Chapter Text
The next time Danny wakes, he’s alone, and it’s daylight.
For the longest second, he’s convinced it was just another dream, an uncannily vivid product of exhaustion and too much junk food, but he is naked, and sticky in places, and the air in the room is rich with the scent of sex and Steve’s sandalwood cologne, and, god, last night—
He presses his face into the pillow and inhales, and it smells like Steve, like them both, and—
He’s in the car in fifteen minutes, most of which he spends going through his house to ascertain Steve’s not tucked in some corner suffering, hurtling down the road to Steve’s house with his lights on—but is that even where he is, where the hell did he get to, why would he leave like that—while he waits for Steve to pick up the phone.
“Hey, Detective,” Junior says, and Danny almost plows into a minivan checking whom it is his goofy thumbs elected to call. “The commander’s just on the other phone. He said to tell you he’ll meet you here at HQ.”
“He’s there already?” Danny asks stupidly.
“Yeah. Been here a half hour or so.”
Panic gives way to anger. “Is he all right?”
“Yeah,” Junior says, and sounds puzzled. “Why wouldn’t he be?”
Why wouldn’t he be, he asks, like overnight the world didn’t tilt. “I’ll be there in a few.”
In his haste, he hits the curb pulling into the parking lot, and the sharp jolt does nothing to ease the churning in his gut, makes images of the previous night intrude, and when he looks up, he finds a big black truck careening past him—Steve.
Danny lays on the brake, hesitates a second to decide whether he should pull a u-turn or go around, and that’s when his passenger door is flung open.
He whirls around, inexplicably expecting Kono but finding Tani instead, in the process of folding herself down into his passenger seat. “Hey, what’s up? McGarrett wants us to go down to the morgue and talk to Noelani about some dead lady.”
Danny has a million questions, none of which are appropriate or answerable at this juncture. The little curl of giddy anticipation in his stomach, the one for Steve, is raw again, like he used to feel, the first couple of years. That scab Danny spent years building up, gone in twenty minutes. God, Steve’s eyes last night though, the way he clung to Danny, pushed back into him, like he wanted to blur the lines between them. What’s wrong, something must be wrong, why else—
“Are we doing this or what?” Tani asks.
Danny snaps out of it. He swings the car around and back on the road. Traffic is a pain in the ass, as it usually is at this hour, and distracts Danny enough to be at least somewhat functional.
“Hey, you okay?” Tani asks when they turn into the morgue parking lot.
“Yeah,” Danny says. “Why?”
“You haven’t said a word the whole way, even when that Miata cut you off. It’s not like you at all.”
Danny ignores the slight jab. “Haven’t had coffee yet.”
“Why didn’t you say? We could’ve got some on the way.”
Danny forgoes answering her for craning his neck, looking for Steve’s stupid truck in the lot. “Where the hell is he?”
“Who?”
Jesus, Danny’s not going to make it today. “McGarrett. Didn’t you say he was going to meet us here?”
She scowls at his tone. “No, I said he wants us to come here. He has a meeting somewhere else.”
With his phone in his hand, Danny strides into the building, already busy tapping on Steve’s name. Sure enough, he’s sent to voicemail. “Steve. Call me. As soon as you get this, please, call me, we need to talk.”
“Ooh, are mom and dad fighting?” Tani coos behind him and Danny’s had it.
He spins around and holds up his hands, letting his expression reflect his lack of patience. “Not today. Okay, Tani? Can you do me that favor, please, and not do this, today?”
Tani blinks and flinches back. “All right. God, did you get punched out of bed or something? Clearly this is not just the wrong side type of a situation.”
Danny grits his teeth and walks on. Noelani greets them outside her exam room with masks, and, of course, it’s going to be that kind of a day.
—
“Thirty-eight year old female, found down by her landlord with a heroin syringe in her arm after neighbors complained of the smell,” Noelani narrates, over the disfigured, bloated corpse. Danny’s mask does not entirely block the reek of cold rot. “On first glance, my assistant ME thought it was a self-inflicted overdose, but he was wrong; it’s a homicide.”
Danny’s phone buzzes. He begins digging it out.
“The heroin was administered after she received the blunt force trauma to the head, which is the actual cause of death.”
“How do you know?” Tani asks.
I’m in a meeting, Steve’s texted. I’ll call you.
Danny grits his teeth against the flare of fury and forces himself to pay attention. Noelani is gesturing at something on her screen, “—enough to account for an overdose. Besides, she only has the one injection mark, and no other indicators of substance abuse. I doubt this woman’s ever used i.v. drugs before.”
“What kind of tool do you think inflicted the head wound?” Danny asks.
“Probably the ground,” Noelani says.
“It couldn’t have been a fall?”
Noelani shrugs. “Ironically, if they hadn’t tried to make it look like an overdose led to her fall, that is exactly what I would’ve thought.”
“Okay, so someone bashed this lady’s head into the ground and then tried to cover it up poorly. What’s it got to do with us?” Tani asks.
Noelani looks at them both, frowning. “McGarrett has a standing order to alert Five-0 to any crime on the island that involves Colombian nationals, and she is one. Angela Fuentes, per her finger prints, here on an expired tourist visa. Sergeant Lukela’s people found a fake ID on her, Mary Landau, at her place of residence.”
The stench of that prison, the fear of suffocation when they were on him, Steve catching him when his knees buckled getting out of the plane—Steve tucking in tight against him last night to sleep, his face hot and sweaty against the crook of Danny’s neck, pressing in like he wanted to crawl into Danny—fuck, fuck. Danny breathes, twists his lips down to hide the expression that wants to creep out. He’s never been more grateful to be wearing a mask.
“Okay, very good, where the hell is he then?” he mutters.
“He said as our best investigator, you’re in charge.”
Danny glares at Tani. “He didn’t say that.”
Her eyebrows furrow over her mask. “I swear he did. Direct quote.”
What the fuck? Danny knows Steve appreciates him, respects his skills as a police officer, but openly acknowledging it like that? Dread flutters low in his gut. Something has to be wrong, very wrong. “Anything else?” he barks at Noelani, unsettled.
Her eyebrows twitch but she visibly decides not to engage. “I don’t know if it’s relevant or not, but it looks like she’s been shot before, probably at least several years ago.” She lifts the sheet covering the body and points at the right side of Angela’s chest where two dime-sized circles of jagged scar stand out pale against the lividity. They look exactly like Danny’s. “And another one in her thigh. She appears to have received appropriate medical treatment for both.”
“Okay.” Danny holds eye contact a little longer with her, in silent apology. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome, Detective.”
“So where do we start?” Tani asks.