H50 fic: Until the Hour of Separation 1/2 (Steve/Danny, PG-13/R)
Title: Until the Hour of Separation
Author: Zinnith
Pairing: Steve/Danny (Past Danny/OFC, Danny/OMC, Danny/Rachel)
Rating: PG-13/R
Spoilers: General for season 1. Goes AU before the season finale.
Warnings: One homophobic slur
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Wordcount: ~ 10 000
Author's Notes: Huge thanks to sirona_gs for the excellent beta and for wrangling my commas into place!
Summary: Danny has a long history of getting his heart broken. Steve sneakily tries to make him move in anyway.
AO3 link
When Danny Williams falls in love, he always falls hard. It’s like being clobbered over the head with a two by four; it drops him where he stands, turns him inside out and blind and stupid and he hates when it happens.
It shouldn’t surprise him that Lieutenant Commander Bugfuck Crazy McGarrett almost gets him killed their first day of working together. That’s how it usually goes, only in a more metaphorical way. When Danny comes home that evening, he’s sore and bruised and his knuckles hurt and he has a bullet hole in his arm. Seriously, a bullet hole, what’s the deal with that? He’s managed his whole career in law enforcement so far without getting shot once, and within 24 hours of meeting McGarrett, his lucky streak is broken.
And God help him, he can’t wait until tomorrow when he gets to see the psychotic bastard again.
The thought makes him want to bang his head against the wall because this was not supposed to happen to him again. He can’t fucking do this again, not when he’s only just begun piecing his life back together after the last time.
After much consideration, he does bang his head against the wall. He does it twice, with feeling. Then the neighbour next door starts banging back, and Danny gives up and rubs his forehead. He takes a deep breath, cracks open a beer, and turns on the TV.
He’ll be all right. He’s done this before, and he knows how it goes now. All he has to do is to keep it from going too far this time.
* * *
Suzie Tanaka was Danny’s first love. She had brown, almond-shaped eyes, and her hair was long and dark and silken. Actually, Danny had no clue what her hair was really like because Suzie was a little weird about it, but Mom had a silk scarf and he imagined Suzie’s hair would feel like that if he ever got to touch it. He was eleven years old and he knew from the first time he saw her that she was the love of his life. Within two days of getting to know her, Suzie had him wrapped around her little finger, and he didn’t mind one bit.
Matty thought Suzie was stupid, but Matty was still at the age where he thought all girls had cooties and he was mad that Danny would rather walk home from school with Suzie than with him. Angie and Liz thought Danny was stupid, and teased him over the dinner table every night until Mom told them to leave him alone.
He never did get to find out what Suzie’s hair felt like. Her family moved to Chicago the summer before sixth grade, and Danny’s entire world ended. He’d been prepared to do anything for her. He’d even tried learning to play the clarinet because Suzie was in the school band and he’d wanted to impress her. He’d turned out to be extremely bad at it and but at least it had made her laugh so he took that as a partial win.
Danny refused to go to school, and he refused to come out of his room. Officially, he was sick; the kind of illness that required careful application of the thermometer to a radiator to produce a fever that was high enough to keep him home from school but not so high that it would merit panicked parents and hospital visits. He was pretty sure Mom was onto him, but she hadn’t called his bluff yet and Danny was far too miserable to care anyway. Mostly he lay on his bed and stared at the ceiling and tried to ignore it every time someone knocked on the door.
Mom came in to sit on the side of his bed one evening. She ran her fingers through his hair and Danny wanted to lash out, scream and shout at her because he was almost twelve years old and not a baby anymore; but he’d also just had his heart broken, and in a way it was nice to know that she cared.
“I wish I could say it gets better when you get older,” Mom said quietly. “But I’m afraid it’s only going to get worse.”
“Not helping, Mom,” Danny told her and turned his face to the wall.
Mom sighed and stroked her hand down his back. “You’re just like your father,” she said. “You give everything you have, heart and soul. And that’s a good thing, Danny, don’t change. I’m just worried you’re going to get hurt.”
“Seriously Mom, you’re really not helping,” Danny muttered.
He never saw Suzie Tanaka again. She wrote him a letter just after she’d moved, told him that she missed him and that she hoped he could come and visit some time. Danny didn’t answer, couldn’t answer, and that was the last he heard from her.
The wound scabbed over, and Danny went back to school and swore he’d never fall in love again.
* * *
Danny falls for Steve the first day they met, and it’s almost scary how easy it is to fall into a partnership with him.
He honestly hadn’t meant for it to go any further than a professional work relationship, a friendship at the most, because he’s been on the job long enough to know that it rarely works out between partners who aren’t also friends.
Most days, it’s not even that difficult to pretend that he’s not stupidly in love with Steve. Danny could easily write a book on everything that’s wrong with the man. Steve isn’t exactly what you’d call well adjusted, and a lot of the time Danny feels like he’s babysitting a six foot plus hyperactive child with frightening amounts of military training and next to no impulse control. Steve’s a walking catastrophe waiting to happen, and Danny wonders when having bullets flying around his ears stopped being a potential risk and became part of his daily routine. There are days when he dreams about locking Steve up somewhere and not letting him out again until he’s passed a written exam on due process and proper police procedure. Then again, Steve would probably ace the test on the first try and then go out and keep doing things exactly the same way he’s always done them.
Then there are the days when something happens that reminds Steve that he’s a human being. Danny thinks they’re a bit alike in that aspect. Steve gets blindsided by his emotions too, but while Danny is very much in touch with his, it’s like Steve hasn’t even realised that normal people are supposed to have them.
It’s almost always cases involving children, more specifically children who’ve lost their parents. They get to Danny too, but he’s learned the hard way, had to learn, that he cannot put Grace’s face on every child he comes across on the job. That way lies burn-out and madness and mandatory counselling.
Steve doesn’t have that experience. Instead, he’s got Navy SEAL-grade skills in compartmentalising. Whenever he comes across something he can’t deal with, he puts it away in a neat little box, out of sight and out of mind, channels his frustration into furious action when what he really ought to do is to stop, take a deep breath and let himself feel something for once.
Danny is one hundred percent sure that Steve doesn’t even realise himself why he’s acting the way he does. He throws himself from one gruelling case right into the next, keeps himself occupied in some kind of desperate attempt to stop past hurts from bleeding through. Steve himself might not want to acknowledge it, but Danny can see it, the deep sadness that flickers over Steve’s face in unguarded moments.
It makes Danny want to cradle him, hold him tight and safe and shield him too.
And then come those days when Steve does something unexpectedly sweet, when Danny catches him with that warm, fond look on his face, and Danny has to go home and bang his head against the wall a few more times, just to remind himself that getting involved with Steve McGarrett would be extremely bad for his mental and physical health.
* * *
Then all pretense comes tumbling down after a day of adrenaline-fuelled desperation. It starts with an anonymous bomb threat to Ala Moana Center at lunchtime and the rest of the afternoon is devoted to the logistic nightmare of evacuating Hawai'i’s biggest shopping mall while simultaneously trying to track down the people responsible for the threat, and determining if there even is a bomb in the first place.
Because Danny is such a very lucky guy, there turns out to actually be a bomb. It’s also set on a timer, and the bomber is busy babbling about how crass commerce has taken the place of culture and history under Chin’s stern glare, and has no intention of providing any information on where he placed his homemade explosive device or how to defuse it.
Because Danny is quite possibly insane, he ends up being inside the mall while the timer is steadily ticking down to zero, since Steve was adamant that he knew the most logical location for the bomb and that there was ‘no time to wait for the bomb squad, Danno, I had bomb disposal training in the Navy’.
If Danny had any brains left at all, that should have been his cue to turn on his heel and walk right back out. He has a daughter, damnit, and he will never forgive himself if he gets himself blown up and leaves Gracie without a father. But Steve is not listening to reason, and Danny is not very optimistic about his chances of hitting him over the head and dragging him out of there, so he keeps trailing after his suicidally determined partner while throwing out every argument he can think of in the faint hope that any moment, Steve will realise that the sensible thing to do is to run for the exits as fast as his abnormally long legs can carry him. Who is he kidding? Steve wouldn’t see reason if it jumped up and bit him in the face.
Then they do find the bomb, and it becomes clear that neither of them is going to make it out of the mall before it goes off.
There are twelve seconds left on the timer, and Steve has that look on his face that usually means his scary laser focus is wholly concentrated on the task at hand, but might also mean he’s thinking very hard about what kind of low-fat delicacy he’s going to have for dinner.
Danny closes his eyes and prays, and hopes that the fact that he hasn’t been to church since Gracie was little won’t have any impact on the benevolence of the big guy upstairs.
He can hear a faint click and mentally steels himself for the big boom. Rachel is going to bring him back from the dead and kill him all over again. Then, Steve exhales slowly and Danny opens his eyes.
The digital display shows 00.04 in angry red numbers. The countdown has stopped. Steve is holding a disconnected blue wire between two fingers. There’s something in his face that Danny has very rarely seen before, something that looks very similar to stark naked fear.
It’s like time suddenly speeds up to normal again, and Steve seems to shake himself awake from the trance-like look he’s had and shouts, “Why the hell didn’t you get out, Danno, you have a kid!”
Danny shouts back, “Why the hell didn’t you get out, you asshole, did you seriously expect me to leave you to get blown up all on you own?” and his hands are shaking, and he decides that the most sensible course of action at this moment is to just sit down on his ass on the floor because if he doesn’t, his legs will probably give out any second now.
Steve slowly sinks down beside him, looking pretty shaky himself, warily eyeing the countdown timer on the bomb as if it’s going to start ticking again if he takes his eyes of the frozen red numbers. It strikes Danny just how very absurd the entire situation is, and he suddenly can’t stop the laugh that bubbles out of his chest. Steve looks at him like he’s gone mad, but then he starts laughing too, the kind of I-can’t-believe-we’re-not-dead laugh that only comes with excessive levels of adrenaline.
The bomb squad arrives a few minutes later to find them sitting on the floor, leaning on each other and howling with laughter. Danny is pretty sure this will add even more wild tales about Five-0 to the circulation.
Later, after Steve has been properly chastised by both Danny and Chin and the Captain of the bomb squad, and Danny has dropped by Rachel and Stan’s home for a surprise visit, begging to get to say goodnight to Gracie in person (he’s very proud of how well he managed not to let on how very close he came to dying an hour ago), the two of them somehow end up at Steve’s place.
It should be like any other evening - a few beers on the lana'i and round four hundred and thirteen of Hawai'i vs. Jersey, possibly interspersed by the always-popular conversation topic ‘Crazy Shit Steve Learned in the Navy’.
It should be like that, because Danny’s entire strategy for how to avoid getting his heart broken again hinges on the old familiar routine to continue like everything is normal. But he still feels a bit shocky, and Steve has been a little too pale and quiet, a little too intense, since they got out of the mall. Something is going to happen tonight, Danny just knows it. He also knows that he’s going to be helpless to stop it once the crucial moment comes, and he really should just drop Steve off and smile and wave goodbye, and then go home and take a cold shower and maybe a Valium or something and go to bed.
He doesn’t. Instead, he parks the Camaro in front of Steve’s garage and follows Steve through the door, and when Steve turns to him in the hall and takes hold of his wrists and presses him against the wall, Danny just goes with it. He opens his mouth and lets Steve kiss him, and then he kisses back because Steve just disarmed a bomb with four seconds to spare and they should be dead right now.
They fall into bed, both of them shaking with reaction and desire and need, and Danny gets to be the one to see Steve’s hard edges soften, gets to see all that laser guided focus directed at him, and it does extremely scary things to Danny’s chest, but it’s so beautiful that he can’t bring himself to regret it.
Afterwards, Steve holds him, face pressed close to his neck, like he’s trying to drown himself in Danny’s skin.
He’s so screwed.
* * *
The bed is empty when Danny wakes up the next morning and he reaches for the vacated spot with a strange ache in his heart, somewhere between disappointment and relief. He figures he ought to be grateful that Steve had the grace to clear out and leave Danny to do the walk of shame with at least a little dignity left. Then he gets up and gets dressed in the wrinkled, sweat-stinking clothes Steve ripped off him yesterday. It’s still early enough that he has time to go home and shower and change before he has to be at work.
He goes downstairs, and it turns out Steve didn’t clear out after all. Steve is in the kitchen, leaning against the counter and drinking something green and probably disgustingly healthy straight out of the blender. He’s dressed only in damp swim shorts, and his hair is drying in funny little whorls around his ears.
“That is so wrong,” Danny says, staring at the sludge that passes for Steve’s breakfast. “Nothing edible should have that colour. I fear for you.”
“You could’ve borrowed a clean t-shirt,” Steve says. “Coffee?”
Danny considers the offer and decides that he’s going to need vast amounts of caffeine to deal with this morning, so he accepts a mug from Steve and promptly proceeds to burn his tongue on the scalding hot drink.
“You should come with a warning label,” he mutters and then takes another cautious sip. “I don’t know what they taught you in SEAL school, but coffee is not supposed to be weaponised, okay?”
Steve doesn’t say anything. He just steps up close and gently palms Danny’s jaw, looking down at him like he’s something precious. Then Steve bows his head to kiss him, and Danny is falling all over again.
* * *
Falling into a relationship with Steve is almost as simple as falling into a partnership was. It’s not like anything actually changes, except for the fantastic sex, which leads Danny to the conclusion that they have actually been dating all this time and no one told him.
“Why didn’t anyone tell me?” he asks Chin and Kono, because if the two of them didn’t notice, they don’t deserve their badges..
“I thought you knew,” Kono says, looking innocent like only Kono can.
“I just thought it was fun to see how long it would take you to figure it out,” Chin says, looking just like he does when he’s making a perp sweat and secretly finds it far too amusing, but can’t let it show because it would destroy his badass image.
Danny buries his head in his arms and groans, and wonders what the hell he’s gotten himself into. If only he had known he could have... what? Stopped it before it even had a chance to begin? That would mean he would never have found out about the noises Steve makes when you kiss his bellybutton.
The problem isn’t that he’s in love with Steve. He’s been in love with Steve since day one, and he’s handled it just fine since then. The problem isn’t even that Steve loves him back.
No, the problem is how natural it all feels, like his life doesn’t even need any adjustment to slip in neatly together with Steve’s. Gracie already adores Steve, and Rachel thinks he’s a good influence (she must clearly have met a completely different Steve McGarrett than Danny, because his Steve is a walking talking recipe for disaster.) They don’t have to go through the awkward stage of finding out each other’s pet peeves and disgusting habits, because Danny already knows that raw onions give Steve gas and that eating them will get him banned from the Camaro for the rest of the day, and Steve is well aware that Danny likes to sleep in in the morning and therefore skips breakfast more often than not, no matter how healthy and well-prepared it is.
It’s like they’ve been together for a lifetime already when in reality it’s only a few weeks, and Danny is beginning to feel like he’s completely lost control of the whole thing. He should take the time to sit down and think it all through, because right now he’s not being very smart. He’s just crazy in love and, he has to admit to himself, stupidly happy.
It just can’t last. Sooner or later, the other shoe is going to drop, and with Danny’s usual luck, that shoe is going to be made of cast iron and it’s going to land right on top of his toes.
* * *
Danny and Eddie Cole were on the basketball team together in junior year. Eddie was tall and had dark hair and eyelashes to die for. The two of them weren’t best friends; Danny’s best friend was J.J. Martinez, and he’d never once thought about what J.J.’s eyelashes looked like. No, Eddie was just the guy Danny liked hanging out with a little too much for his own good. The two of them used to sit in Danny’s room and talk about what they were going to do after school, about their dreams and expectations. Danny thought that he might become a firefighter like Dad, or maybe an ambulance driver, which would also be cool. Eddie just wanted out and away, to go anywhere but here.
There was something about Eddie that Danny just couldn’t put his finger on, something new and exciting that gave him a weird feeling in his stomach. The way Eddie looked at him, the way Eddie listened to him made Danny want to spend a whole lot more time in his company, and they were already pretty much inseparable.
Then Eddie started turning up Danny’s his jerk-off fantasies, the shy little duck he did with his head when he’d said something clever, the thoughtful line of his mouth. The first time it happened, Danny was so surprised he had to stop and wonder what the hell was wrong with his brain. Then he thought, Oh, that’s what it is, part relieved that he’d finally figured it out and also a bit freaked out, because he was pretty sure this was going to turn problematic.
Troublesome or not, Danny was hopelessly in love with Eddie Cole and there was nothing he could do about it, except carry on as usual and hope that Eddie wouldn’t notice.
Close to Christmas, Eddie was talking more and more frequently about going away. Before, he’d always talked about what he was going to do after graduation, but now Danny was getting the feeling that Eddie was gearing up to just drop out of school and pack and go. He couldn’t figure out why, because Eddie was really smart and got high grades in all his classes, and Coach Abramovitz was talking about making him Captain of the basketball team next year. The more he talked, the more nervous Danny got that one day, Eddie would simply be gone. He hadn’t forgotten Suzie Tanaka and how she’d disappeared from his life.
Then came the day, just after school had started again after the winter break, when Eddie turned up at the Williams’ family home to ask Danny to come with him. It was cold out and the snow was coming down, and Eddie was only wearing a shirt. He was shivering and Mom made him come in and sit in the kitchen and warm up, and then she sent the two of them to Danny’s room to find something dry for Eddie to wear.
Danny was pretty sure Eddie had had a fight with his dad again; the two of them didn’t get along at all, but when he asked, Eddie said that nothing had happened. He’d just had enough. He was leaving, now, at once, and he wanted Danny to come too.
Danny protested that he couldn’t leave, he had school and Angie and Liz and Matty to look out for, and all kinds of responsibilities he couldn’t just give up.
Then Eddie grabbed hold of his shoulders and kissed him, and everything else ceased to matter completely.
They ended up naked together in Danny’s narrow bed. Danny’s first time was fumbling and awkward and new in every way, and the moment they were done, he wanted to do it all over again. He and Eddie spent the rest of the evening making out and planning their big adventure. Eddie wanted to go immediately, but Danny convinced him to wait for a couple of days, just so they would have time to make better plans.
The next day in school, Eddie acted like nothing had happened. At first, Danny thought he was just trying to keep their adventure a secret, but after lunch, when Eddie hadn’t even looked him all day, Danny cornered him outside the school cafeteria and asked what the hell was up with him.
Eddie said that nothing was wrong, he just had stuff to do and by the way, he wasn’t going to leave after all. Come to think about it, it was probably best if he and Danny stopped hanging out so much because people were beginning to talk.
Danny stammered something about yesterday, not really believing his ears. He’d already started to pack his bag.
“If you ever tell anyone about yesterday, I’ll kill you,” Eddie interrupted and backed away like he’d been burned. Then he ducked around a corner and disappeared.
Danny felt like he’d been punched in the gut and left on the ground gasping for breath. He’d been ready to do pretty much anything for Eddie, including leaving home and running off to see the world together. Never mind the fact that a couple of seventeen-year-olds with no car and barely any money probably wouldn’t get much farther than Hoboken.
Now, Eddie seemed to suddenly hate him for some reason, and Danny had no idea what he’d done wrong, how he could have misread the situation so completely.
Danny quit the basketball team and he wouldn’t touch a ball again until many years later when the memory of Eddie had faded enough that it didn’t hurt so much anymore. His grades dropped to the point where Mom and Dad started to worry, but he just couldn’t bring himself to care. He just wanted Eddie to stop strutting around school with his stupid eyelashes and his shy smile like nothing had happened. He was miserable for months and he was angry even longer. He’d wanted to give Eddie everything, and Eddie had taken it and then thrown it on the ground and stomped on it like it was worth nothing.
It took time, but Danny did forgive Eddie eventually. A year later, Mr Cole kicked his son out, ‘kicked’ in the literal sense of the word. There was a lot of gossip in the neighbourhood. As far as Danny could tell, Mr Cole had found out that Eddie was a ‘faggot’ and Eddie had ended up in the ER with two cracked ribs.
All Danny could think about was how very lucky he was that his own parents had only made vaguely questioning noises about grandkids when he’d finally managed to get up his nerve to tell them that he really liked girls, okay, girls were awesome, but he kinda liked guys too.
In a way, he should be grateful for the whole ugly experience. Eddie had taught him to guard his heart better, that even the people he loves can hurt him. He knows now that he has to be careful and that he has to be smart, has to use his head. Eddie had taught him that he needs shields, that he has to learn how to protect himself, or there’s a very real possibility he’ll see the day when love will kick the shit out of him and stomp him into the ground and leave him unable to get up again.
Last time he heard, Eddie lived in San Fransisco with an interior designer named Mark. Danny thought about calling a couple of times, just to let him know there were no hard feelings, but he never got around to it.
Part 2
Author: Zinnith
Pairing: Steve/Danny (Past Danny/OFC, Danny/OMC, Danny/Rachel)
Rating: PG-13/R
Spoilers: General for season 1. Goes AU before the season finale.
Warnings: One homophobic slur
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Wordcount: ~ 10 000
Author's Notes: Huge thanks to sirona_gs for the excellent beta and for wrangling my commas into place!
Summary: Danny has a long history of getting his heart broken. Steve sneakily tries to make him move in anyway.
AO3 link
When Danny Williams falls in love, he always falls hard. It’s like being clobbered over the head with a two by four; it drops him where he stands, turns him inside out and blind and stupid and he hates when it happens.
It shouldn’t surprise him that Lieutenant Commander Bugfuck Crazy McGarrett almost gets him killed their first day of working together. That’s how it usually goes, only in a more metaphorical way. When Danny comes home that evening, he’s sore and bruised and his knuckles hurt and he has a bullet hole in his arm. Seriously, a bullet hole, what’s the deal with that? He’s managed his whole career in law enforcement so far without getting shot once, and within 24 hours of meeting McGarrett, his lucky streak is broken.
And God help him, he can’t wait until tomorrow when he gets to see the psychotic bastard again.
The thought makes him want to bang his head against the wall because this was not supposed to happen to him again. He can’t fucking do this again, not when he’s only just begun piecing his life back together after the last time.
After much consideration, he does bang his head against the wall. He does it twice, with feeling. Then the neighbour next door starts banging back, and Danny gives up and rubs his forehead. He takes a deep breath, cracks open a beer, and turns on the TV.
He’ll be all right. He’s done this before, and he knows how it goes now. All he has to do is to keep it from going too far this time.
* * *
Suzie Tanaka was Danny’s first love. She had brown, almond-shaped eyes, and her hair was long and dark and silken. Actually, Danny had no clue what her hair was really like because Suzie was a little weird about it, but Mom had a silk scarf and he imagined Suzie’s hair would feel like that if he ever got to touch it. He was eleven years old and he knew from the first time he saw her that she was the love of his life. Within two days of getting to know her, Suzie had him wrapped around her little finger, and he didn’t mind one bit.
Matty thought Suzie was stupid, but Matty was still at the age where he thought all girls had cooties and he was mad that Danny would rather walk home from school with Suzie than with him. Angie and Liz thought Danny was stupid, and teased him over the dinner table every night until Mom told them to leave him alone.
He never did get to find out what Suzie’s hair felt like. Her family moved to Chicago the summer before sixth grade, and Danny’s entire world ended. He’d been prepared to do anything for her. He’d even tried learning to play the clarinet because Suzie was in the school band and he’d wanted to impress her. He’d turned out to be extremely bad at it and but at least it had made her laugh so he took that as a partial win.
Danny refused to go to school, and he refused to come out of his room. Officially, he was sick; the kind of illness that required careful application of the thermometer to a radiator to produce a fever that was high enough to keep him home from school but not so high that it would merit panicked parents and hospital visits. He was pretty sure Mom was onto him, but she hadn’t called his bluff yet and Danny was far too miserable to care anyway. Mostly he lay on his bed and stared at the ceiling and tried to ignore it every time someone knocked on the door.
Mom came in to sit on the side of his bed one evening. She ran her fingers through his hair and Danny wanted to lash out, scream and shout at her because he was almost twelve years old and not a baby anymore; but he’d also just had his heart broken, and in a way it was nice to know that she cared.
“I wish I could say it gets better when you get older,” Mom said quietly. “But I’m afraid it’s only going to get worse.”
“Not helping, Mom,” Danny told her and turned his face to the wall.
Mom sighed and stroked her hand down his back. “You’re just like your father,” she said. “You give everything you have, heart and soul. And that’s a good thing, Danny, don’t change. I’m just worried you’re going to get hurt.”
“Seriously Mom, you’re really not helping,” Danny muttered.
He never saw Suzie Tanaka again. She wrote him a letter just after she’d moved, told him that she missed him and that she hoped he could come and visit some time. Danny didn’t answer, couldn’t answer, and that was the last he heard from her.
The wound scabbed over, and Danny went back to school and swore he’d never fall in love again.
* * *
Danny falls for Steve the first day they met, and it’s almost scary how easy it is to fall into a partnership with him.
He honestly hadn’t meant for it to go any further than a professional work relationship, a friendship at the most, because he’s been on the job long enough to know that it rarely works out between partners who aren’t also friends.
Most days, it’s not even that difficult to pretend that he’s not stupidly in love with Steve. Danny could easily write a book on everything that’s wrong with the man. Steve isn’t exactly what you’d call well adjusted, and a lot of the time Danny feels like he’s babysitting a six foot plus hyperactive child with frightening amounts of military training and next to no impulse control. Steve’s a walking catastrophe waiting to happen, and Danny wonders when having bullets flying around his ears stopped being a potential risk and became part of his daily routine. There are days when he dreams about locking Steve up somewhere and not letting him out again until he’s passed a written exam on due process and proper police procedure. Then again, Steve would probably ace the test on the first try and then go out and keep doing things exactly the same way he’s always done them.
Then there are the days when something happens that reminds Steve that he’s a human being. Danny thinks they’re a bit alike in that aspect. Steve gets blindsided by his emotions too, but while Danny is very much in touch with his, it’s like Steve hasn’t even realised that normal people are supposed to have them.
It’s almost always cases involving children, more specifically children who’ve lost their parents. They get to Danny too, but he’s learned the hard way, had to learn, that he cannot put Grace’s face on every child he comes across on the job. That way lies burn-out and madness and mandatory counselling.
Steve doesn’t have that experience. Instead, he’s got Navy SEAL-grade skills in compartmentalising. Whenever he comes across something he can’t deal with, he puts it away in a neat little box, out of sight and out of mind, channels his frustration into furious action when what he really ought to do is to stop, take a deep breath and let himself feel something for once.
Danny is one hundred percent sure that Steve doesn’t even realise himself why he’s acting the way he does. He throws himself from one gruelling case right into the next, keeps himself occupied in some kind of desperate attempt to stop past hurts from bleeding through. Steve himself might not want to acknowledge it, but Danny can see it, the deep sadness that flickers over Steve’s face in unguarded moments.
It makes Danny want to cradle him, hold him tight and safe and shield him too.
And then come those days when Steve does something unexpectedly sweet, when Danny catches him with that warm, fond look on his face, and Danny has to go home and bang his head against the wall a few more times, just to remind himself that getting involved with Steve McGarrett would be extremely bad for his mental and physical health.
* * *
Then all pretense comes tumbling down after a day of adrenaline-fuelled desperation. It starts with an anonymous bomb threat to Ala Moana Center at lunchtime and the rest of the afternoon is devoted to the logistic nightmare of evacuating Hawai'i’s biggest shopping mall while simultaneously trying to track down the people responsible for the threat, and determining if there even is a bomb in the first place.
Because Danny is such a very lucky guy, there turns out to actually be a bomb. It’s also set on a timer, and the bomber is busy babbling about how crass commerce has taken the place of culture and history under Chin’s stern glare, and has no intention of providing any information on where he placed his homemade explosive device or how to defuse it.
Because Danny is quite possibly insane, he ends up being inside the mall while the timer is steadily ticking down to zero, since Steve was adamant that he knew the most logical location for the bomb and that there was ‘no time to wait for the bomb squad, Danno, I had bomb disposal training in the Navy’.
If Danny had any brains left at all, that should have been his cue to turn on his heel and walk right back out. He has a daughter, damnit, and he will never forgive himself if he gets himself blown up and leaves Gracie without a father. But Steve is not listening to reason, and Danny is not very optimistic about his chances of hitting him over the head and dragging him out of there, so he keeps trailing after his suicidally determined partner while throwing out every argument he can think of in the faint hope that any moment, Steve will realise that the sensible thing to do is to run for the exits as fast as his abnormally long legs can carry him. Who is he kidding? Steve wouldn’t see reason if it jumped up and bit him in the face.
Then they do find the bomb, and it becomes clear that neither of them is going to make it out of the mall before it goes off.
There are twelve seconds left on the timer, and Steve has that look on his face that usually means his scary laser focus is wholly concentrated on the task at hand, but might also mean he’s thinking very hard about what kind of low-fat delicacy he’s going to have for dinner.
Danny closes his eyes and prays, and hopes that the fact that he hasn’t been to church since Gracie was little won’t have any impact on the benevolence of the big guy upstairs.
He can hear a faint click and mentally steels himself for the big boom. Rachel is going to bring him back from the dead and kill him all over again. Then, Steve exhales slowly and Danny opens his eyes.
The digital display shows 00.04 in angry red numbers. The countdown has stopped. Steve is holding a disconnected blue wire between two fingers. There’s something in his face that Danny has very rarely seen before, something that looks very similar to stark naked fear.
It’s like time suddenly speeds up to normal again, and Steve seems to shake himself awake from the trance-like look he’s had and shouts, “Why the hell didn’t you get out, Danno, you have a kid!”
Danny shouts back, “Why the hell didn’t you get out, you asshole, did you seriously expect me to leave you to get blown up all on you own?” and his hands are shaking, and he decides that the most sensible course of action at this moment is to just sit down on his ass on the floor because if he doesn’t, his legs will probably give out any second now.
Steve slowly sinks down beside him, looking pretty shaky himself, warily eyeing the countdown timer on the bomb as if it’s going to start ticking again if he takes his eyes of the frozen red numbers. It strikes Danny just how very absurd the entire situation is, and he suddenly can’t stop the laugh that bubbles out of his chest. Steve looks at him like he’s gone mad, but then he starts laughing too, the kind of I-can’t-believe-we’re-not-dead laugh that only comes with excessive levels of adrenaline.
The bomb squad arrives a few minutes later to find them sitting on the floor, leaning on each other and howling with laughter. Danny is pretty sure this will add even more wild tales about Five-0 to the circulation.
Later, after Steve has been properly chastised by both Danny and Chin and the Captain of the bomb squad, and Danny has dropped by Rachel and Stan’s home for a surprise visit, begging to get to say goodnight to Gracie in person (he’s very proud of how well he managed not to let on how very close he came to dying an hour ago), the two of them somehow end up at Steve’s place.
It should be like any other evening - a few beers on the lana'i and round four hundred and thirteen of Hawai'i vs. Jersey, possibly interspersed by the always-popular conversation topic ‘Crazy Shit Steve Learned in the Navy’.
It should be like that, because Danny’s entire strategy for how to avoid getting his heart broken again hinges on the old familiar routine to continue like everything is normal. But he still feels a bit shocky, and Steve has been a little too pale and quiet, a little too intense, since they got out of the mall. Something is going to happen tonight, Danny just knows it. He also knows that he’s going to be helpless to stop it once the crucial moment comes, and he really should just drop Steve off and smile and wave goodbye, and then go home and take a cold shower and maybe a Valium or something and go to bed.
He doesn’t. Instead, he parks the Camaro in front of Steve’s garage and follows Steve through the door, and when Steve turns to him in the hall and takes hold of his wrists and presses him against the wall, Danny just goes with it. He opens his mouth and lets Steve kiss him, and then he kisses back because Steve just disarmed a bomb with four seconds to spare and they should be dead right now.
They fall into bed, both of them shaking with reaction and desire and need, and Danny gets to be the one to see Steve’s hard edges soften, gets to see all that laser guided focus directed at him, and it does extremely scary things to Danny’s chest, but it’s so beautiful that he can’t bring himself to regret it.
Afterwards, Steve holds him, face pressed close to his neck, like he’s trying to drown himself in Danny’s skin.
He’s so screwed.
* * *
The bed is empty when Danny wakes up the next morning and he reaches for the vacated spot with a strange ache in his heart, somewhere between disappointment and relief. He figures he ought to be grateful that Steve had the grace to clear out and leave Danny to do the walk of shame with at least a little dignity left. Then he gets up and gets dressed in the wrinkled, sweat-stinking clothes Steve ripped off him yesterday. It’s still early enough that he has time to go home and shower and change before he has to be at work.
He goes downstairs, and it turns out Steve didn’t clear out after all. Steve is in the kitchen, leaning against the counter and drinking something green and probably disgustingly healthy straight out of the blender. He’s dressed only in damp swim shorts, and his hair is drying in funny little whorls around his ears.
“That is so wrong,” Danny says, staring at the sludge that passes for Steve’s breakfast. “Nothing edible should have that colour. I fear for you.”
“You could’ve borrowed a clean t-shirt,” Steve says. “Coffee?”
Danny considers the offer and decides that he’s going to need vast amounts of caffeine to deal with this morning, so he accepts a mug from Steve and promptly proceeds to burn his tongue on the scalding hot drink.
“You should come with a warning label,” he mutters and then takes another cautious sip. “I don’t know what they taught you in SEAL school, but coffee is not supposed to be weaponised, okay?”
Steve doesn’t say anything. He just steps up close and gently palms Danny’s jaw, looking down at him like he’s something precious. Then Steve bows his head to kiss him, and Danny is falling all over again.
* * *
Falling into a relationship with Steve is almost as simple as falling into a partnership was. It’s not like anything actually changes, except for the fantastic sex, which leads Danny to the conclusion that they have actually been dating all this time and no one told him.
“Why didn’t anyone tell me?” he asks Chin and Kono, because if the two of them didn’t notice, they don’t deserve their badges..
“I thought you knew,” Kono says, looking innocent like only Kono can.
“I just thought it was fun to see how long it would take you to figure it out,” Chin says, looking just like he does when he’s making a perp sweat and secretly finds it far too amusing, but can’t let it show because it would destroy his badass image.
Danny buries his head in his arms and groans, and wonders what the hell he’s gotten himself into. If only he had known he could have... what? Stopped it before it even had a chance to begin? That would mean he would never have found out about the noises Steve makes when you kiss his bellybutton.
The problem isn’t that he’s in love with Steve. He’s been in love with Steve since day one, and he’s handled it just fine since then. The problem isn’t even that Steve loves him back.
No, the problem is how natural it all feels, like his life doesn’t even need any adjustment to slip in neatly together with Steve’s. Gracie already adores Steve, and Rachel thinks he’s a good influence (she must clearly have met a completely different Steve McGarrett than Danny, because his Steve is a walking talking recipe for disaster.) They don’t have to go through the awkward stage of finding out each other’s pet peeves and disgusting habits, because Danny already knows that raw onions give Steve gas and that eating them will get him banned from the Camaro for the rest of the day, and Steve is well aware that Danny likes to sleep in in the morning and therefore skips breakfast more often than not, no matter how healthy and well-prepared it is.
It’s like they’ve been together for a lifetime already when in reality it’s only a few weeks, and Danny is beginning to feel like he’s completely lost control of the whole thing. He should take the time to sit down and think it all through, because right now he’s not being very smart. He’s just crazy in love and, he has to admit to himself, stupidly happy.
It just can’t last. Sooner or later, the other shoe is going to drop, and with Danny’s usual luck, that shoe is going to be made of cast iron and it’s going to land right on top of his toes.
* * *
Danny and Eddie Cole were on the basketball team together in junior year. Eddie was tall and had dark hair and eyelashes to die for. The two of them weren’t best friends; Danny’s best friend was J.J. Martinez, and he’d never once thought about what J.J.’s eyelashes looked like. No, Eddie was just the guy Danny liked hanging out with a little too much for his own good. The two of them used to sit in Danny’s room and talk about what they were going to do after school, about their dreams and expectations. Danny thought that he might become a firefighter like Dad, or maybe an ambulance driver, which would also be cool. Eddie just wanted out and away, to go anywhere but here.
There was something about Eddie that Danny just couldn’t put his finger on, something new and exciting that gave him a weird feeling in his stomach. The way Eddie looked at him, the way Eddie listened to him made Danny want to spend a whole lot more time in his company, and they were already pretty much inseparable.
Then Eddie started turning up Danny’s his jerk-off fantasies, the shy little duck he did with his head when he’d said something clever, the thoughtful line of his mouth. The first time it happened, Danny was so surprised he had to stop and wonder what the hell was wrong with his brain. Then he thought, Oh, that’s what it is, part relieved that he’d finally figured it out and also a bit freaked out, because he was pretty sure this was going to turn problematic.
Troublesome or not, Danny was hopelessly in love with Eddie Cole and there was nothing he could do about it, except carry on as usual and hope that Eddie wouldn’t notice.
Close to Christmas, Eddie was talking more and more frequently about going away. Before, he’d always talked about what he was going to do after graduation, but now Danny was getting the feeling that Eddie was gearing up to just drop out of school and pack and go. He couldn’t figure out why, because Eddie was really smart and got high grades in all his classes, and Coach Abramovitz was talking about making him Captain of the basketball team next year. The more he talked, the more nervous Danny got that one day, Eddie would simply be gone. He hadn’t forgotten Suzie Tanaka and how she’d disappeared from his life.
Then came the day, just after school had started again after the winter break, when Eddie turned up at the Williams’ family home to ask Danny to come with him. It was cold out and the snow was coming down, and Eddie was only wearing a shirt. He was shivering and Mom made him come in and sit in the kitchen and warm up, and then she sent the two of them to Danny’s room to find something dry for Eddie to wear.
Danny was pretty sure Eddie had had a fight with his dad again; the two of them didn’t get along at all, but when he asked, Eddie said that nothing had happened. He’d just had enough. He was leaving, now, at once, and he wanted Danny to come too.
Danny protested that he couldn’t leave, he had school and Angie and Liz and Matty to look out for, and all kinds of responsibilities he couldn’t just give up.
Then Eddie grabbed hold of his shoulders and kissed him, and everything else ceased to matter completely.
They ended up naked together in Danny’s narrow bed. Danny’s first time was fumbling and awkward and new in every way, and the moment they were done, he wanted to do it all over again. He and Eddie spent the rest of the evening making out and planning their big adventure. Eddie wanted to go immediately, but Danny convinced him to wait for a couple of days, just so they would have time to make better plans.
The next day in school, Eddie acted like nothing had happened. At first, Danny thought he was just trying to keep their adventure a secret, but after lunch, when Eddie hadn’t even looked him all day, Danny cornered him outside the school cafeteria and asked what the hell was up with him.
Eddie said that nothing was wrong, he just had stuff to do and by the way, he wasn’t going to leave after all. Come to think about it, it was probably best if he and Danny stopped hanging out so much because people were beginning to talk.
Danny stammered something about yesterday, not really believing his ears. He’d already started to pack his bag.
“If you ever tell anyone about yesterday, I’ll kill you,” Eddie interrupted and backed away like he’d been burned. Then he ducked around a corner and disappeared.
Danny felt like he’d been punched in the gut and left on the ground gasping for breath. He’d been ready to do pretty much anything for Eddie, including leaving home and running off to see the world together. Never mind the fact that a couple of seventeen-year-olds with no car and barely any money probably wouldn’t get much farther than Hoboken.
Now, Eddie seemed to suddenly hate him for some reason, and Danny had no idea what he’d done wrong, how he could have misread the situation so completely.
Danny quit the basketball team and he wouldn’t touch a ball again until many years later when the memory of Eddie had faded enough that it didn’t hurt so much anymore. His grades dropped to the point where Mom and Dad started to worry, but he just couldn’t bring himself to care. He just wanted Eddie to stop strutting around school with his stupid eyelashes and his shy smile like nothing had happened. He was miserable for months and he was angry even longer. He’d wanted to give Eddie everything, and Eddie had taken it and then thrown it on the ground and stomped on it like it was worth nothing.
It took time, but Danny did forgive Eddie eventually. A year later, Mr Cole kicked his son out, ‘kicked’ in the literal sense of the word. There was a lot of gossip in the neighbourhood. As far as Danny could tell, Mr Cole had found out that Eddie was a ‘faggot’ and Eddie had ended up in the ER with two cracked ribs.
All Danny could think about was how very lucky he was that his own parents had only made vaguely questioning noises about grandkids when he’d finally managed to get up his nerve to tell them that he really liked girls, okay, girls were awesome, but he kinda liked guys too.
In a way, he should be grateful for the whole ugly experience. Eddie had taught him to guard his heart better, that even the people he loves can hurt him. He knows now that he has to be careful and that he has to be smart, has to use his head. Eddie had taught him that he needs shields, that he has to learn how to protect himself, or there’s a very real possibility he’ll see the day when love will kick the shit out of him and stomp him into the ground and leave him unable to get up again.
Last time he heard, Eddie lived in San Fransisco with an interior designer named Mark. Danny thought about calling a couple of times, just to let him know there were no hard feelings, but he never got around to it.
Part 2