fic: "odds even (diving through holes in the sky)"
♥ hello all ♥
Reveals went up today over at h50_exchange! I actually committed fic for this one O_O Posting it here to have a copy in my journal.
Title: Odds Even (Diving Through Holes in the Sky)
Pairings/Characters: Danny/Chin/Steve (Hawaii Five-0 [2010])
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~1200
Notes: Cheerfully shameless abuse of snapshot prose and sense imagery. Written for zortified in the second round of h50_exchange. Title from Matt Nathanson's "Bottom of the Sea".
When they have nights off, they begin with the ocean, and they end with the sea.
**
It’s rare that they have a day off, all together. Even if they did, it’s hard to say what they’d do with it. They’re grown men, used to independence, and for the most part it suits them fine. Danny’s got Grace, Steve’s got vine-tangled trails to race through, aimed at one summit after another and a record time to beat, Chin’s got zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance.
Far more often than days, though not so often as to become commonplace, they have the nighttimes to share between themselves, and their nights together begin with the tides, undertow and lull, drawing them to the Piko’i shore.
Time is not a thing to be wasted, Danny tells them, extreme in his seriousness. Chin agrees.
Then, together, they do very little until Steve explodes with restless tension.
(Steve pays them back for the payback, but that’s part of the fun, isn’t it?)
**
Once upon a time, Steve assumed he had more experience with days on end of next to no sleep, pushing his body until there was nothing left but the sharp tang of adrenaline and the essence of fixation keeping him on his feet, head operational, going going going until the mission was accomplished. Emotions endangered a mind trained to maximum efficiency in compartmentalization.
Then he came home.
In another life, he’d have been pissed off at still not quite understanding how events unfolded. But that was a life in which knowing the answers to everything mattered, and he’s been learning to let things go. Slowly. But learning.
It’s easier with Danny’s voice in his ear, haranguing as a sign of affection; with Chin in his peripheral, fond in his slightly exasperated amusement, occasionally shaking his head, never snapping or scolding.
(Waiting for them to catch up with him. He’s always at least three steps ahead, but no one really minds.)
**
Danny’s more than backup. So is Chin. So is Steve. They never say as much out loud, but they get it, they do, all of them. He has Steve’s back and Steve has Chin’s back and Chin has Danny’s back, and around and around they go, circles interlacing like flat stones skimmed over still water, concentric rings spreading out into infinity.
Among those circles, each of them remain, whether there are guns in hand or clothes cast carelessly aside to land where they will. Bodies as supple as they are strong, not perfect but all the better for it, whether lean and dark as shadow lightning or brightly-burning as July heat waves, or cool blue-grey of a storm, urging one another to hurry up, already, time’s a-wasting.
Sometimes Steve lets them take the lead. Because he can, when they’re alone together.
(Danny used to gripe about “alone together” being an oxymoron. He’s mostly stopped. They’ve come a long way since then.)
**
The habit of racing began as a joke, a bet, a challenge to see who could reach the water’s edge fastest, who could dive the deepest, who could make it most worth Danny’s while to shed his layers and swim, free of everything else.
They hit the water running and don’t stop until it swallows them. It’s the best. Like taking a sprint off a cliff’s edge and being caught before they begin to fall.
Danny won’t admit he wishes he’d given up his stubborn streak sooner, but spilled milk and all that, and he’s spent enough time regretting the past for one man.
The ocean isn’t what he’s used to. It isn’t better. It simply 'is'.
He thinks that’s why he likes it.
Sometimes he floats face-down and watches his St. Michael’s medal floating beneath him, and thinks of baptism, rebirth, and second chances.
Then he surfaces, from a world of calm, dark silence, and breathes deep of the air that still tastes of the sea, and though he still sometimes wonders how he got here, and wishes things that had happened hadn’t had to… mostly, almost completely, he knows he’s not where he wanted to be, but he’s where he needs to be.
(Someone generally dunks him right around then, and he forgets philosophy for horseplay. Within limits. As with all other messes Steve makes and Chin indulges, if one of them drowns he’s not cleaning it up.)
**
Steve likes how the nights can seem longer than they are in Hawai’i, where the sun sets like it means it, a sharp delineation between sun and moon. They’re both not long enough, and without an end in sight.
Which means there’ll be time for other things later. Cool sheets growing skin-warm and sweat-damp, twisted into hills and valleys, knotted in tight fists, rucked up beneath them as they cling together and come apart and fall into place again.
For now, there is night swimming, washing away everything but themselves. Who they really are. Fire. Water. Stone. Metal. Earth.
He watches, and he sees:
Danny tripping on the cuff of his slacks and taking a header into the sand, coming up spitting silica and laughing the laugh of the exhausted, who knows a joke isn’t that funny but can’t stop himself, who keeps going until it is a joke, until he’s scoured away tensions that needed dissolving, until he runs pell-mell into the water and the world bursts around him.
Himself, swimming silently beneath the surface, grabbing Danny by the ankle and three times out of four about-facing swiftly enough to avoid being kicked.
Chin floating between them, the center of their ever-rotating sphere. The center, which will hold.
(Achebe was mostly right about entropy, but he and Danny and Chin have a habit of beating the odds.)
**
They blend together, Chin thinks, floating on his back in the salty-warm sea, easy with the gentle tides that wash them from here to there, to the ocean and back again. The same, on some levels. Different, on far more. Not enough to matter at the top and bottom of the sea.
He lets the easy ebbing of the water carry him to shore and spreads his arms wide to embrace the sky, imagining the stars to be bursts of color, red and gold.
Dragons dancing among the mountains and curling up to rest in the valleys.
A string of laurel leis unspooling free, scarlet hibiscus petals falling velvet-soft, the leftover liquid gold of the sunlight absorbed into their skins.
Kites, cut from their strings, sailing free over the ocean as high and fast as they want to go, with nothing to stop them as long as the night wind blows.
Themselves, in the dark and quiet hours, when they swallow boyish whoops of glee, massage away the exhaustion of grown men with worlds of weight on their shoulders, and curl together in a braided strand of three, rising and falling and rising again, until it’s hard to tell where one leaves off and the other begins.
(Exactly as they should be.)
**
Steve’s swum back from the deeps, seal-sleek, at home in the water as a selkie, to rest at Chin’s left. Danny, as coated in sand as if he’d been dipped and rolled in sugar, gripes at the pair of them about how they’re both going to float away or fall asleep, but it's his eyes that are half-closed, and they're the ones keeping him buoyed.
Steve wiggles his toes in the water, tiny swishes of current creating their own small waves, and rests his head close by Chin’s, just like Danny.
(Together, they watch the stars wheel by.)
Reveals went up today over at h50_exchange! I actually committed fic for this one O_O Posting it here to have a copy in my journal.
Title: Odds Even (Diving Through Holes in the Sky)
Pairings/Characters: Danny/Chin/Steve (Hawaii Five-0 [2010])
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~1200
Notes: Cheerfully shameless abuse of snapshot prose and sense imagery. Written for zortified in the second round of h50_exchange. Title from Matt Nathanson's "Bottom of the Sea".
When they have nights off, they begin with the ocean, and they end with the sea.
**
It’s rare that they have a day off, all together. Even if they did, it’s hard to say what they’d do with it. They’re grown men, used to independence, and for the most part it suits them fine. Danny’s got Grace, Steve’s got vine-tangled trails to race through, aimed at one summit after another and a record time to beat, Chin’s got zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance.
Far more often than days, though not so often as to become commonplace, they have the nighttimes to share between themselves, and their nights together begin with the tides, undertow and lull, drawing them to the Piko’i shore.
Time is not a thing to be wasted, Danny tells them, extreme in his seriousness. Chin agrees.
Then, together, they do very little until Steve explodes with restless tension.
(Steve pays them back for the payback, but that’s part of the fun, isn’t it?)
**
Once upon a time, Steve assumed he had more experience with days on end of next to no sleep, pushing his body until there was nothing left but the sharp tang of adrenaline and the essence of fixation keeping him on his feet, head operational, going going going until the mission was accomplished. Emotions endangered a mind trained to maximum efficiency in compartmentalization.
Then he came home.
In another life, he’d have been pissed off at still not quite understanding how events unfolded. But that was a life in which knowing the answers to everything mattered, and he’s been learning to let things go. Slowly. But learning.
It’s easier with Danny’s voice in his ear, haranguing as a sign of affection; with Chin in his peripheral, fond in his slightly exasperated amusement, occasionally shaking his head, never snapping or scolding.
(Waiting for them to catch up with him. He’s always at least three steps ahead, but no one really minds.)
**
Danny’s more than backup. So is Chin. So is Steve. They never say as much out loud, but they get it, they do, all of them. He has Steve’s back and Steve has Chin’s back and Chin has Danny’s back, and around and around they go, circles interlacing like flat stones skimmed over still water, concentric rings spreading out into infinity.
Among those circles, each of them remain, whether there are guns in hand or clothes cast carelessly aside to land where they will. Bodies as supple as they are strong, not perfect but all the better for it, whether lean and dark as shadow lightning or brightly-burning as July heat waves, or cool blue-grey of a storm, urging one another to hurry up, already, time’s a-wasting.
Sometimes Steve lets them take the lead. Because he can, when they’re alone together.
(Danny used to gripe about “alone together” being an oxymoron. He’s mostly stopped. They’ve come a long way since then.)
**
The habit of racing began as a joke, a bet, a challenge to see who could reach the water’s edge fastest, who could dive the deepest, who could make it most worth Danny’s while to shed his layers and swim, free of everything else.
They hit the water running and don’t stop until it swallows them. It’s the best. Like taking a sprint off a cliff’s edge and being caught before they begin to fall.
Danny won’t admit he wishes he’d given up his stubborn streak sooner, but spilled milk and all that, and he’s spent enough time regretting the past for one man.
The ocean isn’t what he’s used to. It isn’t better. It simply 'is'.
He thinks that’s why he likes it.
Sometimes he floats face-down and watches his St. Michael’s medal floating beneath him, and thinks of baptism, rebirth, and second chances.
Then he surfaces, from a world of calm, dark silence, and breathes deep of the air that still tastes of the sea, and though he still sometimes wonders how he got here, and wishes things that had happened hadn’t had to… mostly, almost completely, he knows he’s not where he wanted to be, but he’s where he needs to be.
(Someone generally dunks him right around then, and he forgets philosophy for horseplay. Within limits. As with all other messes Steve makes and Chin indulges, if one of them drowns he’s not cleaning it up.)
**
Steve likes how the nights can seem longer than they are in Hawai’i, where the sun sets like it means it, a sharp delineation between sun and moon. They’re both not long enough, and without an end in sight.
Which means there’ll be time for other things later. Cool sheets growing skin-warm and sweat-damp, twisted into hills and valleys, knotted in tight fists, rucked up beneath them as they cling together and come apart and fall into place again.
For now, there is night swimming, washing away everything but themselves. Who they really are. Fire. Water. Stone. Metal. Earth.
He watches, and he sees:
Danny tripping on the cuff of his slacks and taking a header into the sand, coming up spitting silica and laughing the laugh of the exhausted, who knows a joke isn’t that funny but can’t stop himself, who keeps going until it is a joke, until he’s scoured away tensions that needed dissolving, until he runs pell-mell into the water and the world bursts around him.
Himself, swimming silently beneath the surface, grabbing Danny by the ankle and three times out of four about-facing swiftly enough to avoid being kicked.
Chin floating between them, the center of their ever-rotating sphere. The center, which will hold.
(Achebe was mostly right about entropy, but he and Danny and Chin have a habit of beating the odds.)
**
They blend together, Chin thinks, floating on his back in the salty-warm sea, easy with the gentle tides that wash them from here to there, to the ocean and back again. The same, on some levels. Different, on far more. Not enough to matter at the top and bottom of the sea.
He lets the easy ebbing of the water carry him to shore and spreads his arms wide to embrace the sky, imagining the stars to be bursts of color, red and gold.
Dragons dancing among the mountains and curling up to rest in the valleys.
A string of laurel leis unspooling free, scarlet hibiscus petals falling velvet-soft, the leftover liquid gold of the sunlight absorbed into their skins.
Kites, cut from their strings, sailing free over the ocean as high and fast as they want to go, with nothing to stop them as long as the night wind blows.
Themselves, in the dark and quiet hours, when they swallow boyish whoops of glee, massage away the exhaustion of grown men with worlds of weight on their shoulders, and curl together in a braided strand of three, rising and falling and rising again, until it’s hard to tell where one leaves off and the other begins.
(Exactly as they should be.)
**
Steve’s swum back from the deeps, seal-sleek, at home in the water as a selkie, to rest at Chin’s left. Danny, as coated in sand as if he’d been dipped and rolled in sugar, gripes at the pair of them about how they’re both going to float away or fall asleep, but it's his eyes that are half-closed, and they're the ones keeping him buoyed.
Steve wiggles his toes in the water, tiny swishes of current creating their own small waves, and rests his head close by Chin’s, just like Danny.
(Together, they watch the stars wheel by.)