Title: My Sister, My Brother
Author: JoJo (solosundance )
Fandom: Hawaii Five-O (2010)
Characters: Chin, Danny, Steve, Mary McG
Relationships: Steve/Danny
Rating: G
Wordcount: 911

A/n: based on episode 4.09

Summary: Catherine had promised Deb she'd look out for Mary and Steve, but she wasn't the one who was there.



Aunt Deb had passed, just before breakfast. 

It had been calm, came the report, and that wasn’t just to make everyone feel better.  Steve had been with her and they knew sugar-coating it just for them wouldn’t even occur to him.

At almost midnight, drained with the familiar wretched finality, Chin stood out front of the house and talked Danny through everything that had gone down from the moment he’d gotten the call that morning.

“Me and Kono have stayed most of the day – the others have been and gone.”
 
He described how, after the doctor came to certify, Steve had paced the house making calls like a robot until the phone had been practically wrestled from his iron grip and Chin had taken over.  How Grace and Jerry between them had taken care of Joanie, while Mary was upstairs with Deb’s body, or weeping periodically all over the kitchen.  How around four in the afternoon Steve had changed out of his white t-shirt and track shorts into the kind of somber formalwear that normally signaled court attendance, and rode with Deb to the mortuary, coming home hours later painfully in control, although Chin could see from his eyes he was wrecked.

“Did he eat?” Danny asked discontentedly from his mom’s chilly porch seven thousand miles away.

“I’m on it,” Chin assured him, which he knew wasn’t exactly the answer Danny had been looking for, and was more or less a lie by this stage anyhow.

“Mary?”

“Been working her way through the garlic shrimp all day.  Not sure she even knew she was doing it.”

“Right.  So where are they now?  Can I speak to my boy?”

“Steve’s sitting at his dad’s desk staring at letters and shit, drinking 80 proof local vodka.  And since Joanie went down his sister’s been keeping a case of beer company out on the lanai,” Chin reported. 

“OK,” Danny said after an unhappy pause.  “So here’s how it’s going to go.  You’re going to let me talk to him, and then – then, if I haven’t managed it, you’re going to stop the two of them from doing this drinking alone thing.  I'll be waiting for a report.”

“Already decided on that,” Chin agreed, breezing over the fact that Danny was kind of bossy in his worry.  “And before you say it, yes I’m going to stay over.  Just in case. Even though he won’t want me to.”

“Babe,” Danny said, sounding relieved.  “I love you, you know that?”

“Sure you do.  Just, well - not as much as you love him.”

“Listen, there’s got to be an insane Navy guy out there somewhere for you too, right?”

“Please God, no.”

“OK.”  Danny blew a breath down the phone, composing himself.  “Phone. Steven. Go.”

Chin cleared some of the debris Kono hadn’t gotten to in the kitchen while they were talking.  Wiped clean Joanie’s high chair, put away all the things that had been taken out of the cupboards and fridge to offer to the people who’d come around with their condolences.  He could faintly hear Steve’s voice next door, but not what he was saying to Danny.  There were long pauses when Chin thought he could almost catch Danny ranting.  When Steve did get to speak there was a different, softer tone in his voice than Chin had heard all day and a little of the weight on his own shoulders slid away.

Once there was silence, he wandered in to retrieve his phone.  Steve was leaning back in the chair.

Chin looked at him in the cocoon of light from the desk lamp.  He looked at the bottle of 80 proof vodka, at the empty glass, at Steve’s arms folded across himself in that characteristic pose. 

“You done?”

Steve was wary.  “I just had the lecture,” he said.  “Five in the morning Jersey time and still I get the lecture.”

“And so?”

“I’m just going to sit here awhile.”  It was clear, despite what anyone might think, that this was what Steve wanted to do right now.  Maybe even what he actually needed.  “You don’t have to stay, Chin.  I mean, I appreciate the hell out of all you’ve done today, man, but we’re good here.”

“Well, if you’re planning on having any more of that paint-stripper, and if your sister is planning on drinking her weight in bottles of beer, then someone needs to be around to make sure your niece gets breakfast in the morning.”

Steve looked chastened at that.  And then he frowned.  “Mary’s drinking beer?”

“Alone, out on the lanai.”

“Thinking time.”

Chin let his brows rise gently towards his hair.  “Alone,” he repeated.  He was actually sorry he had to remind Steve to push his own preference for solitude aside.

Steve had shadows under his eyes and looked as if he was holding himself together. 

“You,” he said eventually, and one corner of his mouth almost quirked.

Unfolding his arms, he reached out to slosh more vodka into the glass.  Then he pushed up from the chair in one fluid move, leaned to flip off the light. 

A few seconds later, Chin observed him padding through the dark carrying the glass and with a rug under his arm.  He watched the silhouette moving down towards the sea.  To where Mary was curled up morosely with her feet under her on one of the Adirondack chairs.  He saw the silhouette hold out the rug, and then sit, leaning forward, on the second chair.

And that’s where he left them.

Drinking alone, together.

He dialed Danny in Jersey, told him he could stand down.