But World Enough, and Time - NC-17 - Steve/Kono
Author: ratherastory
Recipient: tailoredshirt
Title: But World Enough, and Time
Pairings/Characters: Steve/Kono, with most of the show characters and a few OCs.
Summary: When Steve meets Kono, he is twenty-eight and she is twenty. He has never met her before. Kono has known him since she was six years old. Or, the H50 retelling of The Time Traveler's Wife.
Rating: NC-17
Content: [oral sex, wall sex, cunnilingus]
Warnings: Violence, swearing, gore, attempted rape (off-screen), and Major character death that's not entirely permanent.
Word Count: 41,284
Disclaimer: All Hawaii Five-0 characters herein are the property of CBS. No copyright infringement is intended. All characters engaging in sexual activity are 16 years or older.
Author's Notes: When I agreed to do a pinch-hit, I didn't quite realise how hard this bunny would bite. tailoredshirt expressed an interest in time travel, and challenged whoever got her prompt to not only write Steve/Kono, but to write them as more than just a hot sex pairing, and thus this story was born. I wish I had another three months to write it, but I fear even then I wouldn't be able to do it justice. Audrey Niffeneger I am not. ;)
I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the mods of this exchange who put up with my being extremely late with this pinch-hit and for misreading my prompt a whole lot and not realising it until it was too late. They have put so much work into this exchange, and I am truly, truly grateful that they didn't smack me with a dead fish for making their work that much harder. Hopefully the end product will make up for my being so high-maintenance. Thank you, guys, for making this whole experience so grand!
PROLOGUE
Sometimes people ask her what it's like, and Kono never knows what to tell them. They think that she must spend all her time waiting for him, but that's not it. Kono doesn't wait for Steve, because Steve is like the tide: coming and going according to a rhythm she only partly understands. He goes unwillingly, comes back with joy and gratitude shining in his eyes, kisses her as though he's been gone a hundred years, until her knees give way.
She thinks of the beach when she thinks of Steve, because that's where they've met the most often, where they've spent the most time together. She stands on the beach and waits for the tide to come in, the water to lap at her toes, creep up her calves, rise until it's swirling all around her. Being with Steve is like being surrounded by the ocean, buoyed by the salt water and pulled by the currents. It's being free and imprisoned at once.
~*~
"What's it like?" Steve laughs when she asks him. Then he looks at her and his expression sobers when he sees that she's in earnest. "I don't know."
He's not a man to whom words come easily, she knows this. So she goes gently. ('Be gentle, Kono,' he'd begged her the last time she saw him before he met her for the first time. 'For God's sake.' So she is, as gentle as she can be.) She takes his hand and plays with his fingers and tugs on the wristband of his watch as he looks on, mesmerised, a smile playing on his lips. The truth comes slowly, haltingly, one image at a time. How it feels like you've blinked and missed something. One minute you're sitting on the lanai, and the next you're standing hip-deep in the ocean, your beer is gone, presumably smashed as it dropped once you were no longer holding the bottle. Your clothes disappear, too―your favourite cargo pants, your green polo-necked t-shirt that you've worn so often that there's a hole under one of the arms where the seam has given way―and it's nothing but you in your bare skin left to fend for yourself until you're pulled back to where you're meant to be.
"Sometimes it's wonderful," he says, voice quiet. "Everything gets this sort of―glow. And that's usually when I get sick, right after. Like getting a migraine," he laughs a little.
She's read all of the reports about him. Only three people in all of HPD know the true identity of the John Doe who keeps cropping up every so often―always naked and reportedly intoxicated―and she's one of them. She sees from the outside what he experiences as terror and confusion and pain. None of the reports ever manages to quite explain how a crazy haole with no clothes managed to escape from where he was handcuffed in the back of a squad car, or how he vanished from the hospital bed to which he was handcuffed while he was still unconscious. More than half of HPD thinks he's a legend or a wild exaggeration, and the other half think that maybe he's a spirit sent to plague them, though they'll never admit to it out loud.
"You ever have those dreams when you're back in school?" he asks, and she nods. "When you're in a class you don't remember taking and there's an exam you haven't studied for, and you suddenly realise you're not wearing any clothes? It's like that, every time."
"I hate those dreams," Kono says fervently.
Steve closes his eyes for a moment. "I hate them too."
PART ONE
The Boy Who Moved Through Time
August 15th, 1994: Steve is 29, Kono is 20
When Steve meets Kono for the first time, it's just after his 29th birthday. She's 21 years old, a vision in a billowing saffron skirt and yellow bikini top, and she throws her arms around him in a bone-crushing hug.
"Oh my God, it's you!"
He stands stock-still, a little shocked by the intimacy of the gesture, and she throws her head back and laughs, teeth like pearls, even and sparkling in the sun, hair wind-swept and salty from the ocean tumbling about her shoulders.
"You told me this would happen."
He thinks he might be gaping at her like a teenager, but it's hard to tell because all his thoughts have vanished like birds startled out of the brush. "Do I know you?"
"Not yet," the girl he will come to know as Kono tells him. "But I've known you my entire life."
~*~
June 7th, 1990: Kono is 6, Steve is 34
Kono learns how to lie to her parents when she is six years old. The lies are never very big, because the big lies are the ones that make you get caught. Her cousin Ano teaches her that one day when his big lie gets him a sound spanking―so hard that he can't sit down for ages and ages. Small lies, though, those are easy.
Kono starts making up rules about lies, so that she'll be sure never to get caught. Don't try to pin things you did on other people, because grown-ups won't always believe that lie. Don't lie about finishing what's on your plate, because grown-ups will see right through that. What she finds she can lie about is where she's going and who she's going with. Her mother's rule is really simple: if you go out to the beach, one of your older cousins has to be there to watch for you.
It's cousin Ano who first tells her she can lie. Cousin Ano is really old, almost fifteen, and she has a boyfriend now, a surfer named Jayden who doesn't want little kids tagging along with them when they go for walks. So cousin Ano takes Kono a little way, then sits her down on a beach towel with a green plastic pail and a little red shovel and tells her to make sand castles until she comes back. And that's what Kono does, the first few times. After that, she realises that she can just tell Mama that she's going out to play with cousin [name] or any one of her other older cousins, even, and Mama will just smile and nod and tell her to be home in time for supper.
Kono likes to go to the beach by herself. Mama has told her it's dangerous, but it's only dangerous if you don't know what you're doing, and Kono is a big girl now. She knows about the tide and the undertow, and anyway what she likes best is to play tag with the waves, running out as they pull back and then running back as fast as she can when the waves return, trying to keep the water from touching her feet. She's very good at this game. She also likes to sit on her beach blanket and dig in the sand, too, even though cousin Nahele said sand castles are for little kids. Kono saw once on television that there were contests for making sand castles, and there were lots of grown-ups with pails and shovels and other tools that Mama said Kono didn't need as long as she had her imagination, so she thinks cousin Nahele must not know what he's talking about.
She's building a sand castle when Steve first lands in the water. She doesn't see it happen, but she hears a splash, and when she looks up there's a man standing up to his waist in the water, a little further out than she usually goes because it's too deep for her to keep her feet properly with all the waves.
The man is very, very big―much taller than Papa, and Papa is a giant who can lift her all the way up on his shoulders. He's a haole, she can tell that from here, all white skin even though he's tanned all over, so he's been in the sun for a while. He's looking around, a little confused, then he jumps a little bit when he sees her, so she thinks maybe he wasn't expecting to see her. The waves bob around him, and he lifts a hand to wave at her.
She waves back, but doesn't go closer. Mama told her it's not safe to talk to strangers, even though he seems okay from here. Sometimes, Mama told her, people who look nice aren't nice.
"Hello!" the man calls out. "What's your name?"
"I'm not supposed to talk to strangers!" Kono calls back. He smiles, but it's not one of those annoying smiles grown-ups have when they think they know something you don't.
"Right. Well, that's very sensible. My name is Steve, which means we're not complete strangers anymore. What's your name?"
"My name is Kono Kalakaua," she tells him, feeling more than a little important now.
"I am very pleased to meet you, Kono Kalakaua," he tells her solemnly.
"Why are you standing in the water?" she squints a little suspiciously at him. Most people would have come out of the water by now to talk to her.
"As it happens, I need to borrow your beach towel. Would you mind lending it to me for a few minutes? I don't have anything on."
Kono thinks she understands. This happened to cousin Ano once, too. "Did you lose your swimsuit?"
He laughs. "Something like that, yes."
She races back to her blanket, snatches up the towel that's folded up on it, and dashes back to the water, wading in slowly with the towel held as high as she can so it won't get wet. "Here you go," she holds it out, and he plucks it from her fingers with ease before slowly wading back toward her.
He gets the towel edge wet when he wraps it around his hips, but she supposes he can't help that. It's a pretty big towel, though it looks small on him. He walks easily out of the ocean and joins her on the beach, water dripping down his legs, and she stares at the big tattoos that swirl over his arms and at the small of his back. She's never seen someone with that many tattoos.
"Why isn't your hair wet?"
"I didn't land all the way in the water," he explains, and that sort of makes sense, except for how she doesn't know now how he got here.
"So how did you get here if you didn't swim? There's only one way in here and I didn't see you."
He smiles again, and his eyes sparkle a bit. They're large and blue like the ocean, unlike Mama's or Papa's or anyone else she knows. "That's because I'm a time traveler, and I just appeared there."
"There's no such thing," Kono tells him. Really, it's ridiculous sometimes, the stories grown-ups tell when they think you shouldn't know something.
"There is too," Steve rejoins easily. "I'll prove it to you if you stick around long enough. After a while, I'll just disappear. That's why I don't have my swimsuit, either. When I time travel, I'm not allowed to take anything with me, not even clothes, because I might accidentally leave something behind which would mess up all of history."
She narrows her eyes at him. "Why?"
"I don't know, actually. I haven't figured it out yet. I don't know any other time travelers, either, so it's hard for me to find out these things."
"You're going to disappear?" She feels oddly disappointed. She doesn't really know Steve, but he feels like a friend now.
"Yes, but I'll come back. In fact... what day is today?"
"Monday."
He stops and thinks about that. "Okay, what's the month, and how old are you?"
"I'm six years old, and it's July."
"That means I'm going to be back next week, on Wednesday, at about two o'clock. I'm going to come right back here, actually. Would you do me a favour, Kono?"
"Maybe?"
He laughs at that. "Good girl. Don't ever agree to anything until you know all the terms. I just need you to bring me some clothes to wear, and ask your mother if she'll give you the little red notebook she keeps in the drawer by the phone but never uses, and bring that too."
"How do you know that?" Kono is amazed, and it will only occur to her much, much later that she should have been frightened by the fact that he already knew all these things that he shouldn't know if they'd only just met.
"This isn't the only time we're going to meet. You're going to tell me about the notebook many, many years from now. I'm going to use it to write down all the dates I'm going to be here, on this little beach. You can come and visit with me, if you'd like, but it's okay if sometimes you're too busy to come."
Kono can't think of a day when she'll ever be too busy to go to the beach, but she's too polite to contradict a grown-up. "Okay."
"Also, and I know this is going to sound a little strange, but you can't tell anyone about me just yet. It won't always be like this, but for now, this has to stay a secret. Can you keep a secret?"
"Yes, I can." Kono is really good at keeping secrets.
His expression changes, then, the look in his eyes growing faraway like Papa's when he's thinking of something sad. "I'm going now, Kono. Good-bye."
She doesn't know what else to do, so she reaches up to shake his hand, and he smiles down at her and mimics her gesture solemnly. The last thing she sees is him smiling down at her a little sadly before he simply fades and vanishes, leaving her towel in a crumpled pile in the sand.
~*~
Kono pesters her mother about the notebook that very evening. If Mama is surprised that she's asking for it, she doesn't show it at all.
"Of course you can have it," she says, pulling it out of the drawer. "I forgot it was there, to be honest. What do you want it for?"
"I'm going to take notes in it," Kono tells her importantly, and Mama laughs.
"Of course. What else would you use a notebook for?"
Papa isn't as tall as Steve, but he's bigger, Kono decides after thinking about it for a while. His clothes should fit. She doesn't think Steve needs much, especially since he's just going to leave it all behind. She takes a pair of Papa's old swimming trunks and the shirt that Mama hates, and stuffs them both in a plastic bag which she hides under her bed. She's fairly dancing with anticipation, can't sleep at all that first night, until Mama gives her a big cup of hot milk with honey in it and sings to her until her eyes finally close.
She has trouble sleeping the night before Steve is meant to come back, too, but this time she pretends so that Mama won't sit in her room with her and ask question, because now she's bursting to tell someone, anyone about her secret. But she promised Steve she wouldn't, and that's more important than how excited she is that Steve is going to come back.
She goes to the beach early in the morning. It's easy enough to slip out of the house because Mama thinks she's out with her cousins at the main beach, and her cousins don't really care if she's there or not because they're all bigger than she is and they like to play games that don't involve her.
Steve isn't there, and for a moment she thinks that maybe he's not going to come, until she remembers that he said he would only be coming in the afternoon. She has her picnic basket, though, and she can stay here all day and Mama won't mind unless she's not home in time for dinner with her hands washed and her hair tied back.
She builds a big sand castle right by the edge of the water and watches as the waves slowly start to creep up and eat away at the foundation. Kono likes to dig moats around her castles, but if she's too far up the beach there's no water in them and she has to carry some back in her bucket and it always gets absorbed by the sand. If she builds the castle closer to the water then her moats fill all by themselves, but the sand under the castles crumbles away before too long and the castles fall down and she has to start over.
Steve lands in the water just as the last of her castle is disappearing into the waves. He doesn't say hi right away, just turns around and throws up into the water. Kono's already wading out toward him with her plastic bag, and she wrinkles her nose.
"Ew."
He wipes his mouth with his wrist. "Sorry."
"Are you sick?"
"No, time travel sometimes makes me sick to my stomach. It's not all that much fun, actually."
Kono gets carsick sometimes, so she understands. She thrusts her bag at him. "I brought you a shirt and swimming trunks."
The trunks are a bit big on him, but he pulls the drawstring tight and thanks her nicely before pulling on the ugly shirt, and she takes his hand so they can walk out of the water together.
"Are you staying this time?"
"A few hours, I think."
"Okay."
Steve asks her to show him the rest of the beach, so she hangs onto his hand and shows him all the places she likes to go, the pool where the hermit crabs like to hide, and all the pretty flowers and plants that grow where the sand stops. He stoops once while they're walking along the sand, scoops something up and deposits it into her outstretched hand. It's a shell, wet and shining with black spots, and it nestles comfortably in the palm of her hand.
"That's cypraea tigris," he tells her. "A tiger cowrie. They actually grow much bigger than that usually, so this one must be made specially for you. It's unusual for one to be out here on the beach like this―I always find the ones I look for in coral caves."
Kono's eyes grow wide. "You go and look at the coral?"
"Yeah. It's sort of a hobby. I'll take you one day, when you're older, if you'd like."
She nods fervently. "Yes. Why can't we go now?"
He closes her hand around the shell gently. "It's not time yet, that's why. You have to be a bit older. But that doesn't mean we still can't go looking for shells on the beach. Do you know what beach combing is?"
She wrinkles her nose.
"Beach combing," he tells her, "is walking along the beach just like we're doing now, and looking for treasure."
"Like gold?"
"Sometimes, but mostly it's natural treasures, like shells and stuff. Those are far more interesting than gold, anyway. You'll see, I promise."
"Okay." She's not sure she believes him, but he seems to think it's true, and sometimes grown-ups have funny ideas about stuff. "Do you want a sandwich? I brought some extra for you."
"No, thank you," he shakes his head. "My stomach is still a little funny. But it's nice of you to offer."
"Does it always make you sick?"
"No, sometimes I travel and I'm starving wherever I land. It sort of depends, but I haven't figured out why one time is different from another yet."
Kono doesn't know what that means, so she puts it out of her mind. "I brought the notebook," she tells him, and his face brightens.
"Okay, let's go back, and I'll write down all the times I'll come back."
He sits on her big blanket next to her while she eats her sandwich and starts writing down dates in the red notebook. He opens it up to show her, to make sure that she can read everything he's written, and seems pleased when she tells him she can.
"You're very smart. Not every little girl your age can read so well."
"I'm the best reader in my class," she informs him proudly. "I can already read chapter books and everything!"
He smiles at that, but he doesn't say anything. He's got that sad look again, and he closes the notebook and sets it aside.
"Are you going again?"
"I'm afraid so."
When he's gone she stuffs the clothes back into the plastic bag and races home so that she can tuck the red notebook away at the back of her closet, safe for now until she finds a hiding place where she knows no one will ever find it. She's never had a friend like Steve, doesn't know anyone else who has, either, and she can tell that this is something very strange and very special. For a moment she finds that she's a little sad that she won't be able to tell anyone about him, but she's also glad, because it means that no one else will get to have this, that for once she will have something that is hers alone.
~*~
November 22nd, 1998: Steve is 22 and 5
When Steve is twenty-two years old, he is sitting on the beach perhaps a hundred yards away from his father's house, telling himself to man up already and go talk to his father. Stress hasn't ever been his friend, though, and so he isn't altogether surprised when he takes a step forward in the sand only to find everything melting away around him. He lands hard on a cold floor, his stomach churning and his ears buzzing loudly. He groans softly, pushes himself to his feet, immediately starts looking around to figure out just where he is and where the nearest set of clothing might be.
It's then that he recognises the place: it's the non-public area of the Waikiki Aquarium, and that can only mean one thing. It's his fifth birthday, and the first time he ever traveled in time. His father brought him and a few of his friends here, and he'd been so excited that he'd sat up half the night thinking about it, until suddenly he'd found himself back at the Aquarium, staring at the fish swimming lazily in one of the huge tanks.
He smiles to himself, even though it feels like his stomach is trying to turn inside out, backs up until he's hugging the nearest wall. He can't get caught now, he needs to go explain things to his five-year-old self, and that means he needs to find some clothing, first. There's a storage closet further down the hall from where he is, and the door is mercifully unlocked. Inside there's a set of overalls and a grubby overshirt, doubtless the janitor's clothing, and beneath that he find a white t-shirt that will probably fit him. He doesn't put the t-shirt on, though, just tugs on the overalls and shrugs into the overshirt and keeps the t-shirt balled up in one hand. He pads back out into the hallway, not bothering with shoes this time around. If he remembers rightly, he won't be needing them anyway.
He slips quietly along the darkened hallways in the maintenance area until he finds a door to the public spaces, then heads purposefully toward the sea horse display. There's a little boy there with his nose pressed to the glass, stark naked and grinning from ear to ear. His dark hair is mussed as though he was sleeping―even though Steve knows he wasn't―and when he turns around to look at who's coming up behind him his blue eyes are sparkling.
"Hi, Steve," Steve says.
"Who are you?" the little boy asks.
"I'm a friend. Do you know why you're here?"
The little boy shakes his head. "Is this a dream?"
"No, it's not a dream. Do you see over there?" Steve points to a small group of children, including one who could be the little boy's twin brother, except of course it isn't. "That's you, except it's several hours before you went to bed tonight. You time traveled, so you could get to live your birthday over again. Isn't that exciting?"
The little boy's grin grows impossibly wider. "Wow."
"I know. Here, you should put this on before people see you and wonder why you're in your birthday suit. Did you know that my name is Steve too? It's a heck of a coincidence, right? But it means we're going to be friends for a very long time. Would you like that?"
"Okay. Do you time travel too?" The boy lets Steve tug the white t-shirt over his head, raising his arms obediently and then taking his hand without reservation. Steve doesn't really remember a time when he was this trusting, but the reminder that it did happen warms his heart a little.
"As it happens, I am a time traveler too. So we're going to meet up a few more times when you're older, and I'm going to show you everything you need to know. But for today, we don't have to do any of that. We're going to go and explore the bits of the Aquarium that you never got to see today. Would you like that?"
"Yeah!"
Steve grins. "All right, grasshopper. Keep hold of my hand, and I'm going to show you the coral reefs. You got to see the big exciting shows earlier today, but I know you're going to love the coral reefs."
He remembers, of course, being enthralled by the coral when he was five. His father and mother had taken him and his friends to see the fish and the dolphins, and he'd stared at the unicorn fish and the angel fish and been fascinated, but what he remembers the most about his birthday, even now nearly twenty years later, is the brightly-coloured anemones, the tiny fish that darted in and out of the reefs and were essential to its survival as much as it was essential to theirs. He remembers holding the hand of a tall man who told him about time travel but who mostly importantly told him all about the delicate balance of life that existed in the reefs, how everything was linked together and how important it was to be ever so careful, so that the reefs would live forever and ever. He remembers staring through the glass at the flashes of orange and yellow and green and blue and red, the iridescent swirl of fish as they swam past, their fins sometimes flickering to fast for him to see. Mostly he remembers feeling as though this, unlike anywhere else, was home.
Steve can sense himself going, but he remembers that he's not the first one to depart tonight. He drops to one knee and ruffles the boy's hair. "I think our time is up for tonight, bucko. You're going to go back to your bed now, and when you wake up in the morning this will probably feel like a really great dream. I wouldn't tell anyone about it, though."
"Not even Mommy?"
Steve considers this for a moment. "Sure, you can tell Mommy. There's no harm in that. She likes to hear about your adventures, doesn't she?"
He never hears the answer to his question, just finds himself holding an empty white t-shirt a moment later. Then he's back on the beach outside his father's house, his own clothes in an untidy pile about twenty feet away from him.
He looks up at the house, sees the light on in his father's study. It's much later than it was, nearly eleven o'clock at night by his watch, which thankfully landed on top of his clothes and thus didn't get any sand in it. He sighs. He doesn't know what he was thinking, coming all the way out here. His father long ago made it clear that he wanted nothing to do with him, and he doesn't see why coming tonight would make any difference.
Steve picks up his clothes and walks back along the beach. Right now, seventeen years ago, his five-year-old self is excitedly telling their mother all about the dream he had, and Mom is nodding sagely.
"Time-travel sounds like a really wonderful adventure," Mom told him then, and he's never forgotten it.
~*~
December 24th, 1987: Steve is 11
There's no warning at all when Steve's mother dies. Later on, when he's a teenager and old enough to understand exactly what happened, he'll scream at the older version of himself sitting on his bed looking at him with eyes filled with the same sadness and pain he can feel in his own heart, and demand to know why he never warned him. He'll refuse to listen to the calm, rational explanation that he couldn't warn himself because it had already happened. Because it would happen again. Because it happens over and over and over and there is nothing either of them, any of them, can do about it.
Steve's mother is a beautiful woman. Even when Steve is eleven years old and barely mature enough to realise that beauty in women is something that men―indeed almost everyone―are meant to appreciate, he thinks she is the most beautiful woman in the world. She has hair the same colour as Mary's, almost as white as the sand on the beach by their house, and it glows in the sunlight when she sits outside with him and helps him to build sandcastles. She works part-time now that Mary is old enough to go to school, but the rest of the time she's at home.
When he's older, what Steve will remember most clearly about her is that she loved to sing. The whole house would be filled with the sound of her voice, humming her favourite tunes as she cooked or cleaned or painted. She sang when she drove, and she'd make Steve sing with her even though he couldn't carry a tune.
She's singing now as they drive to get Mary from her friend's house. Steve's been home all day with a headache, and he's out of sorts because he's slept for the better part of the morning and afternoon and is still groggy, and she's singing a silly song about a kid who wants his teeth back for Christmas, and he wishes she'd stop because it's making his head hurt.
"Mom," he starts plaintively. "Do you have to sing that?"
She turns in her seat a little to smile tolerantly at him in the rearview mirror, opens her mouth, and that's the last thing she ever does. There's a weird clicking sound, and the next thing Steve knows he's standing by the side of the road, shivering in the sudden breeze, watching his mother drive past in the car, her head turned so that he can only see her blond hair pulled into a loose bun at the nape of her neck. He imagines he can see tendrils of hair escaping in tiny wisps, even though he's too far away to see.
The car explodes.
"Mommy!"
He's thrown backward by the force of the blast, lands hard on his hip on the shoulder of the road. There's fire and metal raining from the sky, and Steve has to throw his arms over his head to keep from getting hit by the debris. All around cars are coming to a screeching halt, people are jumping from their seats to get to the burning wreckage, yelling things he can't make out at all. His stomach roils violently, and he rolls to his hands and knees in order to throw up onto the grass near the shoulder.
Steve doesn't ever remember exactly what happens after that. He sits there, not twenty yards from where his mother is burning, and watches the flames lick at the clear blue sky. Someone finds him―a man's voice asks if he's okay, and when he doesn't answer a blanket is wrapped around his shoulders.
"It's going to be okay, Steve," the man says to him, rubbing his arm comfortingly just below the shoulder. "I promise. I know it doesn't seem like it now, but you're going to be okay. You see that ambulance that's pulling up?"
Steve nods dumbly. It's impossible to miss the ambulance, sirens wailing and lights flashing. He used to think ambulances were cool, like fire trucks, but now the firemen are milling about trying to extinguish the flames and pulling out a wicked-looking metal tool that they're going to use to cut his mother's remains out of the car. He wonders how he ever thought he could like fire trucks.
"Okay, good. I need you to get up and go over to the paramedics. Tell them you rolled out of the car when it caught on fire, okay? You took off your clothes because they were burning. Got it, Steve? You can't tell them you time-traveled, they won't believe you. If they ask, you weren't wearing your seat belt, but they won't ask."
The man nudges him in the small of the back, and Steve gets up mechanically and walks across the road. There are two police cars there now, blocking the traffic in either direction. No one notices at first, until he goes up to the nearest paramedic and puts a hand on his elbow, making the man jump.
"Holy―! I never saw you there, son. You all right?"
Steve shakes his head. "Is my mother still in there?"
The man looks stricken. "Oh, kid, is that your mother? Were you in the car, son?"
He nods. "I rolled out when it caught fire," he says, remembering the strange man's instructions. He feels like he's underwater. Maybe none of it's real. Real people don't live underwater.
"Jesus. Okay, come over here and sit down, okay? What's your name?"
"Steve. Steve McGarrett. Someone should tell my dad..." he stops, looks over at where his mother's car is still smouldering. "He's a cop. He works for HPD. Someone should tell him Mom is hurt."
That attracts the attention of one of the local officers. "Oh my God, that's Jack McGarrett's kid. Someone get dispatch to contact him, get him over here ASAP. Hey, hey Steve, you remember me?" the cop drops to a crouch to talk to him, face scrunched up with concern. "I work with your dad, buddy. You okay? Were you in the car?" Steve nods, and the cop reaches up to squeeze his shoulder. "It's going to be okay. We're going to get your dad down here, get you checked out. It's going to be okay."
"I know," Steve says before he can think better of it. "The man said so."
"What man, Steve?"
Steve looks back across the road, but the man is long gone. "I don't know."
~*~
Part II
Recipient: tailoredshirt
Title: But World Enough, and Time
Pairings/Characters: Steve/Kono, with most of the show characters and a few OCs.
Summary: When Steve meets Kono, he is twenty-eight and she is twenty. He has never met her before. Kono has known him since she was six years old. Or, the H50 retelling of The Time Traveler's Wife.
Rating: NC-17
Content: [oral sex, wall sex, cunnilingus]
Warnings: Violence, swearing, gore, attempted rape (off-screen), and Major character death that's not entirely permanent.
Word Count: 41,284
Disclaimer: All Hawaii Five-0 characters herein are the property of CBS. No copyright infringement is intended. All characters engaging in sexual activity are 16 years or older.
Author's Notes: When I agreed to do a pinch-hit, I didn't quite realise how hard this bunny would bite. tailoredshirt expressed an interest in time travel, and challenged whoever got her prompt to not only write Steve/Kono, but to write them as more than just a hot sex pairing, and thus this story was born. I wish I had another three months to write it, but I fear even then I wouldn't be able to do it justice. Audrey Niffeneger I am not. ;)
I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the mods of this exchange who put up with my being extremely late with this pinch-hit and for misreading my prompt a whole lot and not realising it until it was too late. They have put so much work into this exchange, and I am truly, truly grateful that they didn't smack me with a dead fish for making their work that much harder. Hopefully the end product will make up for my being so high-maintenance. Thank you, guys, for making this whole experience so grand!
PROLOGUE
Sometimes people ask her what it's like, and Kono never knows what to tell them. They think that she must spend all her time waiting for him, but that's not it. Kono doesn't wait for Steve, because Steve is like the tide: coming and going according to a rhythm she only partly understands. He goes unwillingly, comes back with joy and gratitude shining in his eyes, kisses her as though he's been gone a hundred years, until her knees give way.
She thinks of the beach when she thinks of Steve, because that's where they've met the most often, where they've spent the most time together. She stands on the beach and waits for the tide to come in, the water to lap at her toes, creep up her calves, rise until it's swirling all around her. Being with Steve is like being surrounded by the ocean, buoyed by the salt water and pulled by the currents. It's being free and imprisoned at once.
~*~
"What's it like?" Steve laughs when she asks him. Then he looks at her and his expression sobers when he sees that she's in earnest. "I don't know."
He's not a man to whom words come easily, she knows this. So she goes gently. ('Be gentle, Kono,' he'd begged her the last time she saw him before he met her for the first time. 'For God's sake.' So she is, as gentle as she can be.) She takes his hand and plays with his fingers and tugs on the wristband of his watch as he looks on, mesmerised, a smile playing on his lips. The truth comes slowly, haltingly, one image at a time. How it feels like you've blinked and missed something. One minute you're sitting on the lanai, and the next you're standing hip-deep in the ocean, your beer is gone, presumably smashed as it dropped once you were no longer holding the bottle. Your clothes disappear, too―your favourite cargo pants, your green polo-necked t-shirt that you've worn so often that there's a hole under one of the arms where the seam has given way―and it's nothing but you in your bare skin left to fend for yourself until you're pulled back to where you're meant to be.
"Sometimes it's wonderful," he says, voice quiet. "Everything gets this sort of―glow. And that's usually when I get sick, right after. Like getting a migraine," he laughs a little.
She's read all of the reports about him. Only three people in all of HPD know the true identity of the John Doe who keeps cropping up every so often―always naked and reportedly intoxicated―and she's one of them. She sees from the outside what he experiences as terror and confusion and pain. None of the reports ever manages to quite explain how a crazy haole with no clothes managed to escape from where he was handcuffed in the back of a squad car, or how he vanished from the hospital bed to which he was handcuffed while he was still unconscious. More than half of HPD thinks he's a legend or a wild exaggeration, and the other half think that maybe he's a spirit sent to plague them, though they'll never admit to it out loud.
"You ever have those dreams when you're back in school?" he asks, and she nods. "When you're in a class you don't remember taking and there's an exam you haven't studied for, and you suddenly realise you're not wearing any clothes? It's like that, every time."
"I hate those dreams," Kono says fervently.
Steve closes his eyes for a moment. "I hate them too."
PART ONE
The Boy Who Moved Through Time
August 15th, 1994: Steve is 29, Kono is 20
When Steve meets Kono for the first time, it's just after his 29th birthday. She's 21 years old, a vision in a billowing saffron skirt and yellow bikini top, and she throws her arms around him in a bone-crushing hug.
"Oh my God, it's you!"
He stands stock-still, a little shocked by the intimacy of the gesture, and she throws her head back and laughs, teeth like pearls, even and sparkling in the sun, hair wind-swept and salty from the ocean tumbling about her shoulders.
"You told me this would happen."
He thinks he might be gaping at her like a teenager, but it's hard to tell because all his thoughts have vanished like birds startled out of the brush. "Do I know you?"
"Not yet," the girl he will come to know as Kono tells him. "But I've known you my entire life."
~*~
June 7th, 1990: Kono is 6, Steve is 34
Kono learns how to lie to her parents when she is six years old. The lies are never very big, because the big lies are the ones that make you get caught. Her cousin Ano teaches her that one day when his big lie gets him a sound spanking―so hard that he can't sit down for ages and ages. Small lies, though, those are easy.
Kono starts making up rules about lies, so that she'll be sure never to get caught. Don't try to pin things you did on other people, because grown-ups won't always believe that lie. Don't lie about finishing what's on your plate, because grown-ups will see right through that. What she finds she can lie about is where she's going and who she's going with. Her mother's rule is really simple: if you go out to the beach, one of your older cousins has to be there to watch for you.
It's cousin Ano who first tells her she can lie. Cousin Ano is really old, almost fifteen, and she has a boyfriend now, a surfer named Jayden who doesn't want little kids tagging along with them when they go for walks. So cousin Ano takes Kono a little way, then sits her down on a beach towel with a green plastic pail and a little red shovel and tells her to make sand castles until she comes back. And that's what Kono does, the first few times. After that, she realises that she can just tell Mama that she's going out to play with cousin [name] or any one of her other older cousins, even, and Mama will just smile and nod and tell her to be home in time for supper.
Kono likes to go to the beach by herself. Mama has told her it's dangerous, but it's only dangerous if you don't know what you're doing, and Kono is a big girl now. She knows about the tide and the undertow, and anyway what she likes best is to play tag with the waves, running out as they pull back and then running back as fast as she can when the waves return, trying to keep the water from touching her feet. She's very good at this game. She also likes to sit on her beach blanket and dig in the sand, too, even though cousin Nahele said sand castles are for little kids. Kono saw once on television that there were contests for making sand castles, and there were lots of grown-ups with pails and shovels and other tools that Mama said Kono didn't need as long as she had her imagination, so she thinks cousin Nahele must not know what he's talking about.
She's building a sand castle when Steve first lands in the water. She doesn't see it happen, but she hears a splash, and when she looks up there's a man standing up to his waist in the water, a little further out than she usually goes because it's too deep for her to keep her feet properly with all the waves.
The man is very, very big―much taller than Papa, and Papa is a giant who can lift her all the way up on his shoulders. He's a haole, she can tell that from here, all white skin even though he's tanned all over, so he's been in the sun for a while. He's looking around, a little confused, then he jumps a little bit when he sees her, so she thinks maybe he wasn't expecting to see her. The waves bob around him, and he lifts a hand to wave at her.
She waves back, but doesn't go closer. Mama told her it's not safe to talk to strangers, even though he seems okay from here. Sometimes, Mama told her, people who look nice aren't nice.
"Hello!" the man calls out. "What's your name?"
"I'm not supposed to talk to strangers!" Kono calls back. He smiles, but it's not one of those annoying smiles grown-ups have when they think they know something you don't.
"Right. Well, that's very sensible. My name is Steve, which means we're not complete strangers anymore. What's your name?"
"My name is Kono Kalakaua," she tells him, feeling more than a little important now.
"I am very pleased to meet you, Kono Kalakaua," he tells her solemnly.
"Why are you standing in the water?" she squints a little suspiciously at him. Most people would have come out of the water by now to talk to her.
"As it happens, I need to borrow your beach towel. Would you mind lending it to me for a few minutes? I don't have anything on."
Kono thinks she understands. This happened to cousin Ano once, too. "Did you lose your swimsuit?"
He laughs. "Something like that, yes."
She races back to her blanket, snatches up the towel that's folded up on it, and dashes back to the water, wading in slowly with the towel held as high as she can so it won't get wet. "Here you go," she holds it out, and he plucks it from her fingers with ease before slowly wading back toward her.
He gets the towel edge wet when he wraps it around his hips, but she supposes he can't help that. It's a pretty big towel, though it looks small on him. He walks easily out of the ocean and joins her on the beach, water dripping down his legs, and she stares at the big tattoos that swirl over his arms and at the small of his back. She's never seen someone with that many tattoos.
"Why isn't your hair wet?"
"I didn't land all the way in the water," he explains, and that sort of makes sense, except for how she doesn't know now how he got here.
"So how did you get here if you didn't swim? There's only one way in here and I didn't see you."
He smiles again, and his eyes sparkle a bit. They're large and blue like the ocean, unlike Mama's or Papa's or anyone else she knows. "That's because I'm a time traveler, and I just appeared there."
"There's no such thing," Kono tells him. Really, it's ridiculous sometimes, the stories grown-ups tell when they think you shouldn't know something.
"There is too," Steve rejoins easily. "I'll prove it to you if you stick around long enough. After a while, I'll just disappear. That's why I don't have my swimsuit, either. When I time travel, I'm not allowed to take anything with me, not even clothes, because I might accidentally leave something behind which would mess up all of history."
She narrows her eyes at him. "Why?"
"I don't know, actually. I haven't figured it out yet. I don't know any other time travelers, either, so it's hard for me to find out these things."
"You're going to disappear?" She feels oddly disappointed. She doesn't really know Steve, but he feels like a friend now.
"Yes, but I'll come back. In fact... what day is today?"
"Monday."
He stops and thinks about that. "Okay, what's the month, and how old are you?"
"I'm six years old, and it's July."
"That means I'm going to be back next week, on Wednesday, at about two o'clock. I'm going to come right back here, actually. Would you do me a favour, Kono?"
"Maybe?"
He laughs at that. "Good girl. Don't ever agree to anything until you know all the terms. I just need you to bring me some clothes to wear, and ask your mother if she'll give you the little red notebook she keeps in the drawer by the phone but never uses, and bring that too."
"How do you know that?" Kono is amazed, and it will only occur to her much, much later that she should have been frightened by the fact that he already knew all these things that he shouldn't know if they'd only just met.
"This isn't the only time we're going to meet. You're going to tell me about the notebook many, many years from now. I'm going to use it to write down all the dates I'm going to be here, on this little beach. You can come and visit with me, if you'd like, but it's okay if sometimes you're too busy to come."
Kono can't think of a day when she'll ever be too busy to go to the beach, but she's too polite to contradict a grown-up. "Okay."
"Also, and I know this is going to sound a little strange, but you can't tell anyone about me just yet. It won't always be like this, but for now, this has to stay a secret. Can you keep a secret?"
"Yes, I can." Kono is really good at keeping secrets.
His expression changes, then, the look in his eyes growing faraway like Papa's when he's thinking of something sad. "I'm going now, Kono. Good-bye."
She doesn't know what else to do, so she reaches up to shake his hand, and he smiles down at her and mimics her gesture solemnly. The last thing she sees is him smiling down at her a little sadly before he simply fades and vanishes, leaving her towel in a crumpled pile in the sand.
~*~
Kono pesters her mother about the notebook that very evening. If Mama is surprised that she's asking for it, she doesn't show it at all.
"Of course you can have it," she says, pulling it out of the drawer. "I forgot it was there, to be honest. What do you want it for?"
"I'm going to take notes in it," Kono tells her importantly, and Mama laughs.
"Of course. What else would you use a notebook for?"
Papa isn't as tall as Steve, but he's bigger, Kono decides after thinking about it for a while. His clothes should fit. She doesn't think Steve needs much, especially since he's just going to leave it all behind. She takes a pair of Papa's old swimming trunks and the shirt that Mama hates, and stuffs them both in a plastic bag which she hides under her bed. She's fairly dancing with anticipation, can't sleep at all that first night, until Mama gives her a big cup of hot milk with honey in it and sings to her until her eyes finally close.
She has trouble sleeping the night before Steve is meant to come back, too, but this time she pretends so that Mama won't sit in her room with her and ask question, because now she's bursting to tell someone, anyone about her secret. But she promised Steve she wouldn't, and that's more important than how excited she is that Steve is going to come back.
She goes to the beach early in the morning. It's easy enough to slip out of the house because Mama thinks she's out with her cousins at the main beach, and her cousins don't really care if she's there or not because they're all bigger than she is and they like to play games that don't involve her.
Steve isn't there, and for a moment she thinks that maybe he's not going to come, until she remembers that he said he would only be coming in the afternoon. She has her picnic basket, though, and she can stay here all day and Mama won't mind unless she's not home in time for dinner with her hands washed and her hair tied back.
She builds a big sand castle right by the edge of the water and watches as the waves slowly start to creep up and eat away at the foundation. Kono likes to dig moats around her castles, but if she's too far up the beach there's no water in them and she has to carry some back in her bucket and it always gets absorbed by the sand. If she builds the castle closer to the water then her moats fill all by themselves, but the sand under the castles crumbles away before too long and the castles fall down and she has to start over.
Steve lands in the water just as the last of her castle is disappearing into the waves. He doesn't say hi right away, just turns around and throws up into the water. Kono's already wading out toward him with her plastic bag, and she wrinkles her nose.
"Ew."
He wipes his mouth with his wrist. "Sorry."
"Are you sick?"
"No, time travel sometimes makes me sick to my stomach. It's not all that much fun, actually."
Kono gets carsick sometimes, so she understands. She thrusts her bag at him. "I brought you a shirt and swimming trunks."
The trunks are a bit big on him, but he pulls the drawstring tight and thanks her nicely before pulling on the ugly shirt, and she takes his hand so they can walk out of the water together.
"Are you staying this time?"
"A few hours, I think."
"Okay."
Steve asks her to show him the rest of the beach, so she hangs onto his hand and shows him all the places she likes to go, the pool where the hermit crabs like to hide, and all the pretty flowers and plants that grow where the sand stops. He stoops once while they're walking along the sand, scoops something up and deposits it into her outstretched hand. It's a shell, wet and shining with black spots, and it nestles comfortably in the palm of her hand.
"That's cypraea tigris," he tells her. "A tiger cowrie. They actually grow much bigger than that usually, so this one must be made specially for you. It's unusual for one to be out here on the beach like this―I always find the ones I look for in coral caves."
Kono's eyes grow wide. "You go and look at the coral?"
"Yeah. It's sort of a hobby. I'll take you one day, when you're older, if you'd like."
She nods fervently. "Yes. Why can't we go now?"
He closes her hand around the shell gently. "It's not time yet, that's why. You have to be a bit older. But that doesn't mean we still can't go looking for shells on the beach. Do you know what beach combing is?"
She wrinkles her nose.
"Beach combing," he tells her, "is walking along the beach just like we're doing now, and looking for treasure."
"Like gold?"
"Sometimes, but mostly it's natural treasures, like shells and stuff. Those are far more interesting than gold, anyway. You'll see, I promise."
"Okay." She's not sure she believes him, but he seems to think it's true, and sometimes grown-ups have funny ideas about stuff. "Do you want a sandwich? I brought some extra for you."
"No, thank you," he shakes his head. "My stomach is still a little funny. But it's nice of you to offer."
"Does it always make you sick?"
"No, sometimes I travel and I'm starving wherever I land. It sort of depends, but I haven't figured out why one time is different from another yet."
Kono doesn't know what that means, so she puts it out of her mind. "I brought the notebook," she tells him, and his face brightens.
"Okay, let's go back, and I'll write down all the times I'll come back."
He sits on her big blanket next to her while she eats her sandwich and starts writing down dates in the red notebook. He opens it up to show her, to make sure that she can read everything he's written, and seems pleased when she tells him she can.
"You're very smart. Not every little girl your age can read so well."
"I'm the best reader in my class," she informs him proudly. "I can already read chapter books and everything!"
He smiles at that, but he doesn't say anything. He's got that sad look again, and he closes the notebook and sets it aside.
"Are you going again?"
"I'm afraid so."
When he's gone she stuffs the clothes back into the plastic bag and races home so that she can tuck the red notebook away at the back of her closet, safe for now until she finds a hiding place where she knows no one will ever find it. She's never had a friend like Steve, doesn't know anyone else who has, either, and she can tell that this is something very strange and very special. For a moment she finds that she's a little sad that she won't be able to tell anyone about him, but she's also glad, because it means that no one else will get to have this, that for once she will have something that is hers alone.
~*~
November 22nd, 1998: Steve is 22 and 5
When Steve is twenty-two years old, he is sitting on the beach perhaps a hundred yards away from his father's house, telling himself to man up already and go talk to his father. Stress hasn't ever been his friend, though, and so he isn't altogether surprised when he takes a step forward in the sand only to find everything melting away around him. He lands hard on a cold floor, his stomach churning and his ears buzzing loudly. He groans softly, pushes himself to his feet, immediately starts looking around to figure out just where he is and where the nearest set of clothing might be.
It's then that he recognises the place: it's the non-public area of the Waikiki Aquarium, and that can only mean one thing. It's his fifth birthday, and the first time he ever traveled in time. His father brought him and a few of his friends here, and he'd been so excited that he'd sat up half the night thinking about it, until suddenly he'd found himself back at the Aquarium, staring at the fish swimming lazily in one of the huge tanks.
He smiles to himself, even though it feels like his stomach is trying to turn inside out, backs up until he's hugging the nearest wall. He can't get caught now, he needs to go explain things to his five-year-old self, and that means he needs to find some clothing, first. There's a storage closet further down the hall from where he is, and the door is mercifully unlocked. Inside there's a set of overalls and a grubby overshirt, doubtless the janitor's clothing, and beneath that he find a white t-shirt that will probably fit him. He doesn't put the t-shirt on, though, just tugs on the overalls and shrugs into the overshirt and keeps the t-shirt balled up in one hand. He pads back out into the hallway, not bothering with shoes this time around. If he remembers rightly, he won't be needing them anyway.
He slips quietly along the darkened hallways in the maintenance area until he finds a door to the public spaces, then heads purposefully toward the sea horse display. There's a little boy there with his nose pressed to the glass, stark naked and grinning from ear to ear. His dark hair is mussed as though he was sleeping―even though Steve knows he wasn't―and when he turns around to look at who's coming up behind him his blue eyes are sparkling.
"Hi, Steve," Steve says.
"Who are you?" the little boy asks.
"I'm a friend. Do you know why you're here?"
The little boy shakes his head. "Is this a dream?"
"No, it's not a dream. Do you see over there?" Steve points to a small group of children, including one who could be the little boy's twin brother, except of course it isn't. "That's you, except it's several hours before you went to bed tonight. You time traveled, so you could get to live your birthday over again. Isn't that exciting?"
The little boy's grin grows impossibly wider. "Wow."
"I know. Here, you should put this on before people see you and wonder why you're in your birthday suit. Did you know that my name is Steve too? It's a heck of a coincidence, right? But it means we're going to be friends for a very long time. Would you like that?"
"Okay. Do you time travel too?" The boy lets Steve tug the white t-shirt over his head, raising his arms obediently and then taking his hand without reservation. Steve doesn't really remember a time when he was this trusting, but the reminder that it did happen warms his heart a little.
"As it happens, I am a time traveler too. So we're going to meet up a few more times when you're older, and I'm going to show you everything you need to know. But for today, we don't have to do any of that. We're going to go and explore the bits of the Aquarium that you never got to see today. Would you like that?"
"Yeah!"
Steve grins. "All right, grasshopper. Keep hold of my hand, and I'm going to show you the coral reefs. You got to see the big exciting shows earlier today, but I know you're going to love the coral reefs."
He remembers, of course, being enthralled by the coral when he was five. His father and mother had taken him and his friends to see the fish and the dolphins, and he'd stared at the unicorn fish and the angel fish and been fascinated, but what he remembers the most about his birthday, even now nearly twenty years later, is the brightly-coloured anemones, the tiny fish that darted in and out of the reefs and were essential to its survival as much as it was essential to theirs. He remembers holding the hand of a tall man who told him about time travel but who mostly importantly told him all about the delicate balance of life that existed in the reefs, how everything was linked together and how important it was to be ever so careful, so that the reefs would live forever and ever. He remembers staring through the glass at the flashes of orange and yellow and green and blue and red, the iridescent swirl of fish as they swam past, their fins sometimes flickering to fast for him to see. Mostly he remembers feeling as though this, unlike anywhere else, was home.
Steve can sense himself going, but he remembers that he's not the first one to depart tonight. He drops to one knee and ruffles the boy's hair. "I think our time is up for tonight, bucko. You're going to go back to your bed now, and when you wake up in the morning this will probably feel like a really great dream. I wouldn't tell anyone about it, though."
"Not even Mommy?"
Steve considers this for a moment. "Sure, you can tell Mommy. There's no harm in that. She likes to hear about your adventures, doesn't she?"
He never hears the answer to his question, just finds himself holding an empty white t-shirt a moment later. Then he's back on the beach outside his father's house, his own clothes in an untidy pile about twenty feet away from him.
He looks up at the house, sees the light on in his father's study. It's much later than it was, nearly eleven o'clock at night by his watch, which thankfully landed on top of his clothes and thus didn't get any sand in it. He sighs. He doesn't know what he was thinking, coming all the way out here. His father long ago made it clear that he wanted nothing to do with him, and he doesn't see why coming tonight would make any difference.
Steve picks up his clothes and walks back along the beach. Right now, seventeen years ago, his five-year-old self is excitedly telling their mother all about the dream he had, and Mom is nodding sagely.
"Time-travel sounds like a really wonderful adventure," Mom told him then, and he's never forgotten it.
~*~
December 24th, 1987: Steve is 11
There's no warning at all when Steve's mother dies. Later on, when he's a teenager and old enough to understand exactly what happened, he'll scream at the older version of himself sitting on his bed looking at him with eyes filled with the same sadness and pain he can feel in his own heart, and demand to know why he never warned him. He'll refuse to listen to the calm, rational explanation that he couldn't warn himself because it had already happened. Because it would happen again. Because it happens over and over and over and there is nothing either of them, any of them, can do about it.
Steve's mother is a beautiful woman. Even when Steve is eleven years old and barely mature enough to realise that beauty in women is something that men―indeed almost everyone―are meant to appreciate, he thinks she is the most beautiful woman in the world. She has hair the same colour as Mary's, almost as white as the sand on the beach by their house, and it glows in the sunlight when she sits outside with him and helps him to build sandcastles. She works part-time now that Mary is old enough to go to school, but the rest of the time she's at home.
When he's older, what Steve will remember most clearly about her is that she loved to sing. The whole house would be filled with the sound of her voice, humming her favourite tunes as she cooked or cleaned or painted. She sang when she drove, and she'd make Steve sing with her even though he couldn't carry a tune.
She's singing now as they drive to get Mary from her friend's house. Steve's been home all day with a headache, and he's out of sorts because he's slept for the better part of the morning and afternoon and is still groggy, and she's singing a silly song about a kid who wants his teeth back for Christmas, and he wishes she'd stop because it's making his head hurt.
"Mom," he starts plaintively. "Do you have to sing that?"
She turns in her seat a little to smile tolerantly at him in the rearview mirror, opens her mouth, and that's the last thing she ever does. There's a weird clicking sound, and the next thing Steve knows he's standing by the side of the road, shivering in the sudden breeze, watching his mother drive past in the car, her head turned so that he can only see her blond hair pulled into a loose bun at the nape of her neck. He imagines he can see tendrils of hair escaping in tiny wisps, even though he's too far away to see.
The car explodes.
"Mommy!"
He's thrown backward by the force of the blast, lands hard on his hip on the shoulder of the road. There's fire and metal raining from the sky, and Steve has to throw his arms over his head to keep from getting hit by the debris. All around cars are coming to a screeching halt, people are jumping from their seats to get to the burning wreckage, yelling things he can't make out at all. His stomach roils violently, and he rolls to his hands and knees in order to throw up onto the grass near the shoulder.
Steve doesn't ever remember exactly what happens after that. He sits there, not twenty yards from where his mother is burning, and watches the flames lick at the clear blue sky. Someone finds him―a man's voice asks if he's okay, and when he doesn't answer a blanket is wrapped around his shoulders.
"It's going to be okay, Steve," the man says to him, rubbing his arm comfortingly just below the shoulder. "I promise. I know it doesn't seem like it now, but you're going to be okay. You see that ambulance that's pulling up?"
Steve nods dumbly. It's impossible to miss the ambulance, sirens wailing and lights flashing. He used to think ambulances were cool, like fire trucks, but now the firemen are milling about trying to extinguish the flames and pulling out a wicked-looking metal tool that they're going to use to cut his mother's remains out of the car. He wonders how he ever thought he could like fire trucks.
"Okay, good. I need you to get up and go over to the paramedics. Tell them you rolled out of the car when it caught on fire, okay? You took off your clothes because they were burning. Got it, Steve? You can't tell them you time-traveled, they won't believe you. If they ask, you weren't wearing your seat belt, but they won't ask."
The man nudges him in the small of the back, and Steve gets up mechanically and walks across the road. There are two police cars there now, blocking the traffic in either direction. No one notices at first, until he goes up to the nearest paramedic and puts a hand on his elbow, making the man jump.
"Holy―! I never saw you there, son. You all right?"
Steve shakes his head. "Is my mother still in there?"
The man looks stricken. "Oh, kid, is that your mother? Were you in the car, son?"
He nods. "I rolled out when it caught fire," he says, remembering the strange man's instructions. He feels like he's underwater. Maybe none of it's real. Real people don't live underwater.
"Jesus. Okay, come over here and sit down, okay? What's your name?"
"Steve. Steve McGarrett. Someone should tell my dad..." he stops, looks over at where his mother's car is still smouldering. "He's a cop. He works for HPD. Someone should tell him Mom is hurt."
That attracts the attention of one of the local officers. "Oh my God, that's Jack McGarrett's kid. Someone get dispatch to contact him, get him over here ASAP. Hey, hey Steve, you remember me?" the cop drops to a crouch to talk to him, face scrunched up with concern. "I work with your dad, buddy. You okay? Were you in the car?" Steve nods, and the cop reaches up to squeeze his shoulder. "It's going to be okay. We're going to get your dad down here, get you checked out. It's going to be okay."
"I know," Steve says before he can think better of it. "The man said so."
"What man, Steve?"
Steve looks back across the road, but the man is long gone. "I don't know."
~*~
Part II