Hawaii Five-0 Fic: No bolts, no locks
No bolts, no locks
Steve, Danny, Kono, Chin, Gracie; Steve/Danny | PG -13| 3,500 words
a/n: Some spoilers for season to date. One reference to "Fathom" (but you don't need to have read that to follow this). Thank you to ariadnes_string for the beta, and to destina for additional vetting. Remaining errors are my fault, not theirs.
Summary: Danny's getting used to Steve's house. Maybe he even kind of likes it.
The first time Danny went into Steve's house, he didn't actually go into the house, he walked into the garage. The air was cooler than the humidity outside, smelling of gasoline and recently cut wood and a hint of salt and dampness, as if pieces of the ocean had blown in and gotten stuck in the corners.
Hawaii so far had been a little unreal -- too beautiful, palm trees and rainbows and surf lingo and no one ever seemed to wear actual shoes if they could possibly avoid it, as if wearing shoes was only something to endure until it was time to go barefoot again. Everything seemed to be five minutes from a body of water, and if there was no water directly involved, then it was like the water pulled everyone and everything towards it anyway.
Mekka was a great guy, a reliable partner, easy to talk to and coming across as more solid than the rest of Danny's new life. Danny and Mekka used to go out for beers after the paperwork was done, and it wasn't that different than home, but the rest of his precinct in the HPD always seemed to be giving Danny the wary eye. He was the mainlander who did things differently and didn't know the local secrets or shortcuts or back ways.
Didn't matter -- he had Gracie, and when Danny was with his daughter, the constant sense of being in the wrong place, of feeling rootless and not being where he was supposed to be went away. She was the most in focus, the only thing Danny didn't feel was impermanent.
The person who stepped out of the shadows of the garage to challenge Danny didn't seem at all pleased to find someone else there and made that clear with his gun aimed. Arrogant, Danny thought, aiming his gun back, disgustingly good-looking, sharp-eyed. He carried himself like Danny was the intruder. Danny wondered how the guy had gotten past the patrol officer watching the crime scene. He carried a kind of tension in his shoulders that made Danny feel the garage was too small for whatever it was this guy could unleash if he decided to toss aside the gun and do things the hard way.
Okay, so it turned out Danny was the intruder, and Steve McGarrett wasn't a criminal.
There was something scarily real and solid about him.
Danny went over one morning to pick up Steve so they could go chase down a lead on the other side of the island. He rapped at the screen door and when Steve called back "Yeah!" from inside Danny pulled the door open and walked in.
"That's what you're wearing?" Sitting on the couch, bent over to tie his boots, Steve glanced up at Danny. His shirt rode up a little above the back of his cargo pants, showing tanned, muscled skin.
"Yes. It's called a shirt. And this," Danny said, "is a tie." He flapped the ends of it at Steve. "I always wear a tie. Yet you seem shocked by these developments for some reason."
Steve straightened up and grinned. "Yeah but it's going to be a scorcher today. You might want to lose the tie this once." He rose to his feet, body moving fluidly.
Right now Steve was all neat and clean, cargo pants wrinkled still from the dryer. Danny caught a whiff of fabric softener as Steve walked by him. He gave it an hour before there was blood or dirt on him, bullets flying, objects or people flying through the air that shouldn't be flying through the air or crashing through things that weren't intended for that kind of use.
Steve grabbed up his phone and tucked his gun into its holster, moving around Danny like Danny was a piece of the furniture, part of the house, as if it was nothing unusual to have Danny standing around watching Steve finishing up getting dressed.
Danny always knocked even though Steve said he didn't, and then sometimes Danny didn't knock, and eventually Steve stopped making smart remarks about it.
That Steve might mistake Danny for an intruder one day, and attempt to kill him with his thumbs, wasn't something that worried Danny -- and he worried about a lot of shit when he worked with Steve, because in a lot of ways, Steve was really kind of scary.
But opening Steve's front door, walking in, that was starting to feel safe, like second nature, normalcy.
The house always smelled like sweet wood and the ocean -- kind of like the garage, minus the gasoline. It reminded Danny a little of the house his family rented on the Jersey shore for three weeks every summer when he was a kid -- Danny always got sunburned, and spent a lot of his vacation in the boardwalk arcades. His Mom used to fuss about him spending too much time indoors, but Danny would hold out a freckled arm, skin peeling from sunburn, and that always ended the discussion.
Steve's house had a few rugs, colors faded from sunlight, furniture worn from many years of people living with it, an actual ship-in-a-bottle, shells scattered on windowsills, a lot of old photographs, people in uniform. The house still screamed tropics, but that was okay, Danny decided he liked it.
After Mekka's funeral, Danny sat in one of Steve's wooden beach chairs, drinking the beer Steve offered him. He watched Steve standing with a beer in one hand, flicking pebbles into the water with the other, and thought about Steve not being there any more. His stomach muscles tightened. Danny took a deep gulp or two of beer to wash the thought away.
A rough case that ran all of them into the ground left Chin with a bandage wrapped around his arm and Kono with dark circles under her eyes. Steve ordered all of them home for a day off and sleep.
"Cook-out and beer, my place, Saturday evening," Steve added, sounding too energetic, the freak, but Danny had spotted the way Steve kept rubbing at the corners of his eyes when he thought no one was watching.
"Take it easy, guys," Kono said, raising her hand with a mock-stern expression. "No falling asleep at the wheel, right?"
"No, it's fine," Steve said. He turned to Danny. "You good to drive?"
"I'm good," Danny said. "I feel like the bottom of a New York taxi cab at four in the morning, but otherwise I'm good."
Kono looked doubtful but turned to Chin. "Okay, cuz," she said, taking his uninjured arm. "I'm driving you home."
"Kono," Chin objected.
"You're going to ride your Harley with that?" She nodded fiercely at his bandage.
"Maybe not," Chin said, and followed Kono out.
In the quiet that fell in their wake, Danny watched Steve cross the war room towards his office, pale glow of the monitors reflected in the dark windows. "Hey, you really okay?" Danny asked.
"Yeah. Just need sleep. In fact," Steve added, "I'm gonna just nap here for a few hours."
"I could drive you home," Danny called after him as Steve went into his office. "I feel like shit but I'm still more awake than you look."
"Nope, really, good here." Steve flopped down, onto the couch, presumably, although Danny couldn't see him anymore.
They never closed their office doors, and Danny walked right into Steve's. Steve lay on his back on the couch with an arm flung across his face, boots still on his feet.
"You're going to sleep here. Like that."
"Just a couple of hours, Danny. Then I'll go home." Steve's eyes were closed, his breathing even. Probably could take a catnap in a hummer during a firefight. Probably had.
"If you're sure--"
"Yep." There was no tension in Steve's voice, only a statement of fact, and a hint of impatience as if he wondered why Danny was making a big deal out of this.
"Okay." Danny stood watching his partner sleep, the tattoo peeking out beneath the sleeve of his t-shirt. He probably wouldn't even wake up with a sore back, the smug asshole.
Danny flicked off the lights. In his own office he got the fleece blanket he kept in his bottom desk drawer--never knew when you'd need a blanket, even in a tropical paradise--and went back to Steve's office. He shook the blanket out and put it over Steve, who never moved or stirred.
Danny smelled the charcoal and cooking meat from Steve's front porch. Before he could knock or open the door, it opened and there was Kono, grinning ear to ear.
"Hey, brah, about time you got here!" She guided him into the house, giving him a quick one-armed hug as she pushed a cold beer into his hand.
The dark circles were gone from under her eyes. He followed her outside into the tropical dusk where Chin was turning the steaks and Steve was standing up to his knees in the water, looking out at the lights around the harbor.
There was Gracie at first, and then there was Steve, and Kono, and Chin, snapping Hawaii into ever-sharper focus while the changeable surf rushed and roared around them.
There was that one time when Danny destroyed Steve's front door.
The top players in a large drug cartel with a strong presence in Hawaii had a falling out and it was body bag after body bag as they waged their war, each trying to seize control. Danny started to think downtime was an urban legend.
Steve finally agreed to go home for a few hours of rest after Chin and Kono and Danny badgered him. Chin went to check into a lead on the North Shore, leaving Kono and Danny to review the files on the cartel members.
Kono noticed a pattern they'd missed, and then Danny called Steve to tell him. He got no answer.
In retrospect, panicking would've been a perfectly viable option -- instead Kono and Danny drove over to Steve's to fill him in on the break in the case. That day was one of maybe three times Danny had ever known Steve to turn off his phone so he could really rest without interruption, rare but not completely unprecedented.
What was unprecedented was every curtain, every blind on the first floor closed tight, the inner front door shut tight and locked even though Steve didn't do that if he was at home. The hair on the back of Danny's neck stood on end.
"Shit," Kono said, seeing his expression. She swallowed and drew her weapon, stepping to one side of the door.
Danny stepped in the opposite direction, gun drawn, and got a peek through an opening in the curtain. He saw Steve lying face down on the rug, arms and legs sprawled. With a quick twist of fear in his gut, Danny hoped he was only down for the count, not dead.
He shifted a few inches to the right and spied a figure moving around in Steve's living room. Danny held up one finger at Kono. She nodded. Danny waited a moment, blood rushing in his ears after that first sting of adrenaline, and saw a second guy standing near Steve. Danny held up two fingers and Kono jerked her head in acknowledgment. He waited to be sure, counting out the beats in his head, six, five, four, three, two, one, and saw nobody else moving around in there so he nodded at Kono and she renewed her grip on her gun, finger near the trigger.
In all his years as a cop, Danny had kicked in exactly two doors, and both times it had hurt like a son of a bitch. This time hurt too, a jolt up his leg that rattled his teeth; at least he'd had enough presence of mind left not to use the leg with the weak ACL.
"Freeze, HPD," Kono shouted and Danny wasn't sure about these guys, but he'd sure listen to her, that was a voice that promised pain and humiliation if you didn't do what she said.
The first guy tensed, fingers twitching as if he was thinking of reaching for his gun but got a look at Kono and her weapon and went still, while Danny got his gun trained on the other suspect.
"On the floor," Kono said, "both of you. Hands behind your head."
They obeyed. Kono's glance flickered quick and alarmed to Steve before she returned a hard gaze to the two suspects, then went to work cuffing them.
Danny went to Steve, knelt and put his fingers to the side of his neck, found his pulse steady and his skin warm. His breaths were even against Danny's cheek when he leaned down.
"Steve. Hey. McGarrett!" Danny turned him gently, checking for blood, and found the gash on the side of Steve's head. "Shit. You can't manage to go one day, one damn day without...Steve!" His fingers dug into Steve's shoulder. Danny was vaguely aware that Kono was calling for backup and an EMT.
Steve opened his eyes, squinted, and groaned. "Aw crap," he said, bending his knees as he put his hands to his forehead. "The fuckers blindsided me."
"Yes, they did," Danny said, helping him sit up.
"You okay, boss?" Kono asked.
"Yeah, I'm fine." He allowed Danny to pull him to his feet, one hand against the small of his back. "I was asleep," Steve said, with a touch of petulance in his tone.
Danny had been under the impression that a Navy SEAL could awaken if a pin even thought of dropping -- finely honed reflexes, yadda yadda -- but decided not to mention that. Steve had been pretty exhausted and even the mighty McGarrett had his limits.
A short while later the HPD was hauling away the perps, Kono in their wake. An EMT dabbed antiseptic on the damage to Steve's head, shining a light in his eyes while Steve wore his Stoic and Feeling No Pain Face.
No concussion. The EMT put her penlight away and briskly gathered up her equipment. Steve tilted his head, looking at something past Danny.
"Danny," he said. "What happened to my door?"
"Your door?" Danny blinked. "You were attacked in your home and we found you lying unconscious on the floor and you're worried about your door?"
"I'm not worried about it, I'm just curious what happened to it. The lock's completely destroyed. I'm probably going to need a new door. Won't be the first time." Steve went over as if he didn't have a big square bandage next to his eye. He knelt beside the door, peering at the damage the way he would have examined one of his do-it-yourself forensic science things. "And there are marks on it that look like shoe treads." He glanced up at Danny, stared at him a little too long.
"Send the bill to me," Danny said. It was too warm suddenly and Danny's muscles were feeling the shaky after-affects of adrenaline, his foot hurting, as he'd known it would.
"Nah." Steve stood up. He didn't look at Danny as he walked past him back to the couch. "It's okay. Thanks," he added, voice so low Danny almost didn't hear it.
Then it was the rainy season, and Steve kissed him and Danny kissed him back. A few weeks later, Steve claimed it was the other way around.
After a forty-five minute argument in the car over who had kissed whom first, it occurred to Danny that maybe he enjoyed these vocal battles with Steve, and maybe Steve enjoyed them too. Without either of them suggesting it, they wound up at Steve's place.
Danny followed Steve up onto his porch and through his front door, not thinking about it at all, without any sense of crossing into someone else's territory. He was aware of his voice going up another few decibels as he tried to get his argument into Steve's thick skull, because Steve had most definitely initiated that first kiss and Danny was a witness. A very first-hand witness.
"Nope," Steve said, and stopped just inside the still-open door, turning back towards Danny. "And no, and no, you're remembering it wrong, obviously my kissing skills are so mind-scramblingly hot you're confused." He grinned in a particularly Steve-ish way that always confused Danny -- it was Steve's You Love Me But You Want to Punch Me Right Now expression. Steve laughed. "You should see your face right now."
"Wait. You were just trying to rile me up? You were purposefully trying to--"
"Worked, didn't it?" Steve's hands were on Danny's shoulders, pushing him up against the door frame, and the heat of Steve's fingers seemed to go right through Danny's shirt.
Steve moved his hands down to Danny's hips, holding him there with his mouth hovering close, but not touching Danny yet. Sweat and deodorant and sunblock, Steve scents, mixed with the wood and ocean smell of the house. Danny almost always caught a trace of ocean hovering around Steve too, his skin and his hair.
"Not at all," Danny said, before he reached around to dig his fingers into the hair at the back of Steve's head, encouraging Steve to duck down so Danny could kiss him.
On a long, slow, overcast Saturday that wasn't one of Danny's weekends with Grace, he helped Steve sand and paint. At least this time it wasn't because Steve's walls had gotten pocked with bullet holes; Steve had just gotten ambitious about doing repairs.
The wind tossed palm trees and stirred up the type of waves that always made Kono give a small whoop of delight and start talking about different kinds of surfboards. White paint dried on Danny's fingers while the sweetness of sanded wood lingered in the air and mixed with the faint, cloying smell of the paint. There were clumps of dried paint in Steve's hair, probably in Danny's too, and Steve had something truly awful playing on the stereo system.
Danny would do something about that, in a second, any second now, only Steve's mouth was warm on his, tasting of the beer they'd both been drinking and a hint of tomato sauce from the regular, plain old pizza Steve had ordered at his request. Mouth moving from Steve's mouth, down along his neck, Danny got Steve pinned against the kitchen counter while the wind rattled around the house. Steve cursed a little under his breath, grabbing onto Danny as if maybe Steve was the one worried everything might wash away.
The wind and overcast days led to something worse. A Kona low, Steve called it.
"It's a godamned cyclone," Danny insisted.
Chin and Kono shrugged, sitting on the floor with Gracie, cards on the coffee table between them.
"Relax," Chin said, holding up his hand in a placating motion. "We get these a couple of times a year, it's no big."
"The island's not going to blow away," Steve said, sitting next to Danny on the couch with about two feet of space between them.
There was a large pile of skittles and Hershey's kisses and macadamia nuts in front of Gracie. Danny suspected Chin and Kono were letting her win but then again, maybe not -- Gracie had somehow developed the most incredible poker face Danny had ever seen. He wasn't sure where she'd gotten that from, certainly not from him or Rachel. Maybe from Danny's grandfather.
As if the weather wanted to prove Danny's pessimism right, a fresh rattle of hail hit Steve's windows and the wind gusted so hard the lights flickered. Gracie's attention snapped away from the cards, her eyes widening and her back going rigid.
"It's okay, Monkey." He leaned forward to rest his hand on his daughter's back, and she turned to look up at him, face intent and serious. "You probably shouldn't listen to your old man on this, maybe you should listen to the people who have lived here a really long time." He felt Gracie's muscles relax under his palm.
Kono and Chin and Steve all made hey, that makes sense, kid faces. Which it maybe did, but that didn't make Danny feel any better about the intensity of the storm. He'd already called Rachel twice, to let her know Gracie was okay. Maybe so he could know Rachel was okay, too.
He watched Steve get up and go get a storm lantern and a few stubby candles, right before the lights flickered again and went out.
Kono clicked her tongue against her teeth in annoyance, the sound sharp in the half-darkness even over the storm. Chin lit the candles and Steve lit the lantern.
Another gust of wind shook the house again and Gracie studied her cards, perfectly calm now in a way Danny definitely wasn't. He'd never minded thunderstorms, and had seen his share of flooding and big storms back in New Jersey, but being on the mainland in a storm was different than knowing you were on one of a small bunch of islands completely surrounded by a mind-boggling amount of water.
"Hey," Steve said, low, and his arm slid across the back of the couch, fingers brushing rough-warm against the base of Danny's neck.
Better to be riding this out in Steve's house than in his shithole apartment that seemed like a matchbook about to collapse when the wind and rain grew too fierce.
Storm or no storm, Danny was glad to be right where he was.
Steve, Danny, Kono, Chin, Gracie; Steve/Danny | PG -13| 3,500 words
a/n: Some spoilers for season to date. One reference to "Fathom" (but you don't need to have read that to follow this). Thank you to ariadnes_string for the beta, and to destina for additional vetting. Remaining errors are my fault, not theirs.
Summary: Danny's getting used to Steve's house. Maybe he even kind of likes it.
The first time Danny went into Steve's house, he didn't actually go into the house, he walked into the garage. The air was cooler than the humidity outside, smelling of gasoline and recently cut wood and a hint of salt and dampness, as if pieces of the ocean had blown in and gotten stuck in the corners.
Hawaii so far had been a little unreal -- too beautiful, palm trees and rainbows and surf lingo and no one ever seemed to wear actual shoes if they could possibly avoid it, as if wearing shoes was only something to endure until it was time to go barefoot again. Everything seemed to be five minutes from a body of water, and if there was no water directly involved, then it was like the water pulled everyone and everything towards it anyway.
Mekka was a great guy, a reliable partner, easy to talk to and coming across as more solid than the rest of Danny's new life. Danny and Mekka used to go out for beers after the paperwork was done, and it wasn't that different than home, but the rest of his precinct in the HPD always seemed to be giving Danny the wary eye. He was the mainlander who did things differently and didn't know the local secrets or shortcuts or back ways.
Didn't matter -- he had Gracie, and when Danny was with his daughter, the constant sense of being in the wrong place, of feeling rootless and not being where he was supposed to be went away. She was the most in focus, the only thing Danny didn't feel was impermanent.
The person who stepped out of the shadows of the garage to challenge Danny didn't seem at all pleased to find someone else there and made that clear with his gun aimed. Arrogant, Danny thought, aiming his gun back, disgustingly good-looking, sharp-eyed. He carried himself like Danny was the intruder. Danny wondered how the guy had gotten past the patrol officer watching the crime scene. He carried a kind of tension in his shoulders that made Danny feel the garage was too small for whatever it was this guy could unleash if he decided to toss aside the gun and do things the hard way.
Okay, so it turned out Danny was the intruder, and Steve McGarrett wasn't a criminal.
There was something scarily real and solid about him.
Danny went over one morning to pick up Steve so they could go chase down a lead on the other side of the island. He rapped at the screen door and when Steve called back "Yeah!" from inside Danny pulled the door open and walked in.
"That's what you're wearing?" Sitting on the couch, bent over to tie his boots, Steve glanced up at Danny. His shirt rode up a little above the back of his cargo pants, showing tanned, muscled skin.
"Yes. It's called a shirt. And this," Danny said, "is a tie." He flapped the ends of it at Steve. "I always wear a tie. Yet you seem shocked by these developments for some reason."
Steve straightened up and grinned. "Yeah but it's going to be a scorcher today. You might want to lose the tie this once." He rose to his feet, body moving fluidly.
Right now Steve was all neat and clean, cargo pants wrinkled still from the dryer. Danny caught a whiff of fabric softener as Steve walked by him. He gave it an hour before there was blood or dirt on him, bullets flying, objects or people flying through the air that shouldn't be flying through the air or crashing through things that weren't intended for that kind of use.
Steve grabbed up his phone and tucked his gun into its holster, moving around Danny like Danny was a piece of the furniture, part of the house, as if it was nothing unusual to have Danny standing around watching Steve finishing up getting dressed.
Danny always knocked even though Steve said he didn't, and then sometimes Danny didn't knock, and eventually Steve stopped making smart remarks about it.
That Steve might mistake Danny for an intruder one day, and attempt to kill him with his thumbs, wasn't something that worried Danny -- and he worried about a lot of shit when he worked with Steve, because in a lot of ways, Steve was really kind of scary.
But opening Steve's front door, walking in, that was starting to feel safe, like second nature, normalcy.
The house always smelled like sweet wood and the ocean -- kind of like the garage, minus the gasoline. It reminded Danny a little of the house his family rented on the Jersey shore for three weeks every summer when he was a kid -- Danny always got sunburned, and spent a lot of his vacation in the boardwalk arcades. His Mom used to fuss about him spending too much time indoors, but Danny would hold out a freckled arm, skin peeling from sunburn, and that always ended the discussion.
Steve's house had a few rugs, colors faded from sunlight, furniture worn from many years of people living with it, an actual ship-in-a-bottle, shells scattered on windowsills, a lot of old photographs, people in uniform. The house still screamed tropics, but that was okay, Danny decided he liked it.
After Mekka's funeral, Danny sat in one of Steve's wooden beach chairs, drinking the beer Steve offered him. He watched Steve standing with a beer in one hand, flicking pebbles into the water with the other, and thought about Steve not being there any more. His stomach muscles tightened. Danny took a deep gulp or two of beer to wash the thought away.
A rough case that ran all of them into the ground left Chin with a bandage wrapped around his arm and Kono with dark circles under her eyes. Steve ordered all of them home for a day off and sleep.
"Cook-out and beer, my place, Saturday evening," Steve added, sounding too energetic, the freak, but Danny had spotted the way Steve kept rubbing at the corners of his eyes when he thought no one was watching.
"Take it easy, guys," Kono said, raising her hand with a mock-stern expression. "No falling asleep at the wheel, right?"
"No, it's fine," Steve said. He turned to Danny. "You good to drive?"
"I'm good," Danny said. "I feel like the bottom of a New York taxi cab at four in the morning, but otherwise I'm good."
Kono looked doubtful but turned to Chin. "Okay, cuz," she said, taking his uninjured arm. "I'm driving you home."
"Kono," Chin objected.
"You're going to ride your Harley with that?" She nodded fiercely at his bandage.
"Maybe not," Chin said, and followed Kono out.
In the quiet that fell in their wake, Danny watched Steve cross the war room towards his office, pale glow of the monitors reflected in the dark windows. "Hey, you really okay?" Danny asked.
"Yeah. Just need sleep. In fact," Steve added, "I'm gonna just nap here for a few hours."
"I could drive you home," Danny called after him as Steve went into his office. "I feel like shit but I'm still more awake than you look."
"Nope, really, good here." Steve flopped down, onto the couch, presumably, although Danny couldn't see him anymore.
They never closed their office doors, and Danny walked right into Steve's. Steve lay on his back on the couch with an arm flung across his face, boots still on his feet.
"You're going to sleep here. Like that."
"Just a couple of hours, Danny. Then I'll go home." Steve's eyes were closed, his breathing even. Probably could take a catnap in a hummer during a firefight. Probably had.
"If you're sure--"
"Yep." There was no tension in Steve's voice, only a statement of fact, and a hint of impatience as if he wondered why Danny was making a big deal out of this.
"Okay." Danny stood watching his partner sleep, the tattoo peeking out beneath the sleeve of his t-shirt. He probably wouldn't even wake up with a sore back, the smug asshole.
Danny flicked off the lights. In his own office he got the fleece blanket he kept in his bottom desk drawer--never knew when you'd need a blanket, even in a tropical paradise--and went back to Steve's office. He shook the blanket out and put it over Steve, who never moved or stirred.
Danny smelled the charcoal and cooking meat from Steve's front porch. Before he could knock or open the door, it opened and there was Kono, grinning ear to ear.
"Hey, brah, about time you got here!" She guided him into the house, giving him a quick one-armed hug as she pushed a cold beer into his hand.
The dark circles were gone from under her eyes. He followed her outside into the tropical dusk where Chin was turning the steaks and Steve was standing up to his knees in the water, looking out at the lights around the harbor.
There was Gracie at first, and then there was Steve, and Kono, and Chin, snapping Hawaii into ever-sharper focus while the changeable surf rushed and roared around them.
There was that one time when Danny destroyed Steve's front door.
The top players in a large drug cartel with a strong presence in Hawaii had a falling out and it was body bag after body bag as they waged their war, each trying to seize control. Danny started to think downtime was an urban legend.
Steve finally agreed to go home for a few hours of rest after Chin and Kono and Danny badgered him. Chin went to check into a lead on the North Shore, leaving Kono and Danny to review the files on the cartel members.
Kono noticed a pattern they'd missed, and then Danny called Steve to tell him. He got no answer.
In retrospect, panicking would've been a perfectly viable option -- instead Kono and Danny drove over to Steve's to fill him in on the break in the case. That day was one of maybe three times Danny had ever known Steve to turn off his phone so he could really rest without interruption, rare but not completely unprecedented.
What was unprecedented was every curtain, every blind on the first floor closed tight, the inner front door shut tight and locked even though Steve didn't do that if he was at home. The hair on the back of Danny's neck stood on end.
"Shit," Kono said, seeing his expression. She swallowed and drew her weapon, stepping to one side of the door.
Danny stepped in the opposite direction, gun drawn, and got a peek through an opening in the curtain. He saw Steve lying face down on the rug, arms and legs sprawled. With a quick twist of fear in his gut, Danny hoped he was only down for the count, not dead.
He shifted a few inches to the right and spied a figure moving around in Steve's living room. Danny held up one finger at Kono. She nodded. Danny waited a moment, blood rushing in his ears after that first sting of adrenaline, and saw a second guy standing near Steve. Danny held up two fingers and Kono jerked her head in acknowledgment. He waited to be sure, counting out the beats in his head, six, five, four, three, two, one, and saw nobody else moving around in there so he nodded at Kono and she renewed her grip on her gun, finger near the trigger.
In all his years as a cop, Danny had kicked in exactly two doors, and both times it had hurt like a son of a bitch. This time hurt too, a jolt up his leg that rattled his teeth; at least he'd had enough presence of mind left not to use the leg with the weak ACL.
"Freeze, HPD," Kono shouted and Danny wasn't sure about these guys, but he'd sure listen to her, that was a voice that promised pain and humiliation if you didn't do what she said.
The first guy tensed, fingers twitching as if he was thinking of reaching for his gun but got a look at Kono and her weapon and went still, while Danny got his gun trained on the other suspect.
"On the floor," Kono said, "both of you. Hands behind your head."
They obeyed. Kono's glance flickered quick and alarmed to Steve before she returned a hard gaze to the two suspects, then went to work cuffing them.
Danny went to Steve, knelt and put his fingers to the side of his neck, found his pulse steady and his skin warm. His breaths were even against Danny's cheek when he leaned down.
"Steve. Hey. McGarrett!" Danny turned him gently, checking for blood, and found the gash on the side of Steve's head. "Shit. You can't manage to go one day, one damn day without...Steve!" His fingers dug into Steve's shoulder. Danny was vaguely aware that Kono was calling for backup and an EMT.
Steve opened his eyes, squinted, and groaned. "Aw crap," he said, bending his knees as he put his hands to his forehead. "The fuckers blindsided me."
"Yes, they did," Danny said, helping him sit up.
"You okay, boss?" Kono asked.
"Yeah, I'm fine." He allowed Danny to pull him to his feet, one hand against the small of his back. "I was asleep," Steve said, with a touch of petulance in his tone.
Danny had been under the impression that a Navy SEAL could awaken if a pin even thought of dropping -- finely honed reflexes, yadda yadda -- but decided not to mention that. Steve had been pretty exhausted and even the mighty McGarrett had his limits.
A short while later the HPD was hauling away the perps, Kono in their wake. An EMT dabbed antiseptic on the damage to Steve's head, shining a light in his eyes while Steve wore his Stoic and Feeling No Pain Face.
No concussion. The EMT put her penlight away and briskly gathered up her equipment. Steve tilted his head, looking at something past Danny.
"Danny," he said. "What happened to my door?"
"Your door?" Danny blinked. "You were attacked in your home and we found you lying unconscious on the floor and you're worried about your door?"
"I'm not worried about it, I'm just curious what happened to it. The lock's completely destroyed. I'm probably going to need a new door. Won't be the first time." Steve went over as if he didn't have a big square bandage next to his eye. He knelt beside the door, peering at the damage the way he would have examined one of his do-it-yourself forensic science things. "And there are marks on it that look like shoe treads." He glanced up at Danny, stared at him a little too long.
"Send the bill to me," Danny said. It was too warm suddenly and Danny's muscles were feeling the shaky after-affects of adrenaline, his foot hurting, as he'd known it would.
"Nah." Steve stood up. He didn't look at Danny as he walked past him back to the couch. "It's okay. Thanks," he added, voice so low Danny almost didn't hear it.
Then it was the rainy season, and Steve kissed him and Danny kissed him back. A few weeks later, Steve claimed it was the other way around.
After a forty-five minute argument in the car over who had kissed whom first, it occurred to Danny that maybe he enjoyed these vocal battles with Steve, and maybe Steve enjoyed them too. Without either of them suggesting it, they wound up at Steve's place.
Danny followed Steve up onto his porch and through his front door, not thinking about it at all, without any sense of crossing into someone else's territory. He was aware of his voice going up another few decibels as he tried to get his argument into Steve's thick skull, because Steve had most definitely initiated that first kiss and Danny was a witness. A very first-hand witness.
"Nope," Steve said, and stopped just inside the still-open door, turning back towards Danny. "And no, and no, you're remembering it wrong, obviously my kissing skills are so mind-scramblingly hot you're confused." He grinned in a particularly Steve-ish way that always confused Danny -- it was Steve's You Love Me But You Want to Punch Me Right Now expression. Steve laughed. "You should see your face right now."
"Wait. You were just trying to rile me up? You were purposefully trying to--"
"Worked, didn't it?" Steve's hands were on Danny's shoulders, pushing him up against the door frame, and the heat of Steve's fingers seemed to go right through Danny's shirt.
Steve moved his hands down to Danny's hips, holding him there with his mouth hovering close, but not touching Danny yet. Sweat and deodorant and sunblock, Steve scents, mixed with the wood and ocean smell of the house. Danny almost always caught a trace of ocean hovering around Steve too, his skin and his hair.
"Not at all," Danny said, before he reached around to dig his fingers into the hair at the back of Steve's head, encouraging Steve to duck down so Danny could kiss him.
On a long, slow, overcast Saturday that wasn't one of Danny's weekends with Grace, he helped Steve sand and paint. At least this time it wasn't because Steve's walls had gotten pocked with bullet holes; Steve had just gotten ambitious about doing repairs.
The wind tossed palm trees and stirred up the type of waves that always made Kono give a small whoop of delight and start talking about different kinds of surfboards. White paint dried on Danny's fingers while the sweetness of sanded wood lingered in the air and mixed with the faint, cloying smell of the paint. There were clumps of dried paint in Steve's hair, probably in Danny's too, and Steve had something truly awful playing on the stereo system.
Danny would do something about that, in a second, any second now, only Steve's mouth was warm on his, tasting of the beer they'd both been drinking and a hint of tomato sauce from the regular, plain old pizza Steve had ordered at his request. Mouth moving from Steve's mouth, down along his neck, Danny got Steve pinned against the kitchen counter while the wind rattled around the house. Steve cursed a little under his breath, grabbing onto Danny as if maybe Steve was the one worried everything might wash away.
The wind and overcast days led to something worse. A Kona low, Steve called it.
"It's a godamned cyclone," Danny insisted.
Chin and Kono shrugged, sitting on the floor with Gracie, cards on the coffee table between them.
"Relax," Chin said, holding up his hand in a placating motion. "We get these a couple of times a year, it's no big."
"The island's not going to blow away," Steve said, sitting next to Danny on the couch with about two feet of space between them.
There was a large pile of skittles and Hershey's kisses and macadamia nuts in front of Gracie. Danny suspected Chin and Kono were letting her win but then again, maybe not -- Gracie had somehow developed the most incredible poker face Danny had ever seen. He wasn't sure where she'd gotten that from, certainly not from him or Rachel. Maybe from Danny's grandfather.
As if the weather wanted to prove Danny's pessimism right, a fresh rattle of hail hit Steve's windows and the wind gusted so hard the lights flickered. Gracie's attention snapped away from the cards, her eyes widening and her back going rigid.
"It's okay, Monkey." He leaned forward to rest his hand on his daughter's back, and she turned to look up at him, face intent and serious. "You probably shouldn't listen to your old man on this, maybe you should listen to the people who have lived here a really long time." He felt Gracie's muscles relax under his palm.
Kono and Chin and Steve all made hey, that makes sense, kid faces. Which it maybe did, but that didn't make Danny feel any better about the intensity of the storm. He'd already called Rachel twice, to let her know Gracie was okay. Maybe so he could know Rachel was okay, too.
He watched Steve get up and go get a storm lantern and a few stubby candles, right before the lights flickered again and went out.
Kono clicked her tongue against her teeth in annoyance, the sound sharp in the half-darkness even over the storm. Chin lit the candles and Steve lit the lantern.
Another gust of wind shook the house again and Gracie studied her cards, perfectly calm now in a way Danny definitely wasn't. He'd never minded thunderstorms, and had seen his share of flooding and big storms back in New Jersey, but being on the mainland in a storm was different than knowing you were on one of a small bunch of islands completely surrounded by a mind-boggling amount of water.
"Hey," Steve said, low, and his arm slid across the back of the couch, fingers brushing rough-warm against the base of Danny's neck.
Better to be riding this out in Steve's house than in his shithole apartment that seemed like a matchbook about to collapse when the wind and rain grew too fierce.
Storm or no storm, Danny was glad to be right where he was.