He lifts a hand over his shoulder in an affirmative gesture as he heads through the doorway, the other shoved in his pocket. "Yeah, yeah."
Which he almost follows up with a crack about whether or not it'll get warm, waiting for Steve to be done studying bootprints, and asking if Hesse also left some detergent residue or forgot a tube of his toothpaste, but he thinks better of it. Strange as it is to consider, it's still Steve's father, Steve's house -- no matter how distanced he might think he is from it, he doesn't need Danny stomping all over either memory with muddy boots, chipping away at it with a jackhammer.
It's actually a pretty nice place, aside from the yellow tape, the bloodstains, the mess created when armed men barged in and hog-tied an innocent old man. The kitchen is big and airy, with old-fashioned valances hanging over the windows above the sink, dark wood, old furniture. It looks like every vacation rental ever -- the kind that haven't been updated since the mid-seventies and have a continual smell of mothballs.
But the fridge is running, still cold, still full of food from whenever John McGarrett's last grocery run was, which strikes Danny as sadder than anything else he's seen yet today. He can handle bloodstains and bodies, yellow tape, paperwork, bullets and funerals; all the immediate ways the world tries to fill itself when a hole is violently made. But this?
This evidence that nobody's ever prepared for it. That you leave behind a fridge of food that'll go bad because there's no one left to eat it, that bills will pile up because no one's there to pay them. That the world keeps moving, and doesn't clean itself up, after. There are still dishes in the dishrack from his last meal. The last dregs of coffee in the coffeemaker.
And Steve is going to stay here. Around all this. Evidence that suggests that his father will walk into the room any second, rather than never again.
He opens the fridge, snags two bottles, and shuts it again, the authoritative thunk feeling like it sounds in his own chest, leaving him to look out the window as he rummages in a drawer for a bottle opener. At the back yard. The beach. The soft and rolling waves. "Looks like there're chairs out back here."
Called out without turning to see where Steve is, or isn't, while popping the top off his bottle. There's no one else here -- Danny's pretty sure he can be heard, even while heading to the sliding back door and porch -- except they call it something else here, right? Lanai. "Yours is on the counter."
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branchandroot
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Date: 2014-09-10 09:40 pm (UTC)He lifts a hand over his shoulder in an affirmative gesture as he heads through the doorway, the other shoved in his pocket. "Yeah, yeah."
Which he almost follows up with a crack about whether or not it'll get warm, waiting for Steve to be done studying bootprints, and asking if Hesse also left some detergent residue or forgot a tube of his toothpaste, but he thinks better of it. Strange as it is to consider, it's still Steve's father, Steve's house -- no matter how distanced he might think he is from it, he doesn't need Danny stomping all over either memory with muddy boots, chipping away at it with a jackhammer.
It's actually a pretty nice place, aside from the yellow tape, the bloodstains, the mess created when armed men barged in and hog-tied an innocent old man. The kitchen is big and airy, with old-fashioned valances hanging over the windows above the sink, dark wood, old furniture. It looks like every vacation rental ever -- the kind that haven't been updated since the mid-seventies and have a continual smell of mothballs.
But the fridge is running, still cold, still full of food from whenever John McGarrett's last grocery run was, which strikes Danny as sadder than anything else he's seen yet today. He can handle bloodstains and bodies, yellow tape, paperwork, bullets and funerals; all the immediate ways the world tries to fill itself when a hole is violently made. But this?
This evidence that nobody's ever prepared for it. That you leave behind a fridge of food that'll go bad because there's no one left to eat it, that bills will pile up because no one's there to pay them. That the world keeps moving, and doesn't clean itself up, after. There are still dishes in the dishrack from his last meal. The last dregs of coffee in the coffeemaker.
And Steve is going to stay here. Around all this. Evidence that suggests that his father will walk into the room any second, rather than never again.
He opens the fridge, snags two bottles, and shuts it again, the authoritative thunk feeling like it sounds in his own chest, leaving him to look out the window as he rummages in a drawer for a bottle opener. At the back yard. The beach. The soft and rolling waves. "Looks like there're chairs out back here."
Called out without turning to see where Steve is, or isn't, while popping the top off his bottle. There's no one else here -- Danny's pretty sure he can be heard, even while heading to the sliding back door and porch -- except they call it something else here, right? Lanai. "Yours is on the counter."