This time when Detective Sergeant Daniel Williams awoke, it was with a loud gasp like he was breaching the surface of the water after a near-drowning.
"Holy—Danny!"
Bolt upright in bed, heart monitor tattling on the flip-flopping the lump of muscle inside his chest was doing.
"Danny, you okay?"
Head swiveled to look at Chin.
At Malia.
The Moon.
He could move.
He gulped in oxygen. All he could hear in his head was the sound of a flatline.
All he could see overlaying very worried Kelly faces was Grace, large brown eyes full of tears. Wailing when he asked about Steve.
Malia moved forward, held her finger over his wrist.
Chin moved to the opposite side of the bed, placed a hand gently on Danny's forearm.
And Danny could feel both points of touch.
"Where's Steve?" he asked.
"At the Naval base in Kepler. He took Grace's lunar rock there and is sticking around while they analyze it," Chin replied. "Are you all right?"
"Was it a nightmare?" Malia asked before Danny could respond to Chin. When Danny nodded, Malia looked up at her husband, then back down at Danny. "You've been having a lot of them?"
Danny let out a breath, felt his heart rate finally starting to slow down. "Steve told you."
"Not much," Chin said, "but enough. He's worried about you, brah. You're reacting like what you got was a lot worse than a knife through the ribs."
"Damn him and his big stupid mouth."
"I know something about dream interpretation," Malia said, drawing a strange look from Danny and a small smile from Chin. Damn if that man didn't have stars filling up his eyes, and not from the Moonscape outside, either.
"Aren't you a medical doctor?" Danny asked skeptically.
Malia nodded. "Yes, but both sides of my family are very mystical. I'm actually descended from several European countries as well as Hawaii, so the things my family practices are a conglomeration of religious and pagan knowledge from a lot of different places."
"Dream interpretation being one?"
She nodded and smiled. "What was this one about, if you don't mind me asking?"
Danny looked up at Chin. It was fucking emasculating to him to be talking about shit like this as though it meant something.
It isn't supposed to happen this way!
Danny suddenly forgot about feeling emasculated or anything else. All he could see was Grace so grief-stricken…and then with her right there he himself had…what? Died? Right in front of his baby?
Oh, hell no.
And so Danny proceeded to explain to both Chin and Malia what he remembered, everything from noticing that Grace and Rachel looked like they had two years earlier to the fact that each nightmare or dream or whatever always occurred in Hawaii.
"The accident in the Camaro is very significant," Malia said, eyes focused on a faraway point. "Also I think that Carpenters song you keep hearing is significant, and the fact that there's some mystery about whether or not Steve's actually dead, and you being paralyzed, is also paramount to what you're experiencing."
"But why would this dream be recurring as though Danny's living the event linearly?" Chin asked. "First he's in the Camaro after the accident, then in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, then waking up in the hospital to find he's paralyzed. It's not like it's the same dream over and over."
"No, you're right," Danny said. "It's not. It's like…swear to God, Malia, like I'm living two separate lives."
Brow furrowed in concentration, Malia stated quietly, "Maybe you are." She seated herself on the chair next to the bed as Chin and Danny exchanged Huh? looks.
Malia closed her eyes, her hand barely-there on Danny's left arm. "The car accident is significant on two levels. First, dreaming about yourself being in one means you're guilty about something or that you've made a big mistake somewhere recently."
Danny swallowed hard.
"Of course, it could simply be a portent of something to come, but that seems unlikely given that we're not in Hawaii and there's no Camaro here," she continued. "But what's notable here is that you dream of Steve dying. That means something inside you is dead, non-functional. Something that has to do with Steve, something no longer working right."
Danny closed his eyes and leaned back into the pillows behind his head. This was getting damn personal. "Fuck," he whispered. He couldn't even begin to fathom what the hell all this meant.
"It's a wake-up call, Danny," Malia said, opening her eyes and looking right at him as he opened his own. "Something needs to be fixed before it rips you two apart for good."
"He followed me up here, you all did, what could need fixing in that?" Danny groused.
"You might be feeling guilty that we all left Hawaii to come up here just because of you and Grace," Chin proposed.
Danny opened his mouth, then clamped it shut again. Well. Talk about hitting the bullseye. He felt his face flush.
"What about the ambulance ride, and being hospitalized and paralyzed?" Chin asked. Bless the man's ability to redirect like nobody's business.
"The best I can link the ambulance to is that you feel that you're being careless about something, in a way that could lead to complications," Malia replied, still looking right at Danny. "The hospital is sort of the same, meaning you need to heal yourself, either your mental or physical self. It could also mean you're afraid of losing control of your body, which would lead us into the paralysis."
Danny just stared at her, having trouble processing everything she was saying, trying to relate it to himself. It just wasn't gelling for him.
"The paralysis is most likely the feeling that you're helpless. That you're in a situation you can't change, something that's out of your control."
"Being here," Danny said without hesitation. "Same as with being in Hawaii."
"That's right," Chin nodded. "It's all about what Stan and Rachel want."
"And I'd say the song's significance is your relationship with Grace. You want to be close to her," Malia concluded, removing her hand from Danny's arm. "Well, I'm no professional on that score, but that's probably all a practicing interpreter would tell you."
Danny flashed her a small smile. "Thanks," he said. Then added, "I think."
Chin's cell phone rang as Malia got to her feet. He pulled it off his belt clip, looked at the screen and said to them, "It's Steve," before answering it. Chin nodded. "Yeah, he's awake. Malia's here, too." Then he tapped his cell phone screen. "You're on speaker."
"I think we've found what those two guys from Gabbana's construction company were after," came Steve's voice through the phone.
"What'd your Navy guys come up with?" Danny asked, sitting fully upright and feeling only the smallest of pinches in his ribcage for doing so.
"Danny. You said Navy."
"Steven!"
Steve chuckled. Malia hid a smile behind her hand and Chin just rolled his eyes as Steve replied, "Gadolinium."
"Gesundheit!" Danny quipped. "Now what's in Gracie's lunar rock?"
"Very funny," Steve groused. "That is what's in Gracie's rock. Gadolinium. Once Captain Lacy, one of the two Navy geologists here at the base, identified it, his assistant Googled it and showed me what it looks like on its own. Danny, some of it's such a light silver I never would know it wasn't silver without being told."
"Well, what's this gadolinium used for?" Chin asked. "Is it valuable?"
"And how," Steve replied. "Apparently it's really rare on Earth and it's used in everything from nuclear propulsion systems for things like subs, to treating dialysis patients. If someone were to find a store of it on the Moon and get mining rights, they'd be rich inside a few months."
"Good God, and my baby's sleeping right on top of a store of it?"
"Seems so," Steve replied. "I'm going to get in touch with Virgil Gabbana and make sure exactly where he found this lunar rock."
"Steve," Danny said, frown lines creasing his forehead.
"I know," Steve interrupted. "If the guys from the construction crew are after that stuff, that whole family might be in danger."
Danny looked up at Chin who said, "I'll go get Kono up. She's taking a forced nap."
"Okay," Steve replied. "You and Kono get on with Gabbana, and collate whatever responses we've gotten from the FBI and local Florida agencies on the remaining men in his crew."
"Will do," Chin said.
"Malia?"
"Yes?"
"How's Danny?"
"You can't ask me? I'm right here, hello."
He could almost hear Steve smile. "Yes, but I want the truth, partner."
"Oh, that's rich coming from Mr. Knife-Wound?-What-Knife-Wound?"
Steve laughed out loud. Malia grinned. "He's doing much better, physically."
Danny's eyes widened in the ensuing silence. Dammit. He knew exactly what Steve was thinking. Confirmed a few seconds later by "You going to lose your marbles on me, Danno?"
"Yes. For you being an ass. Now get back here and pick me up, we have work to do!"
"On my way."
Steve ended the call.
Chin and Malia said their good-byes.
And Danny worried.
As usual.
All the things Malia had said about what his dreams…more like nightmares…meant. And yet for all any of them knew maybe they weren't dreams. But Danny, well…he wasn't prepared to get quite that tinkly just yet.
He was here on the Moon. Grace was eleven years old. Stanley, Jr. was two. Danny had his own small-ish but adequate room in the Five-0 Moonbase. So did Steve. So did Kono. So did Max. Chin and Malia's was a little larger to accommodate a bigger bed.
A new and supposedly ultra-sexy Chevy called the Crescent was being built and would be delivered to Steve within six weeks' time, at which point Danny fully expected to receive it as a gift that he'd never be allowed to drive.
Things were normal, even though they were living on a big, dead rock in space. They had a couple murders to solve. They had a lead as to why the two men had been on the Moon to begin with, let alone why they'd been killed.
And his baby girl was potentially in danger. All in all, a typical case for Five-0, really, and Danny couldn't help but worry about Grace even when she wasn't possibly involved in a case he was working on.
But what about the damn nightmares? So real, so very real he could still feel the ghost pains when he'd awakened in the overturned Camaro, when he'd been in the ambulance. His heart could still feel the grief over Steve, the fright when he found he couldn't move any part of his body except his eyelids and lips.
And most of all, Grace's child-like belief in him. You can do it, Danno. I know you can.
But what was he supposed to do? If he was to believe this was something that was going to happen, it made no sense because they weren't in goddamn Hawaii!
His thoughts were interrupted by his room door swishing open and Steve looming in the doorway. "I think you dreaming about Hawaii was psychic or something," Steve said.
Danny blinked. "Huh?" he asked rather eloquently.
"The last three men of those five that Gabbana told Stan didn't want to return to the Moon are in Hawaii according to flight records."
"Are you kidding me?"
"Nope," Steve said, shaking his head and walking all the way into the room. "And there's a rare metals and gemstones dealer the FBI's been tracking out of Honolulu for over a year now."
Danny put a hand on his forehead. This could not be happening.
"HPD's distributing photos of the three construction guys and Gabbana's on his way to the Fort Lauderdale airport to catch a flight to Oahu because four more men from original Edwards construction crew have gone missing and he thinks they're there."
"What are you trying to tell me, Steven?"
Steve looked down at him, arms folded over his chest. "Our case just took a left turn at the North Star. We've gotta go back, partner."
Danny stared at him.
Suddenly he didn't know what terrified him more: the dreams he'd been having or the sudden realization that if he and Steve returned to Hawaii, they might actually come true.