It doesn't matter. None of it. Not the glares he gets from the officers busy cleaning up the mess he and Steve created, not the soft swearing drifting behind him. He's walking away. Will lay out the consequences of treating him like a stray dog that needs to be trained, and walk away.
Even if every instinct is screaming at him to go back.
To get into it. To beat senseless, or be beaten senseless. To just let it all go, all this anger and frustration and embarrassment that dogs his every step, this constant refrain of not good enough that's continually simmering fury in his blood and sharpening every thought.
He knows Steve isn't the world. That Steve had nothing to do with Rachel leaving, and that Steve wouldn't have picked him to come to Hawaii, and that Steve isn't every member of HPD who never, once, in six months, accepted him.
(He's not Meka, either, Danny's actual partner, the one guy here he feels like he can relax around, who laughs instead of frowns at his arguments, who takes him out for beers and tells him it'll just take a little time.)
But he is, all of those things, all of those people. Steve is the world that's been dragging Danny for too long, he's the people who have it all, those golden people who get recognized as the best, who command respect, who will always be better. He's not Danny, shabby khakis and button downs and ties and hangs up religiously every night, washes by hand and irons on his own so he can look somewhere near professional but never quite makes it past rumpled.
(But he lost his father. And he lost his mother, years ago. Danny read the file, and there's a tiny voice in his brain, itching, one he wants to smack away but can't quite, saying Steve doesn't exactly have it easy, either.)
Whatever. He doesn't actually want to get beaten to a pulp, so he just heads back towards the scene, glaring at the officers who step back away from him, like he's a drop of oil running across a thin scrim of water, daring them to make something of it.
no subject
It doesn't matter. None of it. Not the glares he gets from the officers busy cleaning up the mess he and Steve created, not the soft swearing drifting behind him. He's walking away. Will lay out the consequences of treating him like a stray dog that needs to be trained, and walk away.
Even if every instinct is screaming at him to go back.
To get into it. To beat senseless, or be beaten senseless. To just let it all go, all this anger and frustration and embarrassment that dogs his every step, this constant refrain of not good enough that's continually simmering fury in his blood and sharpening every thought.
He knows Steve isn't the world. That Steve had nothing to do with Rachel leaving, and that Steve wouldn't have picked him to come to Hawaii, and that Steve isn't every member of HPD who never, once, in six months, accepted him.
(He's not Meka, either, Danny's actual partner, the one guy here he feels like he can relax around, who laughs instead of frowns at his arguments, who takes him out for beers and tells him it'll just take a little time.)
But he is, all of those things, all of those people. Steve is the world that's been dragging Danny for too long, he's the people who have it all, those golden people who get recognized as the best, who command respect, who will always be better. He's not Danny, shabby khakis and button downs and ties and hangs up religiously every night, washes by hand and irons on his own so he can look somewhere near professional but never quite makes it past rumpled.
(But he lost his father. And he lost his mother, years ago. Danny read the file, and there's a tiny voice in his brain, itching, one he wants to smack away but can't quite, saying Steve doesn't exactly have it easy, either.)
Whatever. He doesn't actually want to get beaten to a pulp, so he just heads back towards the scene, glaring at the officers who step back away from him, like he's a drop of oil running across a thin scrim of water, daring them to make something of it.
They don't. And that's fine by him.