#anyway we're canonising Alex's tramp stamp for the purposes of lyrical accuracy | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

redgoldblue · 4 months

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for the drabble spotify wrapped game, if you want: i rolled my rainbow d10 twice and we have a 75 🌈

❤️ 🌈

75: America's Sweetheart by Elle King

uh. I don't know where this came from. i apologise, my partner-in-fluff 🫡

Also I am obviously not abiding by the technical 100-word definition of drabble here, but instead the much looser 'short piece of writing'.

spotify wrapped drabbles!

Steve doesn't know when he stopped caring about killing people. It didn't bother him until he started caring again.

It's not anyone unusual, is the thing that gets him. It's a nameless, almost-faceless drug smuggler that he didn't even mean to kill, but he shot with intent to disable and a little too much carelessness in a rush to stop the ship they came in on, and when he finally loops back around there's a pool of blood and a corpse with a busted femoral artery.

He's kneeling down, checking a pulse even though it's clearly absent, removing weapons even though he'll clearly have no use for them, when his fingers brush against a thin edge in the inside pocket of the off-the-rack grey suit jacket the guy's wearing.

When he pulls it out, it's a photo. He has to look down to check that it's the same guy in it, partially because death rictus changes a face, especially when your comparison is smiling and happy, and partially because he just hasn't looked at his face properly. It's the same guy, his arm around a similarly smiling woman shoulder-height to him and so close in features she has to be his sister, with a chubby-cheeked frizzy-haired kid straddling his shoulders and holding onto the woman's hand.

One of the first things the military teaches you, explicitly or not, is to erase personhood. Your own, and your enemy's. Numbers, statistics, body parts and targets and usefulness.

He puts the photo back into the dead man's jacket and moves away. A tech comes at some point, body-bags him, and Duke is there and the rest of his team have it well in hand, so he goes back to where their cars are parked, boosts himself onto the hood of the truck, and waits.

Kono walks past at some point, but they're still in the midst of cleanup and HPD handover, so even though she does slow and ask, "You okay, boss?", when he replies in the affirmative she nods and keeps moving.

He remembers himself before. He remembers when it would never would have occurred to him not to think that every person with a bullet in them is a person with a family. A person with a life, at least before they were a person with a death.

He doesn't bother trying to count. The impulse washes over him, but it would take hours with military records and Five-0 reports to calculate anything even close to accuracy.

Himself before was decades ago, but also not that long ago. It was target practice at the Academy and work behind computers in Military Intelligence and crawling through mud with a similarly young Freddie by his side.

Himself after, apparently, is sitting on his own truck at the edge of his own city watching his family and his family's family and his friends and his friends' friends move efficiently through shipping containers and body bags.

Eventually, Danny finds him. He takes one look at Steve's face; he doesn't say anything, just leans against the hood next to Steve and waits.

Eventually, Steve finds the words. "I don't think the military would like me anymore, Danny."

It's not all that new a state of affairs; he got driven by revenge and tattoos in non-regulation places and too many personal attachments and he remembered how to have fun in quiet spaces and how to love in loud ones. He started caring again.

"Good," Danny says, harsh and definite, and Steve realises with a start that the things that would debase him in the eyes of his country are probably exactly the same reasons Danny - not just Danny, his whole family - would cite for loving him. Except the tattoos, maybe.

He can't bring himself to be upset about it in the face of that.

#Hawaii Five 0 #Steve McGarrett #character study #that's not true i know a little bit where this came from #we rewatched waiwai last night which is the first time in like four seasons that steve does something truly unhinged to a suspect #(shoots the russian spy in his hospital room)#and i was thinking about how he does it left right and fucking centre in s1 #whereas by s6 it is very clear that he's only doing it bc Cath is in serious danger if they don't get that information #and the mental shifts that had to occur for that #anyway we're canonising Alex's tramp stamp for the purposes of lyrical accuracy #my writing #fanfiction #mine #tag games #sensitive flower #if you'd gotten one higher it would've been atlantic city and i truly don't know what i would have done with that

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