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The friendships you make as a child are often the strongest, deepest, and most enduring of all the friendships you ever have. Maybe if Steve McGarrett had stayed in Hawaii, hadn't lost his mother and for all intents and purposes his father and sister, too, maybe then that would have been true for him.
As it was, he came to the Navy wary of trust, reliant on proof of loyalty before he could let anyone inside. He was just into his early twenties when he volunteered to become a SEAL, when he met Freddie Hart, with his desperate eyes, and deep-down well of pain, with his vulnerability that the instructors saw and tested each and every day of the weeks they trained, promising him comfort, safety, surcease of all of the unnecessary pain, if only he would give up and ring the bell that waited for his hand.
SEAL team training was beyond any test Steve might have imagined, bootcamp a pale imitation. Freddie's crisis as the end was in sight, formed the last cord they needed to bind each other tight. Closer than a wife, closer than a father, a mother. There were no questions unanswered by the end. They were what they were, the rest was unimportant.
Freddie's life, until BUDs, hinged on meeting the expectations of his impossible to please father. He was the son who never quite measured up. A son who never heard the praise that lived in his father's heart. Then, in one night it all turned around. In one night, one shared act, wrestling under the once rung bell, one shared conversation, he and McGarrett merged into a friendship that transcended all tests.
Commander Steve McGarrett became a man, a partner, a friend for whom he'd lay down his life. A man he loved, a brother.
Steve understood that for him, Freddie was the guy who defined trust. He formed other connections, had other friends, but Freddie was the yardstick he used to measure them by.
And then he died, so Steve could escape with his life. It was a pain that never left Steve McGarrett, at the same time the memory gave him the strength that he needed to get through all the missions to follow.
The years of fire that forged a partnership, one that existed separate of all other relationships in his life, came to a bloody, tortured end. Then the emptiness followed, the circle never closed, until the rage three years after that greatest loss, when Steve looked down on the broken, rotting corpse buried in the fields of North Korea, in an unmarked grave, and wept for the man who lay down his own life so that Steve lived.
He did what he could, what was left for him to do. He brought Freddie's body home. Against all odds. He finished the mission, the last that he would undertake for the Navy, it was for Freddie Hart, and no one else. No organization. It was his final duty for his friend, the end that their beginning demanded of him.
The funeral was more pain, but there was a fraction of peace in the ritual, in the gathering of family, in others who loved Freddie as Steve had. No pain could equal the pain he'd already been dealt, seeing Freddie shot, knowing he would die in a hostile place, apart from all who cared for him, knowing he had no choice but to leave Freddie behind, when all of his being cried out for him to carry him if he could not walk, to breathe for him if he could not breathe, to bring him home if that was all that was left.
For the mission they said, but more, to save Steve's life, to Freddie, a life worth more even than his own.
Now, with one circle closed, there was a new life for Steve, there was Danny. Whose humanity thawed the hard forged ice Steve held within. Danny who might some day become the only other who could fill the shape of emptiness that lived inside.
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