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The thing is, withstanding torture isn’t always quite as difficult as it sounds. Not if you’ve had the right training, if you’ve established the right mind-set. Not if you’re dedicated to upholding a slightly warped set of priorities. Hell - not if you’re just the right brand of crazy.
Oh, it’s painful, sometimes beyond imagining, beyond description. Even the most skilled of agents still feels the sting, the shock, the stab of the knife. And then, well, then there are the moments beyond, when the adrenaline wears off and you’re left alone in your cell, left alone with your chains and your thoughts and your agony. That’s when the pain really hits.
Giving in doesn’t necessarily make a person weak or selfish. Everybody likes to think that they would never betray their loved ones, that they would die for their children in a heartbeat, but there’s an awful lot of bargaining going on in the world.
There’s an instinct that kicks in. It’s like drowning. People can’t help but take in a deep breath, right at the very end. Even though they know that they’ll suck in deadly water, not desperately needed oxygen, they open their mouths against their will. It’s the same with torture. There’s a moment where the best intentions tick over into nothing more than the need to survive.
And yet, there are some people, some… aberrations, who are trained to re-organize their priorities; to mould their instincts in such a way that they go against the grain. There are some who have learned to place the safety of others, the safety of organizations, the safety of information, above their own physical needs.
Danny Williams is just the right brand of crazy.
-----
There are certain agents who seem a little dead inside. Danny doesn’t really judge them, so much as try to avoid them. They might be efficient and skilled, but he doubts that they’d have his back any more than a slice of toast. Being an agent is a world of contradictions, because it’s every man for himself combined with an overwhelming need to protect those around you.
Danny enjoys working with Sydney Bristow. They understand each other and watch out for each other, but their priorities are on the same wavelength. The problem is that they’re both too empathetic. Sydney has endured all manner of horrors, but she can’t watch Danny take a crushing boot to his jaw. Danny has held out against all sorts of pain, but he can’t watch Sydney’s elbows bent at unnatural angles.
Luckily, they always have a few tricks up their sleeves, and intelligence, training and sheer luck have seen them through. The heartbreaking truth of it all, is that he would let her die if it was necessary. Not because of a lack of heart, not because of a lack of love. But because he knows that she has made a choice, the same as him, to precariously place herself on the spectrum of self-preservation.
In the end, they both slide out of the business. Sydney marries, becomes a mother, wants different things from life. It’s much the same with Danny. One day he meets Rachel and before he knows it, his priorities have shifted slightly. He wants to come home to her. His cover has him at a small-town Jersey station that exists only on paper and the mysterious corridors of the internet. When Rachel falls pregnant, however, he makes the jump for real and sneaks into a life at the Newark Police Department.
Looking down at Grace, so tiny, a little bundle of warmth, he knows that he’s made the right choice. He’d loved Sydney like an insanely dangerous sister, loved his whole team, but little Grace hasn’t made the same choices that they had made. She needs to be protected, and there is no life, no organization, no information that he wouldn’t give up to keep her safe.
Still, he has the instinct to protect, to fight for people who can’t fight for themselves, and being a police officer is as noble a purpose as being an operative for the CIA.
Eventually, things with Rachel fall apart. When he isn’t in the grips of anger, he can understand that his priorities were so out of alignment with hers that it was doomed from the start. It doesn’t make her a bad person, really, just different.
Life rolls on, and he ends up in Hawai’i. Perhaps the greatest irony – and the greatest secret, national security be damned – is that he was actually born there. Oh, he left when he was four, there’s nobody around to remember the Williams clan, but his early years were spent frolicking on the beach and taking his first steps in the middle of a pineapple plantation. His government personnel file is such a patchwork of truth and lies that nobody knows, and he intends to keep it that way.
Then he meets one Steve McGarrett, and everything goes to hell in a hand-basket.
-----
He makes the decision to rescue Steve knowing full-well the consequences, and he doesn’t regret it for a second. He hesitates, certainly, because he’s been out of the game for years, he left the world of espionage for very specific reasons. But he never regrets it. Steve has been caught up in Danny’s past, and even if he’s no longer an agent, it will always be his job to protect his partner. He follows Steve into burning buildings for Five-0, he might as well follow him to Colombia and pluck him from the clutches of an old enemy.
One thing leads to another, and they end up sharing more than just a job, more than just friendship. They wake up next to each other, eat off the same plate whenever Kono isn’t looking, bond over a mutual penchant for sex on the kitchen floor, (thank goodness Steve invests in household cleanliness).
Even though they both decide to never discuss the intricacies of their past, despite a fairly even level of clearance, occasionally vague anecdotes slip in during the early hours. Danny mentions one morning, head smushed happily into his pillow as Steve kisses and nuzzles down the curve of his back, that he misses the rush of sky-diving. He still chuckles at the memory of Steve falling off the bed in shock. Against all odds, they both have slightly edited stories involving polar bears, and Danny wonders at how life could possibly bring together two people who’ve traipsed around the North Pole doing heck knows what.
For the most part, however, they’ve both left those lives behind.
-----
When Danny wakes up, it’s not a lazy tumble into consciousness. It’s a snapping open of eyes, an intense and effective investigation of surroundings. He is suspended, his arms raised awkwardly above his head, wrists chained to the ceiling; his ankles are crossed, shackled to the floor. Steve, face to face with him, is similarly bound, but still unconscious. He rattles his chains a little as he stirs and Danny hushes him, hoping to give them more time until their captors notice that they’re awake.
They quickly trade curt assessments of their situation, briefly lamenting the ankle chains. Lesser skilled foes tend to forget the feet, and Danny has escaped similar occasions with well-timed kicks to the belly.
It’s anybody’s guess why they’re there. Neither of them can recall any red-flags, although they assume that since Steve was active until much more recently than Danny, this has something to do with SEAL dealings.
That is until Sark, an old enemy, walks into the room, and Danny is suddenly hurtled into his past.
Sark wants information, information that only Danny possesses, and he’s willing to do anything to get it. It’s been a long time since Danny was tortured, but he’s still as sure as ever that he can withstand whatever is thrown at him.
It’s the same old problem, all over again. The bone-deep empathy, the heartbreak at seeing someone else in pain. With the exception of his daughter, Danny loves Steve more than he’s ever loved anything else in the world.
And yet, as he watches Steve bleed, as he watches Steve shake and gasp and twist in pain, as he listens to Steve’s chains rattle, there is nothing that he can do. Steve is strong. Steve is trained. Steve made the same choice that he made, all those years ago, to live on the blurred edges of self-preservation. Steve, like Danny, looked at his priorities and jumbled them up in a way that makes no sense to most people. But they make sense to each other.
It doesn’t really help. It doesn’t help at all. When Sark leaves, frustrated but with the promise of more, all Danny can do is whisper, “I’m so sorry, I love you.”
There is silence for a few moments, and then Steve’s hoarse voice whispering back, “it’s okay, I understand, I love you, don’t give him what he wants.”
When Sark returns, Steve looks up into Danny’s eyes and with renewed strength says, “I’d do the same.”
-----
They’re aided in their escape by Chin and Kono and, to Danny’s immense surprise, Sydney, who is operating under the guise of being an old Navy friend of Steve’s. Steve, who has never met her before in his life, cottons on quickly – it’s easier to sweep this under the rug of SEAL business, because the team doesn’t know about Danny’s past.
When the day is done, he and Steve end up curled awkwardly around each other in the old tub, warm spray splattering down over their heads. It’s a ridiculous picture, as Steve is several feet too tall for it and Danny feels like his shoulders are a mile too wide, but their shared shower had dissolved into exhaustion and they’d sprawled inelegantly to the ceramic floor with little fuss.
Steve is peppered with various dressings, more cling-wrap stuck on him to protect various bits and pieces than a bowl of pasta salad, but for the most part, he’s okay.
And yet, Danny can’t quite look him in the eye. Priorities and mind-sets and training all seem to have flown the coop, and even though he knows that he did exactly what he needed to do, what Steve wanted him to do, hell, what Steve would have done if the situation was reversed, he can’t help but feel like he’s betrayed the person he loves.
“I’m fine, Danny,” Steve says over and over. “I’ve been through worse.”
Danny suspects that time will heal all wounds, not to mention his guilt. It hits home now, more than ever, that he could never have successfully been with someone who wasn’t like him. He could never have combined his life with Rachel, because they operated so differently. Danny wouldn’t have been able to divulge information to save her, but he wouldn’t have been able to watch her in pain, either; not because he loved her more than Steve, he didn’t, but because she hadn’t made the same choices that they had made. It wasn’t fair to her.
-----
Nevertheless, it comes as a shock to Danny when, a week later, Steve announces that he has organized an honourable termination of his contract with the Navy. No more occasional SEAL missions, no more possibility of being recalled, no more answering to forces beyond Five-0 and the state of Hawai’i.
When Danny asks about it, as they’re curled up on the couch, half-watching Ocean’s Eleven and half-snoozing on top of each other, Steve merely shifts closer, tells him that he realized that there was nothing he wouldn’t have given up, if Grace had been in the room with him.
Oh, it would be a lie to say that their lives beyond the Navy, beyond the CIA, are calm and peaceful and safe. It would be a disservice to Five-0, to ignore the risks that they still take, the risks that Chin and Kono take, every day. Danny knows that their task-force seems, well, utterly bonkers to anybody not in the know, and it is. But it’s also a team, a circle of protection, a promise that no man, (nor woman), will be left behind.
All in all, theirs’ is an odd kind of love. A kind of bond that is strangely strengthened by the acceptance of secrets, the awareness of risks and of sacrifice. Whatever happens, whatever torture he or Steve may one day face, Danny knows that they’ll both fight tooth and nail for that which they love.