I do not own Hawaii Five-0 or any characters. No copyright infringement intended.
Notes: I'm thrilled with such a positive receipt of this ... thank you!
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Steve only glanced over to Danny once after Kono left before starting to randomly flip through a magazine. Where she was questioning Danny's lack of interaction and wondered at how cold he seemed to be, Steve had written it off as just another of his partner's tendencies to be overly sensitive. The negativity had become a norm in their banter and Steve thought nothing of Danny's moodiness.
Hell, if Danny caught so much as a head cold, he'd gripe for days on end. His office would look like a damned pharmacy. Tissues, pills, cough meds. And the griping ... it would start on the first sneeze and last until the very last hacking cough.
Plus, he knew how Danny felt physically because they'd virtually had the very same operation. If anything, Steve hurt more because he'd been shot. Multiple times. With bullets; something which Danny had thankfully managed to avoid since he - Danny - was sitting on the right side of the plane. Unlike Steve, who as Danny saw fit to point out, had clearly been sitting on the wrong side and ergo, had been shot! In essence, only dumb blind luck had put him directly in the line of fire.
It was a stupid war of words. The shooter had one goal in mind and that was to bring down the plane. He'd been specifically after the pilot. Steve had been the pilot and as such, he had his own ergo point to make!
Harrumphing under his breath as he replayed one of their last conversations, Steve shook his head. They had been poking at each other in an ever-increasing manner of wills, egos and words. Danny had promptly ended that go-round by trying to slam the privacy curtain closed. It was funny really and Steve began to grin.
More fond than really annoyed, and certainly believing he was more in tune with his partner than Kono would ever be, his smile deepened. Things were fine. Danny was okay and they'd be back on their feet in no time.
Danny was a negative soul and liked to complain. He complained about everything. Cantankerous came to mind and Steve nearly chuckled out loud at that word.
Before she'd left the hospital, Kono had been bordering a line close to worried, but Steve easily accepted this as their norm. They were both healing up and this was Danny's normal. Everything was fine; even the barbed jokes were part of their every day existence. Nonetheless, there was one which Steve found himself regretting. Said recently, it was the very reason Danny had roughly jerked the privacy curtain closed in the first place.
And, thinking about what he'd said now, Steve's smile melted from his face with a certain realization. Maybe it hadn't been so funny; just maybe he'd gone too far.
'I promise you Danny you give him time he's gonna grow up to hate you just as much as I do.' Of course he hadn't meant it. He'd been doing a thing; their thing. It was what they did.
Still, the words had popped out of his mouth too fast for him to even reconsider saying them. Mulling them over, Steve cringed inside and regretted them. He hadn't meant it at all, but now they sounded beyond harsh. Mean even and Steve wondered if that was when Danny had begun to back off. His kids were a sensitive subject, and rightly so.
Especially Charlie who'd been so, so sick. What he'd said had been unfair and rude.
'Nah,' Steve wasn't smiling anymore but he shook his head to the contrary about these new burgeoning feelings of guilt. He didn't mean it in a bad way. He never would. His partner was damned sensitive and nothing more. The whole thing was simply a friendly discourse, even if their banter was about a serious subject interspersed with Danny emoting about his touchy feelings.
Pausing his thoughts, Steve thumbed the head of his bed up higher in order to see Danny better. Lax in sleep and with the blanket still tucked up nearly to his chin, Danny's face lacked some color, but he was indeed sleeping quietly.
Steve stared at him for a long time before finally going back to paging through the dog-eared magazine. He wasn't reading it though, he was thinking.
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"Danny? How are you feeling?" The question seemed sudden and it came from directly over his head. The woman's voice was soft, testament to the late hour, but it leaked persistently into his consciousness and he found that he resented being disturbed. He was hot - then cold - then only colder despite still being under the extra blanket which Kono had tucked around him. He shivered and muttered an annoyed sound, his eyes stubbornly closed and his desire to sleep stronger than that of obeying the nurse.
"Danny?" She pressed, her hand warm against his wrist as she moved the blanket aside in order to adjust the line leading into his arm. Her questions and constant attentive nature were all intentional ploys by this nurse to test his current state and he just didn't feel like answering.
"Detective? Danny? Can you tell me how you feel?"
With what seemed like an excruciating effort, Danny peeled his eyes open because he knew that she'd not give up. His lids were gummy and he had to blink a few times to clear his vision before trying to focus on the blonde nurse who was hovering just over the bed. He inhaled as if to speak, but then only managed a rough grunted noise of affirmation.
"You didn't eat your dinner," the nurse noted. "Do you feel all right?" She had a queer look on her face, a worried frown in fact and Danny mumbled another sound when his voice didn't seem to want to cooperate.
"Yeah," Danny finally said, his tone groggy with fatigue. "M'fine." His voice was hoarse and weak even to his own ears. He swallowed hard and tried again to get his point across, hoping the nurse would simply leave him alone. "I'm just not hungry. I'm fine, just a bit tired."
"You're a little ... clammy," the nurse added thoughtfully. "But ... tell me the truth. How do you feel? Are you still cold?"
"I'm okay," Danny mumbled again. He aimed a lopsided, completely unbelievable smile her way as a shiver wracked his body. He felt terrible down to his toes, sicker than before and that surprised even him and he began to wonder if he should be worried about that. Still, he tried to argue the aches and overall feeling of being truly sick.
"Really ... just ..." His breath hitched and he had to stop talking. Swallowing thickly as his voice cracked and he felt a wave of fatigue which overwhelmed him, Danny closed his eyes before being able to insist that the was only tired. No. This was different and he was worse; he was bone-weary, exhausted.
"Detective?" He'd zoned out. Lost time and he struggled back to just nod a reply which was evidently the wrong thing to do as the nurse briefly disappeared.
"Hey. What's wrong? Is he sick ... what's wrong?" Steve's voice was distant as he interrupted the nurse and muzzy-headed, Danny frowned because their mutual concern was on the rise - and entirely for him. It made no sense. While he was achy, he was more tired than anything else and who wouldn't be after what he'd managed to pull off on an undercover job gone sideways?
"Detective Williams? Danny?" The nurse's voice was persistent when she returned. It drilled into his head as he tried to zone out and ignore her wheedling. "Can you open your eyes for me?" He sensed her worry increasing now. Her queries multiplying to drown out Steve's, and completely reluctant about obeying any single one of them, Danny finally peeled his eyes back open with an intent just to satisfy her so she'd leave him alone.
"Whu?" He murmured tiredly as he stared blearily up into her face. "M'fine ... juss' tired."
"I know dear, but we need to check you out," she kindly tried to explain, the question about who 'we' might be leaving his mind when his doctor almost magically appeared in the room. Danny belatedly recognized the woman's authoritative voice first and his confusion deepened when he realized the privacy curtains had been drawn around him. An action which had set his partner off even more in the neighboring bed as another question was thrown their way.
"Is he okay?" Steve called out again. His voice far away, yet his mood disgruntled proven by the curse when he didn't immediately get an answer. "Doctor Benning?"
"Steve," Danny whispered far too softly for his friend to hear. His goal was to put Steve at ease, but now, Danny wasn't entirely certain that he could as more medical staff entered the room. They seemed to swarm around him and he cringed weakly away as the warmth of the blanket was removed and his hospital gown pushed aside for his physician to examine the surgical site itself. Danny shivered and then moaned as his belly was probed and pressed.
It hurt so much more than it had before and he opened his eyes to object, squinting helplessly into Benning's face, surprised that her normally placid expression was now one of concern. He wanted to ask what was wrong and only managed to slam his eyes closed when her fingers located a particular spot which left him seeing stars. Feeling deafened by the pain, Danny just heard her demands for a bedside ultrasound. He missed more than he heard, but registered that her tone was urgent and brooked no argument. People were moving around him now at a dizzying pace, responding without question to her directions.
Coming and going, his welfare the singular concern, the activity became frightening in its intensity. He literally felt the tension in the room, however he could only rock his head in denial as Steve called out again demanding to understand what was going on.
But this wasn't supposed to be about him. It was about Steve ... his injuries. The life-saving surgery. His condition ... and not Danny's. Danny was fine. Perfectly okay except for a slight queasy feeling and aches which were to be expected after crash-landing an airplane on a not-so-soft sandy beach.
Danny moaned again, this time frustration warred with pain as an oxygen mask was placed over his face and the head of the bed lowered so that he lay completely flat on his back. The room was suddenly over-run and Danny knew that something was terribly wrong. He visibly winced as Benning's warm fingers traced across his abdomen and then over his broken ribs, higher even as she mentally cataloged things which seemed to dissatisfy her even more.
It hurt and the moment Doctor Benning placed the ultrasound wand on his stomach, Danny audibly gasped. Hands clenched, his knees alternately flexed as he sought traction with his heels, digging in the mattress in a weak reactive attempt to get away. She soothed him and hushed his rising moans of pain while she continued her evaluation, knowing that he was oblivious now to everything except the agony he was in.
"What the hell's going on?" Steve ground out as he struggled to push himself upright. He'd been half-sleeping and the nurse's low, one-sided conversation had brought him fully awake. He was now stunned to see an increasing level of activity in the room.
"Hey?" He questioned automatically. "What's wrong? Is he sick?" Worry spiked when no one paid him heed. The privacy curtain around his partner had been closed. It now billowed and swung as medical staff swarmed over his partner. But he couldn't see a damned thing and no one even seemed to know he existed as all of his questions went ignored. Steeling himself, Steve pushed the blankets off his body to swing his legs carefully over the side of his bed. He'd been up a few times already; in fact, so had Danny. Slow, easy walks of the long hallway were encouraged and Steve dug in now, resolute in knowing that he could stand and shuffle the few feet to Danny's bed.
No one paid him any mind at all as he made his way towards Danny, one arm locked protectively around his middle, his shoulders hunched from discomfort and fear. Steve made it to the foot of Danny's bed just as an orderly swiped the curtain aside. He made it there just in time to get a good look at his best friend as the medical staff milled about, each with a particular job to do while Doctor Benning finished her examination.
Steve got there just in time to see Danny's grayish, sweat-slicked skin and hear the shocking visceral yell which came out of his mouth as he jack-knifed in the bed when Benning hit a certain spot as she completed her examination. Eyes wide when the female doctor uttered an unlikely oath, Steve froze in place, stunned by what he was seeing. Yet, when a nurse moved aside, Steve simply forgot how to breathe.
Danny's torso was littered by deeply colored bruises and abrasions. A myriad of blues, purples and inky blacks extended over his abdomen, covered his left side to nearly under his armpit and then splattered like abstract art across his chest. Splotches of a deeper red just below his ribcage looked newer though.
Regardless, all of the soft tissue injuries looked painfully extensive.
Old and ... new? Why would some look so very new? Steve at first couldn't quite process the reason or the why of what he was seeing at all. His eyes flickered to the white bandage. Surgery. Sure, of course, the incision ... their bandages nearly matched down to the same location. They'd only had nearly similar surgeries. But, what the hell was this? At a loss to understand, Steve's brain sputtered and then stopped until it kicked back in with a sickly vengeance. What he was seeing had nothing to do with Danny's donor surgery.
The plane crash. Broken ribs. Of course. Steve hadn't even considered the results of such a severe blunt force trauma and the damage which it might have done; at least, not really. He hadn't seen Danny and had only made assumptions. Bad, wrong assumptions about his partner and best friend.
'Oh my God', Steve mouthed silently as he was forced to back away for more medical staff.
This wasn't Danny. It couldn't be. He'd been fine ... he'd been sleeping. Only sleeping.
Now he was scarcely semi-conscious and moaning in agony while his doctor was simultaneously cursing under her breath and spouting orders to a terrifying number of staff. Leads which hadn't been there before now ran to and from Danny's body, as did fresh bags of fluids. His sweat-streaked face was partly hidden by an oxygen mask; damp hair matted to his head.
And all the while, Steve could only stand there, stock-still and unmoving, watching and rendered mute as Danny was transferred to a waiting gurney. Only to be whisked away to a place which Steve could only hazard a guess at.
No one had answered him. No one had really acknowledged that he was there. Left stranded in a now empty room, Danny's bedding strewn to the floor and looking as if a winter's storm had swept in on them without fair warning, Steve choked back a stunned helpless exclamation.
~ to be continued ~