Chapter Text
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Something was wrong, he could feel it.
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Steve glanced at his watch for the fifth time in what felt like thirty minutes, but was actually only two. Danny was supposed to have been here by now, it was ten o’clock on a Tuesday morning.
He hadn’t seen Danny since they all left HQ last night around seven. Trying to get a handle on these missing persons cases, they’d been bent over the computer table all day until they looked up at the clock and realized it was past dinnertime and they scrammed. And since he’d been having meetings with the Governor before heading to HQ in the morning, Danny had been driving himself in.
After getting in and getting distracted by phone messages and unanswered emails, Steve hadn’t noticed Danny’s office was empty until it was close to ten o’clock.
Later, when he realizes how much time was wasted, the guilt would set in and his heart would crumple from the weight of knowing he might have been able to prevent it all from happening.
--
Pushing his chair back from his desk, he walks over to Lou’s office. He opens the door, tapping on the doorframe to get his attention. “You seen Danny?”
Lou looks up from the missing persons’ reports he seems to be reading again. “No, I haven’t.” He looks down at his watch, frowning at the time. “It’s ten am, he’s usually here by now, isn’t he?”
Steve nods, chewing on his lip, before heading into the bullpen where Kono and Chin are going through the case files for the hundredth time.
“You guys seen Danny?” he asks them, his hands on his hips.
They glance at each other for a moment, as if just realizing that Danny hadn’t shown up yet.
“No, actually, we haven’t.” Kono’s brow furrows in concern.
“Did he have an appointment this morning?” asks Chin.
“He didn’t tell me he did. I thought the same thing too, but he’d have texted or called if he was running that late. But he’s not answering, I’ve tried his cell like ten times.”
Scrubbing a hand across his face, Steve forces himself to take a deep breath. It could be nothing – his phone could be dead and he overslept, his car died and he’s at the shop getting it fixed and forgot to call, he turned his phone off as he went to the dentist. It could be nothing, there was no reason to panic.
Yet.
--
“I tracked his phone and it says it’s at his apartment,” reports Chin as Steve enters the bullpen again.
“I called Rachel and she said she hasn’t talked to Danny since the day before yesterday, and that as far as she knew, he didn’t have any appointments scheduled for this morning.”
Chin frowns, but before he can say anything Steve’s phone rings.
“Boss, he’s not here at the apartment. His phone was on the kitchen table, but the Camaro isn’t in the driveway.”
Chin’s already tracking the car’s GPS before Steve can even voice the command.
He straightens up, confusion on his face. “It says he’s at the supermarket on Kaiulani Street. That’s an odd time to go grocery shopping.”
--
Steve tries to stop the tremor in his hand by clenching and unclenching, but he can feel it moving throughout his whole body, so he’s not sure of how good a job he’s doing.
“I don’t have a good feeling about this, Chin.”
His voice doesn’t sound like his own because once he’s said what’s been running through his mind since that morning, his world feels like it’s starting to close in on itself.
“I’m sure everything’s fine.”
But it sounds hollow and Steve can see the way Chin’s lip thins and his shoulders are tense.
--
When they get to the supermarket, Steve’s world officially feels like it’s tilting. The Camaro is in the parking lot and there’s a broken bag of groceries underneath an open driver’s side door.
It’s the first sign of what Steve’s been afraid of this entire time and he’s seeing spots.
--
Chin comes over. “They’re closed on Tuesdays, but I got the owner on the phone and they’re headed up here now so we can take a look at the security footage.”
He’s putting up a valiant effort in not showing the stress and concern on his face, but Steve can see it plain as day.
--
But when the owner pulls in not even ten minutes later, leads them to the back where they can watch the security footage, and they watch Danny get ripped from their lives almost fifteen hours after it really happens, Steve realizes something so life-altering in that moment he staggers from the weight of it:
Danny Williams is the most essential thing in his life, and now that he’s gone, his world is crumbling.
--
The lights from the police cruisers are blending with the tears that refuse to fall. His chest is hurting so much he feels like he can’t breathe. His hands won’t stop shaking long enough to do anything. He’s thrown up three times since the first time they watched Danny’s kidnapping on the security tape and his world collapsed.
--
Duke and HPD show up at some point and CSU starts sweeping the scene. Steve vaguely remembers calling the Governor and telling him.
Honestly, Steve doesn’t remember much of anything past the look in Danny’s eye on the security tape when he realized what was happening and the sinking hole of despair that began to suck the blood from his veins. He can’t stop watching the tape, he’s seen it at least twenty times – angrily and forcefully hitting the rewind button in hopes that if he watches it enough times, maybe it didn’t happen.
When he’s rewinding it for the twenty-seventh time, Eric’s hands are prying his fingers off the tablet and Steve has to close his eyes because he can’t look into his eyes right now, he can’t see what he knows will be there, he just can’t.
“Please,” he begs Steve in a broken voice. “Please tell me it isn’t true, please.”
Steve squeezes Eric’s fingers almost painfully, and he bows his neck back and towards the sky in agony.
--
This is the moment.
Once he admits it, there’s no going back. There’s no denying it any longer. There’s no longer any hope that this isn’t all one terrible, horrific nightmare and he’ll wake up any minute now and Danny will be sitting next to him on the lanai.
This is it.
--
When he opens his eyes again and sees Eric’s tear-streaked ones, something in him snaps and the floodgates open. “I can’t, I can’t. Oh God, he’s gone, he’s really gone…”
He’s sobbing and he thinks Eric is too because he can feel a wetness on his left shoulder, but everything is fading into white noise and all he can do is wait until the torrential floods flow out of him and leave a wake deep down into the very depths of his soul.
Danny’s gone.
--
Steve grips his phone tightly in his hand for the first two days, waiting for it to ring. He doesn’t sleep, he doesn’t eat. Images of Danny in the security tape flash across his eyes, and he has to leave his house the first time he goes home because every inch of it reminds him of Danny and he’s already punched three holes in the wall.
They put it together on day four.
By day six, Steve’s resigned himself to believe there’s no ransom call coming.
Rachel drops Gracie off the night of the seventh day because they’re both not sleeping. Steve falls asleep with her in his arms, in Danny’s chair out on the lanai, after repeatedly calling Danny’s phone so they can listen to his voice on his voicemail. She stays with him three nights a week after that.
Danny’s family arrives from New Jersey on day nine and his mom holds him while he cries for a good ten minutes in the airport parking lot. Steve gets drunk with his sisters that night and they tell Danny stories until three in the morning. Steve can’t stop telling Danny’s dad "I’m sorry" and "It’s all my fault" until he gets socked in the face, and then he’s handed an ice pack for his cheek and the two of them reminisce about all of the things Danny hated about Hawaii.
On day fourteen, the hotline for Danny and the other missing persons officially stops ringing. Steve holds Kono’s hair back as she vomits her lunch.
On day seventeen, Steve drags Eric home with him and they sit and listen to the ocean and remember how much Danny complained about the sound.
On day twenty-one, they catch a lead that dries up three days later. Chin punches a wall and Lou cleans up his knuckles.
Mary visits on day twenty-five and stays for five days. The first day, she holds Steve in Danny’s bed at his apartment, for hours, as he sobs himself into exhaustion. The third day, she and the team fall asleep piled on the couch in Steve’s office staring at the wall and passing around a bottle of scotch. By the fifth day, Steve’s feeling a little better until he looks at the calendar and realizes Danny will have been gone a month come morning.
It’s the one-month anniversary and they all sit in the middle of HQ and watch home-made videos they compiled of Danny: Grace in between Steve and Eric, Kono in Adam’s lap, Malia on Chin’s chest, Renee alongside Lou. They leave the lights off so they can pretend no one hears the other crying.
On day thirty-two, the Governor holds a press conference expressing his support in permitting Five-O to remain on the missing persons’ case and informing the public that other cases will be rerouted to HPD, NCIS, BAU, the BAU’s IRT, and MacGyver’s DXS, as needed. The team leaders for each team call Steve to confirm and he manages to keep it together for two of the five calls.
The morning of day thirty-four they find the first body, and Steve stares at the fourteen-year-old boy’s pale skin while Lou throws up in the bushes.
Sam and Callen fly in to help HPD with a case about a dead intelligence officer in Waimanalo on day thirty-six. Every night, Sam takes Steve and Kono sparring until their anger has left their hands trembling, and Callen takes Chin and Lou to the gun range to shoot until there are bruises on their trigger fingers.
Day forty-three is Christmas Day and Rachel shoves Steve, Grace, and Eric on a plane headed for New Jersey two days before. They hold each other the whole flight, too tired to talk and too depressed to cry. They all bunk together at Danny’s parents’ house, because they can calm each other best when the nightmares hit, and are never more than three feet away from each other. No one judges them for crying whenever they eventually do.
Steve breaks down and sobs in the Governor’s office the afternoon of day forty-six, and the Governor cancels his afternoon meetings to build Steve’s resolve back up.
On day fifty-two, Catherine helps them pin down a far-fetched lead but it falls through eight hours later.
Steve throws in his last favor in the Navy on day fifty-seven and cries himself hoarse in Gracie’s hair that night.
For the two-month anniversary, they listen to Bon Jovi and eat malasadas, while watching reruns of CHIPS on the floor of HQ, and pretend the last two months are all a bad dream.
Danny’s parents fly in again on day sixty-four. They stay with Steve, and along with Eric and the team, help clear out Danny’s stuff from his apartment and into Steve’s house because his lease is up and he’s not there to pay rent. It takes them the whole weekend, and then they get drunk on cheap alcohol and watch the home videos that Danny’s parents brought with them.
On day seventy-one, Joe helps them pin down a lead that takes them to their second body, a seventeen-year-old girl.
Jack and MacGyver’s team flies in on day seventy-eight to help HPD with a case about a missing dermatologist. They show up at the Palace every night they’re there with dinner and don’t try to fill the silence that’s made a home in the Five-O offices.
Sang Min pays them a visit on day eighty-five with a broken hand and a solid lead.
On day ninety, they find him.
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