haole_cop | 00:00:00

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00:00:00

"Now it's my crime scene."

Those could have been, should have been, the last words he heard from McGarrett, and in a kinder world, they might have been, but the world hates Danny Williams, and he's not exactly feeling all that generous towards it, himself, so he's honestly not even a little surprised when the authoritative rap on his door comes attached to a too-tall, too-broad, too-aggressive Navy SEAL with revenge on the mind and Daddy issues from here back to the boardwalks of Wildwood.

He hates him.

Because of this joker, he's home in the middle of the day, instead of at work, work, he might point out, where he's attempting to catch the guy who did this to McGarrett, Sr., which is normally what the child of a murder victim wants, right? They want the cops to do their damn job and haul the dirtbag in for justice.

They don't storm in and take over like it's their goddamn platoon out in fucking Afghanistan.

Except McGarrett, okay, he doesn't seem to have gotten the memo. There's a reason officers don't get involved if the deceased was a family member, and this is exactly why: it makes people angry, irrational.

(He hopes to hell this is McGarrett being irrational.)

It's too close, too personal -- and it's also not his case anymore, so he's got no idea why McGarrett, shirt sticking to his skin from the soaking rain that just hit, because it rains every goddamn day here, what a fucking miracle, Hallelujah, is standing on his doorstep, because it isn't that.

(And it's not that either, he refuses, it's not happening, and there's no possible way this whackjob noticed. It could be he doesn't even have a timer, or got his blown off while single-handedly stopping an insurrection with a couple of grenades and a can-do attidtude.)

So he just stands and waits, with one hand still on the doorknob, ready to slam it shut just as soon as possible.

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Great, he says, we're gonna get along great.

And then leaves, taking the argument with him, and leaving Danny with nothing to do but try to rub the sour taste of hatred out of his mouth and ignore the flash of red at the edge of his vision as his hand drops; nothing to do but go back to the little table holding Grace's photo and his badge and gun, to pick up the latter two.

He doesn't doubt McGarrett got him reassigned, doesn't doubt that it's all been worked over by the Captain, because he's that kind of guy, apparently. The kind that heads into a taped-off crime scene and steals first evidence, and then the scene itself, phoning in an oath to pick up the title of "cop" for a day, and has now picked him up, too, like he's no harder a thing to get than that damn toolbox.

Just a piece of equipment.

Danny hadn't thought he could be treated any worse than what HPD was already giving him, with the cold shoulders and the glares and the desk that's practically an island, but once again, as always when he thinks things can't get worse, he's wrong.

His keys are on the table, too: he snatches them up and swings outside to follow, slamming the door shut a little harder than is strictly necessary. "My car's over there," he says, flat, heading to the stairs and pointing at the dull gray Mustang in the lot as he moves, smiling thin and angry. "Or did you already know that, too?"

He's not a mind reader, but everyone's got one who isn't a tourist. A car. Even in Hawaii, that's a no-brainer assumption.

Steve listened to the door slam, loud and heavy behind him, without a twitch. He'd heard air raids, dominio explosions and any number of military vehicles that were so much louder it was laughable. Let the guy throw his tantrum-pity party. Steve was fine with him having a problem with breathing the air, even. So long as he got them where they needed to be, and he did the job that needed doing.

He'd been through enough men to not take it personally, if those two requirements were being met.

"It was that, or cab." Steve said, even and easy, like it was obvious. He'd been using them since he arrived, after all. But it was much easier to have a set of wheels with a person on the ground, too. It hadn't entirely slipped his mind either. He was back in the file, digging for the address. "This way we don't have to around for someone else." Too.

"Oh, so you do know which one's mine? That really is incredible. No, not the fact that I have a car, genius. As you so deftly pointed out, I've been on this godforsaken rock six months, what, you think I've been running around chasing crooks on foot that whole time?"

With a tone that adds idiot, and none too quietly, as the rickety wooden stairs clatter under his shoes and he makes for the Mustang. "Maybe put a siren on a scooter, or rented a bike?"

He really doesn't want Steve to answer that. Given the disrepair of his, you couldn't even call that a house.

Rat trap tenement meant for the seedy under belly of the world crawling types everywhere. It was a miracle if the man wasn't arresting people in his own complex every week. But given that, and what the whole interior looked like, still, six months later, that didn't give a rousing vote of confidence toward anything the man owned. Over the monkey suit he was wearing, that made him stick out like a sore thumb and begged for anyone in Hawaii to note he wasn't one of them.

Steve made a gesture with his hand for Danny to get on with it already, since the lot was there. "So, which one?"

Steve was looking at all of them for something in the middle, about as mediocre as everything else he had.

"Which one? Which one?"

He hasn't stopped moving since getting out of the apartment, hit the pavement and was making a beeline for the Mustang, while McGarrett takes a second to exemplify just how much of an arrogant douchebag he really is. "Was I, just now, pointing at just a random car, for kicks? That one."

Pointing again at the Mustang, and walking towards it with quick steps, half-turning to wave a derisive hand in the air. "The one I've been heading towards since we got out here, Einstein, which you would have noticed if you could deign to pay attention to anyone other than yourself for more than five seconds."

Things he shouldn't be saying to his new partner, things he definitely shouldn't be saying to someone who has the Governor on speed-dial, but it's not like it'll be the first or last time his mouth has gotten him in trouble, and it's a little bit of a relief. A venting of building steam pressure, that's crushing up against his windpipe and setting his blood at a hard boil that can't be good for him, right, it's gotta be high blood pressure or something, but it comes out like this and always has: hard, poisonous words, and a complete disregard for everyone who thinks they're better than him, like this asshole, like the bigots at HPD, like Rachel, like everyone in this miserable sideshow of a world he's been cursed to live in.

You'd think he was announcing it to the whole neighborhood. Loud and obvious. Not Steve's choice in this kind of place, unless he's taking someone's face off, but then Steve doesn't live here. Hasn't lived here for six months. But that thought is quickly replaced with a look of rather blanketed confusion while he's getting eyes on the silver car they're walking toward, pretty straight at. The Mustang in the parking lot.

That he probably would have pegged belonging to a meat head, drug dealer.

Not the mouthy transplant Detective who didn't have one expensive object in his whole house.

Silver. GT. Not the kind of thing he would have pegged in the slightest. He would have been looking for something beaten up around the edges, dings and sputtering muffler. Something that looked like it'd seen better days and was being held together on a wish and prayer, or, you know, vitriol and spite, like it's owner. But it's a mustang. Silver, and maintained looking. Stopping him up entirely for a second while they're getting there.

"A Mustang?" Steve's looking over like maybe the guy got his shirt size wrong. Or Steve did. Looking for the connection between the two, the same way he'd looked for the correlation between the cases. Wondering for a moment if this was where all his money went. He wouldn't be the first guy to have a wallet eating muscle car fixation. "You bring it with you from the mainland?"

"Do I look like I could afford to ship anything bigger than a Matchbox from the mainland?"

He gestures to the Mustang, pissed off. "Just get in."

McGarrett's blatant surprise is doing nothing to mollify his aggravation; it only feeds the fire, stirs it into sullen, lashing flames. It's over a thousand bucks to ship a car from California to Hawaii, and it would've been almost that in gas to drive cross-country in his old sedan, so, yeah. Sure. He got here, and he got a fun car.

It's not new. It's not sleek or polished; it's got the same rough edges he feels, and the engine is a pissed-off growl that hums under his skin, ramps up with his blood pressure and echoes along his nerves. It's fast, and fun to drive, and he likes it, even if it's not perfect, even if he wishes there were just a little something extra to it.

But it'll be fine today, no matter how bewildered McGarrett is that he's got a decent ride, so he jerks open the driver's side door and slides inside, grumbling about the heat of the day and the black interior as he does.

Steve pretty sure nothing that just came out of Danny's mouth made any sense. Sure expensive to get anything from the mainland to Hawaii, or vice-versa. He'd know. It's not like much of anything from his childhood home was found anywhere else, unless you were willing to pay top dollar for it. But there were prices, and then there were prices. And even if shipping was insanely expensive.

It wasn't usually as expensive as, say, buying a whole new car.

Even a new used car was still up there. When you figured in payments and interest.

But Steve had seen the whole gamut of weird purchases made with too much money and too little time over the last decade. Soldiers and sailors were nowhere near as rational with their money, especially when money seemed like a thing that really only existed whenever you were off mission. Since everything else was handed to you during and figured out, syphon on or off that magical number hitting a bank account but not needed by you at the time.

So, Danny has car. Maybe it's his one inch above having absolutely nothing except his job. It's not like Steve was going to be around long enough to want to ask the question no less be around long enough to hear, or even puzzle out, the answer. He got in the car, not paying much attention to the muttering on the other side, other than to note that he still hadn't stopped. That he really didn't need any more audience than himself to keep going on and on.

No more talking is fine by Danny, who waits for McGarrett to get in before tossing his phone in the console and turning the key. The engine roars into life and settles into a constant growl, while he reaches back for his seatbelt, checks the mirrors, backs out.

"So, I guess you got an address for Doran?"

He can keep it professional. He can. He's a good partner, even if HPD doesn't think so, even if his reviews always come back as surly, argumentative, impatient. It's just for this one case, maybe even this one pick-up and interrogation, and he can work with the guy for that long, right?

Maybe he's not going to go out of his way to make friends (there's a flash of red on the inside of his wrist that catches his eye; he grimaces, and peels out of the parking lot with a sudden heavy foot on the gas and a screech of tires), but he does still need to know where they're headed.

Steve gives him the clipped edge of a look, even as the car peels out, again, not quite like Steve would have expected.

Because Danny would know. It was Danny's file, and Doran was Danny's lead, before the last few hours. His father bricked up, as well as in that hole in the ground at the Punchbowl, in the mortar of black print, crime scene photos, and two slight layers of manila. Like so many other folders in HPD, and throughout countless years worth of missions Steve had been handed them, or seen the growing weight of his own.

Steve rifled back through the few sheets collected on Doran, to find the right one. "Here."

Steve pushed the paper at him, maybe even to see if he'd take it and read or throw a fit about the newest clearly impossible thing he couldn't do. It's really halfway through the air to that side of the car before it even hits Steve to consider just reading it. Making anything any easier on the man, who did not go out of his way anywhere to make anyone want to help him specifically. But it isn't like he knows all the roads here. Some of them, maybe. But all of it is old memories.

But it wasn't that far, and the name pulled up memories enough for Steve. If Section 8 had a Section 8, that would be it.

Is how to be an obnoxious dick like, Navy SEAL 101? He tosses a glance at the passenger seat, reaches out to take the paper (flash of red light on his wrist, he doesn't look, won't, refuses) and look it over. Nothing new, then. Doran's probably holed up in the same bad little neighborhood well outside the contained sprawl of the city, the shack town they've traced him to before.

If he's not, there are a few other places to try, but Danny shoves the paper back over towards the file Steve's holding without checking to see if Steve's paying attention, takes a hard right towards the highway, out towards where traffic will fall away and the Mustang can eat up miles like inches. Engine opening up, his foot heavy on the gas, mind half on the road and half on the case, with a little niggling corner trying to get him to look at his wrist, to come to terms with the fact that those numbers aren't ever going to move again.

And it's all McGarrett's fault.

(Or Rachel's, for moving them here to begin with, but he already blames her for everything else, just for the sake of variety, he ought to give her a pass on this.)

Steve stared out the front windshield, again, bungling the stillness with how oddly familiar everything was.

Even in not being able to place it all, even in the idea he might not have seen it all even when he was young. There's an air of familiarity to all of it. The way people tie their bathing suit skirts. The cant of their heads when they talk. The loose hold of shoulders and that every present smiling. Even the way the wind blows through the trees as the car is flying past them. It's all eerily, frozen fingertips trailing up his spine, stepped on his grave, familiar.

Or his fathers'. The only thing that could get him out here in the last decade, more dedicated to his work than anything else. Not that either of them had made any bones about needing or wanting that to be anything other than what it had been since he was a kid. But that voice, and all its last words, stuck, like an ear worm dug in, Hey, Champ and Listen to me, Champ. Apologizing for lying to him, about what, Steve still didn't know. Saying that he loved him. When those words were more foreign than any foreign language.

Which was a fitting time for the car to suddenly explode in the small sounds of a horror movie, making Steve look toward that side again. Bypassing the silent radio and looking at Danny looking at his phone, facial features tightened as he hit a button and threw the phone back in the center console. Not that the man was looking for pointers, but Steve always found horror movies the perfect way, back when, to a girl into your lap, more than to be a warning against a person.

Which could be only one person. Given Danny Williams easily broke down on a logic wall. He had had less than a dozen connections here, even for his half a year, but his relationship with his captain, partner and work was effective, even if antagonistic, which only left one person for it to be.

Steve looked back toward the window as Danny did. "Take it your marriage didn't end so well."

His first reaction, unsurprisingly, is a wave of anger.

What is surprising is how hard, sudden, and vicious it is: leaves him feeling a sick twist in his stomach while his hands grip the steering wheel hard enough to whiten knuckles, because he suddenly just wants to haul off and punch Steve McGarrett and his fucking questions and his uncaring theft of Danny's life right in the face.

He wants to yell at Rachel for calling him now, during this, this worst day of his life, for forcing him to come here, for leaving him, for saying she loved him when they both knew it couldn't ever really be true. Not as true as it should have been. He wants to hate her, with a sudden hollowing out of his chest and gut, and he wants to hate McGarrett, too, and that disinterested question.

"No." It's tight, exhaled, relcutant. It didn't end well. It ripped him apart, limb from limb, snacked on his heart and soul and spent long months slowly tearing strips of flesh away from him until he was left this raw, bleeding mess. "She was, quite literally, not the one."

Made all the more obvious by his unbelievably offbase timer, the one that he can't help glancing at now, with a glare. It's responsible for all this, and he's got no one but himself to hold accountable.

So he glares at the timer, the road, Hawaii all spread out around them, while the Mustang accelerates angry down the clear road.

"Which would've been bad enough, but then my ex remarried and dragged my daughter to this pineapple-infested hellhole."

He's expecting all of the rote and repetition answer that most divorcees had, even among the armed forces, even among his own men, but he's not expecting the flippant anger at Hawaii. It was Hawaii. No one hated Hawaii. A good ninety percent of the world dreamed of going there -- while other people, who Steve was not pointing fingers at, or claiming he knew, especially as it existed at him in disturbingly technicolor familiarity, remembered it as a place they'd never get back to.

Especially when they were already there, surrounded with it and its technicolor familiarity.

"You don't like the beach?" The question was so much easier than the hazy thought. Like it was impossible.

Danny needing to be ornery about everything that might exist within a couple miles of him. Or an entire island now.

"I don't like the beach."

Doesn't even allow the thought of used to in his head. Just doesn't like it. Not the sand, not the sun, not the sticky sunscreen that gets sand all over him, not the salt water, not the erosion and storms and flocks of tourists it brings.

And he doesn't exactly feel like discussing it much, either.

"Who doesn't like the beach?"

That one goes fast and crazy. Because that's not even just Hawaii. That's everywhere.

He couldn't even think of more than a handful of places he'd ended up on R&R with Cath that didn't have one.

Everyone in the world loved a good beach. Ocean rolling out. Close as natives got to being lost in the endless blue.

Me.

Like he just said, but McGarrett seems to require some kind of response, just like everyone does when they first hear that Danny doesn't like beaches. "I like cities."

Shrugged, glanced over. The guy's looking at him now, instead of the road, and Danny's not sure he likes it, wishes that attention was focused somewhere else. He looks back at the road. "You know, skyscrapers."

Sidewalks. Little bodegas. Weather that wasn't either five-alarm sunshine pouring over everything or rain threatening to flood the world.

He's getting on a roll now, thinking of Newark, Jersey City, Manhattan. "No tsunamis, no jellyfish..."

God. Did this guy not have excuses pouring out his ass for anything? It was like listening to a list of what was better and therefore only. Steve liked cities the globe across. He, also, liked the remote nowhere of a mission, too. Didn't mean he was bent enough to think the beach was a horrible place just because it was connected to horrible things, people or events.

That was all crap. If Steve went that route he wouldn't have loved beaches after fifteen. Or The Navy.

Steve hedged that next one, accusatively unimpressed, because two could play this game.

He could narrow down the why. "Tell me you can swim."

That question comes out of nowhere. "Can I swim?"

How does he get there from not liking the beach?

It's amusing how much annoyed derision and denial he can shove into three words, isn't?

It gets at something under Steve's cool, making him need to poke it harder.

The way he would with any of his men, "You don't know how to swim."

"I don't --"

What? It's so -- it's not even -- this guy is so far beyond obnoxious it's giving Danny a headache. "I swim."

Look, he might hate swimming. Okay? He might hate the water and avoid it whenever possible, but this is just offensive, the idea that he can't do something, and that's why he doesn't like it. Like McGarrett's just decided his answer is the right one, one that fits into the box he's decided to put Danny in, and nothing Danny says will change his mind.

He hates being ignored, stomps all over that easy lack of curiosity. "I swim for survival, not for fun."

"Alright." Steve says the one word.

Pushing as much bland, blank, leading disbelieve as one can there.

But then the horror music starts again, leaving Steve to glance down, and back out.

Twice might actually mean something. Or it might mean they ignore it for the next five.

Twice, one right after the other, and that might mean she actually wants to talk to him, instead of leaving him a clipped, terse message. He could let it ring, but the alternative is continuing to fume at Steve for his assumptions, so he throws himself in front of the lesser of two evils, picks up the phone, shoves it to his ear. "Yes, dear."

Exhaled and already angling for a fight, until "Hi Danno," comes tinny down the line, and everything changes.

Everything. The world shifts. Anger evaporates like it was never even there, and he's grinning before he realizes it, while his heart makes a painful little sidelong skip. "Hey, Monkey."

She sounds so good. Cheerful and sweet and bright and everything that's good in the world, and it's like all the shit in his head and chest just up and moves out, packs up and leaves, without warning or hesitation. Not Rachel. Just his baby girl, sounding questioning about why he answered the phone like he did. "No, I thought you were your mom."

Steve can't even stop the sudden turn.

Because while he hadn't really been paying attention to the two word salute to the ex-wife, the way you Don't Pay Attention to a lot of things in barracks, bunks, tents, and camps, where you have no choice but to be living right in every other man's boots, but you still wanted to give them their privacy. That wasn't.

After those two words, Danny William's voice hit a brand new register. High, and warm. This vibrating laugh changing that third word almost into two or three, and making Steve's vision swerve from not really looking out the windows to looking over at Danny. Up, down, not quite toward getting into his business. But that was. That was really happening.

"I'm so glad that everyone liked Mr. Hoppy."

Grace is chattering in his ear, his favorite sound, and a movement out of the corner of his eye only warrants a glance at the guy in the passenger seat, and nothing else. His focus is taken, all on her and her childish, innocent delight. He can't even be pissed about the rabbit, she's so cheery and triumphant.

It'll hurt later, he knows, but not now. Right now, he's bulletproof, and when Grace says how excited she is to see him later, he could pretty much just fly. "I'm excited too, baby. We're gonna have so much fun this weekend."

They always do. It's the one good thing that came of his marriage, this little girl, and the only good thing in his life. He'd move to Hawaii all over again, just for this. He'd move to China. He'd go anywhere, just to be able to see her.

And it's starting to slip away again; this is just a short call, he knows, one of the daily ones as she's coming home from school, and she's already saying goodbye in his ear. "Hey. Danno loves you."

He'll remind her every chance he gets, waits to hear love you, too, Danno, before he takes the phone away from his ear again and presses the button, feeling full and empty at the same time, a familiar ache spreading through his chest.

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