Hi, everyone! I'm back with a BIG story. I've been working on this for weeks, and I'm so excited to share it with all of you. I just started the last chapter, so a new installment should be posted every few days. I started writing fan fiction as a way to find my voice as a writer. Lately, I've kind of found myself in a comfort zone, so I designed this story to challenge to write something new and different. It's been a lot of work, planning and research, but the end product was something I'm really proud of.

I'm delaying the inevitable, so read and please let me know what you think!

Note: 1. I do not write death fics. 2. This is essentially two stories in one. It follows Steve in the present and Danny in the past.

Chapter - The End in the Beginning

Present

For the first time decades, Steve McGarrett, one of the most elite soldiers in the world, carried no weapon, nor did he scan the horizon for not threat as he walked out beneath a sky of layered blues and star-studded blacks.

The only thing he carried, besides suffocating, heart-hammering dread in the days since Danny's abduction was grasped in his left hand—a simple restaurant timer, a proverbial detonator, and he had a pretty good idea whose life would be blown apart when it finally hit zero. Steve banged the clock against his leg and hurled it down in the sand, snarling with hatred. He knew everything about the damned thing—it was made of dye-injected ABS plastic at a Rubbermaid factory in Atlanta, Georgia; it had an LCD digital readout, and came in three different colors, black, white and red—and yet it told him nothing about who had snatched Danny or why.

He squinted at the numbers in the darkness. 3 minutes, 48 seconds. And picked it up again, brushing off the sand.

The air smelled faintly of salt and sand and the water that lapped leisurely at his feet brought the Navy man no solace, no reprieve from the lurid nightmares of the last five days. As much as he'd fallen apart since, he wasn't sure he could handle what would happen when the clock stopped.

Steve was a study of a man at his worst, only clinging to sanity because he had no idea what would happen if he let go. The muscles of his back and jaw bunched tighter than the errant rock underfoot; his mind a bustle of half-formed desperate prayers. Please let him live. Please let him be okay. Please bring Danny home.

Without warning, Steve's knees buckled and hit the soft, damp sand. Exploding with uncontrollable rage and grief, Steve stuffed his hand into his mouth and screamed around his first, biting down on his knuckles until he tasted warm copper. Yet throughout the well-deserved tantrum, his left hand remained locked on the clock that had appeared on his lanai a day after Danny had gone missing, set mysteriously at 99 hours, a grainy Polaroid of a broad-shouldered man wearing a dirty dress shirt, tie speckled with blood, and a black bag over his head. As soon as Steve had ripped it off the clock, the timer set with an innocuous beep and hadn't stopped.

Until now.

The same tinny beep invaded his thoughts and he looked at the clock at the zeros flashing. He imagined killing blows, gunshots puncturing that skull beneath the black headbag, the stopping of hearts and the macabre puddling of blood, the flatline of a dialtone.

Please don't let him suffer.

Steve hoisted himself to his feet and promptly folded at the waist again, sick to his stomach and lightheaded. He had been subsisting on a little more than coffee and adrenaline, so it wasn't the first time his body had failed him as much as he'd failed Danny.

When he made it to his feet again, he doggedly trudged back towards the house, grief blossoming like a morbid flower with every step.

It took Steve a moment to realize that the garish blue tint the shrubbery and sand had taken wasn't due to his the perpetual headache behind his eyes, but from the sirens of the two squad cars casting a ghastly pall over his property.

For the first time in 99 hours, Steve dropped the red clock and bolted for the house in a dead run.

The next few minutes happened in jagged, strobing glimpses of time that Steve would never be able to recall in coherent order. Kono sobbed, crumpled against the fender of his truck, hand covering her mouth.

Kamekona used his massive size to corral Gabby up the front walk, even as she hollered, ugly, horrified, like a wounded bird.

"Keep him back!" Chin sprang up from the ground and ran towards him, arms flung wide, face stretched in terror. "Steve, stay back. Don't look." There was blood on his hands.

The long-simmering shock and newfound confusion rendered his reflexes slower than normal and Chin had managed to shove him back a few feet before Steve caught a glimpse of a swathe of soiled linen and an outflung arm covered in a dusting of golden blond hair. "Danny. DANNY!" Steve shouted, mouth dry and heart cantering. "Chin, let me go."

"Steve, you cannot see this. Please stay back. Steve, please."

"Chin, I'm warning you, get the out of my way. Move."

With a growl, Steve freed himself from Chin's grasp with violent efficincy and stepped over him with indifference as soon as he dropped. Three strides later, Steve stood a foot away from where Danny Williams lay, filthy and naked and beaten, half-wrapped in a stained tarp as if he'd been thrown in the drive way like trash waiting for collection. Steve fell to his knees, trembling, and covered him up, preserving a scant amount of dignity for his fallen friend.

Danny's face was unrecognizable, beneath the red earth packed into a patchy beard and the swelling, and the flaxen hair was now tinged with both congealed and wet blood. Steve lifted a hand to cover his mouth as another scream threatened and felt the wetness there, smearing against his cheek. He stared at it, mind blank, and then he looked at Danny's head, seeing the tearing of skin, and maybe even the ivory of bone. Steve leaned forward and finally saw what Chin hadn't wanted him to. Danny's eyes were open, still brilliantly blue, but unfocused and without light, because his partner, best friend, and a father of one, had been shot in the head.

120 hours ago

Danny never had never been blessed it was a sixth sense or Super SEAL's spidey sense. It was why, at thirty-five years old, he was an unapologetically bitter after having been blindsided by the tragedies that others probably saw hurdling towards him like a friggin' asteroid in a disaster movie. His divorce, Matty's embezzlement, Jenna Kaye's double-cross had all blackened a part of him that believed in goodness and civility and happy endings, and left Danny that much more cynical.

It was why he didn't expect the frantic, rain-drenched woman standing by the side of the road with a smashed fender with a car seat in the back and a bleeding leg would lure him into an awning between two buildings, "to escape the rain," and into an ambush. One second she was clutching her purse and sobbing, and another, she was elbowing to the face like a muay thai fighter. Danny staggered, nose bleeding, eyes watering, and before he could grip his service weapon, something was harshly threaded over his head and yanked taut. A blindfold and garrote all-in-one.

Mind reeling, Danny tried to discern up from down, inhale, and track voices all at once, but it was disorientingly silent, save for the scuffle of shoes and the pounding of rain. All of his life, Danny had been underestimated because of his size. No one really knew how tenacious he could be until he was too late. Danny would and had fought like a junkyard dog to make sure he was able to come home for his daughter or back up his partner, and this time was no different. Panic licked through his blood stream, because this wasn't a Five-0 tactical op, it was an all-out guerrilla ambush, and he was already down one sense and outnumbered.

He twisted and stomped blindly aiming for feet. His elbows jutted out and connected unprotected ribs. Calloused hands gripped his neck and slammed his face into an unyielding and unforgiving surface—probably brick, judging by the way it grated skin off his forehead and shoulder. The second strike stole robbed him the coordination of his limbs as his head throbbed and unconsciousness loomed. Blood and starbursts trickled into his eyes. The next thing he knew he was forced to his knees, zip-ties securing his arms behind him. A merciless twist of his headbag literally smothered anymore attempts to escape as Danny's head spun and his felt lost inside of his body. Once he was limp and dangerously close to passing out from lack of oxygen, they dragged him backwards and hurtled him up and down. He landed haphazardly on a hard surface, shoulder and hip making an impressive thwack on impact.

Fear took on a whole new meaning when he heard the gunning of an engine and knew he was being taken. The pain in his head didn't matter, neither did his bound wrists. He'd move mountains to escape and kill with his bare hands if necessary.

Before he could even mount a last-ditch offense, the air was kicked out of him, ribs bending dangerously from the force of the blows, chest aching.

And the van ambled away.

He dipped in and out, falling into black and returning to the same in a disorienting haze of terror and confusion.

When the vehicle stopped, Danny was hauled out of the back. The breeze was steady and he listened carefully, hearing the catcalls of wild birds and the hissing rustle of leaves and grass. The earth was soft, but rocky beneath his feet. It hadn't rained here, which meant Danny was miles outside of Honolulu.

After a metallic squeak and glide, the kidnappers shoved him onto his knees, cut his zipties and slammed behind him. Chains twinkled and a lock clicked.

He snatched off the headbag and cursed. There was barely any light, just a few errant rays that leaked in from the cracks in the door and a bit from the roof. The first thing that he noticed was the heat, sweltering and steamy, like the inside of a car after a sunny day. After just a few minutes, Danny's skin was slicked with a fine sheen of perspiration. By the time Danny had tried to break down the door and beat against the walls, he was dripping.

His prison was essentially a four walls made of corrugated metal and a dirt floor and a bucket in the corner.

Danny fixated on that bucket with alarming intensity, shaking with terror and helplessness. He'd never had a sixth sense about anything, never predicted that he'd be kidnapped in the middle of the day in paradise, but Danny knew by the presence of a simple household item that he was going to die here.