Fic: Of Bets and superSEALs
Title: Of Bets and superSEALs
Rating: PG
Pairings/Characters: Steve/Danny, Kono
Warning/Spoilers: random through the series
Disclaimer: Steve and Danny are not shacking up yet, by definition, I do not own Hawaii Five-0.
Summary: "Boy meets boy in boy’s house. Boy does not shoot boy. Boy and boy dance around their feelings because they’re boys. Boy and boy need girl to knock their heads together."
Author's Note: I started this quite some time ago and randomly finished it tonight. Includes a devious!Kono, an equally devious(if not offscreen)!Chin, and a flustered Daniel Williams.
Any day that starts off with the words, “Danny, Kono, go get our suspect” and ends somewhere around the phrase, “Do you think you’ll have sex on your first date?”, is bound to be a weird one, if not completely intolerable.
Things go wrong as soon as they leave - and Danny gets to drive for once, and no, he does not let Kono drive because Steve is one thing and Kono is another, he’s pulling rank here - because she’s got this stupid shit eating grin on that somehow scares him more on her than it does on Steve.
“What. Why are you doing that?”
She leans back like a cat, eyeing him with a raised brow. “Doing what?”
“Oh, no. You know what. That freaking grin. It’s evil. It’s McGarrett evil.”
And leave it to her to stare at him like he’s crazy and that’s when he really knows there’s something going on, because the complete flip to innocence and oh hail the mighty saint kono is maybe more frightening than the grin was in the first place.
“Oh, yeah, that’s really convincing. I’m convinced.” He decides not to argue it in favor of the fact that he’d probably lose, and instead lets idle conversation - which starts with the location of the place they’re hunting their suspect down in and somehow ends up with what color shirt Steve was wearing that day - wash over them. For once, it’s not an argument in the car, but … Danny finds that he kind of misses it.
He won’t admit it on pain of death.
It’s when he mentions that no, she’s not allowed to tell Steve he surfed his first wave until he says she can that she starts sporting that stupid grin again.
“That one. That grin, right there, okay? What is that about?”
“Twenty-nine.” She practically sings it.
He lets it go because at that very moment, he’s pulling the car - and look at that, he’s driving his own car, he can’t believe it! - up to the fine dining establishment that their weekend ruining alleged criminal works. It looks like the last person who ate here and actually enjoyed themselves was a resident of the 1960s. It’s run down and probably sporting a few fine vermin, which Danny doesn’t really want to consider as he and Kono walk in the door like two ordinary people who might actually consider selling their souls by eating here.
-
It starts how all great chases start: Danny says their suspects name into the diner, and they hear a clatter from the kitchen.
They’re off.
Kono disappears from sight, out the front door and probably around the back. Danny’s vaulting over the countertop, dashing through the swinging kitchen door, racing through the kitchen, and shoving through the back door -
Just in time to see Kono swing a garbage bag into their suspects face, and to watch him go down.
He stares.
She winks.
-
Their man ran because he was taking money from the diner. Danny lets the diner owner handle it, because she says she wants to. The only thing they leave him with is the shiner that’s going to be there tomorrow, which he probably deserves. (The man made Danny run, leap over a countertop, which his knee is going to feel tomorrow thank you very much.)
“About the freaking garbage bag.” He says, wiping his hand on his jeans, standing outside in the tiny, rundown center the diner is located in. “You are a scary, scary woman. And I appreciate that, I really do. But if we could just back it up for a moment, because you. You are acting like you’ve just finished reading superSEAL’s handbook for living and took notes on it.”
It’s a rant, complete with a waving finger and a raised eyebrow.
“Notes, brah?” She looks nothing less than completely amused.
“Yes. Notes. Scribble, scribble.” Danny mimes it, scribbling the imaginary pen on the imaginary paper of the palm of his hand.
“Forty nine.”
The numbers! She’s doing the numbers again, and she’s up to forty nine this time and it’s driving him crazy. She knows it. He can see that she knows it.
“What?” He says, making sure it is very, very calculated.
“Four. T. Nine.” She says it like he’s slow.
“Is that some kind of weird Hawaiian code? Did you learn that from superSEAL’s notebook?”
“Fifty.” She’s suppressing a laugh.
“Stop. Just. Stop.” Danny’s pinching the bridge of his nose, about to go postal, lose his shit.
“It’s fifty now. I won, by the way.” Kono is practically clasping her hands in front of herself and swinging back and forth - at least, that is the utter impression he gets of what she’d like to be doing by the expression on her face.
“I wasn’t aware we were playing a game.”
“Oh, not you and me. Chin thought you’d only bring him up twenty times. I told him no way. “
“You… you bet on-“ He chokes, sputtering over the words because there are no words to explain just how messed up that is.
“How many times you’d mention the boss? Yes.”
He throws a hand up into the air and she’s laughing again. “How do you even figure fifty times? What, do you have a little clicker or are you just superwoman now? Have you really been counting?”
There’s that grin again, the one he first saw early in the day and suspected the highest of evils. “The first time was in the car. You said the grin reminded you of Steve. I didn’t start counting till we got in the car, but you mentioned that you wouldn’t let me drive because the boss driving your car was enough.”
He would like to strangle someone. Danny can feel the blush creep up his neck and he curses it to the high heavens.
“Aw, c’mon, don’t go all shy on me!” She reaches out and - oh, no, she is not pinching his cheek - he ducks, ready to pin her arm behind her damn back. She takes a step back and he’s saved the trouble. “It’s cute, brah.”
“Oh, it’s cute?” He gives her a look that says, I will end you, but she goes all serious on him.
“You know, he likes you too.”
He chokes on air. “Excuse me?”
“Boy meets boy in boy’s house. Boy does not shoot boy. Boy and boy dance around their feelings because they’re boys. Boy and boy need girl to knock their heads together. Boy and boy go back to boy’s house and-“
“Ooookay.” He clamps his hand over her mouth but removes it before she gets the bright idea to bite him. “I don’t know where you get these little ideas, but you’re an insane person. Do you know that? You’re worse than-“ He cuts himself off because he does not, does not want to hear fifty one leave Kono’s mouth. “How do you even figure that, huh?”
“Well, for one, Chin’s up to fifty-two.”
Something like stars explode before his eyes, very real and making his heart beat way too fast. He doesn’t need Kono to explain what she means, even though he can hear her explaining somewhere very, very far away.
He manages to say, “I’m going to kill the both of you.”
To which she responds in a chirp, “No you won’t.”
Game’s up, because he’s tired - very, very tired, and the core of the problem that the two of them are dancing around - okay, maybe him a little bit more than Kono - is looming in front of him like a brick wall and the only way to meet it was to run head first.
“How long have you known?” He asks, and succeeds in the very noble attempt not to add the words, ‘you little monster’ on the end of his sentence. He backs up and sits on the edge of the fountain. Kono follows.
“Awhile. You don’t look at someone like the two of you do without being absolutely in love with them.”
He wants to put his head in his hands, sigh, take a very long nap - at least, that’s what his mind is telling him to do, but it feels like this heavy, heavy weight has been lifted off his shoulders.
“So you two just figured you’d take things into your own hands?”
The corner of her mouth turns up. “Well, were you gonna do something about it?”
He rolls his eyes. “Point taken. He really ….” Danny scratches his cheek and can’t believe the words he’s saying. “He feels the same? You know this, for a fact, with all of your creepy intuition and -“
“One step removed from having your picture in his hypothetical locker.”
He wants to question her again. He wants to make sure, turn this thing inside out because unlike Steven J. McGarrett he does not jump into things like throwing grenades and people and he likes to think things through just a little bit more, thank you, especially when it comes to his heart, because he wears it on his sleeve just a bit and it’s vulnerable there.
But maybe several months is enough to think things through. Because he’s kidding himself if he says he hasn’t been turning every single phrase over in his head for the past four months at the very least, if not from the moment he met the man.
Kono’s hand pats at his back. He probably looks a few different shades of contemplative green, or orange, or whatever shade it is people turn when they think things over and get queasy at all the possible ways they could get their heart torn into fucking shreds.
“So,” She says, drawing out the word. He looks at her from the corner of his eyes. “Do you think you’ll have sex on the first date?”
He’s going to kill her.