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It started on a good day.
Or rather, on a day with just the normal level of mayhem. But Danny got to chase down the bad guy for once, and Steve got to rescue the princess. Even if the princess in this case was a two-hundred pound former Marine sergeant turned private security guard.
The only casualty was the building, which exploded.
Danny whipped around at the boom, barely remembering to keep his heel firmly planted between the perp’s shoulder blades, and saw Steve staggering away from the blast, the unconscious guard in a fireman’s carry across his shoulders. There was blood everywhere, and for a hideous moment Danny thought it was Steve’s.
But it turned out to be all the ex-Marine’s, even though it was slathered so thickly over Steve’s head and face that he was wiping it off his lips and out of his eyes.
So, yeah, messy—but a good outcome all the same.
++
After they’d booked the bad guy, sent the grateful guard off in an ambulance, and washed up as best they could, they went for pizza.
And that’s when the weird stuff started.
Afterwards, Danny tried to remember if they’d had anything but their usual argument about what kind of pizza to get—the one that involved Steve trying, every time, to order pineapple, and Danny reminding him that fruit did not belong on pizza, look it up in Leviticus if he didn’t believe him. But he didn’t think so. In any case, they ended up with exactly what they always got: green peppers and mushrooms—because Steve hated onions and Danny hated olives and both of them distrusted the meat at this particular place. When the pizza arrived at their table, they both grabbed slices without ceremony and dug in.
When Danny next looked up, though, Steve was holding his pizza at a weird angle between his mouth and the plate. He had a strange expression on his face, like he’d frozen mid-chew, and he’d gone sheet white.
“You okay?” Danny said.
But Steven only made a weird little gagging sound, shook his head, and dropped the slice like it made of hot coals. Then he shoved his chair back from the table and stumbled towards the men’s room.
Danny grimaced, hating to think what all that meant. He sniffed suspiciously at his own pizza, but it smelled fine.
When Steve didn’t come back, he threw a few bills on the table and went to investigate.
And sure enough, there was his partner, gripping the bathroom sink with one hand and cupping water into his mouth with the other. The unmistakable tang of fresh vomit emanated from one of the stalls.
“Ah, dude,” Danny said. “Why didn’t you tell me you were feeling sick?”
Steve spat into the sink, pulled in another scoop of water, and spat again, before he lifted his head. He looked awful, like it had been more than ten minutes since he’d fled the table—shadows under his eyes and lines at the corners of his mouth Danny could’ve sworn hadn’t been there that morning.
“Came on sudden,” he said.
“Ugh. That sucks.” Danny pulled some paper towels out of the dispenser and handed them to Steve. “C’mon, let’s get you home so you can puke in peace. Or at least in more sanitary conditions.”
+++
The weirdness continued with Steve calling in sick the next day. This was pretty much unprecedented, in Danny’s experience. Usually, it took the threats of qualified medical professionals to make Steve stay home, and sometimes even that didn’t work. But he supposed a nasty stomach flu could floor anyone.
Steve certainly sounded bad when he called in, strained and exhausted. Danny offered to bring over popsicles and ginger ale, but Steve told him not to bother.
“What do you think it is?” Danny asked. “Not food poisoning, right, because I had the exact same thing and I’m fine.”
“Who knows? Some virus, probably.” Steve suddenly sounded even worse, utterly wrung out. “Just gonna try and sleep it off. Be in tomorrow.”
+++
And so he was, though he looked just about as bad as he had in the pizza place bathroom, give or take a few sleepless nights—sallow and sunken-eyed, even a little woozy, like he’d taken some medication that hadn’t quite worn off.
Still not eating, either.
Kono’s mother had sent in a plate of some Hawaiian specialty that Danny couldn’t pronounce. Or maybe the dish was Kono’s mother’s own personal specialty—he might have missed part of the explanation in his haste to grab one of the caramel and nut clusters when Kono passed them around the break room.
“Feeling up to one of these?” she asked Steve. “Sometimes I think my mom sends them in just for you, ‘cause she knows they’re your favorite.”
“I…uh…I dunno. I’m still a little…you know…” Steve looked almost wistfully at the sweets. “Okay. Yeah. Just a bite.”
He lifted a piece and bit off a careful mouthful. They all watched hopefully as he chewed once, twice, started to smile. And then suddenly spit what was left in his mouth into his hand.
“I’m sorry,” Steve said to Kono, looking stricken. “It’s good—your mom’s a genius. I’m just—I guess I’m still kinda—“
“No, no, it’s okay,” she called after him, worried, as he disappeared down the hall.
+++
And so it went for the next few days, though Steve didn’t make the mistake of trying to eat in front of other people again. He just got paler and more irritable, dropping weight by the hour, at least to Danny’s eyes.
“Want some?” Danny tried that Wednesday in the car. He held onto the steering wheel with one hand and pulled the pack of saltines—plain and easy to digest, right?—out from between the seats. He might even have bought them specially, though he’d sure as hell deny it if you asked.
Steve shook his head.
“Still feeling crappy, huh?”
Steve shrugged and turned his head towards the window.
“Seriously, when’s the last time you ate anything?”
That got a bit more of a rise out of him. “Give it a rest, Danny, for chrisssakes. It’s no big deal. Do you even want to know how long I’ve gone without eating before?”
“No, Steven. No, I do not. That, however, that is not an answer to my question. Moreover, it’s not the point. We are not on a mission right now. We are not in the jungle. We are in a perfectly well-equipped metropolitan center—“
“Whoa. Did you just call Honolulu a well-equipped metropolitan center? Can I quote you on that?”
Danny ignored him. “—with excellent medical facilities, so that if what’s going on with you isn’t a virus—it’s an ulcer, maybe, or some kind of blockage—“
“Blockage? Really? Who am I—your Aunt Mildred?”
“No—you are definitely not my Aunt Mildred. If you were my Aunt Mildred you would’ve had seven different specialists on the phone by now and—“
“Danny.” This was in a different tone of voice altogether. Steve had his hand over his eyes now, and the rest of his face looked so tired and miserable that Danny ground to a halt mid-rant. “Look. These things sometimes take a while to go away, that’s all. If it’s not better in a few days, I’ll call a doctor—I promise.”
Danny’s anger, if that’s what it had been, faded instantly. He tucked the crackers away and reached over to give Steve’s shoulder a quick squeeze. “Okay, buddy. That’s all I’m saying. Okay.”
+++
And he probably would’ve left it at that if he hadn’t seen Steve doing battle with his water bottle the next day.
They’d gone out to do some follow-up interviews on the exploding building case. There were two guards besides the one who’d been injured, and the obvious decision had been to do separate interviews, in case their stories didn’t match up.
When Danny got done with his guy—who had been somewhere out the other side of useless—he found Steve already outside. Something about Steve’s stance, though, stopped Danny from approaching. Steve looked almost combat ready—feet spread, arms lifted out from his sides—except that he was at just the right angle for Danny to see there was nothing in front of him and nothing but a water bottle in his hand.
As Danny watched, Steve lifted the bottle to his lips, tilted it, and then tensed, as if swallowing was something that demanded the effort of every muscle in his body. Done, he sagged a little, shoulders rising and falling with his breaths. Then the process began again: the readying, the lifting the bottle to his lips, the struggle to swallow, the relief. Danny felt his gut twist in sympathy, but didn’t want to interrupt, in case he stopped Steve getting the hydration he needed.
Finally, after four or five rounds, the whole thing seemed to get to be too much. Steve threw the bottle to the ground, and when it landed at his feet, kicked it viciously under the car.
“Hey,” said Danny, deciding the time had come to intervene. “What’d that poor innocent piece of plastic ever do to you?”
Steve scowled and ignored the question. “Get anything?”
“Nah. You?”
Steve shook his head, and got into the car on the driver’s side. “So. What now?”
Danny got in too. “Hospital called this morning. The guy you rescued, Ruiz, he’s well enough to talk to us now. We should probably go see if he remembers anything.”
Steve didn’t say anything, just stuck the key in the ignition and turned it. Looking back, Danny could’ve kicked himself for not putting two and two together, for maybe pushing them straight into the eye of the storm. But by the time he’d noticed the death grip Steve had on the steering wheel, they were already halfway to the hospital.
+++
To his credit, Steve lasted a good five minutes with Ruiz—eyes landing again and again on the spots of blood seeping through the bandage around the guard’s head and then darting away—before he mumbled, “Uh, Danny, I need to…check on that thing…remember?” and more or less bolted through the door.
Ruiz paused in his halting account of the night the building exploded and looked at Danny questioningly.
“Under the weather,” Danny told him, making a sympathetic face, and Ruiz seemed content.
Soon enough, though, Ruiz’s tattered memories slowed down to a series of head shakes, and Danny, who was starting to feel anxious, wrapped it up.
The chances of Steve having cabbed it out of there were pretty high, Danny thought—he might even have taken the car—but just to make sure he checked the men’s rooms on Ruiz’s floor and the ones below.
He found Steve two floors down, bending over one of the sinks again, staring at the water running out of the tap like he didn’t know what to do with it. His jaw was clenched so tight Danny could see the knots of muscle standing out on either side of his face.
“We’ve gotta stop meeting like this, babe,” he said, and was relieved when Steve summoned the energy to flip him off.
But he was still worried enough to press his hand to Steve’s forehead: cold under a layer of sweat—far colder than anyone in Hawaii should be, in Danny’s opinion. This time, he wet the paper towels and mopped Steve’s face and neck himself. Steve shivered under the touch, but didn’t otherwise seem to notice.
“Wanna see a doctor? Seeing how we’re in a hospital and all?”
Steve shook his head. “I just want to—I think I—I just need to get some sleep. I, uh, I want to go home. Could you—could you just maybe give me a lift?”
His voice shook the tiniest bit, and Danny blamed that, the closest he’d ever heard Steve McGarret come to pleading, never mind asking for a ride, for the fact that he gave in and drove him.
+++
But he followed him in when they got there, because nothing could convince him Steve was okay on his own right now.
Chased him in, that is. Because Steve vaulted from the car and stormed through the house like a bat out of hell, wrestling locks, slamming doors, and stripping as he went. Anxiety skyrocketing, Danny followed the trail of discarded clothes down to the water’s edge, and found Steve, naked except for his boxers, standing knee-deep in the surf. He had his head tilted skyward and he was panting like a he’d run a marathon. But at least he didn’t seem like he was going in any deeper.
Danny waded in after him without rolling up his trousers. “I think you’d better tell me what the fuck is going on,” he said. He wasn’t angry, not even exasperated. Just tired, and worried down to his bones.
“You wouldn’t understand,” Steve said.
“Yeah. Yeah. I think we’ve established that I won’t understand. But that doesn’t mean you can’t tell me. I can still listen. I can still try to help your dumb ass.”
Steve looked at him then, and the exhausted despair on his face was enough to make Danny cry.
“I’m tasting blood,” he said. “Every time I eat or drink, it’s like I’ve got blood in my mouth.”
“Your own blood?” Danny tried to imagine what medical condition would cause such a thing, and how dangerous it would be, but he kept his voice level.
Steve shook his head.
And it was a measure of how freaked Danny was that not a single vampire joke sprang to mind. His brain just went blank for a few moments. Then a couple of things came together. “Ruiz? Did you get some of his blood in your mouth the other day, and it spooked you?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.“ Steve had his eyes back on the waves. “This—I think it’s a memory. I think maybe the thing with Ruiz made me remember something.” The tremor was gone from his voice. His body had gone still, too, like he was readying himself for something.
“Yeah?” Danny said, and forced himself to wait.
The sand under his feet shifted, the ocean worried at his pants legs, and he could’ve sworn the tide came in another foot before Steve spoke again.
“It was in Basra,” Steve said finally.
“You were in Basra? Danny blurted, and could’ve kicked himself for interrupting.
“No. Not officially, anyway.”
Danny held up a hand. “Lemme guess—they sent you in when it got really bad.”
“Maybe. I dunno. It was bad enough, that’s for sure.” Steve swallowed hard and locked his gaze on the middle distance. “Anyway. We were on our way to—to do what we’d come to do—and we came across these Army guys who’d gotten pinned down. Just a few squads of them—must’ve gotten cut off from the rest of their company—or maybe they weren’t officially there either.”
“So, you helped them out?” Danny said, when the pause stretched out too long.
“Yeah. They were in bad shape. Most of them had found cover, but this one big guy, he’d taken a shot to the head, and he was laid out in the middle of the intersection, bleeding like crazy, this tiny medic working on him—shit coming at them from both sides. So—“
“So—“
“So—I sent some of my men to take out the snipers. And I got the injured guy the fuck off that street.”
There was an edge in Steve’s voice now, and even though the Pacific eddied around his ankles, and the soft Hawaiian sky spread out over his head, Danny could feel it: the arid heat of Iraq, the dust, the confusion.
“Easier said than done.”
“Easier said than done. The injured guy weighed two-hundred, easy and the medic, he couldn’t’ve been more than one-forty soaking wet. No way were they moving on their own, and their own guys were too busy just surviving to help. I gave them some cover so the medic could work, but there wasn’t much he could do. The guy was seizing, eyes rolling around, frothing at the mouth. And his head. There was some kind of serious hole in the back of his head, pouring blood. “ This was the heart of it. Steve’s mouth worked spasmodically for a moment before he could get it back under control. “But finally, the medic gave him something that knocked him out, I threw him over my shoulders, and we dodged bullets over to where their LT was screaming into the radio for casevac.”
“And?”
“And that was it. I was covered in the guy’s blood—it was in my hair, my ears, my mouth—but I don’t think I really noticed at the time. Just wiped it off with someone’s spare blouse and rinsed my mouth out with water. Then we were back on mission. I think I’d forgotten all about before we were two klicks away.” Steve sounded calm, like he was laying out the facts of some case for the team over at HQ.
“Until the other day.”
That broke the spell. Steve doubled over like he’d been punched and retched helplessly into the surf. There was nothing to come up, just muscle spasms and spit.
“Ah, man,” Danny murmured, moving close enough to lay a hand on Steve’s back. “That’s…just…fuck.” Steve was shivering hard now, and Danny could feel his ribs under his goose-pimpled skin . “C’mon, let’s go inside now, okay? Let’s not be Exhibit A on how you can get hypothermia, even in Hawaii.”
+++
Steve let himself be chivvied up the beach, though he moved like his feet were made of lead. Above them, the sky dipped decisively towards evening.
“You know what this is, right?” Danny ventured, as Steve paused to retrieve and pull on his discarded polo.
“I know what it is.”
“So, you know you need to call someone, no more fucking around, right?”
“Yeah.” Steve’s voice was heavy, flat. “I will. The combat stress specialist over at the Navy Clinic is pretty good. Dr. Carozza. I’ll call her in the morning.”
Even after everything that had happened, that one nearly tipped Danny over. “Hold up,” he said. “You know a therapist?”
Steve shrugged.
“You know a therapist and you didn’t call her this week, when you were practically starving to death because of some—some—phantom taste memory thing.” Danny could feel the anger and frustration starting up again, because, god, if he survived Steve McGarrett, it would be a miracle.
Steve shrugged again. “I thought it would go away. And then, I didn’t want to bother her unless it got really bad.”
“Really bad? Really bad? Not eating for almost a week doesn’t count as really bad?” And okay, maybe the anger was just a defense against the way Steve was breaking his heart right now.
“I ate. Toast is usually okay. And apples. Crunchy stuff. Harder to confuse with…you know.”
They were at the house now and Danny still didn’t know whether he wanted to punch Steve, or hug him, or maybe call 911. “Take a shower,” he said instead. “Warm up before you turn into a SEAL-sicle.”
+++
Steve came back from the shower in track pants and a fleece pullover, but he still looked so cold Danny wanted to find a blanket to pull around his shoulders.
“What’s this?” Steve asked, looking at the plate of toast triangles and apple slices Danny had laid out on the kitchen counter. “Grace’s afterschool snack?”
“Shut up, doofus” Danny said peaceably. “Or I’ll take away that big-boy beer.” He gestured at the open Corona with his own bottle.
“Bossy much?” Steve muttered, but he sounded marginally more relaxed as he picked up the plate and bottle and followed Danny into the living room. He didn’t try and eat or drink, though.
“You ever find out what happened to the guy?” Danny asked, after he’d clicked on the TV and they’d been staring at the screen for a few minutes.
Steve shook his head, frowning.
“I was just thinking you might feel better knowing what happened to him. Even if he, you know, didn’t make it,” Danny pressed, not quite daring to look at Steve.
“Closure, huh?” Steve said the word like it was part of the ritual practice of a dangerous cult.
“They say it happens sometimes, who knows? You could look him up.”
But it turned out Steve didn’t know the man’s name or unit, though he thought he’d been a PFC. The only thing he could remember with any certainty was the date, since it was part of the original SEAL mission. He even remembered the time down to the quarter hour.
“So, easy,” Danny told him. “We just get the names of Army enlisted men casevaced from Basra with head wounds during that window—we can narrow it down from there. Catherine could do it, no problem.”
That met with some resistance. “No. No way am I calling her and saying, I dunno, hey Cath, I’m losing my shit down here, can you do me a solid and find the name of some guy I probably didn’t save in a place I wasn’t supposed to be? Oh, and let’s catch that dinner I owe you—too bad I won’t be able to eat anything.”
Danny smiled. Steve being pissy meant he was feeling a little better. “You know she would, bro’. It’s not like she doesn’t already know you’re crazy.”
Steve just closed his eyes and went stony-faced.
“I’ll do it. I’ll tell her it’s for a case,” he pressed.
Steve to opened his eyes at that. “Hand me my phone,” he said. “No way am I letting you talk to Cath.”
Steve stalked out of the room to dial. Danny turned up the volume on the TV and tried very hard to focus on college basketball rather than the conversation in the next room. He wondered what Steve was telling Catherine. Some lie about a case, or the truth it had taken Danny all week to get out of him? He realized how little he knew about Steve’s relationship with Cath. How little he knew about who Steve trusted and who he didn’t. He’d thought Steve trusted him, in his own batshit ninja kind of way. But this memory storm out Steve’s past had put them in uncharted waters.
After what seemed like a long time, Steve came back with a scrap of paper in one hand.
“So,” he said to Danny’s expectant face. “There were a fuckload of casualties that day. More than—more than I knew anyway. But only two Lance Corporals with severe head wounds were airlifted out mid-afternoon. One was African-American. My guy was white.” He put the piece of paper down on the coffee table. “Tyler Varney. Born August 1, 1989. Traumatic Head injury. Five months at the Brooke Army Medical Center—four in outpatient rehab. Honorable Discharge in 2009. Cath’s going to text his contact info in a minute.”
“So he’s alive.”
“Messed up pretty bad, but, yeah, he’s alive.” Steve didn’t smile, but something came over his face that might’ve been the beginning of one.
His phone chimed. Looking over his shoulder, Danny saw an address and phone number in Ft. Collins, Colorado. They both stared at screen for a few moments.
“You gonna call?”
“Nah. Not now. It’s pretty late in Colorado.”
“Hey, I don’t know about you, but if some guy saved my life, and I never saw him again, I wouldn’t really care what time of day he called.”
“You think?”
They both peered at the words on the screen, as if willing them to divulge more information. None was forthcoming. All they knew was that Mr. and Mrs. T. Varney lived on Pleasant St. now. The announcers on the TV switched from basketball to hockey. The light outside the windows dwindled almost to black. Danny was about to call the question for the night when Steve abruptly grabbed the phone and his beer and left again. In the hall, Danny could hear him saying, “Mrs. Varney? I’m sorry to call so late, but—“
And then he was too far away for anything but vague rumbles of sound to drift back.
Left alone, Danny worked his way methodically through his beer and tried again to imagine the conversation Steve was having. Did the military have codes for this sort of thing? How to address the wife of the man whose life you’d saved? How to explain why you’d never called before? And what had he thought Steve could get out of this phone call anyway? Affirmation? Consolation? Absolution? Maybe a touchstone, nothing more. Some assurance that amid the official secrets, the tricks of memory and the body's phantoms, this one thing had really happened: Steve had been on the street with Varney that day and they had both survived.
He was thinking about getting himself a second beer when Steve reappeared, his face suspiciously wet.
“You talk to him?” Danny asked, his voice come out more tentative than he meant it to.
“Mostly to his wife. Tyler still has some trouble talking. She put him on for a bit though. He’s doing okay—planning to go back to school soon—for engineering—turns out his brain still works even if his mouth doesn’t. He—“ Steve took a shaky breath and collapsed onto the sofa like his knees had gone out from under him. “He thanked me. Though why he should—I mean I just— “ He stopped, scrubbing weakly at his tearing eyes.
“Hey,” Danny said helplessly. “Hey.” Then he noticed something. He nudged the empty beer bottle in Steve’s hand with his knee.
Steve looked at it, surprised.
“You gonna puke?”
Steve considered the question carefully. “No,” he said, sounding a little surprised.
“Then you, my friend, have about thirty seconds before you pass out.”
Steve considered this too, and accepted Danny’s diagnosis with a grunt. “Turn out the lights, willya? And set the alarm?” he said, in what was probably the most back-handed invitation to spend the night Danny had ever heard. He’d take it, though, and the tacit declaration of trust it implied, if only to make sure that Steve kept his promise about Dr. Carozza in the morning.
He watched Steve’s eyes slide shut, the muscles in his face slacken and his breathing morph into tiny snores as his head sunk into the sofa pillows.
Then he got up to finally find that blanket.
The end