Disclaimer: See initial chapter.
A/N: Readers, please don't give up. Trust me, and Max Bergman - we've both done the research.
By the time Steve, Chin, Kono and Dr. Max Bergman arrive at his burial site – a walk-in freezer located on the island of Lanai– Danny's been dead for over twenty-four hours. His skin's a pasty, blue-gray hue and his eyes aren't closed, like he'd thought they were. They're open and unseeing in death.
"Don't touch him," Max says when Steve moves to cover up Danny's naked body; because he knows that Danny wouldn't like to be left like that. Not even in death.
Kono's eyes well up with tears. "I can't believe we're too late."
Chin rests a comforting hand on her shoulder and turns her away from Danny's nakedness, pulling her in for a hug. She buries her head in his chest and lets some of the tears fall, but quickly brushes them away and hardens her heart for now, because Danny doesn't need her sorrow and pity, he needs her anger and her sense of justice.
This is no way for anyone to go, and they aren't any closer to catching the killers than they were with their last victim who died from exposure. His death was nothing like Danny's, though, which makes it harder for them to work up an accurate profile for their killers. The only thing they know is that the killers are a couple, like Paul and Karla Bernardo, or Charles Chi-tat Ng and Leonard Lake.
Steve clenches his fist and turns away from Doctor Bergman, letting the man get what evidence ha can from Danny's corpse. He really wants to hit someone, but settles for slamming his fist into the metal wall of Danny's tomb.
He can hear Danny's voice in his head, scolding him for being an idiot. Steve can almost feel Danny's hand on his arm pulling him away so that he can't do any more damage to his bloodied and swollen knuckles as he winds up to strike the wall again.
Neanderthal, Danny chastises, are you planning on breaking your hand? You know that the Governor will pull you off this case unless you keep your shit together. And, babe, I really need you to hold it together, to bring me some justice, because, seriously? I'm lying naked in a fricken' freezer. And don't even get me started on what happened to me before you guys found me.
He can picture Danny shudder, and Steve doesn't even want to think about it. He knows what Danny went through. He's read the files of the other victims. It makes him sick to think of what Danny had to endure, and that he was too late to stop it from happening.
Danny was with the sadistic bastards for a week. An entire week. Just like the last victim, a man who'd relocated to Hawaii from the mainland a couple of years ago. They'd both been taken from public places – Danny just outside of a grocery store, Jimmy outside of a bar.
The similarities between the two victims, other than in their cause of death, are eerie. Danny had been tied up and locked in a freezer until he succumbed to hypothermia, and the other man, Jimmy, had been tied up and locked in a metal box that was left out in the sun until his body gave way to hyperthermia.
Both men were divorcees; both had moved to the island of Oahu in the past couple of years; both had a daughter who lived with her mother; and both had blonde hair and blue eyes. Another striking similarity was their stature – both stood at no taller than five foot five.
Their tombs were just big enough to accommodate them. Both had been taken from the island of O‛ahu, and it was presumed by boat, as there had been no record of either of them (under an alias or otherwise) at either airport, and brought to one of the outer islands. Jimmy to Hawaii (the Big Island) and Danny to Lana‛i.
Further investigation into Jimmy's disappearance and death – two months before Danny had been taken and Five-0's nightmare had begun– led to the discovery that there had been other deaths, all occurring within two months of each other, and all caused by one extreme or another. And that had brought in a B.A.U. team from Washington D.C.
A joint investigation led to the discovery that their 'unsubs' had started their killing spree with a rather simply, using a hypodermic needle filled with air, plunged directly into the heart. It had been a relatively quick death in comparison to the others.
The method employed by the killers had become more complex over the year: hyperkalemia (potassium had been pumped into the victim intravenously, until the man had overdosed and died), hypoglycemia (the victim, a diabetic, had been pumped with too much insulin), hypoxia (a plastic bag had been secured over the man's mouth and nose), hyperglycemia (the victim had been given overly high doses of Prednisone), and hyperacidity (the coroner had found an excess of stomach acid, and determined that it had been somehow added to the victim's stomach).
The newspapers called them the 'Hyperactive Killers.' It was a moniker that Danny had deemed ridiculous, and a waste of taxpayers' money. An assessment which Steve had chuckled at, but one with which he wholeheartedly agreed.
The killers' methods were mindboggling, and made about as much sense as the couple whose killing spree hadn't started until they were well into their seventies, Ray and Faye Copeland. They had even made a quilt from the clothing of their victims to keep warm with during the cold winter months.
By current count, the killers had started their spree almost a year and a half ago, with Danny being their latest victim. They seemed to alternate from abducting, torturing and killing dark-haired men, to blondes every couple of murders. All of their victims had relocated to O‛ahu from somewhere outside of the islands, marking them as haoles by the locals.
"I think, yes," Max says to himself, and Steve turns to glare at the doctor whose hands are running over Danny's chest.
Danny whose own hands are bound at the wrists – arms stretched out on either side of his body, strung taut, tied to the metal poles holding the empty shelves together – with a rope wound so tightly that it'll be impossible to remove rope without taking some of his skin with it. It makes Steve sick to his stomach. He can feel the bile rising to his throat. It burns the back of his nose, but he needs to keep it together. For Danny.
"What've you got doc?" Chin asks, because Steve just can't, not right now. Not when he wants to push the doctor's hands off of Danny, and protect his partner's modesty.
"I think I can do it," Max says cryptically, and he pushes his glasses up with a gloved index finger, not really answering Chin.
Kono takes a step forward; she's looking everywhere but at Danny. She can imagine the detective reprimanding her for gawking. Can picture him turning red with embarrassment, or maybe he'd encourage her to look, he could be that way too – coy and flirtatious.
She can picture Danny winking at her, and smiling, slow and seductively.
Like what you see, rookie? Take a picture, it'll last longer. Kono envisions Danny giving the photographer a nasty gesture as the man snaps picture after picture of the dead detective.
And then he's posing, and it's Kono's turn to blush. Thinking about the possibilities of how Danny would react makes Kono uncomfortable, so she focuses on Max, and ignores the photographer who hasn't stopped taking photos of Danny since they arrived.
Kono takes a deep breath and kneels beside Max. "Do what?"
Max turns his head to look at her, his hand lingering on Danny's chest, as though he needs to stay in contact with the dead man at all times. Like, if he isn't touching Danny, what he's about to posit won't work.
But, he knows the science behind what he's about to suggest. He's spent hours poring over the documented research, and he thinks that he can save Danny. That he can bring the dead man back to life. He's grateful that the killers chose Danny to suffer from hypothermia, rather than something obscure and irreversible like being buried alive – the embodiment of hypogea.
"I think that, if I can get his core temperature back up, and if he has a steady source of oxygen, I can reanimate him." He can't keep the excitement out of his voice, knows that it will sound jarring in this somber place, and that it'll seem like he's cold and uncaring, but he can't help it.
Chin kneels beside them. His frown – the puckered lines between his eyebrows – communicates volumes to Max, even more than McGarrett's string of expletives accompanied by a second fist to the icy, metal container does.
"What do you mean?" Chin's fingers hover over Danny's left wrist, as though he's itching to free the man from the rope that binds him to the freezer.
Max smiles, and he's not as oblivious as everyone makes him out to be, he knows that McGarrett is mad at him, that he may even want to substitute his face for the wall. But right now, all that he can think about is how perfectly preserved Danny's body is in its current, frozen state of being. It's like the man is hibernating. All bodily functions have been suspended.
'But,' Max reasons, and he can picture Danny pacing impatiently in front of him, waiting for him to finish whatever it is that Max has to say, because he's a busy man, and has places that he needs to be, other than here, waiting for Max to give him a straight answer for once.
He wants to tell imaginary Danny to put on some clothes, because he can't seem to picture Danny in his usual state of habiliment, or his natural color. So, what he's faced with in his imagination is a stiff-moving, blue-skinned, naked Danny Williams, building up to a rant.
'All bodily functions have only been suspended temporarily,' he finishes his thought, before blinking at Chin, and returning the detective's frown.
"I can reanimate Danny," Max repeats, and he tries to control the enthusiasm in his voice, but judging by the way everyone is looking at him, he knows that he failed. He looks from Chin to Kono to Steve, and then back to Danny.
"I've studied all of the cases in which people have been reanimated after suffering from overexposure to cold. One of the most famous cases was of a little girl, Erica Norby. She had a core temperature of 61 degrees when she was found, and she recovered completely after she'd been warmed and resuscitated. Or, there was a Japanese man who was reanimated after falling asleep in the snow. He wasn't discovered for twenty-three days, and his temperature had plummeted to 71 degrees. Danny's core temperature is currently at 68."
"But, do you think that with everything else he's suffered…" Chin trails off, and then he does touch Danny's wrist, as though anchoring himself.
Max is even more certain than he was when the idea first came to him. Almost as soon as he'd seen what the killers had done to Danny, he'd known. If he believed in presentiment, he'd have thanked whatever deity had sparked his newly found interest in the study of cryogenics and the more recent studies concerning the possibility of human hibernation.
But, he is a man of science, not a man of superstition, so he lays the accolades at the feet of those who'd paved the way for him and Danny – the founding fathers of cryogenics – Kelvin, Faraday, Cailletet, Pictet, and others.
He nods his head in mute answer to Chin's unasked question, because he isn't sure that he can contain his eagerness over the science involved.
Danny, if his case holds true with that of the other past victims of the murderous duo, will be far from out of the woods once he's been reanimated. But, surely alive is better than dead, and once Danny is back amongst the living, where Max is certain that the young, vivacious detective belongs, his body can heal from the rest of the torture he'd been subjected to.
"Yes, I'm certain that, once he's been reanimated, Danny's body will be able to make a full recovery from the injuries that he's sustained, provided that his abductors did not deviate from their established pattern." Max sticks to a detached, clinical answer, because he isn't comfortable doing anything else.
"I wonder," Kono says, and she shifts her gaze to Danny's face, careful not to look anywhere else, "if that's what Danny would want."
She brushes the hair back from Danny's forehead, ignoring the medical photographer's scowl at her action as he takes yet another photo, this time of Danny's right foot – the sole of which has been burned through, in sporadic spots, with sulfuric acid. His left foot will have suffered a similar fate; the profilers from D.C. had surmised that the unsubs did this early on, to keep their victims from escaping.
The road to recovery won't be an easy one, provided that Max's theory is correct, and that he can bring Danny back from the dead. It reminds Kono of some of those incredible, unbelievable true stories that she's seen on TV, where people tell stories of how they died and were brought back to life, but not before seeing a pure, white light or something similar to that. Kono wonders if Danny is watching them from outside of his body, another experience many who'd died and come back to life seemed to have in common. She feels a prickling at her back and chances a look, only to find her boss standing behind her, glowering.
Would you like to see what happens next?