Sorry, but I'm confused about what you're trying to do... I think I'm confused by "byte array".
Everything "inside" the computer is binary. For example 01010101 can be displayed as 55 hex but by default you'll see 85 decimal. That's assuming it's a value/variable, not an ASCII representation of a value.
Or we could have 0101 0101 0101 0101 which is 2 bytes (spaces added for human readability) and 5555 hex or 21,845 decimal.
That's a regular 16-bit integer but you can split it into two bytes with "bit manipulation", masking the high-byte to leave the just the low-byte value, and by bit-shifting right by 8-bits to leave the just high-byte. You can write those two values into separate byte variables (both equal to 55 hex or 85 decimal in the above example).