Disclaimer: I don't own anything. Title taken from Revelations 6:7-8, "I looked and there before me was a pale horse! It's rider was named Death, and Hell was following close behind him."
Everything is blood, blood; blood on Steve's shirt and on his face and blood pounding in his temples and roaring in his ears until all he can see and taste and smell is red, metallic and bitter. Death. And all he can think of is how close they had all come to death today, and how that thought scared him more than anything else he had ever had to face.
Death in the Navy was a constant. The one thing you could always count on as a SEAL was the companionship of death. The horseman rode with them, in the weight of the packs on their shoulders as they cut their way through the foliage, in the sick, suffocating heat of the air buzzing with a thousand different dangers; in the press of their rifles, the cool metal in their palms turning hot and heavy with gunfire and blood, a stain that never truly ever faded.
And there was always blood. Death, sitting on his pale horse, was an unbiased observer, swinging his sickle in lazy circles which felled one side or the other without predeliction and no matter who won there was always loss; in the end everyone who came out alive had blood on their hands.
So it was natural not to get close to anyone, because they were taught, and they knew, that not everyone in their unit would make it home alive. The odds didn't fall that way, and so though they fought together, the bonds made in war were nothing solid, nothing emotional because if you allowed yourself to rely on one person and they were ripped away, you were floating out to sea, unanchored, uprooted and you didn't stand a chance.
But Five-0 is different.
Steve has always been good at compartmentalising, he had to be, and he knows now the difference between being in the Navy and being stationed here; has probably always known it, but not so much until this moment when Danny goes down with a cry and Kono takes a slug to the gut and Chin is beaten, bloody but defiant and everything is red; blood and rage and war and when its all said and done he comes back to Earth with Chin and Kono chorusing his name and Danny's sure hands on his arms, holding him back and the body of their ring leader is cold and stiff beneath the river of blood gushing from his nose, warm and wet and red.