Work Text:
Steve finds out from two gossiping nurses, of all things.
“And they’re the same blood type?”
“What are the chances, right?”
The words fly over his head, meaning absolutely nothing at all like most things have, the few times he’s won the jackpot of consciousness. It’s med talk anyway. Irrelevant.
Steve has been in and out already. Once he woke up once to a rather groggy, swimming explanation about surviving a shooting—a shooting? Who shot me? Weren’t we on the plane?—though he’s hazy on the details. He can’t even remember what their case was about.
To be honest, he doesn’t much care.
Besides, Steve knows the important bits, even if the doctor’s mouth was moving on mute for a while there: two bullet wounds, six hours of surgery, and he’s going to make a full recovery. End of story. That’s all he needs to know, really, once they also told him that his team has been in and out to visit.
Safe, he thinks. Visiting means the team is safe.
There’s no better lullaby for a man like him than to know that everyone he loves is accounted for and in one piece. He can stand down.
“You’ve both been unconscious for most of the heartfelt visits,” Dr. Makau remarks at one point. It’s said in a wry tone, with a flick of salt and pepper eyebrows while he makes a note on Steve’s chart.
An older doctor, early sixties, he’s got a spring in his step that makes Steve jealous. A quite literal insult to injury.
The blinds in his ICU room are open now but it’s dark outside, especially from the high vantage of this floor. The lights have been dimmed and it’s eerily quiet, even for a hospital. Last time Steve was awake, daylight streamed in blinding bursts and lunch was starting, so he’s been out for hours this round.
Heavy bowling balls, dipped in acid, roll around Steve’s gut. He’s not in pain exactly. Moving, however, is a kind of discomfort he’s never experienced before and never wants to again. A steam roller compresses him in real time, under a weight that feels crushing and hot and insistent.
It’s coupled with a tiny toll gate inside his body and it steals away the life savings of his energy whenever he so much as lifts a hand to touch his face. Which Dr. Makau berated him for profusely.
“Lie still, Commander!” he keeps barking.
That sounds like a good idea, actually.
Steve settles in to obey medical professional advice for once…this latest dose of pain management medication kicking in…his eyelids heavier than the gaping maw of suture lines along his torso…
“I hear he didn’t even hesitate.”
“They’re close, these two.”
“Yeah, but still. That’s something I’d have to think about before doing for my sister, let alone my work partner.”
Someone shuffles around Steve’s bed, reading the blood pressure machine that keeps squeezing his arm. The voices are familiar; same two nurses as last time. “It’s crazy when you think about it. He wouldn’t even let us patch the fractured ribs first.”
These last two words are the only ones that finally make it through the fuzz around Steve’s brain. This is the longest he’s been awake so far, a whopping one hundred seconds, but the cost of that is the fact that nothing is processing at the correct speed. His brain misfires the words until they’re a jumbled mess. By the time it does, the nurses are off on another topic.
Still, he knows what he heard.
Fractured ribs—one of our team is injured.
Knowing their track record, it’s probably Chin. He would go and get himself battered six way to Sunday just to avenge Steve’s shooting. Plane jacking. Whatever it was.
The nurses finish their check list of Steve’s vitals and amble off, still softly chatting about an emergency landing on a beach. And slivers or livers or some other nonsense Steve doesn’t possess the energy to note.
Wait.
Steve’s eyes pop open all the way, the background beeps picking up traction. His breaths start to feel tight.
Another word clicks—
Both. Earlier in the day, Dr. Makau said both.
Steve doesn’t even hesitate. He slams the call button before he’s even attempted to sit up.
Calm down. It’s probably just a precaution. But why would someone with broken ribs be staying in the ICU? Is Abby with Chin? Did one of his ribs puncture a lung? Why wouldn’t staff tell Steve that right away as part of the update?
“Commander!” Dr. Makau himself runs through the door, faster than even Steve expects. The surgeon is pale, eyes on the galloping heart monitor. He nods at Steve’s surprise. “Your bpm notified us before you did.”
Only then does Steve realize that he’s breathing shallow. Sweat pools in sticky ponds at the base of his throat and the gap behind his neck. His palms are slick where his fists clench in the sheets.
“Doc, who on my team is injured? Is Lieutenant Kelly here?”
Dr. Makau totally bypasses this question in a very Danny Williams-esque way that both comforts Steve and raises his hackles.
“Hey!” he snaps. “Who fractured their ribs today and who—”
“You’ve been in here for two days, Commander.” Dr. Makau talks over him. As if Steve hasn’t spoken in that panicked tone at all. He grabs Steve’s wrist—which he just then notices is flailing around—and stares him down. “Forty-two hours, to be precise. Your plane crashed on Friday. It’s almost the start of Sunday now.”
Steve blinks. That…that he didn’t expect. It doesn’t ease his worry, however. Rather, his anxiety rachets up another notch, for he knows that busted ribs don’t require two days in the ICU.
Dr. Makau is still leveling that laser gaze at him, hardly blinking. Steve, dizzy, notes that Makau seems tenser than he does.
Why didn’t they tell me?
A divot materializes around the doctor’s brow, softening one side of his mouth in something too strong for sympathy. The expression doesn’t just denote a doctor seeing his patient in pain—it’s wonder and raw heartache all wrapped in one.
Steve’s eyes widen. The case comes flooding back to him, their aliases. The plane. Danny yelling at him.
“Danny,” Steve rasps.
Dr. Makau nods again. “He sustained multiple rib fractures and breaks during the crash, Commander. All of which he ignored just to catch your drug dealer. Apparently Detective Williams can be as stubborn as you.”
Laughter is the usual response to this. It’s there, begging for a joke about how Danny learned from the best and Steve isn’t the only one who defies doctors’ orders. Maybe he’ll have someone to commiserate with.
But for Steve the words tighten his grip, now wrapped around the doctor’s forearm. “Where is he?”
“Commander, please take it easy—”
“Did the ribs hit something?”
Makau sighs, perching on the edge of Steve’s bed and appearing not the least bit affected by the fact Steve has him leashed by the arm. “You sustained damage to your liver. Severe damage.”
Frustration steals over Steve in a hot burst. “We don’t have time for this.”
They don’t have time to be talking about him. What’s wrong with his team, his family, is the key issue here and why he’s borderline hyperventilating.
Makau lied when he asked about his ohana being fine—Danny is in the ICU from a plane crash and they didn’t tell him. Something about that sits wrong. Even for their track record.
“Yes, you do.” Makau’s tone is final, if a little quiet.
“Okay.” Steve isn’t strong enough to keep up the grip and slumps back onto the pillows. The room spins in time with those gut bowling balls. “But it’s fixable, right? The surgery patched me up, no foul.”
Makau hesitates.
“Doc.” Steve’s heartrate jumps, an audible, palpable sensation, and Steve feels strangely naked that his nervous system responses should be so exposed.
“We almost lost you on the table.” Makau hands Steve his chart from the end of the bed, thicker than his thumb and chock full of post-op notes. “Your liver was failing. Only a donor could save your life once it crossed a point of no return, a viable match with healthy liver tissue from which to regrow yours. Livers can regenerate, you know.”
These words are scrambled too, medical jargon and twenty-five cent terms too complex for his mind to retain longer than a few seconds. Too many syllables. Too many potential worst case scenarios. No, he did not know that and like the earlier conversation, he doesn’t much care.
It’s Steve chart header that jumps out at him:
‘Allograft to the victim’s liver, double surgery.’
Surgery.
Double surgery.
Last of all—a signature on the consent page. Just a squiggle, a capital D followed by a few vowels and a garbled mess of a last name that starts with a W. It’s a sloppy W, the person’s hand most definitely shaking while signing, its peaks wonky like a broken rollercoaster.
The steamroller snuffs out inside Steve’s body once the words finish ricocheting around his thoughts. Icy, crystallized waves lap up what little heat remains. It creates steam, a pressure inside Steve’s chest that has nothing to do with bullets or surgery or morphine.
The pressure begins to climb his esophagus, so he swallows it back.
Nothing can stop a sudden shrill ringing, however. Steve distantly wonders if his heart has actually stopped, flatlining for the world to hear. It’s an all-encompassing sound. Thinking is impossible over the sound, his whole body locked in an earth quake.
‘Don’t you die on me!’ Danny had sounded so scared.
“Commander!”
Now Steve feels everything, as if the dam of fuzzy medicated bliss broke open with one sweep of his eyes over Danny’s signature: the scratch of starched cotton, disinfectant stinging at the back of his sinuses, inflamed flesh searing in micro flashes, the PA calling for another nurse, heart monitor beeping…beeping, beeping, beepingbeepingbeeping—
“Steve!”
Only at Makau’s shout does Steve realize he’s on his knees on the cold linoleum, leads half torn off, front of his Johnny gown splotched with red. He sinks down farther, one hand braced on the arm Makau has wrapped around the front of his torso, the other on the floor.
Makau may be in shape—but even he isn’t strong enough to stop Steve when he’s on a mission. Steve pushes at the restraining arm.
“Where is he?” Steve growls and almost doesn’t recognize his own voice.
“Commander—”
“I won’t ask again.” Steve pants, coughing on his own spit, and feels a few lonely tears of pain and anger slip across the bridge of his nose. The ringing in his ears fades enough for him to hear the ragged sound of his own breathing. “Tell me he didn’t.”
Makau’s face falls, despite the curl of a half smile still on his lips. “I’m afraid he did.”
“He…” The pressure threatens to make a nuclear appearance. Steve fights it with everything he has, lost in a vertigo tailspin. He may have lost everything, but he’s not about to yield this bit of his dignity. Only Danny gets to see that. “He really went under the knife? Just like that?”
“Lucky thing, too,” says Makau. “It would’ve taken too long to test your other team members. Daniel knowing already that his blood type is the same as yours saved time…saved your life.”
“Danny.”
“Hmm?”
Steve kneads a hand into his chest. “He likes to be called Danny.”
This is important. It is vitally important, though Steve can’t articulate why.
Makau takes the correction in stride, mostly because he’s trying to tug Steve to his feet and back into bed. “Alright. Danny, then. Now will you stop trying to pull a Shawshank?”
At some point during Steve’s well-intentioned yet undignified spill to the floor, nurses have rushed in, their hands under his arms to prepare for reattaching leads. His blood seeps in warm webs down his stomach. The sensation makes him shiver where it meets cool skin, a judder around his belly button and ribcage.
Steve shakes his head. “Not yet. I want to see him.”
‘Want’ would better be translated ‘move heaven earth to.’ Steve figures this unspoken threat is obvious. He’ll shove every last one of them out of the way if he has to, public image and courtesy be damned.
“You’re not strong enough,” Makau protests. Also without missing a beat. “Even a jaunt in a wheelchair could reopen all the hard work I just did on those sutures.”
“If you won’t take me to him…” Steve scrambles. “…then I want him moved in here.”
“Why?”
Opening his mouth, Steve almost yells, we’re a package deal, that’s why.
He swallows the words back just in time. They’re true, and they’re right, but like his rampaging pulse he doesn’t want the world hearing it just yet. Even if the world consists of only three nurses and a peeved off trauma surgeon for now.
“Please, Doc. Last time I saw Danny, we were being shot out of the sky.” He forces his hostile posture to relax. “I need to see for myself that he’s okay.”
“You would go through all this trouble, just to be near your partner?”
Steve glares Makau dead in the eye. His tone rivals steel. “Yes.”
Makau just stares for a moment, the first time Steve’s seen him caught off guard. He holds a gauze pad to Steve’s incision site. The gentle pressure brings more tears to Steve’s eyes but he won’t let himself turn away.
“It’s not protocol.” Makau’s voice has gone even quieter, reverent. “Our ICU rooms are designed to accommodate one patient at a time. That’s why he’s down the hall in his own suite, like you.”
Steve spies a flicker in the doctor’s eyes. “But they can hold up to three, no?”
Makau’s smile finally cracks the other side of his face, though he looks near tears himself. He speaks to someone over his shoulder without looking away from Steve. “Ms. Edwards, could you transfer Detective Williams into this room?”
The nurse looks skeptical. “Right away, doctor.”
Steve sags against Makau the minute she’s out the door. Now that he’s had his way, his body crashes from the abrupt adrenaline surge. He’s still shaking, but they get him on the bed with little hassle.
“Wait.” Steve resists their attempts to lay him back.
Makau huffs in irritation. “Steve, we’re doing what you asked. He’s on his way.”
“I know, and thank you, but just…let me sit for a second.”
To his credit, the doctor simply sighs and compromises—he doesn’t let Steve sit in the visitor’s chair, but he does prop Steve on the edge of his bed instead of reclining. He even holds onto Steve’s shoulder to stop the swaying.
When the IV is re-inserted, Steve loses a few minutes to the rush of morphine, its prickly cycle down his toes and back up his sides. This turns out to be just as well, since transporting a critical patient, even thirty feet down a hallway, is apparently much more involved than simply wheeling Danny through the door.
A team of no less than four nurses move as a unit, one pushing along the IV pole, another with a portable pulse oximeter, one carefully maneuvering a tank, and the lead one steering the bed. Steve sucks in gulps from his own oxygen mask while they complete their choreographed dance getting everything in place.
It takes a full five minutes before they step back and disperse enough for Steve to see Danny’s face.
Makau, still sitting at Steve’s side, catches his breathing hitch. “Commander? Are you alright?”
Steve fights the pressure where it mushroom clouds behind his eyes. “How long since he last woke up?”
Makau rubs at his eyes, also a first. Steve straightens in alarm.
“He hasn’t, really,” the doctor admits. “It’s nothing to be concerned about. We knew this might happen with him as an at risk patient, especially since he was a recent bone marrow donor and he metabolized the anaesthetic slower than you. He opened his eyes for a few minutes this afternoon and nodded to answer my questions. That’s it for now.”
“It’ll help with his recovery,” says Steve, “him being in here with me.”
Makau hums. “His recovery…or yours?”
Steve’s throat begins to ache. A harsh, relentless ache that has nothing to do with his recent intubation.
Makau pats his shoulder before standing. “Fifteen minutes, Steve. We’ll give you two some privacy. Then you sleep, understood?”
Steve doesn’t remember nodding. He doesn’t remember if he said anything or who closed the door. His eyes are locked on Danny’s face, grey as an ice rink and completely void of expression.
Come to think of it, Steve’s not sure he can remember a time since they met that he’s not looking at Danny. He’s the firefly in every room, bright and spry and stinging.
They didn’t arrange the beds close enough for Steve to reach out and touch Danny, a completely unacceptable fact.
Steve can’t fathom a world where he’s not permitted to place a hand on Danny’s back or poke his side or pat his knee. Such a thing is too terrible to contemplate.
“Danny, Danny, Danny…”
Steve whispers under his breath while breaking the rules and sitting in the visitor’s chair after all. He flips it around so it faces Danny’s bed instead of his own. With his knees trembling and long since numb, he falls into it. A heavy, lost thing.
The pressure breaks right when Steve does.
The first sob comes out of nowhere, but the rest follow at a marching pace that Steve couldn’t hope to stop if he tried. They wrench up through his battered body. One at a time, painful not just because they tug at his stiches—but because he cannot fathom what’s happened.
“That’s my job, Danny.” Steve’s oxygen mask fogs. “Taking the hits is my thing, not yours.”
It’s as if someone has deliberately fortified his access to Danny, a macabre recrimination against Steve’s carelessness: Danny’s fingers are wrapped in tape and plastic tubes and a host of wires. The backs of his hands are blue, cracked in places with ugly purple splotches running up his arms. Steve’s hand hovers for a split second, unsure if he should make contact. He doesn’t want to cause Danny any more pain than he already has.
He’s here because of me. If not for the liver, Steve thinks, then because he didn’t spot the enemy helicopter in time to divert their course.
Forget the bowling balls—the entire world spins in drunken pirouettes.
Everything except for Danny.
He is the one stable thing that won’t move, flat out refuses to move, in Steve’s life and it grants him the courage to clasp the bruised fingers. Though they feel limp, unexpressive like Danny’s face, they’re warm. Danny is alive and here and the island of his soul, however quiet at the moment, grounds Steve too.
“Why’d you do that, huh?” Hot tears cut through the grit on Steve’s face, the tired folds of skin that feel like they’ve aged ten years since he read Danny’s signature. “Why’d you risk yourself? You’ve got people who need you.”
Danny’s heart monitor is a lot more sedate than Steve’s. He watches its pointy ups and swoops with urgent eyes. After a minute of this, his breathing starts to match Danny’s. Slowing down. Sounding human. Danny’s hair splays in a messy halo around his head on the pillow, and for some reason it’s the most heartbreaking thing Steve has seen all day.
“You’re an idiot, you know that?”
Steve’s tears wet their twined hands.
“I can’t really say thank you, even though I know I should. I can’t wrap my head around you doing this, putting so much on the line for me. I’m angry, Danny. Furious as hell and confused and…”
And I’m sorry. None of this should be happening.
Nothing changes on Danny’s face at this emotional admission, of course, unconscious as he is.
But Steve thinks about how much his partner gambled—just to save his sorry life—and something white hot, blistering wells up inside his heart. It’s in his mouth, his ears, the thumping piston of his lungs, his sweaty elbows, that pulsing spot on the bullseye of his chest, right at the top of the liver incision…
The feeling almost makes him vomit, a nausea that somehow still brings a grin to his face.
Danny’s whole appearance is changed in this one thunderclap instant. As if someone placed new prescription lenses on Steve’s eyes.
Steve leans forward and indulges himself, forehead pressing on the back of Danny’s hand. No one is around to see and even if they are, well, they’re a package deal. Few things in life are as obvious and sure for Steve as this fact.
An artery running along the side of Danny’s thumb beats against Steve’s skin and chases away his headache.
And tagging along with this overwhelming flood is realization, that Steve doesn’t have to imagine a world where he can’t touch Danny. Such was his life until seven years ago.
A life he wouldn’t go back to now for all the money in the world. Not even for the promise of getting to be with his father again.
I wouldn’t trade it.
The truth of it hurts, in the best way possible. Steve’s fingertips buzz where they stroke Danny’s hand. Maybe Danny transplanted himself into the organ of Steve’s lonely days long before yesterday, so long ago that neither of them noticed it.
Steve leans back in the chair, hand white knuckled around Danny’s smaller one. He engulfs it in both of his own. “I love you too, alright? I love you, so you can shut up about it now with these big, scary gestures.”
He can practically hear Danny’s rebuttal, how super SEALs are giant hypocrites on the best of days. Not to mention stingy.
Steve is too wrung out for a laugh, but the thought of what Danny will say to all this unwinds the last coil sprung tightly inside his body. Enough that he slumps against the bed and rests his head next to their hands.
“You know, I read a little bit of Makau’s chart notes on transplantation.” Steve’s eyelashes are clumped with tears, face sticky, body throbbing in about twenty different places. But the rise and fall of Danny’s chest is a dulcet lullaby. His whisper fades to a breath. “About how the body accepts new tissue and regrows it as part of its own system…”
Danny’s eyes roam under his lids in conjunction with the heart monitor picking up speed, the most activity Steve’s seen from him so far. He runs a thumb over Danny’s wrist. His partner’s eyes stop moving, heartrate settled, and Steve smiles.
“You can deny it all you want, Danny, but Hawaii is home now.” His eyes droop. “And I’m glad you…glad you healed with us…”
He loses the battle to stay awake just as Danny graduates from unconsciousness to real sleep, his breathing pattern rebooting to a different rhythm and his fingers twitching. The two men fall asleep together, heartbeats metronomic in the hushed space between their palms.
Danny’s index loops around Steve’s thumb.
Right where it should be.