Look at me, actually having this chapter up on time! Congratulations, me.

A huge thank you once again to everyone who reviewed. and thanks to all the guest reviewers whom I can't thank personally. I really do appreciate all the feedback and support.

Well, onto the next installment! No more continuity with the previous chapters-we're starting over here with a blank slate for our boys. Please let me know what you think!

Standard disclaimers apply.

"All that I've known,

Buildings of stone,

Falls to the ground

Without a sound.

This is my word,

Heartbreaker, gatekeeper,

I'm feeling far away, I'm feeling right there."

"Have you seen Steve this afternoon?"

Chin's question caught Danny off guard, his mind still working to finish up the sentence he was writing, and so it took him a minute to process what Chin had said. "What?"

"Steve. He's not in his office and I need him to sign off on some stuff for the governor."

Unhelpfully, Danny's first instinct was to look through the glass walls to his partner's office, though the empty chair made it clear that its occupant was somewhere else. His second instinct was to sweep the office with a quick look, not untrusting of Chin, but needing to confirm with his own eyes that Steve wasn't there. "No, I haven't seen him since lunch, actually. We were coming in and he said he left something in the car and that he'd be right up, but to be honest, I don't know if he ever came in. I got caught up in my paperwork."

Danny could see the quick look of worry that flashed through Chin's eyes, felt the same fear run through his own mind before reminding himself that Wo Fat was dead, that the big bads out there were dead, that Steve was safe. At least the bad guys you know about, his brain threw out there quickly before he could stop it. "How long ago was that?"

Quickly, Danny glanced at the time on his phone. "Probably about an hour and a half." He tried to ignore the voice that whispered to him that that was plenty of time for someone to grab McGarrett, for them to hide him away somewhere the team couldn't find, but it was hard to quell the rising anxiety. "Have you tried calling him?"

Chin shook his head, letting out a deep breath as he did so. "I'll do that now," the Hawaiian man said, putting his phone to his ear. "You know he'd laugh at us for being worried, right?"

"Yeah, well, us being paranoid has saved his ass a time or two, so I don't care."

Chin smiled, his grin fading just a little bit as he dropped the phone away. "Voicemail."

"I can—" Danny was cut off by the chirp of Chin's phone, indicating a text message. "Is it from him?"

Chin's smile returned a bit as he read the message out loud. "'Sorry, can't talk right now but everything's fine. Had to run home and will probably be here the rest of the afternoon, so I'll see you tomorrow. Tell Danny I said to stop frowning at me and get back to work.' Well I guess that answers that, then. I'd worry that it was fake, but for the fact that he knows you so well."

"And you're just going to accept the random and vague excuse of 'I had to run home' from him? Run home for what? What if he's texting under duress? I swear we need a safe word."

"I don't think he'd be taking the time to make jabs at you if he was in some sort of trouble; in fact, I'm pretty sure that he'd find a way to let us know something was wrong. He is a pretty smart guy," Chin added with a rueful smile.

"Yeah, and he also attracts trouble like a magnet," Danny replied grumpily, not wanting to acknowledge that Steve was clearly fine when his gut was telling him otherwise. "Whatever, if the jerk wants to spend his day at home while the rest of us toil away with paperwork, so be it."

Chin just laughed, and started to move back towards his own office. "I guess that's one of the perks of being the boss, huh?"

Danny didn't reply, just rolled his eyes, and moved back to his chair, taking out his phone as he did. Regardless of what Chin thought—or would say if he knew what Danny was doing right now—Danny wasn't convinced that everything was okay. He couldn't ignore that unsettled feeling, that rush of anxiety from earlier that refused to dissipate, that urge to check in one more time and make sure that Steve was as perfectly fine as he had convinced Chin of. So knowing that Steve wouldn't pick up his call, he instead typed out a quick message: You promise you're good?

Steve's response was fast: Fine—sick from lnch. Do I need 2 send u pix?

Danny felt a brief rush of irritation at his partner's snarky response, muttering to himself that he was only trying to be nice and caring, but nonetheless sent back a benign reply: No, thanks. Let me know if you need anything.

Steve didn't reply after that, but Danny forced himself to go back to work anyway. He sat, most of his mind dedicated to reading over the reports, fixing errors where necessary, but as he did so, he couldn't help but fidget. There was something bothering him, something nagging him, something poking at the back of his mind that wouldn't let him settle, but he couldn't put his finger on exactly what it was.

And then, as he was looking at one of Steve's notes on the casework, it hit him. Steve always wrote out messages fully and properly. He hated chat speak, and though he had never explicitly asked the SEAL why, Danny had always assumed it had something to do with the precision that the military had drilled into him. Steve had complained once, only half in jest, after receiving a text from Grace that was filled with abbreviations and substitutions; arguing that writing that way could let the intent of the message get lost. "And moreover, it's just sloppy, Danny," Steve had argued with a sigh. "It only takes an extra two seconds to type everything out and then nothing is left up to interpretation."

Danny had laughed at the time, had told him to try convincing his teenage daughter of that, but now that conversation was repeating in Danny's mind for a completely different reason. He dropped his pen and quickly grabbed his phone, staring at his partner's last message filled with missing letters and numbers in place of words that Steve would ordinarily hate.

And just like that, all the anxiety was back, coming to the forefront of his mind like he had never tried to push it away. He quickly dialed Steve's number, unsurprised when it went to voicemail, dialing it a second time just in case as he moved from his office to Chin's. As it went into voicemail again, he pushed open Chin's door, clearly not hiding his worried expression well enough as the Hawaiian man's face quickly morphed into worry too. "What's going on, Danny?"

"Nothing, I'm sure," the Jersey detective started, not sure how to explain what he was thinking without sounding paranoid, not sure exactly what he was thinking. "I just can't shake the feeling that something's not right with him. I'm never going to be any use here when my mind is miles away, so I'm just going to run over there and double check that he's good."

Chin nodded, not saying anything for a moment. "If everything is fine, he's going to be annoyed." It wasn't a reprimand, though, or even phrased in a way that sounded like a discouragement; instead, merely an observation.

"That's fine, he can be annoyed all he wants. But we're the only people in his life that he has to worry about him, and I'm not about to let him down by ignoring my gut. If he needs us, if he doesn't, I'm there."

Chin nodded again. "Let me know if either of you do need something."

And that, right there, was why Danny loved Chin Ho Kelly as much as he did: he didn't argue, he didn't point out all the holes in Danny's logic, he just supported and buoyed you up however you needed. "You're the best, Chin," he threw out with a genuine smile as he backed away. "I mean that, one thousand percent. I'll let you know what I find out!"

Danny stood outside the McGarrett household, trying not to pace and failing miserably. Steve hadn't answered his repeated knocks, and Danny was torn between pretending to respect the man's privacy, and just using his key, to hell with respecting Steve's space. After pounding on the door one more time and still receiving no response, he reached a compromise in his mind: use the key, but send a warning text beforehand.

He quickly typed out a message ("I'm obviously here and I'm not going away until I see that you're alive. If you don't open the door in 30 seconds, I'm coming in."), waited the appropriate time, minus just a few seconds, then slipped the key out of his pocket and into the lock, and made his way inside.

He wasn't sure what he was expecting to find when he walked in the door; images both of Steve locked in a life or death struggle of some kind, or a McGarrett extremely pissed at the violation of privacy had run through his mind on the way over. But he certainly didn't expect to find Steve wrapped in a blanket, looking almost as bad as Danny had ever seen him. He was pale and was shaky, more fragile than Danny was familiar with. His entire face was blank, but it wasn't the forced neutral expression that the SEAL would sometimes still adopt when trying to keep Danny from knowing what he was thinking or feeling; instead, it was almost a numbness, a forced nothingness. The fact that it took Steve a few minutes to look up from the couch and meet Danny's eyes only made the blonde more concerned. "When you said you were sick, I didn't actually believe you, but now…" Danny trailed off, moving closer to the couch when Steve didn't immediately tell him to leave.

"Just food poisoning, Danny, I'm fine. You can go back to work."

Danny raised an eyebrow at that. "You look like shit and sound like you've been in a screaming match with a drill sergeant. So I'm going to go with not fine. Also, you and I," Danny motioned between them, waiting just a beat for Steve to meet his gaze so he could make his point all the more clear, "You and I had exactly the same thing for lunch, and I'm right as rain. Want to tell me what's really going on here?"

Steve opened his mouth to respond when he shivered violently, and pulled the blanket more closely around him. After a moment, he seemed to collect himself, pulling himself back to the conversation at hand. "Then I guess I must be coming down with something."

"Uh huh," Danny responded, already moving forward to place a hand gently on his partner's forehead, mimicking the motions he used on his children when they were ill; as he was long past the point of trying to shy away from the fact that Steve McGarrett had come to occupy a place in his heart previously only occupied by blood relatives and his children. "You don't feel like you're running a fever, but clearly you feel like you are."

McGarrett moved to swat away Danny's hand, but the motion was halfhearted at best. "It's nothing, just cold. I just need to work it out of my system."

At that, Danny stilled. "Work it out of your system? First you've got food poisoning, then the flu, but now you're just working it out of your system? What the hell is wrong with you, Steven?"

"I told you everything was fine, Danny. Why'd you even feel the need to come over here?"

"It's a good thing I'm used to your 'I'm going to try to push you away when I'm feeling vulnerable' routine by now, McGarrett. Otherwise my feelings might be hurt." Slowly, he lowered himself to a seated position on the coffee table in front of his partner, intuiting that figuring out what was happening here was going to take a lot more time and effort than he wanted to give standing. "And in answer to your very obvious attempt to redirect this conversation, you used chat speak."

Though still strangely blank, that brought Steve's eyes up from where looking at the floor. "What?"

"Chat speak. You hate it, which I know because I've overheard the multiple conversations you've had with my daughter about being better than to use it, and because I've sat through the same lecture on occasion. So when you won't answer our phone calls and you send me a text message that is so supremely unlike you, I have to wonder if everything is copacetic. So if you really wanted to be alone in your current condition, you should have tried a little harder to seem normal." Steve nodded slowly, right before another shiver raced up his spine, and Danny's gut clenched with worry. "Steve, buddy, you're scaring me a little bit here. You look terrible, you've got this thousand-yard stare going on, and even though you're one of the smartest people I know, you're barely keeping up with this conversation. I just want to help, babe. Talk to me."

For a brief moment, Danny could see the calculations working in McGarrett's mind, the pros and cons of letting someone in being weighed out as though he were working the scales of justice himself. Every potential benefit against all the possible harm of opening up, the question of how honest to be pitted against the question of returns or betrayals, and Danny wondered what Steve had been like up until the age of 15, before his trust in the world was broken. He wondered what the man sitting before him would have been like without the Navy there to exploit all those cracks in his soul.

And then the moment was gone, and a slightly crazed calm look settled in Steve's eyes. It was a fuck it look if Danny had ever seen one, and his partner's suddenly direct tone match his apparent mood shift. "On one of my tours, I got stuck outside overnight, miles away from the base. Things…happened, and the end result was that it was just me and this other kid, younger than I was, greener too, out in the middle of the desert. And people always just assume that because it's a desert that it's hot, right? But when it's winter, and when it's a cloudless night…I think even without the blood loss, it would have been the coldest thing I've ever experienced. We were only out there two nights, but it seems like it took me two weeks to get warm again." He paused for a moment eyes someplace else. "I thought we were going to die, freeze to death right out there under the stars. This kid, he kept looking at me and saying in amazement how cold it was, like no one had ever warned him that it could actually be winter in that part of the world. Here I am, trying not to fucking bleed out and leave this kid all alone, and all I can think about is the fact that someone should have told him, should have prepared him."

Steve stopped speaking, and Danny's mind was trying to process, trying to make sense of this random, jumbled story that had been thrown at him. "I don't…"

And then he did.

He remembered grey clouds rolling in as they were driving back from getting lunch, remembered stepping out of the car and cringing at the crispness in the air, remembered saying incredulously how cold it was, letting his tone finish the thought of but it's Hawaii, but it's paradise, but it's supposed to be tropical without saying the words. He remembered rushing inside, and hearing Steve call out that he'd be right up, and then Danny had walked into the Palace without another thought until Chin had come knocking on his door.

He didn't know and then he did, and Danny wished he could have gone back to his moment of blissful ignorance more than anything. But he couldn't, and all sorts of feelings were wreaking havoc with his emotions, namely shame and guilt, and something that felt way to close to pity. Finally, quietly, he asked, "Have you been having flashbacks all afternoon?"

Steve's only response was a sharp nod, eyes closed and face drawn like he was admitting to something disgraceful.

"Fuck. So when you say you just need to get it out of your system, you mean because your mind has been—"

"Yeah."

"Are you still…there?"

Steve shook his head, letting out a long breath. "No, this is just what happens next."

Danny's next question tumbled out his mouth before he could stop them. "But you've been out of active service so long. Why now?"

The SEAL, because it was hitting Danny now more than ever that there would never really be an 'ex' before that descriptor, let out a humorless snort. "Some things stay with you, Danny, no matter how long it's been. I close my eyes, and I can taste the sand in my mouth, can feel the hardness of that place in my bones. I can see the bombed out homes, the places that got destroyed by one side or another, and I can hear the voices of the men I served with as clearly as though they were right next to me. When this happens, I'm not a reservist; I'm ten years younger and stuck in the middle of war. And right now, I can't get fucking warm."

There were a million things flashing through Danny's mind at that moment, one of which was a simmering and subtle rage at the fact that Steve didn't just have to live through these things once, but see them again and again in his mind. It wasn't fair, and it made him want to rage at the world for making the best person he knew suffer like this. Suffer alone, too, because while Danny knew cops that had dealt with flashbacks and could relate to what they were going through, here he was at a loss. He'd never known the horrors of war, had been spared such a thing by men like the one sitting beside him, and he didn't know what to say to make any of this better. Words like I'm sorry and it'll get better seemed hollow and empty, not strong enough for the magnitude and complexity of the situation, and Danny was out of his depth when words couldn't fix the problem.

So, knowing he couldn't offer any words to make his best friend feel better, he did the next best thing. Without saying anything, he hauled a rather stunned SEAL to his feet, and started pulling him outside, blanket balled up in his hand.

"Danny, what are you doing?"

"You can't get warm, you say, and I say we live in one of the warmest places ever."

"It's not that easy, Danny."

Danny didn't say anything until he'd pushed Steve into one of the deck chairs unceremoniously, and then turned to face him. "I know it's not that easy, Steven. I know that there's a lot of shit going on in your head right now, which I may or may not have unintentionally triggered by complaining about the weather today. I also know that you clearly would rather be dealing with this on your own, since you came and hid out here, and that is well within your rights as a veteran, since I am not a vet and do not have the same experiences to pull from. But I also know that sometimes, when things are going wrong up here," he said, tapping Steve's forehead gently, "breaking the cycle or changing the scenery can help."

He paused for a second, suddenly second-guessing everything that he was trying to do, before he took a deep breath in and pushed on. "Obviously my daughter's nightmares are not the same thing as having war flashbacks, but when she was little and had a particularly bad dream and she'd come running to me, I'd make her tell me a story about something happy and fun before putting her back to bed. So there you are, inside, freezing, probably stuck on some loop in your head that you can't get out of until your pain in the ass partner comes knocking. But now, now you're out here in the nice Hawaiian sun—well mostly nice, since we're a few degrees below our normal temperature, but my point stands. Every time you start to feel that cold in your bones, focus on the feeling of that sun and remind yourself that you're thousands of miles and days away from that. And once we get you warm, then we can work on everything else."

For a few moments, the only sound was the gently lapping of waves on the beach in front of them, McGarrett actually listening to Danny for once and sitting with his eyes closed, face tilted up in the afternoon light. As the sailor sat there, Danny slowly moved backwards, making himself comfortable in the chair next to his partner's, all the while watching Steve's face for any more signs of distress. But instead, as he sat and watched, he saw a few lines soften, and slowly, Steve seemed to stop holding himself so tightly together and sank into the chair just bit.

That last movement gave Danny just enough courage to finally say the last thing on his mind. "I'm sorry, Steve."

McGarrett opened one eye slowly to glance at Danny before closing it again. "I know my brain is a little bit funny right now, but I swear you just apologized for me having issues from something that happened long before I ever met you."

The Jersey detective sighed. "Clearly I know I am not the cause of this, though maybe slightly the instigator this afternoon—"

"—Danny, this is not—

"—but what I meant is that I'm sorry this is happening to you. That it happens at all."

At that, Steve finally sat up a little bit, pulling the blanket tightly around him, though Danny wasn't sure if the action was conscious or not, and looked at Danny with clear eyes. "I knew the day that I decided to be a SEAL that I was going to be seeing things, doing things, that were going to bring me face to face with the worst parts of humanity. I was prepared for the fact that I was going to be going into the toughest situations, and I knew that even if I got out alive, I wasn't always going to come back whole. If I hadn't wanted to deal with any of the after effects of that life, I would have rung that bell on the first day of training."

"That doesn't make it right that you're having to deal with waking nightmares."

"A lot of people deal with a lot of shit that they shouldn't have to," Steve replied with a shrug. "Everyone has their own battles."

And Danny knew then with McGarrett's matter of fact tone, had really known it all along, that no matter what he said or did or felt, Steve was always going to accept this as just something he had to go through, something that was a guaranteed side effect of the life he'd chosen rather than the inevitable injustice of war that Danny knew it to be in his bones. Steve had recognized and submitted to what he saw as a natural consequence, not a sacrifice he shouldn't have had to make.

Danny knew that he could try to press the issue further, keep going until Steve saw Danny's point, pushing until the SEAL realized that not accepting such occurrences as normal and also not regretting his service could go hand in hand; but in the end, they'd still be right where they were now.

So instead, Danny just sighed and nodded. "Well, regardless, I'm sorry that this is the burden you have to bear. I wish I could do something more to help. You should let me know if you have other triggers, things that I can avoid saying or doing, or situations that we should keep you out of. I don't want this happening again."

"Danny, stop." Though still clearly emotionally and physically exhausted, there was a bit of levity to Steve's voice that hadn't been there before, and it calmed the Jersey detective just a bit. "First of all, this isn't the first time this has happened since leaving active duty, nor will it be the last, and that's just how life is. Secondly, there's nothing in my routine that I need to change, nor do I need you walking on eggshells around me now. Besides, I've known you for seven years and you're not one to be polite just for the sake of someone else's feelings." The last part was said with a smile, immediately quelling Danny's immediate defensiveness. "And finally, you did help—a lot. When I have flashbacks, it's not a fun process, and trust me when I say that tonight is not really going to get a lot better. But you coming here, you forcing me out of my normal way of handling this…it helps. It means something. So don't sell yourself short, yeah?"

Danny nodded again, this time not speaking because of the lump in his throat. It was things like this that always served to remind him of how grateful he was to have Steve in his life, much as he might complain sometimes, and always served to remind him that fate just kept saving Steve one more time, making sure that he'd made it out of that desert and into Danny's life.

So he just nodded a third time, and settled in, ready to help with whatever else the night brought.

And there we have it! Danny's advice on how to help get rid of nightmares is actually something my mother used to tell me as a child, which inevitably ended up with lots of imaginings of spiders as being turned into cute fuzzy unicorns instead of the hellish demons they are. ;)

Also, a very huge and sincere thank you for any vets who might happen to be reading. Thank you for making the sacrifices that you do so that the rest of us don't have to.

Anyway, the next chapter should be up within a week or so! Any thoughts are welcome!

Charlotte