A/N: Fun fanfiction statistics of the day (because I'm a dork and this is fun for me):

Hawaii Five-0 (6.7 thousand stories): average reviews: 6.5 per chapter. (whump/hurt/comfort stories: 9.5 per chapter). Popular genres: hurt/comfort and family.

Firefly (7.2 thousand stories): average reviews: 2.5 per chapter, popular genres: romance, friendship (2 of the top scoring stories were French)

CSI Miami (6.5 thousand stories): average reviews: 3 per chapter, popular genres: romance, hurt/comfort

Game of Thrones (5.2 thousand stories): average reviews: 6 per chapter, BUT that # is closer to 4 when I remove a couple of major outliers. Popular genre: drama.

Note: I used a small sample size, so error is possible. Didn't have time to do more sampling, and don't know enough programming to data dump and analyze with python. Hoping to get there eventually! :)

Tuesday Morning:

Danny Williams hummed happily as he pulled into the Five-0 parking lot Tuesday morning. The sun had just appeared over the ridge and a gentle breeze rippled through the air. It was a beautiful day, cool by Hawaiian standards, but the lower temps and clear, blue skies recalled memories of Autumn for the Jersey native. Nevermind that it was technically winter here on the islands, just past Christmas, and there would be no elegant color change, no frost, and certainly no blizzards. The morning felt good and Danny was determined to enjoy it.

As he swiped his sack lunch from the passenger seat (a healthy sandwich and a banana, Grace would be proud of him), he spotted a familiar blue truck parked under the trees at the far end of the lot. Danny groaned. Sitting in the exact same spot as yesterday, it had the same small branch caught under the windshield wiper and a handful of stray leaves scattered across the hood. There was only one possibility: Steve had spent the night in the office… again. Danny rolled his eyes and heaved a long-suffering sigh.

It wasn't uncommon for the Navy man to get caught up in a case, especially kidnapping or human trafficking cases where human lives were at stake, but this was a horse- a freaking unicorn, for Pete's sake- so he had absolutely no excuse for not sleeping at home. Danny shook his head, annoyed. He and his partner were going to have a little talk about priorities when he got up to the office. But still… he inhaled deeply, stretching as he reached for the lobby door… Danny wasn't going to let it bother him. He was having a wonderful morning, and he was determined that it would stay that way.

His positive attitude lasted a little less than five minutes. Arriving at the Five-0 doors, he was surprised to find the office dark and still locked up. Normally, his rigidly-disciplined partner would have been here for a solid 30 minutes already, the lights would be on, the doors unlocked, the coffee brewed… Danny flicked the switch by the door and waited for the overhead florescents to flicker to life. Perhaps the Neanderthal was still sleeping?

Squinting at the epoxide-sealed and duct tape-laden coffee pot on the table, Danny decided against caffeine for the morning and headed straight for Steve's office. The blinds were drawn and the lights off, but when he turned the handle, he found it unlocked.

"Steve?" he whispered into the darkness. Getting no response, he pushed the door lightly and stepped inside. "You up, babe?" he asked softly as he entered the dim interior. The chair at the desk was empty, which was a good sign since Danny had found his partner slumped over on the hard, mahogany wood before. Turning slightly, his eyes sought out the ex-SEAL's other favorite 'bed.'

"Of course," he muttered to himself. Although he had expected it, Danny still rolled his eyes when he spotted his partner passed out on the couch against the far wall. Sprawled across the surface with his legs spilling over the edge and one arm trailing the floor, Steve appeared dead to the world. Glancing once more at his watch, Danny decided that the man had slept long enough. If he had a headache the rest of the day, well, it was his own fault. Perhaps he would think twice before working late and crashing at the office next time.

"Couldn't go home and sleep like a normal person, could you?" Danny chided as he flicked the blinds open and turned on the lights. "Why does every case have to be a mission to you? Go, go, go, no eating, no sleeping- this isn't the military, babe." He paused when the man of normally-ninja reflexes failed to stir. "Steve?" Moving to the couch, he gingerly tapped his partner's shoulder. "Come on, up and at 'em!"

Steve snored lightly, oblivious to Danny's presence. Bending over him, Danny seized both shoulders and shook vigorously. "Rise and shine, soldier!"

When Steve failed to deliver his usual retort of It's 'sailor,' Danno!, the detective became concerned. "Steve? Hello?" Prying open an eyelid, he was troubled to see the pupil sluggishly shrink in response to the light. Seizing the arm on the floor, he pressed his fingertips to the wrist and was slightly reassured to feel a strong, if slow, pulse throbbing under the skin.

"Well, you're alive," he muttered softly as he studied his partner's prone form and tried to decide what to do next. Pulling out his phone, his finger was hovering over Max's number when Steve suddenly stirred.

…

Steve came to awareness slowly, guided back to consciousness by the soft grumbling of his partner's voice. Unlike similar experiences in which he'd woken up alone, confused, and in a strange place (usually a foreign hospital bed), this time Danny's voice helped anchor Steve to reality and allowed him to slowly merge with the conscious world. As he laid still in a state of half-sleep, he realized he was in his own office, and Danny was somewhere nearby, on the phone with someone. Only half understanding what he hearing, Steve listened drowsily to his partner's vocalizations while his tired body tried to find the capacity for movement.

"…coming around now… yes, I'd rather he went to the hospital, too, Max, but there's a huge wreck on the Pali and all rigs are at least an hour out… right, since he's breathing and in one piece, he's low priority." Danny smoothed a hand over his hair, a nervous habit he'd developed back in Jersey. "I don't know, Max, about 80, I think?... No, but his pupils are slow. Reactive, but very slow… Yes, I did feel the back of his head, and no, there's no obvious bump there." Beginning to feel slightly annoyed, Danny turned away, and was startled as Steve uttered a low groan suddenly.

"D'ny?"

"Hey Max, I need to let you go; he's coming around... Yes, and tell Charlie we want a rush on it…. Yeah, thanks. See you soon." Stowing the phone in his pocket, Danny dropped to his friend's side.

"Steve?" he asked cautiously. "You back with me?"

Steve muttered something unintelligible.

"How's that, babe?"

"Uhh…" Steve tried, but the words wouldn't quite form. Annoyed, he slung an arm over his head toward the couch and tried to push himself upright.

"I don't think so, mister." It didn't take much effort for Danny to pull his partner's arm down to his side and pin him into a prone position. "You stay there a few minutes longer. Max is already on his way."

"M'fine," Steve grunted in a disgruntled tone. "Jusgimmeamin."

"Okay," Danny sat back on his heels and ran a hand through his hair. "Just take it easy. I think you've been drugged."

"Sdtv," Steve said, which Danny took to mean sedative. Then "Tsu?"

"What?" Danny hoped the effects of whatever drug it was would wear off soon. " 'Too soon?' " he guessed. "What's too soon?"

Steve groaned and threw his arm up again, this time landing it on his face where it managed to block out most of the annoying light. Through gritted teeth, he growled his question again, making an effort to enunciate each letter: "C… S… U?"

"So somebody was in here last night?" Danny quickly made the jump in logic behind his partner's request and surveyed the office again, glad that he hadn't touched anything besides the couch. "Who was it? What did they want?" he asked, but Steve was too tired to answer. As he drifted off again, his arm flopped into Danny's lap with a faintly-uttered "Mmph." Danny was about to push it away when he noticed the angry, red mark in the crook of the arm. "What the hell?" Danny whispered to himself. Lifting the other arm, he checked for similar markings and found none. A frightening deduction began to form in his mind and he looked quickly around the office for any sign of something out of place, any evidence to support his theory.

There was the folded American flag on the shelf and the model Navy ships above the books, still perfectly positioned where his OCD partner had placed them years ago. A neat stack of file folders, each carefully labeled, was positioned on the desk, though one folder was slightly askew. Danny made a mental note of the folders and let his eyes wander the rest of the room. Two pens resting in the holder on the desk. A lamp sat just behind the pens. Steve's computer and monitor were just to the right of the lamp. A book on signaling techniques, likely related to Steve's next round of reserves training, rested on the left side of the desk. The chair had been pushed back from the dark, mahogany surface as though its owner had risen and neglected to push it back in. A light rain jacket hung on the hook by the door.

Danny frowned and rubbed the nape of his neck with one hand. It all seemed normal enough, but something didn't sit well with him and he couldn't quite put his finger on it. He looked down at the semiconscious form of his partner resting against him and came to a decision.

"Right you. Either wake up and explain this to me, or I'm dragging your butt to the hospital."

"No ho'pitl." Steve had awoken again and his response was surprisingly coherent.

"Steve, something happened here and I want to know what it is." Danny pulled out his phone and ghosted his finger threateningly over the emergency services number. He hoped Steve hadn't overheard him talking with Max earlier and didn't know that an ambulance wasn't available. "You going to fill me in, or am I gonna call an ambulance?"

For a few seconds, Steve blinked hazily as he tried to respond. Then he must have drifted off again because the next thing he saw was Max bending over him…

…

"Good morning, Commander," the ME chirped cheerily as Steve's eyes batted open. "It is good to see you back in the land of consciousness." The ME crouched by Steve's side, conducting a preliminary exam while Danny hovered nearby with poorly-disguised concern. "How are you feeling?" he asked as he wrapped a blood pressure cuff around Steve's arm.

"Unngh." Steve closed his eyes as the cuff tightened. It was tempting to drift into sleep again, but the poking and prodding prevented him from doing so. He flinched as a hand reached under his shirt and something cold settled on his chest.

"Just a stethoscope, Commander," Max said gently as Steve warily cracked one eye open. "Do you have any other injuries that you are aware of?"

Steve thought about it for a second. "No."

"He- or they- didn't do anything else to you?" Danny asked with concern.

Steve responded with a curt shake of his head and a grunt and tried to sit up. He managed a partial rise before the room suddenly spun and he tipped sideways, nearly rolling off the couch before Danny caught him with a heavy oomph!

"What the heck, Steven! Can't- mmph!- can't you wait five minutes?" the detective chided as he took the brunt of Steve's weight and maneuvered him back onto the couch and forced him back into a reclining position.

Steve frowned, but couldn't find the energy to protest or respond. Through lazy, half-lidded eyes, he watched as Max inserted a needle and held a small vial at the crook of his arm, allowing the dark red blood to rush in. Although some energy was beginning to return to his system, he felt completely drained. He flexed a finger slowly, annoyed at its sluggish response. Above him, Max talked Danny through his examination, but Steve was only partially paying attention.

"The Commander appears to have sustained a puncture wound, likely from a small gauge needle. That was a very good observation on your part." Max explained to Danny, indicating the small, red spot on Steve's other arm as he continued his work.

Steve squinted at the mark and frowned. "I don' rem'mber that," he slurred slowly. "I was sit… 'rck… talk… 'othin'," but it was too difficult to continue and he gave up with an annoyed huff.

Max seemed unconcerned by this revelation. "Your amnesia is hardly surprising if a lighter, volatile sedative, soaked in a cloth, perhaps, were initially used." He mimed holding a rag over his nose and mouth. "The initial vapors would make Commander McGarrett unusually compliant and possibly induce amnesia," he explained to Danny, "enabling the perpetrator to administer a more powerful sedative via injection. If he were drugged, it is possible that trace amounts of the chemical may still be in his system. I've taken a few samples, per your request, but I still think it is vital that the Commander be taken to the hospital for a thorough exam and observation."

"No hospital!" Steve delivered his most coherent response of the morning. "M' fine, D."

"Yeah, and I'm the Easter Bunny," Danny snorted.

"Not going," Steve insisted adamantly.

Danny rolled his eyes.

"Gentlemen, if I may suggest a compromise," Max spoke up, trying to head off any future interruptions to his work, "Commander McGarrett needs to lay very still while I am working, so perhaps this would be a good time for you, Detective, to interview him about last night's events. After that, I recommend an hour of rest somewhere quiet, perhaps in Lieutenant Kelly's office, since I see that CSU has arrived to sweep yours, and then, if the Commander cannot stand and walk on his own, please call me."

…

The story came out in bits and pieces, which Danny pieced together over the next quarter-hour as Steve relayed everything he could remember. It wasn't much to go on and, if Danny were being honest, he was a bit disappointed in the Navy SEAL. Whatever his partner had been drugged with left him foggy and groggy and not entirely coherent, which in turn made Danny's attempts at information-gathering much more arduous. Through garbled speech, loose gestures, and agonizingly long pauses, Steve explained to him that he had been drugged in his truck in the parking lot and then deposited in the office to sleep it off.

"So you left the office sometime around 1am?"

"Yeah."

"You got in your truck. There's a guy in the backseat with a gun."

"Yeah."

"You have a chat. Then he drugs you and that's all you remember?"

"Yeah."

"What did the guy want with our unicorn? Is it the world's most popular horse?"

"Wasn' abou' the horse, D. He… he said… no Mr. Ma."

"No Mr. Ma?" That explanation had then required further explanation since Danny was unaware of the extent of the research Steve had conducted the night before.

"Said to leaf… leave it 'lone. Don' mess with it."

"Why? Who cares? He's just a computer tech, right?"

"No." After Steve went through the highlights of his background search on Mr. Ma last night and explained that the details were in the folders on his desk, Danny tried to summarize:

"So the Man in Black breaks into your truck and waits for you just to tell you to stop investigating Mr. Ma? And then he drugs you and leaves you in the office?"

"Yes."

"Well that seems like a waste of his time. Was there anything else? Who was he?"

"Don' think so. And he didn'… didn't say who he was." Steve was equally frustrated with his inability to remember more about his mysterious attacker last night. Despite the fact that HPD's best crime techs were now sweeping his office, neither he nor Danny held much confidence that it would help. Their best hope was the security footage from the night before.

…

Through the blinds in Chin's office, Steve watched the proceedings in the bullpen and his own office with remote interest. Max was packing up the vials of blood for Charlie while chatting with Danny, and several crime scene techs were taking fingerprint and hair samples from the knobs, tables, desks, and window frames around the office. Nearly thirty minutes of his required hour of 'nap time,' as Danny had gleefully named it, was up, and Steve was feeling only marginally better.

He stretched one limb out carefully. The tiny part of him that was awake was furious at having been taken down so easily and completely unaware, but that tiny part would have to wait until the rest of him caught up. Reaching a hand behind him, he grasped the couch against which he had been slumped for the past half hour and tried to pull himself upright. He succeeded, but immediately succumbed to sudden vertigo and slumped sideways as the office spun around him. When he finally pulled himself upright and looked out the window again, Max was gone and Danny was frowning at the smart table in the center of the room.

"Commander?" A young man from CSU, an intern according to his badge, opened the door and blinked in the dim light. "Can I ask you a question?"

Danny, rushing into the room behind him, answered for Steve. "Yes… Nahoa?" he asked, reading the kid's name off the badge clipped to his shirt while Steve just frowned against a growing headache.

The intern looked nervously between the pair and finally settled on Danny. "The Commander needs to check his safe. We need to know if anything is missing."

"That's classified," Steve said quickly. It wasn't actually classified- storing classified documents in the safe would have broken a host of Navy regulations- but he did have some sensitive documents about his mother and Wo Fat and other odds and ends that were no one else's business.

"I don't have to know what's in there," Nahoa said quickly, raising his hands. "We're just trying to assess what they've taken."

Steve grunted and began to stand shakily. Danny rolled his eyes and quickly thrust an arm around his shoulders before he could topple over.

"What have you found so far?" Danny asked the intern as he helped Steve to his feet.

"Not much," Nahoa admitted. "All the fingerprints belong to you, Detective Kelley, Officer Kalakaua, Commander McGarrett, Mr. Ortega, or Mr. Kartosh, the custodian," the intern said, reading from his notepad as he followed Danny and Steve toward the safe. "Nothing seems out of place and there are no loose fibers or other trace materials. If someone was here, then they cleaned up after themselves." He stood back respectfully as Danny lowered Steve to the floor in front of the safe and looked away even though Steve was blocking the dial. "We did take a few partials, but Mr. Jordan- that's my boss- thinks they'll belong to one of the team members. No one's looked at the security footage yet- Mr. Jordan said you'd probably want to do that yourself."

Danny nodded. "I'm looking at it now. We'll contact the lab when we're done." Both men looked down as Steve closed the safe. "All good, babe?"

"It's all there," Steve sighed in relief.

"Good. If it's okay, then I need to check in with my supervisor," Nahoa said, excusing himself.

Danny nodded his approval and helped his partner back up. "Time to lay back down," he said firmly to Steve, but his partner was having none of it.

"I'm fine," Steve mumbled grumpily. Swaying but generally upright, he moved slowly across the room and leaned heavily on the smart table beside Danny. "What've we got?"

"What've we not got is the better question," Danny returned. "Are you sure you left the office around 1 am?"

Steve shot him a glare. "I know what time I left, Danny."

"Okay, well…" Danny stepped back. "You might want to see this for yourself.

Steve frowned. Seizing the controls, he pulled up footage from the lobby downstairs and scanned through the images.

Nothing.

With a snort of disbelief, he selected the camera situated just inside the Five-0 bullpen. Through narrowed eyes, he watched as the janitor came through at 11pm, and the night watchman made his rounds at 12. At 1:15, he saw himself exit his office, lock it, and disappear from the frame. The office remained dark until morning.

Pulling up the lobby footage, he fast forwarded to 1:15am and waited to see himself walking down the staircase. But as the minutes ticked by on the screen, the lobby remained obstinately empty. Just in case he had missed something, he let it play out at high speed until the morning.

As the footage ended, he finally turned to Danny who had been curiously silent. The shorter man stood motionless beside him, his eyes sweeping the last frame on the screen with rapt attention.

"You came back upstairs, though," Danny finally pointed out. "At some point, you went downstairs to your truck and then came back up, but you managed it without any of the cameras seeing you."

"I don't remember coming back upstairs. I figured they carried me up here after drugging me." Considering his height and weight, that posed another problem- either his attacker was unusually strong, or there was more than one perpetrator involved- but Steve was more interested in the problem of the missing security footage.

Danny was, too and reached out to manipulate the footage for himself. "You leave the office at 1:15… but you never get to the lobby. And somehow, miraculously, you made it back to the office without any of the cameras seeing you, either." He played footage from the lobby, then returned to the footage of the Five-0 office. From the moment Steve locked the doors until Danny unlocked them that morning, no one was seen entering or leaving the office. "Did you do some kind of weird ninja thing and climb out a window?"

"Replay the lobby footage again," Steve requested, ignoring his last comment, and Danny obliged. "Okay, this doesn't make sense. I should be walking through those doors here," and he tapped the screen at 1:17. "D, I was in my truck when the man drugged me. I got to my truck. Then I was drugged. Then I ended up back here where you found me."

"Then why doesn't the video show it? You never reached the parking lot, Steven. There's nothing in the footage to suggest you made it to the first floor."

Exasperated, Steve played back the lobby footage again. "I didn't dream it, Danny. It was real. This," he pointed to small red dot on his arm, "is real."

"Look, I believe you. But," Danny huffed and pointed between the conflicting images, "that implies that someone somehow drugged you, dragged you back upstairs- which is no small feat-, got you inside the Five-0 office- which requires a password and keycard, by the way- and then edited all the security tapes before he left." He cast a sidelong look at Steve. "Come on. I know we're both thinking the same thing."

Steve knew what Danny was thinking, but hesitated to admit his own thoughts were along the same lines. "Danny, if it's the CIA or NSA, I'd receive a warning through official channels. Not like this."

Danny sighed, but reluctantly accepted this explanation. "Okay. If that's the case, then this isn't your ordinary, run-of-the-mill criminal. This is some kind of elite hacker if he pulled all of this off. We need Jerry."

"No can do. Jerry's helping his mom, remember?"

"Okay, Toast then."

"On the East Coast at a big tech conference."

"One of your Navy connections?"

Steve shook his head. "Not for something like this."

"Something like what?" Danny faced him with a glare, his frustration spilling over into anger. "We were hacked, Steve! No, wait, more than that: we were hacked, the security footage was tampered with and erased- oh, and let's not forget that you were kidnapped and drugged in your own office! If there was ever a time to call in the big guns, this is it!"

Maybe it was the lingering effects of said drugs, but Steve was in no mood to argue. When the detective had finished his mini-rant, Steve bluntly laid out his reasons: "I'm a reservist, Danny. With Catherine retired and Joe out of the picture, I don't have the connections that I used to." It hurt, actually, to know that years of service had earned him only a small handful of favors at the higher levels, but Steve would never admit that, especially not to Danny. And he didn't feel that now was the time to call in one of his few favors remaining… not yet. "Besides, I've got a funny feeling about this one. How did the man in the truck know what I'd been doing? It was late, everyone else was gone… How could he know about our case? And that I'd been looking into Mr. Ma specifically?"

Danny looked around the office uncomfortably. "Do you think he's bugged your office?"

"CSU would have found it."

"Hacked your computer?"

"Unlikely. I'm using some Navy encryption software." At a loss for what to do, Steve flagged down a crime scene technician and had the man find the file folders he had left on his desk. Donning a pair of gloves to avoid damaging any evidence, he passed them to Danny with a shrug. "Here's the research I did last night. Maybe there's something in there. And, just for you, I narrowed down a search grid for the 'unicorn'."

Danny flipped open the first two folders and nodded approvingly at the contents. Then he pulled the third folder open. "Um babe?" Danny held up the plain folder that had "Mr. Ma" printed neatly on the side. "This one's empty."

"What?" Steve snatched it from his hand. "No, that's not right. It should have his employment and marital info and…" He searched quickly through the remaining sheets and folders on his desk, but the papers were gone. "I guess he took it."

"Please tell me you have a backup?"

"Yes. I saved everything on the computer," Steve said, logging into the machine. "Taking the physical papers won't do much good on stopping us from looking into Ma unless-" He stopped suddenly as an empty folder appeared on his screen. "This doesn't make sense."

Danny watched quietly for a minute. "Don't tell me- everything's gone," he hazarded a guess.

Steve tried a few more keywords, but with the same results. "I don't understand."

"Me either, babe."

"You don't get it, Danny- my computer extremely high-level encryption software." Steve rubbed his head where a low, throbbing ache had begun itself known. "I keep very sensitive information on this computer. If he gained access to it, that's a hug breach of security." Leaning back in his chair, he scrubbed a tired hand over his face. "I'll have to file a report."

"Well, on the plus side, I guess we know what he did after bringing you back upstairs," Danny commented. "While you file your report, why don't I go back and re-do all that research you did last night?"

"Don't bother," Steve grimaced. "I've got a hunch that's all disappeared, too."

…

Steve's hunch was correct. While the Five-0 commander spent the rest of the morning filling out paperwork for an apparently very long and detailed report, Danny did some digging and tried to recover the files that had gone missing during the night. As Steve had predicted, the databases had been wiped of any hint of a Mr. Ma, and all internet searches revealed nothing.

"It's like this guy never existed," Danny complained. "How do you make a man completely disappear overnight?!"

More captivated now by Steve's mysterious attacker and his ability to make things disappear than Mr. Ma, Danny turned his attention to the building's security systems and began looking into how the files and footage could have disappeared. However, despite his best efforts, he had nothing to show when Steve finished two hours later.

On a sticky note, Danny jotted down everything that had disappeared so far:

The thief- or thieves

The horse / unicorn

Mr. Ma

Danny stopped and scratched the last line out. Mr. Ma didn't just disappear. For all points and purposes, Mr. Ma didn't exist. And, if the internet and his recent research were to be believed, neither did his wife or daughter.

A/N: I wrote 4 different versions of this chapter and am still not very happy with it. At the end of the story, I plan on having a "Deleted Scenes" chapter with items that I cut.