Chapter 61 "And God Was Listening"
A/N: (7/7/2017) Oh wow, I am so grateful for your reviews. Yes, it was a very dark chapter. So many of you had emotional, deeply caring thoughts about it. If I had as many friends as Danny does (and Steve!), I would be One Lucky Lady! But I have you as readers and reviewers, so I *am* One Lucky Lady! I'm sorry I haven't thanked each of you individually, but literally I have been writing this chapter all day!
Hopefully, this chapter will begin to show a brightening of the horizon. We have some stuff to still work through, but the reward will be there. Because it has to be!
CBS owns all things H5-0.
Chapter 61 "And God Was Listening"
(Friday, 30 December 2016, 1 p.m.)
"He hates me now," Danny said flatly to his blanket as Steve disappeared into the hospital room's bathroom. "He can't look at me. He hates me. I don't bl -"
"He doesn't, Danny," interrupted Dr. Cornett, his voice sad, compassionate, and trying to sound reasonable. "He needs to cope, he just needs a minute to get his brain to take all this in." He himself wondered if Steve might be calling Duke. But he couldn't say anything about that to Danny.
After some long seconds of silence, Danny whispered, "Maybe."
Dr. Cornett whipped out his own phone and quickly called Hannah and told her not to return to Danny's room just yet. "Something has come up, there's no time to explain now, but you don't have to worry, and I will let you know when you can come back. I'm certain you don't have to worry, just, uh, they need to talk. Guy stuff. Plans." He called Becca, who was just about to take her lunch break, and told her the same thing. "Hannah is down in the cafeteria, why don't you two meet up and talk girl stuff? Weddings, dresses, all that kind of thing. Seriously, they just need to do some guy stuff!"
Danny was petting Angel while the fan and water ran in his bathroom. He didn't comment on the doc's phone calls. Angel was holding his face and licking his chin when they heard the sounds of someone about to leave the bathroom. Danny kept his eyes downcast.
Steve looked at Danny, felt a pang of regret and self-recrimination in his heart, and glanced quickly at Dr. Cornett, giving him a subtle, worried shake of his head. "Um, sorry. I just needed a minute. Sorry." He returned to the chair by Danny's bedside, and Steve hesitantly reached over to cover Danny's cast with his good hand. Steve intoned flatly, "It's not your fault. It's all on Stan. How were we to know that such a sicko was in our midst, hidden in plain sight?"
"And Rachel," whispered Danny, crying very quietly, while Angel gently pawed away his tears. "She was hiding, too. I'm so stupid," he said, the latter self-accusation said with more vigor. "How could I be so stupid, all these years? I failed you, Steve. I don't blame you if you hate me now. I'll quit Five-0 if you can't stand the sight of me."
Steve started to cry silently, again. "No! No. Danny…" he protested, grabbing tissues again. He shoved the box at Danny, and Angel picked some out with her teeth and deposited them on his chin, and gave Steve's unsteady hand a brief Kitten Facerub of Love, which sped up the rate of Steve's own tears. "Hate you? How is it even remotely possible that you could even begin to think I could hate you? You're my brother! How could I hate you for even the smallest part of time, like a quintillionth of a bazzillionth of a second? Don't even think it. And don't you dare quit Five-0! I c-c-can't do this job without you! I love you!"
Dr. Cornett discreetly snuck some tissues. He also called the lab and the pharmacy.
"I got you drugged unconscious, and nearly killed because I didn't have a clue that my ex-wife and her husband hated me this much," said Danny, and his control was lost. Emotionally, he was hating himself enough that Steve didn't need to for him to feel like he had made such a mess of things. "He almost killed you! If he … did the other thing, you can't possibly still like me or even bear to have me in your sight."
Steve blew his nose while crying.
Danny blew his nose while crying.
Dr. Cornett blew his nose while crying.
Steve pulled his chair closer to Danny's bed and moved his hand to Danny's shoulder. "I failed you! You should hate me! And I think I get to decide who I can have in my sight. I'm so sorry I failed you, Danny. I'm so sorry I didn't protect you from Stan. I should have sensed something amiss. I can't forgive myself this time. I know you really do hate me now."
Danny's breath hitched as he cupped his hand behind Steve's neck and drew his forehead to touch his, while Angel put a paw on each of their faces as their tears streamed, neither now having a free hand to wipe them away. She did her best to keep wiping them away with her paws. "Steve, I could never hate you, you know that, you boob. You are my brother! Stan hurt you! Who knows how badly? And you can't protect me from a, a, a -"
"Sicko," said Dr. Cornett, his voice wobbly as he silently went to the door, and accepted the tray the nurse had brought him from the lab.
Danny grabbed onto the word. "Sicko! You can't protect me from a sicko you don't have any reason to think is I mean was one! Please don't be mad at yourself. I can't handle it if you hate yourself because you think you failed me when I'm the one who failed you."
So they not-so-quietly held on to one another as their sinuses went hysterical, their tears beat Angel's best attempts to keep up, and they did not notice when Dr. Cornett rubbed Steve's shoulder, above his new cast, with alcohol and then gave him an injection after already inserting a similar injection into Danny's IV line.
"Neither of you failed the other," said Dr. Cornett, once he had disposed of the syringes. He had gotten himself under control, but his voice was nasal and his head was pounding. He blew his nose again after he slipped off his blue non-latex gloves, then out of habit used a pump of the hand sanitizer in every hospital room.
He watched as the two dear friends slowly stopped crying, but kept their foreheads touching, their hands cupping the backs of each other's necks. Danny sniffled. "You don't hate me?"
"Never could," sniffled Steve in reply. "You don't hate me?"
"Not possible. But we can hate Stan."
"Yes, we can do that."
"What if Rachel knows?" asked Steve, and finally noticed that Angel was working hard to dry his and Danny's faces, using her tongue now since her paws were all wet.
Danny sniffed and swallowed, grimacing as his head pounded from his stuffed sinuses. "I don't think she does; she didn't throw it in my face yesterday, and she would have. Oh, my head."
"Yeah," agreed Steve. "She would have. Stan kept secrets. Speaking of which, did Dr. C just give me a shot?" He and Danny unclasped and leaned back, turning with reddened eyes to look up at their doctor.
"An antihistamine for the sinuses, and here are the Tylenol for the headaches," said Dr. Cornett, having poured icewater in two paper cups and retrieved the analgesic from the bottle in the cabinet in Danny's room. He had already taken 2 for his own headache. "Crying is very healing, but it does have side-effects. Do you want one or two tablets?"
"Two," they responded in unison.
After they had taken their medication and handed their empty paper drinking cups back to Dr. Cornett, he asked them if they were ready for him to draw the blood to have tested for anything under the sun that Stan might or might not have exposed them to. When they nodded, Dr. Cornett began with Steve and ended with Danny, drawing four medium phails of blood from each, capped tightly and labeled. A nurse came in, with two tablets of paperwork and incongruously sealed cups of orange juice and unsealed chocolate chip cookies, and the doctor handed her the holder with the clearly marked phials in it. He checked so many boxes on each lab slip, and wrote in some tests not on the papers, before looking them over and sending them off with the nurse. "The lab is expecting those yesterday."
Steve and Danny were ordered to drink the orange juice and eat the cookies, and to try to take a nap. Dr. Cornett had already ordered a cot for Steve to be brought into Danny's room, since he would not want to leave it, and Danny would not want him to leave either. Once the orderly brought that in, with pillow and blanket, they cooperated and at least tried to rest.
When Angel had finally finished to her satisfaction the licking dry of her front paws, she peered over the side of the bed at Steve curled up on his cot, then pulled Danny's blanket over him using her little teeth, because for some strange reason, humans only covered when they slept, then (feeling her own exhaustion) picked Danny's blanket-draped six-pack to tuck up properly on, and fell almost instantly into slumber.
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H50 H50 H50 H50
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Halfway across Honolulu, the mail truck pulled up in front of a non-descript building, the ground floor of which had once housed a small, failed insurance firm. It now was the home of Grover Consulting, which was not exactly doing a booming business.
The mail carrier, a thin, small man of mixed races, who had been working this same route for twenty years almost to the day, prepared the stack of big and small envelopes to take into the building. Many of them were advertisements and flyers. But one large yellow manila envelope with a padded liner caught his eye, because written in old-fashioned Palmer script in a feminine handwriting was the word, "Misdelivered". The mail carrier grinned. The 22nd was the day his alternate ran the route. He could even tell that the handwriting of the "Misdelivered" notice was the work of Mrs. Wong, who ran her own quilting shop, Quilts Galore & More, two blocks east and one north.
He frowned at the mess on the envelope. It looked as if it had been run over by a truck, but he knew the black marks were just grease and excess ink on some of the machines at the Post Office. It was addressed by hand, black medium Sharpie. It had two mailing stamps on it, one from the 22nd of the month, and the other bearing yesterday's date. Well, at least it was reaching the right address this time!
The owner, a big black man with a smile to light a room, and a frown to make one think of a dark winter night in Alaska, came to meet the mailman at the door, the meeting happening because the owner, Mr. Lou Grover, needed to take a stretch, and maybe would go up to the top of the block and have a sandwich from the little diner that brought in a steady income from feeding all those who worked in the shops and offices in the area. He greeted the carrier and took the stack handed him, and was drawn instantly to the messed up manila envelope.
After wishing each other a Happy New Year's Eve, which was tomorrow, a Saturday on which Lou would not be working, they parted and Lou took his mail back into his office, lunch for now forgotten. He looked at everything else first, tossed the fliers and ads into the waste bin, and looked again at the misdelivered manila envelope.
Addressed in block capital letters that seemed masculine to him, Lou studied the writing until he finally decided his curiosity had the better of him and he slit open the top with a hefty letter opener that looked official and uninteresting.
Out slid a tri-folded slip of ordinary white typing paper, bearing the crumple marks of what was inside it: a computer thumb drive in a little Ziploc baggie.
Odd.
Lou carefully, using the letter opener, his retired policeman's instincts kicking into high gear, unfolded the paper and read, "You hate Danny's guts, too. Enjoy." It was signed, in what Lou considered one of the stupidest moves any man could possibly make, "Stan Edwards" with a smiley face in blue ink. There was a post script, "Let's do lunch someday. You could really help me out, and perhaps I could help you in return."
Lou returned everything to the manila envelope, slipped it all inside a voluminous plastic bag from the latest time he had picked up his shirts at the dry cleaner, and with his face looking like a very cold winter night in Alaska, set out in his truck for Tripler, after calling and being told that Danny Williams was still there, and therefore Steve would be with him or close by.