands to hold still, damn-it. The smell of rain and the fresh air told his muzzy brain that he wasn't anywhere near the city anymore. Which was definitely a problem, because no one would have a clue where to look for him. There was a dull burning sensation in his side and a suspicious wetness clinging to his shirt. The acrid smell of dirt and the metallic ring of blood in his mouth informed him that although he'd been knocked out with something, there had been at least one fist involved. He tried to shake his head slightly to clear some of the cobwebs and was rewarded with a slicing agony that had him groaning in response. Moving, bad...got it. He thought.

The Five-0 detective wanted to throw up so badly that he wondered why his stomach wasn't rebelling against him at this very moment. A little mutiny would be okay here. It might help with the pain. But nothing happened, no matter how many times his gut flip-flopped or serpentined, his last meal remained firmly in place. After a moment Danny gave up and tried to force his eyelids apart, but they were extremely disobedient and remained stubbornly sealed. See stomach, that's how you do it. Okay, so he was having internal conversations with himself and that was strange, so head injury? Maybe.

Steve's face flashed in front of his closed eyes and Danny suddenly wondered if he'd get the chance to fix things with his stubborn ninja-SEAL, or if they'd be separated by the grave before that happened. He'd always thought the expression 'give up the ghost' was ridiculous, but as he laid in the back of the truck moving further and further from his friends and family...he wondered if, as a ghost, he could watch over them? Flashes of Grace and all the things he was likely to miss panned in front of his still closed eyes like a personal movie of his life. A life that he may not live to see. Oh Grace, I'm so sorry monkey. Danno's sorry and he loves you. A pain that had nothing to do with his current situation nearly stole his breath away at that thought. And his partner? He'd tried, he really had. But McGarrett hadn't allowed him back inside the Great-Wall-of-Steve, not since the accident and now?

All Danny can think of is the silence. There'd been so much 'silence' between them that it had been nearly deafening.

There was a distinct direction shift in the travel of the truck and something tickled his nose. Suddenly the Jersey detective found himself coughing as water rushed against his face. He managed to force his eyes open and blinked slowly several times before the water covered his head and he coughed again. The outburst, set off an explosion of stabbing knives inside his battered skull and an icy cold burning sensation in his side. "Son of a bitch." He panted in a pained whisper.

'Oh yeah, bastard stabbed me.' He thought calmly. And Danny actually found that odd and a tad funny. He was a very passionate person, as Steve would call him, and he almost never exhibited 'calm' as one of his attributes. But that was what he felt at the moment. The fire that he knew he should be feeling in his lower body was completely absent and he reveled in the relief, even if for only a moment.

'That's bad, I bet?' He wondered silently. The pitter-patter of rain increased and he knew that he'd been taken up into the jungle. 'God, I really do hate all jungles…everywhere. All of them. Equally.' The words kept popping into his brain and he was helpless to stop them as it flitted from subject to subject.

The slow rumble of the vehicle over what had to be unpaved roads decreased when it started to climb and Danny started to slide backwards in the bed until he slammed into the tailgate. His lower back colliding with a long metal object and he couldn't hold back the cry of pain as it broke through his paralysis and his world titled violently. Explosions of white light raced around inside his skull like evil little lightning bugs trying to zap him of his consciousness.

Danny bit at his lower lip, trying to control the ebb and flow of agony that was now freezing his ability to think clearly. Several moments, or hours…he didn't really know…later, Danny felt the truck slow again and then stop all together. He groaned pitifully and tried to roll away from the metal that had taken stole his refuge from pain. It was distressing when he realized that he was 'stuck' to the damn thing.

Footsteps sloshed through puddles outside the bed and suddenly the light was trying to burn a hole into his brain when the cover was thrown back. Danny's eyes couldn't adjust fast enough and he couldn't stop the cry of pain and surprise as he was hauled unceremoniously out of the truck. He landed on his side, knocking the air out of him and causing him to wheeze hoarsely. The snarky comment on his lips died instantly as the metal rod was jarred lose and Danny's entire body lit up in pain. He instinctively reached out with his right hand to try and stabilize himself and felt the still healing bones in his right forearm snap across the weak point in the bone as he collapsed against the muddy and rocky ground.

"Smile for the camera, Detective." A man's voice said. It took Danny's brain a moment to connect the accent to the man that had pretended to be a doctor. He looked up into a very blurry thing that had to be a cell phone, as it was being pointed directly at him and then managed to suck in enough air to focus his vision slightly. He pulled his right arm against his mid-section and tried to protect the now bleeding wound in his side. But the man wasn't finished yet. "Say 'hi' to Five-0, Detective Williams."

Even through the red haze of pain, the cop realized what he was…bait. Danny's blonde eyebrows cut down in anger. "S'not my best side." He murmured angrily.

"Don't worry, Detective. You won't be alone for long." Danny wasn't sure he'd heard that correctly and blinked several times trying to get his brain to decipher what the guy meant.

"What?" He managed.

"Nothing. Smile."

And Danny got it. The bastard was going to send pictures of him, all beat to hell, to his team…to Steve. How fucked up was that?! Danny knew that this would destroy his best friend, his brother, and his partner in crime fighting. If they didn't get Danny back alive, this time? Steve wouldn't come back from it. He'd throw himself off that 'wall he hides behind' and that would be it…he'd be gone. He still didn't understand what the guy meant when he said he wouldn't be alone. Who else could he possibly mean would...oh shit. Not Steve.

Danny hadn't expected the man to step forward and kick him with the toe of his expensive pointed shoes. Bastard would have metal on the ends. He aimed perfectly and the front edge of the leather shoe found the exact spot he'd stabbed Danny before leaving the clinic. It hadn't been deep enough to do any real damage other than leave the bloody trail for Five-0 to follow, but it hurt like hell and was now bleeding freely.

"Or perhaps, goodbye would be more appropriate." Danny could only listen as the man taunted his team. His world was comprised entirely of just remembering to breathe. He curled in on himself and everything spun like a crazy top.

H50 H50

Steve looked around the room in rising concern. Not only was there evidence that Danny had been taken forcefully, and probably painfully…if his cast was anything to judge by, but the blood suggested that it had been violent too. None of these things was making Steve feel any better about the absence of his snarky partner. He bit at his lower lip and dropped to his knees looking for any other clues. The smell of the place was turning his gut in distaste. Steve ignored the slightly nauseating feeling and focused on the task at hand. He could be sick later. Right now Danny needed him to 'one-hundred-percent focus' as the Jersey man would have said, his hands slashing through the air like fleshy knives.

Something sitting behind the examination table caught his attention and Steve crawled closer. He heaved a sigh of frustration when he saw a wallet. Not a normal thing to find in a doctors office and certainly not unaccounted for. He slid his fingers between the table and the wall and pulled the brown leather out. A small part of him was hoping that when he opened that wallet it would belong to some eighteen-year-old athlete or someone, anyone other than Danny.

He slid back and sat down on his haunches before cracking the leather open and deflating when he saw the picture, as the air seemed to be sucked out of the room. Steve was still staring at the one and only, Daniel Williams' drivers license. He couldn't move as he looked at the goofy picture of his partner. Danny was using his 'persuade a suspect' smile in the photo. Leave it to the man from Jersey to fake a smile for a license. He was still sitting there, staring at the photo when Kono popped her head into the room.

"Boss? What're you doing here?" She stepped into the room, her gaze bouncing around, searching for Danny. "They take Danny for some more x-rays or something?" The expression on his face must have set off something inside her, because she tilted her head and continued without taking a breath. "What happened?" Kono looked around the room again, searching and her eyes landed on the cast, with Grace's drawings, and the blood on the silver table. "Where's Danny?"

Steve swallowed and forced himself to get to his feet. He handed her the wallet and she slumped against the table before looking up at him after opening it. "We just got him back." She said softly. Her warm brown eyes were full of concern and an underlying hint of anger.

"Call Chin. We need to process this room. Hell, process this entire clinic. I don't care, but get me something to go on. Because right now? Danny's just gone." He was already striding out the door when he heard her call after him.

"Where're you going?"

Steve didn't even slow down as he answered. "To talk to the doctor. Someone took Danny from this room and I find it very hard to believe that no one saw anything." The words were ground out between Steve's clenched teeth and the tightness in his chest increased with each step he took. He'd spent the last five weeks pushing Danny away because he couldn't resolve his own feelings of guilt and now? Steve may not have the chance to correct that. And that was completely unacceptable in the navy man's opinion. This was going end with him and Danny getting back what they'd lost on that mountain five weeks...he'd make sure of that.

H50 H50

Dr. Max Bergman stared at the results of the blood test and frowned. He didn't want to call the Commander with these results. The uptight medical examiner had come to consider the Five-0 task force as his friends over the years and he hated giving them bad news. But when the news involved one of the members of that elite team…themselves? It was so much worse.

The blood sample that the leader of the appointed task force had sent him did indeed belong to Danny Williams.

He picked up the phone and dialed the well-known number. "Max? What'd you find out?" Steve's voice bounced across the speaker like he was driving or something.

"The blood sample is a match to Detective Williams. I'm sorry, Commander." He took a deep breath when the other man didn't immediately answer. "I ran the sample three times just to make sure."

"I'm sure you did your job thoroughly, Max. Thank you for pushing that to the top of your list." Steve pulled in a long breath.

"Of course. If I can be of any further assistance, please don't hesitate to call me."

Max was still talking when Steve pulled the phone away from where he'd been balancing it on his shoulder as he wrote down some information. Chin Ho Kelly stepped around the corner of his office and frowned when he saw the devastated look on his friend's face. It hadn't been good news. He thought in silence.

Steve hung up with the M.E. and stared at Chin as he tried to collect his thoughts. When the silence went on too long Chin took the lead. He'd seen this look on Steve's face before. The day that Jameson had asked him to take over the task force and he and Chin had talked for the first time in almost fifteen years.

"The blood? It's Danny's?" The shorter man asked. Chin had suspected it, so had Steve. But having confirmation just…well, it sucked.

"Yeah." Steve answered softly.

Chin leaned against the wall and folded his arms across his chest. The myriad of emotions that were skipping across his friend and boss's face would've been comical under any other circumstances. He was pretty sure that Steve hadn't felt that many unguarded emotions in a long time. Or maybe since Danny was almost killed last month. He thought silently.

"Okay Steve, what do we know?" Chin knew that they needed to keep moving forward. It would be too easy to get bogged down in the severity of the situation and that wouldn't help Danny one bit. Steve had discovered Danny's wallet at 15:43 that afternoon. Danny's appointment had been at 12:30. Which meant that there was only about two and half hours that were unaccounted for. It wasn't enough time for someone to have gotten Danny off the Islands. But it was enough time to have taken him somewhere that might be impossible for Five-0 to track.

Steve lifted emotional eyes and stared at Chin for a moment before his training kicked in and he slammed his wall into place. It was the presence of this wall that had allowed him to survive and function after his father had died, after his mother had been murdered, though that had been a ruse. Without it? Steve would've sunk into a puddle of murky emotions that would cloud his mind and derail his thinking and with Danny's life on the line…he couldn't afford that.

"We know that Danny's missing and that he was injured in the process." His voice was cold, calculating, and emotionless as he recounted what he knew. "We know that not much time had passed between Kono dropping him off and me discovering he'd been taken. We also know that Danny knew something was up or he wouldn't have dropped his wallet behind the table. His phone was smashed and then waterlogged, so his attacker knew enough to guess that we'd try and track it. No one at the clinic remembers seeing anything out of the ordinary."

Chin nodded evenly. "We also know that Danny was seeing a new doctor today. A specialist from the Big Island, so he wouldn't have been immediately tipped off by a new face."

"Okay…so what the hell are we looking for?!" Steve blurted out. His phone vibrated in his pocket and he pulled it out without looking at the screen. "McGarrett." He growled.

"Commander." The unfamiliar voice set off the warning bells inside Steve's head and he pulled the phone away from his ear and glanced at the screen. "No called ID." He only had to lift his eyes to Chin, before the other man was rushing to the computer to run a trace.

"Who is this?" he demanded.

"I'd be less concerned about who I am and more concerned about 'who I have'." Another buzzing and a video link came through. The trace actually popped the link up on the big monitor in Five-0 headquarters.

Both Steve and Chin's eyes flashed up when the video opened. The back of a truck was thrown open and Danny was pulled roughly from the bed. He looked terrible, but alive. Danny stretched out his bad arm to try and catch himself as he fell, breaking it again in the process. Steve's breath froze at the pain on Danny's face as he landed in a heap. A piece of a tire jack rolled free of his body, and there was blood on it. "Say hello, Detective Williams."

The world seemed to stop and Steve couldn't stop staring at the battered state of his best friend. Danny looked terrible. There was gash on his cheek that looked like it needed stitches and the blonde man was squeezing his eyes shut as pain reflected out of his body posture. Whatever guilt Steve had been feeling was immediately trumped by the white hot rage that blasted through him.

"What the hell do you want?" Steve bit out angrily.

Danny moaned and rolled over, the long split on his cheekbone had dried and there was an angry redness to the wound that worried Steve…infection. The man never stepped in front of the camera and Steve didn't recognize what he was seeing in the background. Where ever this son of a bitch had taken Danny? Steve didn't know it. "Smile for the camera, Detective."

And Steve saw it. The exact moment when Danny realized what type of game this was. The kind that had bait, namely him. When he didn't do anything more than drop his eyelids closed and curl into himself, the man stepped forward and kicked Danny hard enough that Steve swore he had felt it. Danny couldn't stop the cry of pain and Steve couldn't miss the red that was spreading rapidly from a wound on Danny's side.

"I swear to god if you touch him again, I'll rip your spleen out through your throat! If you want someone, take me." Steve blurted out as the rage consumed him. But the line died and the video of Danny disappeared. "No!" He spun on his teammate like a man possessed. "Chin! Tell me you know where that was coming from?"

Chin swallowed the angry and frightening lump in his throat. "It was a burner and he must have removed the battery right after he hung up, because I've got nothing." It hurt all the way to his soul to relate those words. Chin was exceptionally fond of the New Jersey detective and knew that if they didn't find Danny soon, they might not ever see him alive again. He hadn't looked good on that video.

"Can you bring it back up and pause it on the shoe?" Kono's voice surprised both men and they pinned her with a thousand questions reflected in their eyes. "I'm pretty sure there was green sand on his boots. There's only one place on the Islands that has green sand."

Steve pulled in a ragged breath. "Green Sands Beach on Hawaii. It's out near Hilo, right?"

Kono nodded. "Yeah, I used to surf around there when I was visiting my aunt. But there are bunch of old lava tubes out there too, so it could take some time to search them all."

Chin shook his head. How had he missed that? A gentle hand landed on his shoulder. "I only caught the end of that video, cuz." She grimaced and her eyes hardened. "I don't think I would've seen it if I'd been focused on Danny the whole time."

Steve was already racing out the door. "Governor, I need your help…"

TBC…

Author's Note: Thank you for the awesome show of support in the form of reviews. You guys are totally awesome and in light of that, here's the next chapter. I've actually been to this beach, it's amazing, but there aren't really any jungles near it, so I am taking liberties there, don't shoot me for it. Also, this isn't going to play out as easily as McGarrett's thinking, he's got his own 'comeuppance' coming. Steve!whump on the way. And this time? Danny's gonna have to watch.

PLEASE REVIEW: And the reviews have spoken…play out this one shall.