Chapter Text
One minute, everything was loaded with a tension so thick you could have cut it with a knife, and the other hell broke loose.
They had planned their attack on the gun smugglers, but as always, plans didn’t sit well with those perps.
Danny ducked behind a barrel, as bullets zipped through the air and riddled the wall behind him. He took a moment to reach out psychically to his team members to ensure they were all fine. Kono’s mind was a maelstrom of calculated hatred for the perps and excited joy about her new sniper rifle. Chin was focused and calm as always. Steve’s mind was the usual solid wall that blocked Danny out. As a general guide, that always worried him to no end, but as he wasn’t Steve’s bonded partner, just the one to keep him in check long enough so the Sentinel Center of Hawaii could continue their tedious and inefficient search for a solid match, he couldn’t really do anything about it.
Danny closed his eyes and drew a quick mental map of the people in the spacious warehouse. One gun dealer tried to sneak up on him from a corner that was difficult to keep in view for the others. Danny rolled over on his stomach and shot him clean in the shoulder. The perks of being a guide, he thought smugly.
Steve jumped down from a container in front of him, gun leveled and eyes hard and cold. Systematically he scanned the area and took out two men that tried to flee through the window. A shiver went down Danny’s spine when Steve was in his sentinel military mode. He never ever wanted to be on the receiving end of that stare.
“Sentinel! Sentinel!” bellowed one of the remaining smugglers. Danny didn’t like that at all, but before he could reach Steve to pull him out of his light zone on his sight, the sun exploded before his eyes.
He groaned in pain from the flying shrapnel that hit him in the chest and from the onslaught of panic and agony that Steve now projected unfiltered directly onto him. He struggled for air and black dots danced before his eyes as he tried to compensate the horrors Steve was feeling at the moment; blinded, deaf, disorientated, panicked and screaming for his guide. But there was none, just Danny, lying in the dirt himself and being useless for a sentinel like Steve.
His ears rang and he needed what seeme to be ages to come to his feet again. As he looked around, it dawned on him that he had been in fact out for some time. Red and blue lights flickered across the building, police officers collected the perps that were able to walk without medical treatment in the first place.
“Boss, you alright?” Kono came rushing to him. Her hair was dusty and she sported a scratch on her forehead, but otherwise she looked fine.
“What happened? How long was I out?” he asked with a sandpaper-raspy voice.
“They threw a sentinel stun grenade at Steve. Unfortunately, you were pretty close as well. Knocked you out for good five minutes, I guess.”
Danny groaned. He still felt Steve inside his head, but the panic was dulled and the agony slowly decreasing. “How’s Steve?”
“He zoned, but the back-up brought the EMS straight with them as soon as they heard it was Five-0 calling for help. I have no idea, why, though”, she laughed, supporting Danny carefully as they walked slowly to the ambulance that was parked in the driveway. “They got a B-class guide on board with them, she’s helping Steve out of his zone.”
Danny grunted his approval. He felt old and beaten, letting his young and sexy co-worker guide him to the doctor like some grandpa. They passed Steve on their way. He lay upon a stretcher, eyes wide open, clutching the hand of a paramedic that talked to him in a soothing voice. Danny couldn’t resist to reach out to him to make sure he really was alright. There still was a lot of confusion emitted by Steve, but the waves began to settle and smooth out as he pulled himself along the voice of the paramedic guide. Steve’s eyes fluttered and he slowly blinked himself back to consciousness. His eyes landed on Danny for a short moment with a tiny upwards quirk of the left corner of his mouth, before he was drawn in by the voice of the guide at his side again.
“Come on, boss”, Kono said quietly by his side. “You’re bleeding, probably need stiches. Steve is alright.”
“Yeah, sure. Thanks, Kono.”
She smiled warmly at him and Danny’s mind was shortly brushed by a feeling of strength, warmth and fondness that he had begun to associate with Ohana, although this time something bitter did lay underneath it all as well. But he was too exhausted to really care, and besides it was impolite to dig yourself into the mind of someone else.