Steve felt the wind rush out of his lungs and felt like he had just been punched hard in the guts as Bridget's words echoed over and over again in his head as he stared at Danny in disbelief, unable and unwilling to quite believe what Bridget had just told him. 'Danny had reapplied for his old job back in Homicide in Jersey.'

There had to be some mistake, some misunderstanding on Bridget's part, but deep down Steve knew there wasn't. Danny was planning on leaving and had not said a word about his plans or even the reasons why to him. What the Hell was going on with his partner and closest friend? Why didn't Danny talk to him about what was troubling him? After all they shared everything, even things that they would never tell anyone else.

A small ripple of guilt stabbed at Steve as he remembered how little he had really been there for Danny in the last few months. He had tried to give Danny the space he thought Danny needed to connect with Charlie and adjust becoming a dad to a desperately ill toddler as well as a teenager by partnering up more with Lou, and resisting the temptation to go hang out with Danny and the kids, like he used to when it was just Danny and Grace. He had tried to let Danny know he was there by sharing their own little personal jokes but last night he had to admit with the tension in the room between himself and Danny, his joke may have gone too far. The last thing he had ever wanted to do was hurt the man who had become his closest friend and whom he considered as the brother he had never had.

"There's so many things I want to tell Danny, that I want him awake to hear me say. Things like how awesome a big brother he has been and how much I love him." Steve blinked in surprise and looked up at his partner's younger sister as he realized that Bridget was still talking to him as the tears ran freely down her face. "Also, I want to tell him how sorry I am. I can't believe how hurtful I was to him about Grace and Charlie. I should have known how much he was hurting both times but I just couldn't believe what he was allowing Rachel to do to him. I guess I was more angry at Rachel for how she was treating him and how Danny allowed her to."

"I don't understand." Steve frowned.

Biting her bottom lip as she looked back at her brother, Bridget swallowed hard as she trailed the back of her finger's lightly down the side of Danny's still face, "I couldn't just believe it when Danny let Rachel bring Grace to Hawaii with Stan after their divorce. It wasn't like Danny to abandon Grace and let her go without a fight. He loves Grace with all his heart, she is his whole world, she is his life."

Steve nodded silently in agreement, aware of just how much Danno loved his Gracey and just how far Danny was willing to go to protect her.

"I know he thought he was doing what he thought was best for her, that he was only a cop and he couldn't give her the type of life he thought Rachel and Stan could. But he was wrong! He was miserable and so was Grace. One night, a few weeks after Rachel, Stan and Grace had moved to Hawaii, he got drunk and ended up at my place. I told him if he really wanted to be a part of his daughter's life, he had to fight for her, show her that she was the most important person in his life. The very next day, he quit his job with Jersey PD and was on the plane to Hawaii to fight for visitation and custody of Grace.

And then Rachel did it to him again. She made him think that they could be a family again. She told him the baby she was expecting was his and then she deliberately tore his heart out and crushed it beneath her heel when she lied to him and told him that she was wrong, that the baby was Stan's and that she was going back to Stan to try and make their marriage work. I told him then and then I told him again when Charlie was born to demand a DNA test, to make sure that Charlie wasn't his but he refused. He believed that Rachel would never be so cruel."

Bridget laughed sadly as she shook her head, "But she was. I was so angry for Danny, at Danny, for allowing Rachel to break his heart again and for allowing her to deny him the first four years of Charlie's life of getting to know and bond with his son especially when Rachel finally admitted the truth and told him Charlie needed the bone transplant. I accused him a second time of abandoning one of his children, of abandoning Charlie instead of fighting for him by not insisting on a simple DNA test when Charlie was born, just like how he abandoned Grace a few years before. But I was wrong, so wrong, and I never should have said those things to him. I never meant them, I never believed them. I was just so angry at what he allowed Rachel to do to him that I lashed out. And now I might not get to tell him how sorry I am."

Danny listened to the disjointed words and pieces of conversation that softly flittered through the darkness. Steve had been right when he had told him that Charlie would grow up hating him as much as Steve did. And who could blame Charlie if he did. After all, as he had heard Bridget just tell Steve, he had abandoned Charlie when he was born, believing Rachel's words rather than his own gut instinct, when Rachel had told him Charlie was Stan's son and not his. Just like how he had abandoned Grace after the divorce when Rachel had insisted on bringing her to Hawaii.

No wonder why all his friends, his Hawaiian ohana, had abandoned him after they found out Charlie was his, why anything he did or said was simply dismissed by them as 'Just being Danny'. They had seen the type of man he was, the type of man who would abandon his children, the type of man who destroyed everything he touched, like his marriage to Rachel, his friendship with Steve, Chin and Kono. Hell, he had even managed to get Matt killed, he should have arrested Matt at the airport, instead he had let Matt escape right into the hands of the men who had murdered him. Deep down, he knew he deserved his friends' disdain but still he felt his heart break just a little more as the voices faded away and he drifted back into the darkness.

Gritting his teeth, against the wave of nausea and light headedness and pains of protest from his tired stomach muscles and the newly sutured wound as he gingerly grabbed the rails of the bed and pulled himself up off the chair, Steve gently placed a hand on Bridget's back as he tried hard to reassure her. "I think Danny knows that you never meant what you said to him. You're his sister, he knows that you only had his and the kid's best interests at heart. Brothers and sisters fight and say things they don't really mean to each other, I know my sister Mary and I have, but the important thing is that we always forgive and forget. We know what was said in the heat of the moment was not was really meant.

And I do know how much Danny loves you and I know he would tell you in a heartbeat that he knows you were sorry as soon as you said those things." Steve took a deep breath as he looked down at Danny, "Besides you are not the only one who has apologies to make to him when he wakes up. And he is going to wake up and recover from this."

Bridget frowned and looked up questioningly at Steve.

Shaking his head in regret and guilt, Steve admitted, "Last night before all this happened, I told Danny that Charlie would grow up hating him just as much as I did."

"Why would you even say that?" Bridget asked, momentarily shocked at Steve's guilt-filled admission.

"I…I didn't mean it. I was joking," Steve rubbed a shaking hand over his head as he looked down at Danny, "telling each other that we hate each other is a private joke between the two of us. You see shortly after Danny and I become partners, um, not that I really gave Danny a choice in being my partner, he punched me in the mouth and told me how much he hated me."

Steve shrugged at Bridget's confused stare as he tried to explain, "Anyway since then, it's become a little joke between the two of us. But last night, Danny was irritable and I guess I overstepped the line and Danny took what I said to heart. I never meant what I said. and I would never do anything or say anything deliberately to hurt him, but I did. I was going to let him cool down before I apologized this morning, but I didn't get the chance."

Clearing his throat, Steve turned and looked Bridget in the eye. She could see the guilt, the regret and the fear in his face as he continued softly, "Danny is an awesome guy, he's more to me than just my closest friend and one of the best dads I have ever met. He loves those kids with all his heart and I know there is nothing he wouldn't do for them." Steve paused as he looked back at Danny and whispered, "There's nothing he wouldn't do for any of us, including risking his own life to save mine."

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AN- The admissions made by Bridget about accusing Danny abandoning his kids are why I think she made the comment to him in the episode she appeared in about how she did not abandon her kids like Danny had done. :)