Title: Bringing down the house
Fandom: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Characters: Danny Williams, Steve McGarrett
Rating: PG-13
Length: 1,829 words (ooops)
Content notes: Contains swearwords, trapped characters, non-graphic injuries, mild panic attacks, claustraphobia
Author notes: Set at some amorphous point in time; no series spoilers
Summary: A building falls on them. How is this Danny's life now?


A building falls on them.

A building falls on them, and it’s maybe testament to how skewed Danny’s perspective has become that the first thing he thinks when he hears the earth-shattering explosion, when he feels the floor convulse and then list alarmingly under his feet and when he meets, for the briefest second, Steve’s wide-eyed look of horror, is Huh, things are exploding. Must be Tuesday.

Then there’s a rising dust-cloud that scours his throat and blinds him, and there’s the screech of metal being torn apart, and an ominous rumble that grows louder by the second, and there’s no more time for thinking.

The world drops him, and there’s that lurching sense of falling with nothing to catch him. Painful bursts slam into him as the building falls with him and on him, and Danny thinks he might have screamed.

Then there’s nothing.

*****

Danny wakes up in the dark.

That’s his assumption at least, because the alternative is too fucking horrifying to contemplate and he decides he’ll cross that bridge when (if, Williams, if) he comes to it. Right now, he focuses on what he does know, starting with exactly how he’s feeling so he can establish whether he’s still in one vaguely Danny-shaped piece. His eyes are gummed up and stinging, and when he runs a hand over his face, his skin feels gritty-sharp and itchy, although he can’t tell if that’s his face, his hands or both. He’s parched, his mouth dry and dusty and it scratches in his throat when he tries to muster up some saliva by swallowing. He’s a mess of aches and stings, and there’s a sick, heavy throb at the back of his skull which makes him a little cautious about putting his hand back there for fear of what he’ll find (Danny is a cop, not a doctor. He does not want to know what his brain matter feels like). Everything still seems to be attached though; arms and legs, hands and feet, nose and ears and he wiggles his toes in his shoes with something approaching relief.

So, okay, battered but not broken. He’ll live to fight another day, etcetera, etcetera. Great, marvellous, fantastic.

Now he just needs to work out where the hell he is.
He’s sitting, he knows that much, leant against something rough and uncomfortable, and when he reaches back, he can feel rough brick and what he thinks is shattered and torn plaster heaped behind him.

Which, right, makes sense. Because a building fell on him, and how is this his life now?

He feels around blindly in the dark, and yeah, that’s rubble to his right, and in front of him easily within reach, almost like he’s caged in by it. That thought is particularly unwelcome, lurching uncomfortably from his head to lodge in his chest, expanding and tightening until Danny feels like he can’t breathe, and he curls his hands into tight fists in an attempt to claw back his control. Fuck, he thinks, wildly, fuck, not now.

There’s a shifting noise to his left, and Danny jumps so badly he smacks his knee on something that’s hard and sharp and biting. It hurts like a son of a bitch, screaming fire shooting up his thigh, and Danny swears viciously as he almost doubles over, every muscle in his body tensing in sympathy as his eyes water.

His fucking knee. On the plus side, the brain-scarring agony kills his impending panic attack dead in the water, so there’s that. Danny will take what he can get, as he struggles to breathe through the pain while he waits for it to die back.

“Danno?” Steve says, groggily, somewhere off to his left. “That you?”

“Who else is it going to be?” Danny asks, grumpily, once the pain has receded enough that he thinks he can speak without hurling, and Steve huffs a breath.

“We had no idea who else was in here,” he reminds Danny, like it’s still important. “You could have been anyone. You okay?”

Danny nods, and then remembers that Steve can’t see him and mentally facepalms. “Yeah,” he says, “I mean, I’m not dead, so given the circumstances, I’d say I was peachy.”

“Good,” Steve says, distractedly, and Danny hears sounds of shifting again off where he roughly thinks Steve is.

“Steve, what-“ he starts to ask, but Steve cuts him off before he has a chance to get the question out.

“Have you still got your phone?” he says, “I don’t know…I can’t find mine.”

“Oh,” Danny says, “Good thinking.” He narrows his eyes, cataloguing what he can feel for a second, and then digs in the pocket of his pants. His fingers catch easily on the familiar plastic, and he tugs the phone out, lifting his hips to slide it past the crease of his thigh. Miraculously, it’s not broken, and Danny lets out the breath he hadn’t realised he was holding as the screen lights up dimly when he taps it. There’s no signal, of course, a little no entry symbol in the place where Danny would have hoped to see bars, but that doesn’t really surprise him. His coverage is shitty at the best of times, and right now they’re under a building.

He’s not sure how many times he’s going to need to think that before it starts to feel real.

He flicks the switch for the torch.

The space they’re in isn’t big; just enough room for Danny to spread his arms right and front if he doesn’t move, with only a little bit more than that to his left and nowhere near enough head room to stand. Steve’s sprawled just to his left, looking as filthy and battered as Danny feels. He’s probably in reach if Danny shifts maybe half a foot, but he’s loathe to move. Everything around him is little more than a heap of shattered brick, crumbled plaster, cracked joists and broken pipes, and a quick glance confirms that the latter is what he’d smacked his knee against. Nothing’s groaning, nothing’s moving, but Danny’s painfully aware that it could and he’s trying exceptionally hard not to think about that.

“Danno?” Steve’s tone is knowing, and Danny cuts him a glance before he even thinks about it.

Steve grins at him, but it’s small and tight, and under the grime and filth his face looks worryingly pale. Danny’s reaching out before he even thinks about it.

“Steve?”

Steve shakes his head. “I’m fine,” he says, “Just can’t really move.”

Danny rolls his eyes, because he’s from Jersey, for fuck sake; he can fucking smell bullshit when he runs into it. And then he looks, really looks at Steve, assessing and evaluating and…oh. Oh, shit.

“McGarrett,” he says, super-calm, and wow, Danny is a fucking professional. “Tell me how you’re fine when there is a fucking breezeblock on your leg.”

Okay, maybe not that professional.

Steve shrugs. “It’s not as bad as it looks,” he says, but there’s a tension in his tone that makes Danny think he’s underplaying the truth at least some.

“Fuck,” he says, and it comes out explosively loud in the small space. “Can you move at all?”

“I…” Steve trails off, and his face takes on a decidedly shifty look in the pale light from Danny’s phone. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” he says eventually.

Danny grits his teeth. “It’s that bad?”

“…no,” Steve says, and Danny can’t tell if he’s lying or not. His eyes flick up to the rubble surrounding them, involuntarily Danny thinks, and Danny’s stomach makes a sideways lurch for freedom as he suddenly realises what Steve is implying.

“Oh, fuck,” he groans, the reality of the tiny fucking air pocket they’re trapped in crashing back into him like a fist to the stomach. He drops his head down between his knees as his chest clenches and his next breath whistles high and uneven.

“Danny,” Steve says, “Danno, stop. Listen to me. We’re fine, nothing’s happening. We just need to hold on until help comes, it’s coming, I promise.”

Danny tunes him out, letting the cadence of Steve’s tone, low and urgent, wash over him instead as he concentrates on bringing his breathing back under control.

It takes longer than he would have liked.

“I fucking hate this,” he grits out, once he feels like he get the whole thing out without choking on it, and Steve cuts himself off mid-sentence.

“I know,” he says, apologetically, and, Danny blinks rapidly, because the hell what? “I’m sorry.”

Danny digs his thumbs into the bridge of his nose. “Steve, babe,” he says tightly, “Why the actual fuck are you apologising for a building falling on me. I am aware that I may have once or twice in the past implied that you are a destructive force of nature, but I did not mean literally. I do not actually think that even you are capable of bringing a building down purely by force of will and-“

His hand hits the rubble, triggering a shower of dust, and Danny’s not sure when he brought illustrative gestures into this, but apparently his hands operate independently of his brain now. His pulse spikes and he bites down the rest of his words, his stomach heaving unpleasantly, as he waits for it to settle.

Steve makes a suspiciously familiar noise, and Danny cuts him a look, taking in his bright eyes and the shake in his shoulders and narrows his eyes.

“You,” he says, jabbing a warning finger in Steve’s general direction, “had better not be laughing at me, fucker.”

Steve shoots him a wide-eyed, innocent look that doesn’t fool Danny for a second. “Wouldn’t dream of it,” he says, but there’s a curl at the edge of his mouth, obvious even through the pained lines on his face, that tells Danny he’s lying. “Although, I mean, you can hear yourself, right?”

“Fuck off,” Danny says, but there’s no heat to it and it comes out flat, as a wave of exhaustion suddenly floods through him, and even bickering with Steve feels like too much. Steve falls quiet and Danny stares down blindly at his knees. The adrenaline he’s been running on since he woke up is seeping away, leaving him tired, drained and shaky in its wake, and he tries not to think about the remains of the building pressing in on him from every direction, about the weight of rubble resting just above his head.

He’s not entirely successful.

“They’ll come for us,” Steve says suddenly, quiet but with such utter conviction that Danny can’t quite bring himself to challenge it. Fuck it, he doesn’t want to, and he lets his head drop back against the rubble.

“Okay,” he says, and it comes out more roughly than he’d meant it to. “Okay.”

*****

Steve’s smile when they hear the first tell-tale murmur of voices above them is positively victorious.

Danny lets him have the win.