A/N: Thank you, again, for reading and especially for the reviews! I can't say how much I appreciate your comments! Thank you! . . . And now I just hope that this won't disappoint anyone's expectations.

Chapter 6

"I told you to get that ear checked out."

Steve slowly opened his heavy eyes and blinked against the harsh, fluorescent lights of the ER. "What are you doing here?" he asked tiredly, pushing himself wearily into a more upright position.

"Chin called, filled me in on what happened," Danny answered flatly. He looked around and grabbed a nearby chair, pulled it over towards the bed and sat down, arms resting on his thighs. He sighed and looked up to meet Steve's eyes. "I did tell you to get that ear checked out."

"It's fine," Steve assured him automatically, looking away.

He let his gaze wander around the small, curtained area until he found the clock hanging high on the opposite wall. It was a little after noon. He had lost track of time between the Palace and the hospital, hardly remembered getting here, or what had happened afterwards. The dizziness, nausea, and pain had effortlessly accomplished what he could never quite manage himself, no matter how hard he tried. The spinning of the world and the buzzing in his head had not only drowned out everyone around him, but also everything inside him, in his mind. All the questions and the guilt had been muted and muffled until they had been small and insignificant and quiet.

"Doesn't look fine to me," Danny said, the tone of his voice still uncharacteristically resigned.

Steve absently touched his left ear, fingers brushing over the cotton ball sticking out of it. He only noticed now that he barely heard anything on that side.

"Alright, Commander," a female voice said before the curtain was quickly brushed aside, revealing a woman wearing a white coat. Steve remembered seeing her before. "Your scans are all looking clean." She peeked up from the large images in her hands and looked at him with raised eyebrows. "Looks like you got lucky."

Steve just nodded.

"You call that lucky?" Danny asked, jerking his head in Steve's direction.

The doctor smiled politely. "It could have been far worse."

Danny got up from his chair and shook her hand. "Detective Williams, I'm his partner," he introduced himself.

"Doctor Huang."

"So what exactly does lucky mean?"

The doctor quickly looked over to Steve, making sure he was okay with her sharing his medical information with Danny. He gave her a terse nod. Danny would find out anyway, and since he didn't remember much from before, this gave him a chance to catch up, too.

"Well, Commander McGarrett has a small tear in his left eardrum. There was some sand and dirt obstructing the ear canal which, as the scans show, did luckily not move past the damaged eardrum, leaving the middle ear mostly unaffected."

"Mostly?" Danny asked, quirking an eyebrow at her.

"There's always the risk of bacteria getting into the middle ear and causing an infection, but I'll prescribe an antibiotic to hopefully prevent that."

Danny nodded and glanced over to Steve suspiciously. "That all?"

Doctor Huang sighed and shot a pointed look at Steve. "Well, Commander McGarrett's blood pressure was a little low when he was brought in. We did a complete work-up. His blood sugar was also low and he's a tad bit anemic. I'd suggest an iron supplement to help with that. Other than that, there was nothing outside the normal parameters. He was also complaining of headache, nausea and dizziness, which, of course, can all be attributed to the injury to the eardrum. However, symptoms that severe are rare." She turned away from Danny and faced Steve with a soft smile. "You should make sure to get some rest, Commander. Eat a good meal and try to avoid stress as much as possible."

Steve swallowed hard and nodded. "I'll try," he promised.

Next to him, Danny huffed out a sarcastic snort.

"Anyway," Doctor Huang said, frowning at the small exchange between them, "I'll get your paperwork and your prescription ready and then you're free to leave. Unless you have any more questions?" She looked expectantly from Steve to Danny.

"Thank you, Doctor," Steve said and forced a smile, eager to get out of the ER. Now that the silence was gone and the questions and the guilt were back, he couldn't bear to just sit around any longer and do nothing.

"Pleasure meeting you," Danny said, reaching out to shake the doctor's hand again.

She smiled at them both before she disappeared behind the curtain.

"You always get the pretty ones."

Steve ignored Danny's comment as he pushed himself further upright and swung his legs off the bed, half expecting the dizziness to return, but it didn't. Now all he needed were his shoes.

"Hey, where do you think you're going?"

Steve glared up at Danny, who had moved a step closer to the bed but was still keeping an unusual distance. "She said I could leave."

"When the nurse brings you your walking papers," Danny argued. "And judging by the classroom full of distinctly green looking first-graders out there, I think that might take another hour or seven."

"I'm fine, Danny."

"Humor me," Danny bit back harshly. Then he sighed and dropped back down onto his chair. "We gotta talk anyway."

"About what?"

Danny shrugged, pursing his lips. "I don't know, man. Maybe the herd of elephants in the room?"

Steve could feel Danny's eyes on him as he kept up the pretense of looking for his shoes on the ground. "Now's not the time," he said flatly, knowing there was never going to be a time when he'd want to talk about . . . the elephants.

"Now's a great time," Danny disagreed stubbornly and Steve knew he was not gonna let this go. "Your shoes are on the other side, by the way."

Steve stopped looking around and glanced up, careful not to meet Danny's eyes. "You hear anything from Max yet . . . about Dyer?" he tried to redirect to simple facts. He could do facts.

"I shouldn't have left like that yesterday."

The softly spoken admission took Steve by surprise. He dropped his gaze back down to stare blankly at the gray linoleum floor. "It's fine, you were pissed," he said and shrugged up one shoulder, pretending that Danny's reaction the day before hadn't affected him, didn't have him wondering why his partner had looked at him so helplessly and hurt before he had left. "You had every right to be," Steve added quietly, more to himself.

"I still shouldn't have just left," Danny insisted.

"And why is that?" Steve glared at him and pushed himself off the bed, determined to find his damn boots so he could get out of here and . . . not have this conversation. He didn't need to hear Danny feeling guilty about all this, didn't need his pity, or whatever else that edge in his voice was.

"Because I'm your partner," Danny shot back loudly. "I should have told you why–"

"Yeah, that's right," Steve cut him off, furious now. Not at Danny, but at himself. Because all this was just becoming far too much. It felt like everything was suddenly spiraling out of control and there seemed to be nothing he could do anymore to keep it all together, to stop everything from falling apart. "You're my partner. Not my babysitter!" It wasn't Danny's job to make sure he did his, and Danny shouldn't feel like it was. He shouldn't think that Travis' death was in any way his fault.

He wasn't the one who had forgotten.

"What?" Danny shot up from his chair and stared at him incredulously. "What is that supposed to mean?"

Steve turned away from him and walked around the bed, still looking for his boots. "Look, I'm sorry if you feel guilty about what happened, Danny," he said after a moment and stopped to look him again. "But you know what? You shouldn't. It wasn't your fault. I told you to go home, I– I told you I'd take care of everything. It's not your fault that I for–" He choked on the word like it was stuck in his throat. He paused, bent down to grab his boots and dropped back down to sit on the bed, his back turned to Danny. "It's not your fault that I forgot."

"Steve, that's not what I–"

"He's dead Danny. He's dead because I . . ."

"Don't," Danny cut in harshly, even though Steve wouldn't have been able to finish the sentence anyway, couldn't bring himself to say the word out loud again. "Don't say that. You don't know what happened. What if someone broke in and killed him, huh?"

"The door was locked. There were no signs of a struggle or . . . anything. He just lay there."

"Okay, so he had an aneurysm or something."

"The kid was nineteen, Danny." And even if it had been an aneurysm. If Travis hadn't been locked away in a small, dark room, forgotten, then maybe someone could still have saved his life.

He felt the mattress dip a little as Danny sat down on the other side of the bed with a heavy sigh.

"Travis is dead because I left him in there," Steve insisted, his voice sounding hoarse to his own ears.

"Steve," Danny started, but then didn't continue, like he was at a loss of words. He was silent for a long minute before he quietly said, "I should have been there."

"It's not your fault Danno. Not your fault," Steve said, his voice nothing but a whisper. Just mine.

…

Danny couldn't help but keep looking over to Steve. He sat slumped tiredly in the passenger seat of the Camaro, his empty eyes gazing out of the window. So far, they had spent most of their trip back to the Palace in silence. Danny driving for once, and Steve letting him.

Danny had thought about calling Chin just in order to break the unbearable silence. Even though Chin would call the second he heard anything – Danny had made him promise. But so far he hadn't, which meant that Kershaw's people were either not done scanning the surveillance footage, or he wasn't ready to share what was on the tapes yet. And Max would probably still need hours to complete his autopsy of Travis Dyer's body. The preliminary examination of the body had been inconclusive and Max had refused to even venture a wild guess as to the cause of death, saying that, given the circumstances, he wanted to be absolutely sure and not make any assumptions.

The waiting had begun. And Danny's patience was wearing thin already. He had never been good at patience, but this was unbearable. Waiting to find out what exactly had happened and who was responsible for a nineteen-year-old's death. He shot another glance over to his partner, wondering how he must be feeling. Steve had to be experiencing a whole different level of unbearable right now.

This wasn't what Steve needed. Not now. Not when he was already only barely holding on.

Danny hadn't slept last night, not really anyway. He had been drifting, lying awake for hours, thinking. Trying to remember the last few weeks, everything, every detail of what had happened after North Korea, after they had gotten Steve back from that hell.

At least they all thought that they'd gotten him back. Maybe they had all been pretending. Because it was easier to simply close your eyes than to face the truth – that maybe they had left a part of Steve back in that bunker, or somewhere along the road back. Maybe Joe had taken it with him when he had left. Maybe it had never been there in the first place.

But there was definitely something missing.

And now Danny was done pretending that nothing was wrong.

Steve had made pretending easy, though. He seemed fine most of the time. Too fine, really.

After returning from North Korea, after being tortured and after watching Jenna die, he had just snapped back like a rubber band. He hadn't talked about any of it, said he didn't need to, that he was fine. And just like that, everything had gone back to normal in a flash – Danny remembered having a hard time keeping up.

Because, even today, he still saw Jenna's dead body lying in that bunker sometimes, chained to the wall, abandoned. Her betrayal and her sacrifice still tore him apart inside. And he wasn't even the one whose trust she had betrayed. How could Steve just move on from that? How could the scars Jenna must have caused him, too, have healed faster than the bruises on his body had faded?

And how could Danny have believed Steve when he had said that he was fine?

But what had happened in North Korea was not even really the problem, only a symptom of the underlying disease. The secrets and lies had spread throughout Steve's life like a cancer.

Shelburne.

Joe had dragged Steve to his father's grave to feed him some story about Shelburne being an alias, a code name, his code name, or something; that he had killed Wo Fat's father. And then he had just left, leaving Steve with most of his questions unanswered, telling him that none of it mattered, abandoning him, like so many people had before.

Danny had no idea when exactly, but he knew that at some point Steve had started to question what Joe had told him about the identity of Shelburne. He probably hadn't quite believed the story in the first place. There had been a note of suspicion and mistrust in his voice – next to the tiny hint of pain because he had lost yet another father figure – when Steve had told him about his conversation with Joe.

Danny remembered the day like it was yesterday. It had been the day little Charles had been born. Steve had picked him up from the hospital afterwards and had even bought him dinner. They had been sitting outside, on the deck chairs behind Steve's house, eating, when he had noticed that Steve had been quieter than usually. It had taken some prodding, but eventually he had told him about Joe leaving, and what he had revealed about Shelburne.

In hindsight, Danny thought that maybe he should have prodded more often, should have tried to make Steve talk about the things that were eating at him. Maybe it wasn't too late to start yet.

It hadn't been long after Joe's disappearance that Danny had noticed Steve staying at the office late again, or getting there before anyone else did. On other days, he was late to come in. And he always looked tired and weary, like there was something keeping him up at night. I was just like before, when Steve had started to be suspicious about how much Joe really knew about Shelburne and what he wasn't telling him. When he had started his own investigation. Only this time, it seemed to be worse.

Steve did his best to pretend that everything was fine, though. When the team went out for drinks, he was there. He even made time to go surfing with Danny. But he always kept one eye on the time, never seemed relaxed. It was like a part of him was somewhere else, still searching for Shelburne even when he wasn't. It was almost as if all the normal things were just bullet points on his to-do list that needed to be checked off. Normal people things, because he needed to appear normal.

But he didn't. Everyone could see that. Everyone who wanted to, anyway. Everyone who didn't spend their nights thinking that maybe all this was just temporary, that he would snap out of it eventually, that the secrets would just go away some day, and that everything would be fine. Because Steve was always fine. At least that was what he wanted people to believe. And Danny – he just had. Maybe because it was easier, maybe because that's what he wanted more than anything – for Steve to be fine.

But he wasn't. Not even close.

And what had Danny done about it? He had left. Turned his back on his friend and left, because he hadn't known what to do. And still didn't.

But he could have done more than just leave. He could have stayed, made sure they cut Travis loose and that Steve got his ear checked. He could have done something. Not nothing. Not just head home and spend most of the night thinking when Steve had needed him to just be there for him – to be his back-up.

They were partners. And that meant they were each other's back-up. Always. Not just when they were out in the field, but also when they weren't. Especially when they weren't. Because out there, they were wearing vests and had their guns and they expected to run into trouble. But yesterday, in the safety of their own offices when Steve had needed him to have his back, Danny had just left.

And now a nineteen-year-old kid was dead.

"Are you gonna get that?"

Steve's low voice startled Danny out of his thoughts. He barely managed not to flinch. "What?"

"Your phone."

Danny only noticed now that it was buzzing inside the pocket of his pants. "Oh." He pulled the cell out and, with a quick glance at the caller ID, answered the call – not putting the phone on speaker for once. Because if there was bad news then this wasn't the way he wanted Steve to hear it. "Hey Chin, what's up? Anything new?"

"No, nothing yet. At least that I know of."

"We're just on our way back, we'll be at the Palace in five."

"Okay, good. How's Steve?"

How was he supposed to answer that question?

"Fine. His ear is gonna be fine," Danny almost stuttered.

"Good," Chin said, the levity in his voice clearly forced. "Listen, Danny, I just got a call from Denning's assistant. He wants Steve to come by his office as soon as possible."

"Does he now?" Danny snapped.

"Yeah. Hey, if you want me to, I'll just call her back, tell her you guys are still at the hospital or something . . . Maybe we can stall Denning until we actually know what happened. Give Steve a little break."

With a glance over to his partner, Danny shook his head. "No, no it's fine."

"You sure?" The hesitant frown was clearly audible in Chin's voice.

"Oh yeah, I'm sure." With that, Danny ended the call and stepped down on the accelerator.

- to be continued -