Work Text:
Steve's phone rings; he digs it out of the pocket of his jeans and puts it to his ear, hears a voice drawl, “Hello, Steve.” Steve's not at all surprised by who it is; doesn't expect the shock of the elevator grinding to a halt and spares a moment to be glad that the safety's still on his gun when he stumbles back against the wall; mumbles son of a bitch when he jars the still-healing stitches in his shoulder.
"I never get used to these American greetings," Hesse says.
Steve collects himself, reholsters his gun and wedges the phone between his ear and his good shoulder. "Hello, Viktor," he says, gauging the distance to the ceiling and the emergency hatch. The walls of the elevator are almost smooth, with only thin gaps between the faux wood panels, but he should be able to haul himself up. The panel over the door tells him that he's stuck between floors 32 and 33, two floors below where Chin thought Hesse was staying. "Nice to hear from you again."
"Not even an attempt at sincerity." Hesse sounds almost bored, the rounded edges of his vowels made tinny by the phone line. "And I wouldn't try that, if I were you."
Steve pauses, the tips of his fingers against the hatch. "Let me guess—you're going to tell me why."
"There's a bomb on the other side of that hatch," Hesse says. "With a pressure trigger, for nostalgia's sake. You try to get out, you won't just blow yourself to kingdom come—you'll take out all those nice people asleep on the floors around you."
Steve swallows, his mouth gone suddenly dry. He remembers Chin kneeling on the ground, device wrapped around his neck and his hair curling damp and dark with sweat; remembers the look on Kono's face, the tight lines of fear and tension around her mouth and eyes. There's a chance Hesse is bluffing, but the timing of the elevator outage argues against that; Steve drops carefully back to the ground, eyes still on the ceiling. "What do you want?"
"I'd say ten million dollars," Hesse says, "but I don't think you'd believe me."
"Go fuck yourself," Steve says, jaw tight. He's trapped in a space four feet by six feet by seven feet; he wants to punch the wall, but he can't.
"Manners," Hesse says. In the background, Steve can hear the dull roar of traffic. Wherever Hesse is, he's not inside the hotel. Maybe near a freeway, but it could just be a street of heavy traffic. "Well, I'd say it's been nice chatting, but that would be a lie." His voice sharpens suddenly. "Here's the deal. I get off this island without your people trying to stop me, there's a chance you'll live."
"You suck at negotiating." Steve eyes the elevator doors, wonders if there's a way to pry them open gently enough that it doesn't set off the trigger.
"Pot, kettle," Hesse says, and hangs up.
There's a space of about thirty seconds, and then Steve's phone rings again. He doesn't have to check the screen to know that it's Danny. "Yeah?"
"Okay," Danny says, words rapid-fire enough to make Steve sigh. Danny talking this quickly is never a good sign. "Okay, I am working on giving you the benefit of the doubt here. I am working on developing the trusting part of my nature, because it's either that or stroke the fuck out. But I'm sure you'll forgive me for asking you this, I'm sure you'll forgive me for having my doubts when I receive an enigmatic phone call from Interpol's Most Wanted asshole—did you just go after Viktor Hesse by yourself when I explicitly told you not to? Repeatedly? When I used words of no more than two syllables at the very most, and Kono promised real nicely that she would shoot you in the kneecaps?"
Steve thinks very hard about how to answer that, but Danny has this weird ability to pick up on when Steve's lying about bodily tackling suspects, or knowing what Miranda rights are, or driving a car off a cliff. (In Steve's defence, that was one time, and it was a small cliff, and the car's suspension still works. Mostly.) He settles on saying, "Hi, Danny?"
There's a muffled sound which could be that vein in Danny's forehead popping, and then Danny says, "Here, you speak to him, because I swear to God I—"
After a second or two, Kono comes on the line. "Hey, boss. What's up?" Distantly, in the background, Steve can hear Danny using language that's both very terse and very creative.
Steve fills her in while he paces as much as he's able. His steps are small and overly careful; his gaze is pulled constantly back up towards the ceiling, and he can feel the back of his t-shirt slowly grow sweat-damp. Step, step, turn, and he tries to concentrate on that, on the almost palpable sense of Kono's focus as she listens to him. When he finishes, she says suspiciously, "Did you just tell me all this so I'd be the one to tell Danny, and not you?"
"Tell Danny what?" Danny says, loud enough to hear clearly. Chin's comments are quieter, but Steve can tell from his tone of patient exasperation that he's probably reminding Kono and Danny about Hesse, and the prison escape, and why this is not quite the time to be indulging in Round 389 of Intervening in Steve's Campaign to Give Danny an Aneurysm.
"I'll alert HPD," Kono continues, ignoring the bickering going on around her, "have them put a watch on the airport and the private landing strips. They already have a list of Hesse's known aliases. We'll head down to the docks—ships are probably an easier way for him to get off the island."
"Okay," Steve says; and then, because he can't think of anything else to say to her, because there's useless adrenaline pumping in his veins, he ends the call and sits down gingerly on the floor. He dials 411, gets put through to the hotel's front desk, and tells the perky-sounding woman who answers that they've got a small problem and maybe they might want to evacuate. She goes from perky to panicked in record time, but dimly through the walls Steve can hear the sounds of the fire alarm going off, shouts and running feet in the corridors. Nothing else to do for a while but wait. He tilts his head back, rests it against the elevator wall and looks up at the ceiling hatch; hopes that Danny's finally gone with Steve's suggestion that speed limits should be regarded as little more than guidelines.
***
Steve's least favourite part of the military was always 'hurry up and wait.' The clock on his cell phone tells him he's been waiting for five minute; it already feels like too long without anything to do. He rests the phone on his left knee, his handgun on his right, and waits. It's tough. He knows his team, knows they're good people, knows he has to rely on them. But Steve knows himself, knows that patience has never been his strong suit—knows that's why he's here; knows that's why Danny's going to give him shit later, why Chin's going to raise his eyebrows in a way that means dumb idea; knows that if Mary were here, she'd be laughing so hard she couldn't breathe.
He looks down at the phone and considers calling her for a moment. There's a temptation there to tell her that he's gone and done something impulsive that might just be more misguided than being eighteen and getting tattoos in the hope that it would make his father talk to him; that he might recognise a certain validity to her observation of You thought that would help? Jesus, Steve, to her continual refrain of Steve, you're my brother, but you're a fucking idiot. His thumb hovers over M. in his contacts list for a long time, but he rejects the idea. He heard his father die; he's not going to put Mary through something similar, just because he wants to hear her voice.
Instead he thinks of the evaluations he got his first year in the navy: "Ensign Steven J. McGarrett is a promising young officer, but has a tendency to throw himself into things without considering the consequences. Likes to do things the hard way."
He thinks of the evaluations he got when he started his training with the SEALs. His instructors there wrote pretty much the exact same thing; the only difference was they saw that as an asset instead of a disadvantage.
He thinks of what Danny is liable to write when he gets around to doing the paperwork for this case, and sighs heavily.
Thursdays.
***
Twenty-three minutes and counting, and his phone rings again.
"Hey," Steve says.
"Do not hey me, you jackass," Danny says. He sounds freaked out but not actively homicidal, which tells Steve that he's worried, that he hasn't got a solid lead on Hesse, but that he hasn't yet lost him for certain. "Do you know what I've had to go through for the sake of your sorry ass?"
"Um," Steve says, because Danny's asked him this question a lot over the past year, and it seems like there's a whole range of possible answers. Steve rarely picks the right one.
Before he can settle on an answer, Danny continues, "Because it was not enough that on Sunday, you had to go drive my car, my car, off a cliff—and no, now is not the time to tell me that it was just a small cliff, Danny, because that is not the kind of mitigation I'm interested in—"
Steve closes his mouth.
"—No, no, because on Thursday you have to go decide that you want to be held hostage inside a hotel elevator by a bomb-wielding, megalomaniacal leprechaun. And do I have a vehicle in which to chase said megalomaniac? No, no I do not. So you know how I managed to get down to the docks here?"
"No, Danny," Steve says obediently.
"By sitting behind Chin on his motorbike and holding on for dear life, because do you know what is not a safe mode of transportation, Steve?"
"No, Danny," Steve says, though he can probably guess.
"A motorbike," Danny says. Steve's glad that spittle can't be transmitted over a phone line. "Here, you talk to him."
"Hey, Chin," Steve says.
"Steve," Chin says, and it's nice to have a voice of calm competence in his ear. Not that Danny's not competent, he's just rarely… calm. Steve suspects it's because he's from Jersey.
"You have a lead?"
"Maybe," Chin says. "Kono's talking with a guy right now."
Steve considers. "And when you say 'talking', you mean…"
"I probably shouldn't tell you," Chin says. "Plausible deniability."
"Is it like the thing with the dog?"
Chin hesitates for a moment then says, "Really, you don't want to know. You doing okay?"
"Fine," Steve says. "Peachy. Just great." He shifts a little, grimaces as he feels a thin trickle of sweat run down his back. The elevator is starting to feel uncomfortably hot, even for someone born and bred in Hawaii's warmth. The lights have stayed on in the elevator, but Steve's starting to think that Hesse shut down the environmental controls when he stopped the elevator's movement. Four feet by six feet by seven feet. 168 cubic feet. Those numbers aren't getting any more comforting.
"No need to get sarcastic with me, brah," Chin says. "We'll have you out soon enough and—hey, cuz, that's not—"
The line goes dead, and Steve sighs. If anyone can get him out of here, his team can; Steve knows that. Danny's ferocious and Chin's smart and Kono is frankly a little terrifying when she's got her hands on a sniper rifle. They're good people, his team. He's just got to trust them to have his back.
***
Steve sets his gun and phone on the suspiciously stained orange carpeting, and empties out the pockets of his cargo pants. He has two empty bullet casings, a stick of gum, two Batman band aids (because Batman is awesome, and because Danny says he has to stop going out on cases without taking adequate medical supplies), a Swiss army knife (because once a boy scout, always a boy scout), forty three cents and a Canadian nickel, a bigger knife, and the head of a very small doll belonging to Gracie. Not ideal supplies for escaping from a stalled elevator which has a bomb strapped to it, but Steve's been trained to work with what he's got. That, and how to jump from a plane at 35,000 feet, free-fall to a low altitude and land in a place that he's absolutely not allowed to identify as North Korea, but he figures that skill set is probably not going to come in so useful here.
He eyes the elevator doors. They're sturdy looking, made to resist damage, and ordinarily Steve would approve of that. Attempting to pry them open with brute force alone would probably set off the trigger, but if he can get the blade of his knife between them, he might be able to work enough space to get some fresh air inside. It's warm enough in the elevator now that his shirt is drenched with sweat, so he yanks it off, tosses the damp cotton on the floor. He starts with the thin blade of his Swiss army knife, carefully working it into the hairline crack between the doors. It's not easy; he can feel the muscles in his back and shoulders protesting, still a little stiff from Sunday's unexpected trip over that cliff, but he grits his teeth and keeps at it.
By the time Hesse calls him, seventeen minutes later, Steve has managed to get the doors open enough to wedge the head of Gracie's doll between them. He's not able to see any daylight through the crack, so he figures he must be exactly between floors, but he's not exploded and there's a faint draft of cool, fresh air coming into the elevator, so he counts it as a win. Seeing the doll's head get squashed like that is a little disturbing, but Steve figures every soldier has to be willing to give up his or her life in the line of duty; plus looking at something disturbing while talking to Hesse seems kind of fitting.
"What?" Steve says. He doesn't have much of an incentive to aim for civility right now. He rests his forehead against the doors, sucks in a breath, reminds himself that he can't punch the door.
"We had a deal," Hesse says. His accent gets thicker when he's angry, his vowels curling in on themselves. "You might get to live if your people don't come after me."
"No," Steve says, straightening up slowly. If Hesse knows the others are trailing him but he's still able to call Steve, that must mean he has line of sight on them. Steve's breath hiccups; his pulse stutters. Shit. Shit. This is why you never ask your team to go out on a limb for your sake when there’s a mission on the line; this is why Steve always wants to take point. "You said we had a deal. If I remember right, I told you to fuck off."
"The charming manners are a familial thing, I take it." Steve hears a familiar sound—a gun being cocked—and his nails dig unbidden into the palm of his free hand. "I have a good mind to kill you right now—but maybe first I'm going to shoot your boyfriend through the head and let you listen to him dying. I mean, it's all well and good for him to go out wearing a kevlar vest, isn't it? But when you combine a high-powered rifle and a clear head shot, well—"
"Don't—" Steve doesn't recognise his own voice, which cracks strangely at the thought of Danny dying—of Danny being murdered for his sake. "Don't," he says, because there's hardly a night goes by when he doesn't hear the gunshot that took his father all over again; because he's almost ready to break years of training; because one set of instincts is warring with another and he’s this close to pleading with Hesse, ready to offer whatever it takes.
"Listen up, Steve," Hesse says, and then there's the sound of a shot and Steve feels like throwing up. He doesn't dare close his eyes, because he knows if he does he'll see Danny lying there on the ground, dark blood soaking into bright hair, and Jesus Christ, who's going to tell Gracie—Danny—
In his ear, Hesse is still speaking—but then Steve blinks and realises that it's not Hesse's voice he's hearing at all. "Kono?"
"Hey, boss!" she says, sounding upbeat. Steve can tell that she's grinning ear to ear. "I shot him through the neck this time! You okay?"
"I—" Steve blinks, relief like the best drug flooding through his system. They're okay; they're all okay, and Hesse is dead, and he's not going to have to break the news to Rachel and Gracie that something happened to Danny and it was all his fault. "I'm. Yeah. Have I told you lately that you're fantastic?"
"Well, I was aiming for his head," Kono says. There's a dull thudding sound, as if she's just aimed a sharp kick at the corpse. Steve probably shouldn't ask about that; he's a little vague on the specifics, but he's pretty sure Danny would frown on things like kicking a convict's corpse. "But I'll take the win. And if you want to give me the thumbs up on the next departmental review, that'd be awesome."
"Totally," Steve says, feeling the first faint edges of exhaustion hit him as the adrenaline starts to ebb from his system. "I'll get you named Most Valued Player and put you down for a raise, how's that sound? Danny can do the paperwork."
"Fine," Kono says, "but maybe you should get the next round of drinks, too. And don't trick Danny into paying for them, either."
"Sure," Steve says, "okay," though he knows that last promise is a total lie. Danny's very amenable to paying for stuff if you tell him that you forgot your wallet—though only after he's got a quart or three of tequila inside him.
There's a moment of silence on the other end of the line, and then Kono makes a low noise of triumph. "Okay," she says, "I've got the detonator. Disarmed it—Chin called the bomb squad while we were heading over here, they should be in position in the hotel right now, but you should probably wait until they get the device off the elevator before you get out of there, okay? Bomb squad last time said those things are temperamental. We're on our way."
She's barely finished speaking when, in the background, Steve hears a familiar whumph, followed swiftly by the pattering noise of debris on concrete. He frowns. "What just blew up?"
"Um," Kono says, in the carefully casual tone she quickly learned to adopt when disavowing all knowledge of extensive property damage. "A cargo ship? But don't worry. It was a small one, full of heroin. The governor won't yell at you. Probably. Um."
Steve rubs at his forehead. "Chin and Danny are okay, right?"
"They're fine!" Kono says brightly, "and absolutely, totally not responsible for that explosion."
"Okay." Steve is perfectly willing to accept that as a full and unambiguous explanation. "See you in twenty minutes?"
"Fifteen, tops," Kono says.
***
Almost as soon as Kono hangs up, Steve hears voices echoing in the elevator shaft overhead. He thinks some of them sound familiar—must be the bomb squad moving into position. "Velasquez? That you?"
"It's Bob's day off, McGarrett," another voice calls back. Laura, Steve thinks her name is. He likes her. She's short, with a mane of bright red curls; put in some time in Afghanistan and says she's got a soft spot for Steve because all the overtime she's put in since he set up Five-Oh has helped pay off a good chunk of her mortgage. "You just sit tight. We're going to make sure the bomb's stable and fully deactivated before we get you out of there, okay?"
"Sure," Steve says, and gives some serious consideration as to whether or not he'll be able to use his Swiss army knife to pry the doors open the rest of the way now. He eyes the door. Gracie's decapitated, smushed doll head stares back at him, and Steve winces. He has a feeling he has an apologetic trip to Toys 'R' Us in his future. He's still thinking about it five minutes later, when the low hum of voices overhead gets overpowered by a new one.
"What the fuck, Steve?"
Steve braces himself. "Danny?" he calls back.
"Do not Danny me! Do not!" Danny says, and at least Steve is reassured that Danny didn't inhale too much smoke when that cargo ship went up. His lungs are working just fine. "I have told you to stop running into life-or-death situations! I have written you a goddamn memo, you Neanderthal throwback, and stuck it to your fridge—to wit, do not run after a homicidal asshole without backup! Or preparation! Or sometimes even a pair of actual, honest-to-god boxers!"
That isn't entirely fair, Steve thinks. "I brought the Batman bandaids?"
He hears Danny say something, though Steve can't quite make out what, and then Laura snorts, as if she's amused. She sounds closer than before; Steve guesses she's been lowered on a zip-line to investigate the bomb. "They might convict," she says, "but don't worry, you'd probably just get probation."
"I can hear you, you know," Steve points out.
"Oh, I know," Laura says cheerfully. "Okay, looks like it's definitely dead. I'm going to take it back up with me just to be sure, get it out of the way, then we'll restart the elevator and let you finish your journey, Commander."
"Yay," Steve says.
There's another short wait, three to four minutes tops, and then the elevator gives a great shudder and starts to move again. Steve has time to gather up his stuff and stick it back into his pockets, to reholster his gun and pick up his t-shirt and cell phone, before the elevator bings. The doors open to reveal half a dozen members of the bomb squad, in full hazard gear; Chin, who says nothing, but has a weary look on his face that clearly says I am too old for this shit; Kono, who's grinning, and carrying a rifle that's at least as tall as she is; and Danny, who is smeared with soot and what Steve very much hopes is someone else's blood. Danny, who is grim faced, who takes one look at him and says, "Oh, of course you took your shirt off. Crazy bastard."
***
Danny yells at him while Steve debriefs the bomb squad, while he wearily holds a phone to his ear and listens to the governor yell at him and tell him she's garnishing his wages for the next forever, while he tells Chin he's glad he didn't get blown up and Kono that he's very glad she's a badass with a sniper rifle, while he walks down thirty-five flights of stairs because there's not a chance in hell that he's getting back in an elevator right now, while he drives back to headquarters. Every time that Steve thinks he's finally run out of things to say, it turns out that Danny's just drawing breath for another round. Say what you might about Jersey, Steve thinks—the state does at least seem to give its people a very broad vocabulary.
"Well?" Danny says while Steve digs around in the drawers of his desk and finds a new shirt. He sniffs it and isn't repulsed; doesn't immediately see any bloodstains; shrugs it on. "Aren't you going to say anything?"
"I—" Steve says, and pauses, and looks up at Danny. Danny looks like fifteen separate kinds of shit, looks like he could sleep standing up; there are dark circles under his eyes and his hair's a mess and there is absolutely no way in hell that he's ever going to be able to wear that shirt or that tie again. Steve thinks of what could have been; of what was, for the space of thirty agonising seconds. "I'm glad you're okay."
Danny opens his mouth, then closes it, then seems to visibly deflate, like a balloon that's been popped. "Now, see, why do you got to go do that?"
Steve's confused. "Do what?"
"Act like a human," Danny snaps, spreading his arms wide. "Most of the time you act like, I don't even know, Mork's backward cousin who's been sent here to figure out the species and is failing spectacularly. You think throwing yourself into the line of small arms fire is a mainstream sport, your idea of what dancing is is frankly embarrassing to anyone in the vicinity, you eat pineapple on absolutely everything—"
Steve shuffles from foot to foot. "Pineapple is delicious," he mumbles.
"—and then every now and then you go and do something that makes me think you're not actually an aesthetically-pleasing robot that came pre-programmed with several martial arts subroutines. It is more than a little confusing, my friend!"
Steve agrees. "I thought I was an alien?"
Danny makes a gesture like he's about to strangle himself with his own tie and find it a mercy. "Alien, robot alien, whatever, stop making me regret not being mad at you anymore."
"Okay," Steve says.
"Well. Okay," Danny says, sticking his hands in his pockets. "I'm glad we had this little talk. And now I am going to call a cab, go home, take a substantial amount of ibuprofen and sleep for a week or so. Do not text me, do not call me, do not send a carrier pigeon after me, okay? I am incommunicado until I feel more like a human being and less like something Kamekona just smushed in the shave ice machine."
"Danny," Steve says.
"Yeah?"
Danny stands there, looking expectant, looking tired, and okay, Steve thinks. Okay. So maybe he's had a minor epiphany sometime between when the elevator doors finally opened and now; so maybe his day's been crappy and he's coming down off one hell of an adrenaline rush and his hands are shaking, just a bit. The thing is, though—the thing is that Steve's been trained for this kind of stuff, the kind that takes stamina and endurance and courage; the kind of stuff that requires you to leap before you look because if you looked, you might just not risk it. He's spent his whole life preparing to come back home, and he never even realised it—getting ready to come back to a place he was born, just to find his family—and whatever, he thinks. Okay. He takes a step forward, and then another, and then he's standing right in Danny's space, close enough that he can smell Danny's sweat, and soot, and the faint aroma of singed hair.
They're toe-to-toe, and Steve swears he can hear that big ole detective brain of Danny's whirring away, thinks he can hear the ding ding ding as Danny finally gets it. Danny's eyes get real bright, like they do when he stumbles across some clue that's really interesting, and Steve fights the urge to grin. "Really?" Danny says. "This is what you think is the logical ending to a clusterfuck like today? Wait, listen to me, what am I saying, asking you about logic, let me rephrase: this is how you want today to end up? Right now, while I'm cranky and you're certifiable and Kono's still out there with a rifle that could, frankly, only have been designed by a man with a truly impressive case of penile-related inadequacy? Really?"
Steve rubs at the nape of his neck and considers how to respond. He's never before had to carry on a conversation which contains simultaneous flirtation and talk of penile inadequacy. He hedges his bets, settles on: "Which answer is the one most likely to get me laid?"
"I kicked puppies in a past life, didn't I?" Danny says, sighing. "Maybe, who knows, I punched Mother Teresa in the face, may she rest in peace, and she and, I don't know, the Dalai Lama teamed up and sent me you by means of admonishment. You are my karmic punishment for 34 years of mostly skipping out on Mass, and shul, and that one time I let Grace listen to a song by that Bieber kid with the hair."
"This means we can make out, right?"
"Oh, what the hell, I can be obliging" Danny says, shrugging in a gesture of generous equanimity. The impression of composure would be more convincing if he weren't grinning like a loon; if his hands weren't already working their way underneath the hem of Steve's t-shirt, callused palms rough and cool against Steve's sweat-tacky skin. "Go ahead, be my guest."
"You're such an asshole," Steve tells him, and he kisses him. Danny makes a faint little noise at the back of his throat and kisses him back—his lips are chapped and his stubble scrapes against Steve's chin; his blunt, ragged fingernails dig into Steve's back—and Steve's hard and panting inside of five minutes. Danny's hands move down to Steve's hips, pushing him backwards so that he's pressed up flush against the wall. Steve finds he has no real objection to make to that, hums happily when Danny tilts his head back just right.
"Okay," Danny says after a little while, when they've pulled away long enough to breathe, "I've taken Psych 101 in my time, I know a little about reflex conditioning and trained stimulus response, so here is what I am not going to do right now: blow you against this wall here. There is little enough respect for due process in this place, I am not about to add to it by having you think that you can go adding to it by getting a workplace reward every time you almost get yourself killed."
"But?" Steve prompts. He's pretty sure there's a but coming up.
"But," Danny says, pausing only to slap Steve upside the head, "but, we are going to leave here and go back to your place—not mine, because frankly, after a week like this, I need more lumbar support than my mattress can provide and also your bed is bigger—and there I will happily engage in acts with you that are probably still illegal in Texas. Definitely Alabama."
"Alabama?" Steve says. "Tempting."
"You're welcome," Danny says, and then Danny's hauling him out the door and Steve's going with him—no hesitation, and he'll welcome the consequences.