Rewrite

AvalonReeseFanFics

A/N: Thank you to everyone who has shown interest in this. I promise to upload again next week!

Chapter 2

Just as she said they would be, they were handcuffed the second the Coast Guard boarded the boat. And luckily for her face Rowan had not said a single other "I told you so." Steve wasn't sure what he would have done if she had said it to him again, probably not hit her, but he would have done something… kiss her maybe? No that was ridiculous.

Danny was pissed off and ranting again, arguing with Steve about their predicament. The captain of the boat was coming back to talk to them when Rowan, who had been silent up until this point suddenly spoke up.

"I need to lose the cuffs," she told him. The captain stared at her as if she were crazy.

"You're suspects in a murder, I'm not uncuffing you," he told her.

"Okay, then someone needs to hold me," she said.

"What the hell are you talking about?" The captain asked.

Rowan suddenly lurched up to her feet. "I'm going to vomit."

Steve finally noted that her face was looking a little ashen and realized that the reason she had been so quiet while Danny and he argued was because she was sea sick. He watched with a wince on his face as she threw herself to the side of the boat and he heard the telltale signs of her being sick. He had almost cried out in fear as he noted that she had thrown herself towards the side with such force that she had almost lost her footing.

She might have gone overboard if the captain hadn't had been quick enough to grab her. Rowan was uncuffed but instead of sitting back down she just lay down where she had been standing, covering her eyes with the heels of her hands as she groaned.

"I'm just going to stay on the floor okay? I feel better when I'm on the floor," she told whoever was listening.

Steve tore his eyes away from Rowan's prone from to find Danny staring at him with a knowing look, like he knew that Steve had been about to jump up and try to grab her—not sure how he was going to do that while handcuffed but he was going to try—before she fell. He avoided his partner's eyes as the Captain said he was going to radio Chin as they suggested to get their ID and then told one of his shipmates to watch the girl in case she tried to jump ship.

"I'm not going to jump ship," she grumbled. "I'm not that stupid."

Danny turned to Steve, "Chin can vouch for us, but he won't be able to vouch for her," he said gesturing to where Rowan was still lying and still groaning.

"Is there any way to make sure the boat doesn't rock this much?" she called out which just caused Steve to roll his eyes and shake his head.

"She really pisses you off doesn't she?" Danny asked after watching Steve's reaction closely.

"No, she worries me," he answered keeping his voice low so she couldn't hear them. "The fact that she knows all these things that she shouldn't know, it worries me."

"She's not a spy though is she?" Danny asked.

"She doesn't act like one," Steve admitted. "To be honest, I don't get that vibe from her, but she could also be a really great actor."

"Oh God," Rowan suddenly groaned stumbling to her feet so she could retch over the side again. Danny winced as he watched her and the growled as he watched one of the ship's men approach hand her a ginger ale to drink.

"Oh she gets the special treatment," he snapped.

Rowan turned to glare at them. "Hey, I'd share with you but I don't think you want to share the can of pop with the girl who just threw up," she snarled. She then turned to the sailor who was standing beside her. He handed her a blanket that that she let him help wrap around her.

Steve found his own stomach roiling as he watched Rowan put a hand to the Sailor's arm. "Not to be too demanding but could my friends get some water? We've had a rough day," she said to him with a coquettish smile on her face.

Steve felt the frown on his face before he realized he was frowning and while the Sailor said he'd get them something to drink that did not make him happy. Even if he was parched.

"Well, she's been pretty useful so far," Danny said to Steve, bumping his shoulder with Steve's.

The captain returned. "I'm sorry for the misunderstanding Commander McGarrett, Detective Williams" he said, reaching over to unlock their cuffs. "A member of your team verified your credentials."

As he leant over Danny he was certain to throw out one more snarky comment: "Well next time I get forced into the ocean at gunpoint I'll be sure to remember my credentials."

Luckily both he and the Captain ignored him. "Captain, was the boat reported stolen?" Steve asked.

"Missing, actually. The owner's wife called worried when her husband hadn't returned," the captain explained.

"Maybe it had something to do with him being shot," Danny offered and Steve tried not to sigh and shake his head. He noted that Rowan was up again and throwing up once more. God, he needed to get her off this damn boat.

"Again I'm sorry. We've been having a rash of pirate attacks recently, so when we got the call about the boat we assumed they were behind it," The Captain said. "When we get to land we'll hand over the investigation to Five-O."

The Captain followed Steve's gaze. He was quiet a bit before clapping a hand to Steve's shoulder to get his attention. "Your team verified you, they didn't verify her," he said jerking his head in Rowan's direction. She was slowly getting back down on the floor huddling up into her blanket as if she were cold.

Steve stared at her, pity starting to overwhelm the logic sensors in his brain. "I can vouch for her. We found her in the ocean, too far away from the boat to be a part of this," Steve said.

"Thank you," Rowan said from her spot on the floor giving Steve a thumb's up to show her appreciation.

"Any idea how she got there?" the Captain asked.

Steve shook his head. "She's in some major shock, she doesn't remember," Steve replied. He wasn't sure why he was lying for her, just that he felt it was absolutely necessary.

"I'm an amnesia-mani-ianiac," she said from her spot on the floor.

"What the hell was that? Did you have a stroke?" Danny asked.

Rowan waved her hand at him. "Ignore me, I'm talking nonsense. I'm pretty sure I'm going to hurl again."

"You know, I don't get it. You were fine on the dinghy and the yacht, both of which were bobbing much more than this," Steve complained, "How the hell can you be this sick?"

"I don't know, maybe cause the dinghy went like 2 miles an hour and the yacht wasn't moving at all?" she shot back. "Oh... yep… I'm gonna do it again…"

Steve turned away as she threw up again shaking his head and trying very hard not to get even more frustrated with her. He ignored the fact that Danny rushed to the side to put a comforting hand to her back and to hold her red-to-blonde faded hair.

But he couldn't keep back the amused snort when he heard Rowan snarl: "I am never leaving dry land again!"

H5O-H5O-H5O- H5O

The whole of Five-O was waiting for them when they got to the dock. Catherine was up first her arms around Steve's neck. Danny barged past them.

"Hey," he said to her. "I'm fine."

Steve scowled at him. "We were fine, and we were lucky to find that boat. But we were fine," he snapped before Danny could get anymore snark out of him.

Danny stopped walking and turned to accost Steve again. "No, we were not fine, okay? Tell her about the sharks," he ordered, he then turned and pointed at Chin, "Tell him about the sharks!"

"Sharks?" Catherine echoed.

"Sharks. A shark. It was a shark," he told her. "But it wasn't a big deal."

"Oh look, it's your girlfriend Catherine," Rowan said appearing behind them, still wrapped in her blanket. "And Chin, oh and Max is over there, why does he have a cane? Oh right, explosion… I always forget about that episode. Where's Kono? Did she stay behind to work leads?"

Everyone was staring at her now her blue eyes darted from face to face. The excited smile that had been on her lips slowly faded as she took in the stares of the people around her. "I really need to stop talking," she said mostly to herself.

"Steve, who is that?" Catherine asked eyeing Rowan who seemed less then interested in her now and seemed to be staring off into the distance as if deciding what to do next and where to go.

Steve started to answer Catherine's question but he got distracted by Rowan's movements. She darted past Danny and made a bee line for one of the cars, but she didn't stop there. Steve watched her perplexed. He couldn't figure out what she was doing.

"Hey, where do you think you're going?" he asked her as she continued to walk away from them.

She turned but didn't stop. "Oh, you know, just gonna try to get home," she said. She then turned and started to walk a little faster.

"Oh no you don't," Steve cried giving chase. Rowan yelped and broke into a full run at that point with Steve, barefoot and chasing after her. They ran down the walkway, Steve trying to catch her, Rowan trying to evade, and doing a damn good job.

She started by throwing her blanket at him, which distracted him for all of two seconds. When he lunged she stopped, crouching down so he missed her and then getting up and tracking back. Steve was undeterred. This continued, her managing to avoid his lunges and grabs despite him being faster then her. She was just better at wiggling away.

Catherine and Danny stood shoulder and shoulder watching the two of them chase each other in circles. Chin came to join them.

"Seriously, who is that?" Chin asked. In the distance Rowan yelped Steve's name as his hand raked down her arm. They heard him bark an apology to her but the chase kept going.

"That's Rowan. She literally dropped out of the sky and onto us. Or beside us. Not the point. She knows a lot of things about us and thinks we're her favourite TV show, the girl's nuts but she very much in the know," Danny explained.

Catherine nodded. "Okay… and he's chasing her because?"

"She knows things about his mother, things that you only just told us," Danny explained.

There was a primal roar of rage followed by a scream and terror and the three looked back just in time to watch Steve tackle Rowan off the dock and into the water. Danny threw up his hands exasperatedly.

He jogged over to where the two were just resurfacing. He heard Rowan's scream of: "STEVE!" and the first of Steve's chuckles. Danny scowled down to him. "God, you are an animal!" he shouted down to him.

Rowan tried to swim past him but Steve jumped on her back. "Where do you think you're going now?" he asked her regardless of the fact that she was underwater.

"What are you waterboarding her? Let her up, you savage!" Danny ordered.

Steve let go of Rowan's shoulders and she immediately came up, and slapped Steve hard across the face. "What the hell is the matter with you?!" she thundered.

"Me?! You were the one evading arrest!" Steve shot back.

"I was trying to get to the ladder so I could get out of the water you NEANDERTHAL!" she cried, shouting that last word, right in his face.

"Oh, you pulling pages from Danny's book now?" Steve taunted.

"Well it's one of his standard insults, and I heard him use both savage and animal already so Neanderthal was all I had left," she explain as she lazily breast-stroked towards the ladder. Steve followed after her, spotting her as she went up first like he expected her to fall or to jump back in and try to escape him via the water.

When Steve joined her back on dry land again he found her staring down at her arm and wincing. He could see the beginning of four long welts from where his nails had raked down the back of her bicep.

"I said I was sorry, but if you had just stopped running this wouldn't have happened," he reminded her. He grabbed her arm, a little more gently this time and dragged her over to Chin. "Chin here is going to take you back to the Iolani Palace and we're going to get down to the bottom of who you are and who you work for."

Rowan just glared at him. "Okay, for starters this is kidnapping," she snapped at him. "And secondly. I already told you who I am and that I don't work for anyone!"

"And I do believe I mentioned that I don't believe you," Steve snarled into her face. He was too close to her. He realized it the second he was looking into her eyes. Those defiant blue eyes that were actually more of a sea blue color, the kind you saw when the waters were calm and great for snorkeling. She smelt of salt and something else, something sweet. Her skin, while red, looked smooth and soft and he was fixating on her lips.

Rowan was the first to turn away, which worried him. And when she did he saw that Chin had produced a blanket for her. He let Chin usher her towards the car and tried not to feel a jab in the chest as the feeling of her presence left him.

He heard her say: "Aw I'm going to get your nice car wet, do you think we could wait until I dry off?"

Steve nearly stormed back over to her and if it wasn't for Catherine standing beside him he might have. Instead he called out: "I swear to god if you do not get in that car I will cuff you myself and throw you in the trunk!"

Rowan turned to back to look at him and as soon as she did he felt that tightness in his chest double. She looked to the back of the car and then back to him. "It's a hatchback, you moron!"

Steve took one step forward and Rowan yelped and threw herself into the car. He ignored the grin on Chin's face. He ignored the pointed look from Catherine and Danny's chuckles. Damn, this girl was going to be the death of him.

H5O-H5O-H5O- H5O

When Steve got back to the Iolani Palace at the end of the night he was exhausted, they all were. The twist in their case, where the sister shot the wife to punish her for killing her brother, was not one they expected. When he got in he saw that there was a bunch of notifications waiting for them.

"Chin what is this?" he asked.

Chin walked over and pulled them up. "So, these are the results to the DNA and fingerprints check we ran on Rowan Pierce," he explained. "According to this she doesn't exist."

Steve glared at the screen. "What?"

"You heard me," Chin said. "She does not exit. She has no file, has no family, there's no missing persons report, nothing at all."

"Nothing?" Steve echoed.

"Nothing!" Chin repeated. "And I inputted everything. Her age, her correct hair color, her birthday. Nothing matches. She doesn't exist."

Danny clapped a hand to Steve's shoulder. "Well there you go, she can't be a spy, because she'd exist. If she were a spy she'd have some sort of cover story, wouldn't she?"

Steve shook his head. This wasn't right. There should have been something, school transcripts, a social insurance number, anything. There shouldn't have been nothing on her, no trace of her life anywhere. He was obviously going to have to confront her about this, but he wasn't looking forward to it. He knew where she had been held all this time, and if her earlier behaviour was any sort of sign he was going to be walking into one of the biggest scenes in his life.

Still he stormed to the elevator and made his way down to the holding cells. When he got there, he found himself stalled outside the door to where she was sitting. He caught his breath, steeled himself for what he was going to walk into, started to draw up the armor he'd need to withstand her vicious barbs.

And then he heard it.

It was the distinct sound of singing. And it was an Elvis song, the best kind of song, a love ballad. Can't Help Falling in Love. Rowan was singing and she was singing well.

For a moment Steve found that he couldn't move. It was like he was under a spell and he couldn't bring himself to break it. It took all his will power to open that damn door, and then all his willpower to not let the wave guilt crush him when he saw her tear stained face.

"You complete and utter asshole!" she shouted. "Do you know how long I've been down here? With nothing to eat, or to drink and I really, really, really need to pee!"

Steve raised his eyes to meet hers. He tried not flinch at the look on her face, the utter rage, the fear and hurt under it all. Still she continued. "Are you happy now? You win. You handcuffed a girl to a chair and left her here for hours! HOURS! You got me, you made me cry. Are. You. Happy?!"

No. Steve was not happy. This was not him winning, this wasn't a game anymore and he truly felt bad for having left her here all day. But he wasn't going to say that to her.

"You don't exist, Rowan," he said to her and a sob came out of her mouth. The sound completely heart wrenching.

"You tackled me today, you had me in a chokehold, and you have my skin under your nails! I am real," she told him. "But I don't come from here. I tried to tell you that!"

"So what? You're from a different time line? That's what you're telling me? Rowan, you have to see how crazy that sounds!" he argued.

The tears were back and that heart wrenching feeling in his chest was doubling. He wanted to brush her tears away, he wanted to tell her that he would make sure everything was okay but he couldn't do any of that and honestly it frightened him that he wanted to do any of these things for her.

"Yes!" she shouted at him. "You don't think I don't know how crazy I sound? But I don't know what else to tell you! I don't exist here because I'm not from here—that is all I got. You don't think I would come up with something a little more sane if I could?"

Steve stared at her. He stared at her hard. She looked so small in that chair. Her red parts of her hair frizzing around her face, the blonde ends matted and sticking to her neck and collarbone, tear tracks running down her sunburnt face. She looked down to where her legs were bouncing, he wasn't sure if it was a nervous tick or because she needed to go to the bathroom.

"I'm scared Steve," she whispered and he tried not to bristle at the way she said his name. In that low silken tone, the kind one would want to hear whispered into an ear late at night or maybe early in the morning. "I don't know what's happening. I don't know how to get home, or where home even is. I'm scared and I want to go home. I just want to go home."

Steve wanted nothing more than to send her home and while he knew he was going to regret this there was really only one thing left to do.

"Alright, say I believe you. You mentioned this morning that you knew who killed our guy," Steve said. "So, tell me, who killed our boat owner?"

Rowan blinked her eyes at him. "What? Why does that matter?" she asked. "I've been here hours, she's gotta be dead by now!"

Steve's smile faded. She couldn't know, not really. She'd been in a box all day she couldn't know what happened. Rowan sighed. "Okay, from what I remember the guys wife did it. She got her boyfriend to whack him and then set the boyfriend up to take the fall by sabotaging the boat so he'd get stuck out there with the dead body. Before you guys got there to arrest her though his sister shot her. I think she heard the wife on the phone, talking about how her boyfriend just needed to bide his time, she put two and two together and shot her. I'm not sure if it was self defense, it might have been I don't remember."

Steve just stared at her. She was right. She was right about everything. What happened with the wife, what happened with the boyfriend and the sister. She had been right. She couldn't have been, but she was.

"How… how did you know that?" Steve asked.

"I told you, it was an episode. I watched it forever ago, but I remembered because of the shark scene," she whispered. "You also spent most of the episode shirtless and that was my favourite kind of episode."

She had a small sheepish grin on her face that made Steve smile. "Oh yeah, your favourite kind?" he couldn't help but ask.

Rowan's red cheeks went a little redder. "We don't need to talk about it, it's not important. It was a crush on a fictitious person. Now that I've met you, you've killed it. Congratulations."

That jab shouldn't have got him the way it did, but it did. "Okay," he whispered. "Okay. Here's what's going to happen. I'm going to take you to the hospital, and after the psych ward checks you out and gives you a clean bill of sanity I'll let you stay with me okay?"

Rowan looked up at him. "Isn't Catherine living with you?" she asked.

"No, no, why would you think that?" he shot back.

She shrugged. "Well I know you two are dating. I know she spends a lot of time staying over. I'm pretty sure at one point she moves in with you and I think you think about…"

"No, stop talking," he whispered. "I don't want to know. I don't want to know what you know."

Rowan nodded. "Fair," she whispered. "I guess that's all fair."

Steven stooped down to uncuff her. "Washroom first, correct?"

His head was right by her ear so when she turned to look at him he caught those clear blue eyes looking up at him and found that he was now fixated on the way her tongue darted out from between her lips. Suddenly he couldn't move again as she stared at him.

"What if I am crazy?" she asked him.

Steve found himself smiling. "Then I'll come visit you in your padded cell."

Rowan didn't smile, she didn't say anything at all. When she was uncuffed she didn't struggle, she let Steve hand her off to the hospital and didn't look back once as she was taken away. Even though he watched. He stood there until she was gone and even a little bit after. And he still couldn't figure out what that feeling was rolling around in his chest.