Ok, so I'm a really bad person! I'm so sorry! I've been completely overloaded at the moment. I really do apologize.

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As soon as Steve pulled into his driveway he knew that something was wrong. It was one of those senses that he had picked up from endless years of chasing 'shoe bombers' as Danny termed them. Reaching for his gun, he climbed out the truck as quietly as he could and listened intently for any noise of movement. Crouching low, he crossed the expanse of space to the door. It had been forced open, the lock smashed in an attempt to gain entry. Very carefully, he nudged it open with his toe, bringing up his gun and checking the corners. It was obvious that the house had been ransacked, but from what he could see it was deserted now. Regardless he checked every room of the house, inwardly cursing at the state of it. Every single floor was completely covered with belongings, overturned furniture and papers.

He was standing in the doorway to his bedroom when he heard the camero pulling up outside, Danny having caught up with his slightly erratic driving. In the same moment he heard something shifting downstairs, and he was out the door in a flash. Out the corner of his eye he saw someone in dark clothing sprinting through his shattered back door. The man turned slightly, and Steve watched with almost detached horror as he pulled up a gun and took aim quickly. In the end it was his well honed skills that saved him, his muscles automatically forcing him down and forwards, throwing himself into a roll and pulling up his own gun in defence.

As soon as he started shooting back, the other man turned and ran, still firing blindly over his shoulder. Ducking into cover, Steve tried to shoot out his leg, but his assailant was too far away and moving too fast for a decent shot. With a shout of frustration, he let his weapon drop as the shaded figure disappeared along the shore.

"Steve!" There was a voice from somewhere behind him, and he turned slowly to see his partner, gun in hand, race towards him. "What the hell happened?" The ex SEAL unsuccessfully tried to rub away his growing headache.

"There was someone here..." He told Danny. The pain in his skull was making it very hard to think straight.

"What happened to your arm?" His partner asked, shock lacing his voice. With some surprise of his own, Steve looked down to see blood streaming down his arm, a ragged hole the size of a bullet in his shirt half way down his upper arm. "Stay still, I'll call an ambulance." Danny glared at him, clearly not trusting him to follow the simple instruction.

Steve barely heard him. Now that the adrenaline, and the numbness that it brought, were wearing off, he was beginning to feel the pain radiating from his right arm, spreading down his ribs and up his neck. The only word that he really caught was 'ambulance.'

'Ambulance is good. It means doctors with morphine.' His mind informed him happily. His thought process was too distorted to truly comprehend the fact that he was talking to himself.

Danny watched his partner out of the corner of his eye as he dialled the relevant numbers and relayed all that had happened to the relevant people. The ambulance first, then Chin and Kono, then SOCO. If people had been here, then they might get lucky with prints. Steve was sat almost completely immobile, and the Jersey native was beginning to fear that he might be going into shock. The ex SEAL was still desperately trying to recover from the traumatic 'incident' with Nick Taylor and Sang Min after all. This new attack was too much.

It took about four minutes for the ambulance to arrive and a further two minutes for them to navigate all their equipment through the wreckage of Steve's living room. Danny couldn't help but ponder the massive cleanup job that faced his partner in the near future, and he made a mental promise that, this time, he would help.

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"Hey boss, you alright?" Kono's voice, though intended to be calm and collected was slightly higher than normal in anxiety. No one felt the need to comment on it.

"Yeah, I'll be fine," Steve reassured her, having recently rediscovered the ability of speech. His arm was better now, the drugs buzzing contentedly in his system, and everything was falling back into place. Despite his reassurances however, Kono still looked over to Danny who nodded surreptitiously in response. The ex SEAL found himself rolling his eyes in fond exasperation. "Told you." Kono grinned at him.

"SOCO teams have arrived, they're going to start going through everything." Chin's voice drifted over to them, before the man himself appeared.

"Can they tidy up while they're at it?" Steve asked, and the others laughed. He felt himself grinning along with them.

'Even if everything else is going to hell, there's still this. This is safe. This is home.' A small voice in the back of his head whispered, and the thought helped to calm his jumpy nerves.

"I'll see what I can do," Chin assured him. "Did you get a decent look at the guy who shot you?"

"Not really," the ex SEAL responded, grimacing. "He was wearing a dark hoodie, his face was shadowed. About 6'2", maybe 6'3". His skin wasn't very dark, I doubt that he was local." Chin nodded. The information wasn't much to go on, but at least it was something. They had solved cases with less.

"Do you think that this is related to that envelope?" Danny asked. He saw the way his partner winced slightly, just as the Kono and Chin both looked up in interest.

"What envelope?" Kono asked, curiosity warring with confusion on her face. Steve closed his eyes briefly, sucking in a breath.

"There was a poem in my van this morning," he told them. "It's on the passenger seat." The cousins turned in unison and headed over to the truck. The partner's watched them go for a second before Danny rounded on him.

"Why didn't you want to tell them about the poem?" Steve frowned and opened his mouth to tell him that wasn't what he had been thinking. "Don't tell me that I'm wrong, I can read you like a book."

"If you could read me so well, you wouldn't keep losing in card games," he ribbed.

"That was one time! And don't change the subject," Danny retorted. Steve had never been hugely subtle when he wanted to avoid a topic.

"It wasn't that I didn't want to tell them. It's just a long story. I don't understand any of this yet, and until we do I think it would be better to keep the poem quiet." Danny could see the logic in that statement, and he knew his partner well enough to hear the undercurrent of raw pain that was unearthed by this case. There was one thing that he disagreed with however:

"But it's Chin and Kono. We trust them surely?"

"Of course we trust them!" Steve sounded slightly hurt that Danny was questioning his loyalties. There was a pause for a moment, then: "This is hard for me, Danno." He admitted quietly. And suddenly it all made sense to the Jersey native. It wasn't that Steve had wanted to keep things secret; it was just that he didn't want to be in a position to talk about this yet.

"I know. Believe me, I understand. I'm sorry."

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What did you think? I do get a sadistic pleasure from torturing the boys, it's frankly a little disturbing. Oh well, it makes for fun writing. Again, massive apologies on the wait. You know that I said that this was psychological? It's really fun to write that, it's just that it takes an awful lot of planning, and trawling through chapters to get the wording of certain things just right. Anyways, I hope it works out alright.

Little side note: SOCO is the English term for crime scene investigators. I'm not sure if there is a common American word (cause most of my readers are from the USA) so sorry if there was any confusion over that.

I think that's it. PM or review me any queries :)