Take it from the Inside (H50 fic, Steve/Danny, NC-17)
Title: Take it from the Inside
Rating: NC-17, but mostly for kink.
Pairings: Danny/Steve, established relationship.
Word Count: ~3.7K
Spoilers: through 1.09.
Warnings: painplay, bloodplay, knifeplay: all RACK (risk aware consensual kink). Sensation play, not power play.
Summary: Coda for 1.09. Most men would need to feel less pain in order to sleep after a night like that. Stood to reason that Steve McGarrett would need to feel more.
a/n: For this prompt, though I didn’t end up following it all that strictly. I thought it would be a quick, porny fill, but it got away from me a bit. Not sure what it is now, except for it’s probably the sappiest bloodplay fic you’re ever likely to read. The kink seems relatively mild to me, but not so mild that I’m not asking you to please heed the warnings.
a/n: title from Wilco, “I am trying to break your heart.”
a/n: a big thank you to calamitycrow for the beta!
Take It from the Inside
In the end, they compromised.
Danny was all for Steve coming home with him. Heck, he was even willing to spring for a room at one of the fancy downtown hotels-it would have been worth it for the mini-bar and the Jacuzzi fixtures in the bath.
Steve, however, seemed to think that the sensible thing to do was to stay up all night getting a jump on the home repairs. The team helped him board up the windows, because, yeah, that did need to be done, but when he’d started digging out the tools for more projects, Chin literally blocked his path, a hand flat against Steve’s chest.
“Take a knee, Boss,” he said, with the look he reserved for Steve at his most batshit. “For all our sakes, okay? Take a knee.”
Steve stared at him for a long moment, caught uncharacteristically off-balance. But then he carefully put the hammer back in the tool box and nodded.
Chin and Kono left soon after. Danny didn’t know if they explicitly knew what was going on between him and Steve, or if they just figured Steve was Danny’s responsibility now regardless. Part of Danny was silently saying, thank you very fucking much, guys, but the rest of him wouldn’t have had it any other way.
So they compromised. Steve got to stay in the house, but Danny coaxed and bullied him upstairs, into the relatively undamaged master bedroom. He started to grab a couple of beers from the fridge before going up, and then thought better of it.
“You got anything stronger?” he asked.
Steve reluctantly pulled a half-full bottle from the freezer. Apple-flavored Smirnoff’s. He made a face. “Left over from Mary Ann.”
“Any port in a storm, babe,” Danny snorted mirthlessly. “Any port in a storm.”
++++++
So here he was: sitting propped up against the headboard of Steve’s bed, a water glass of too-sweet vodka going warm in his hand, watching Steve pace. No-pace was the wrong word: watching Steve prowl around the room, restlessly rearranging objects and examining surfaces, never coming to a halt.
Steve hadn’t bothered to put his shirt back on after the EMTs had treated his injuries, and he looked a little wild, traces of soot and powder, a couple of random scratches along his ribs. The medics had put a butterfly bandage over the cut on his forehead, and six stitches in the knife wound on his bicep. The gash was covered now with a clean white dressing. Both bandage and dressing would be gone by morning, Danny knew.
The night was warm enough that a shirt wasn’t strictly necessary, and clearly ex-Navy SEALs had no truck with things like shock. But Danny still kinda wished he’d cover up. Steve being so-so naked-was distracting Danny from-from whatever it was a truly responsible partner-slash-lover would be doing right now. Not that he knew what that was. The endless firefight, plus the vodka, plus whatever painkillers the EMTs had doled out, would have had any regular person flat out by this point, not prowling around like a mountain lion that had lost its deer carcass. Danny was starting to think the caring thing to do would be to cold-cock Steve with the butt of his own gun, just to get him to sit still for a minute.
Worse, Steve’s display of flesh wasn’t getting to Danny for any of the reasons a body like that would get to 99.9% of the population-the chiseled abs, the tattooed arms-nice as those were. The thing was-the thing was-and Danny could barely admit it, even to himself-he had to keep jerking his eyes away from Steve’s wounds, from the traces of blood at his hairline, the red dotting the otherwise pristine bandage on his arm.
And it wasn’t as if he’d hadn’t seen Steve’s blood before-saw it every fucking week, seemed like. But it was like the repeated exposure had raised some kind of sensitivity in him, the way some people got more and more reactive to bee stings over time. So that what had once just made him feel mildly protective now felt a lot like-well, like an allergic reaction-his pulse ramping up, his throat constricting, sweating breaking out on his palms. Except he was pretty sure he wasn’t having a lethal auto-immune response. It felt more like--
Well, he wasn’t sure what it felt like. And that worried him. He’d chewed the whole thing over ‘til it just about made him crazy. He was like a dog with a bone with these things, Rachel always said. And he didn’t think it was Steve’s pain that was turning him on-or at least, not mostly. It was more like seeing Steve laid open made Danny want to touch him in the weirdest and most inappropriate ways-made him want to explore the line where the inside met the outside, stake a claim to what lay beyond Steve’s perfect surfaces. The urge was visceral, territorial-and had nothing at all to do with the companionable, mutually satisfying thing they had going on.
A thing Danny had no desire to jeopardize with this strange new possessiveness.
Danny had only realized just how bad it had gotten the week before, when Steve had bullied the whole team into getting complete physicals. Because it turned out that as much as he loved throwing himself-and the rest of them-into crazy amounts of danger at regular intervals, Steve was the kind of boss who wanted to ensure that everyone was otherwise healthy. Healthy enough to withstand the shitstorms he tossed them into, Danny supposed. It made sense, in a McGarrett kind of way.
As luck would have it, their exams had finished at the same time, and Danny had found himself sitting across from Steve in a spindly plastic chair as a matronly nurse drew blood samples from each of them in turn. Steve first, and Danny had tried not to stare-it didn’t seem entirely polite to watch a syringe going into someone else’s body. But he kept darting little glances back. He couldn’t help himself.
The nurse had tied a piece of blue plastic above Steve’s elbow, tapped the flesh on the inside of the joint expertly. “Nice veins,” she’d said, in that offhand tone nurses have, and Steve had smiled vaguely, as though he were used to be complimented about such things. But Danny had been riveted-the whole world narrowing and slowing. The pull of red out of the narrow rope of blue had seemed like the emergence of a secret, like it could tell Danny all the truths about Steve he’d never dared to ask. For one hot, strange moment, he’d wished it were his hand plunging in the needle, holding the syringe. A jolt of desire had slammed through him, hard as a pile driver. Shit, he’d thought, shit.
“It really doesn’t hurt at all, Hon’,” the nurse had said, and tapped Steve on the shoulder. “Tell your buddy it doesn’t hurt.”
“Wha’?” Danny had been startled back into awareness. “I know-I know it doesn’t hurt.”
“Uh-huh. ” The nurse had clearly decided he was bluffing. “I just thought you might be a little bit anxious, that’s all, the way your eyes went all wide like that. Happens to lots of people, nothing to be ashamed of--”
“That’s right, Danno, nothing to be ashamed of,” Steve said, with that special brand of smug amusement that made Danny want to smack him. “I bet there’ll be stickers and lollypops if you’re a brave boy for the nurse.”
“Fuck you, McGarrett,” Danny had grumbled, sticking his arm out, while the nurse muttered “Language, gentlemen, language” disapprovingly.
And God knew they’d tried out a whole bunch of things in bed by now-and in the car, and even once or twice in the alley behind HQ-but this was one set of interests Danny vowed right then to bury deep.
++++++
And yet here he was, feeling his skin prickle as Steve absently-mindedly rubbed his wounded temple. That is not what he needs, Danny told himself sternly-he needs to settle down and get some rest, not have you perving on him like some Jersey version of Edward Cullen.
“I’m taking a shower,” he announced, swinging his feet off the bed, suddenly hating the smell of adrenaline and powder residue on his clothes and hair. Hating Hawaii and Steve McGarrett for good measure, for giving him some crazy kink he could fucking well do without.
Steve waved a hand at him, and Danny stalked into the bathroom.
++++++
When he came back, Steve was cleaning his weapons-and not in any metaphorical way Danny could get behind. In an absolutely concrete, intense, and overly-focused way that made the tension in his back and shoulders visible from across the room.
Steve had already dismantled his gun, the pieces neatly lined up on the small round table the served the room as a desk. Next to them lay Steve’s bowie knife.
The knife he had used that evening to kill an old friend.
And Danny was pretty sure that he himself would have thrown that knife as hard as he could into the Pacific, but here Steve was, cleaning it as meticulously as any other weapon. Sometimes Danny felt he didn’t know the guy at all.
Steve was now running a chamois cloth over a different knife, one Danny hadn’t seen before, but which he was sure had emerged from some recess of Steve’s lunatic tac vest-Danny wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d pulled a nuclear warhead or a samurai sword out of that thing. This knife was smaller-the type of thing they would have called a shiv back home, though probably the Navy had a more technical term for it.
Danny sighed. He remembered how much Rachel had hated sleeping in a room with weapons in it. Steve probably wouldn’t be able sleep in a room without them. Not for the first time, he wondered what he’d gotten himself into. Padding over to the dresser, Danny rummaged in Steve’s drawers until he found some sweats-too big, but blessedly clean. He started looking for a shirt, too, but then figured when in Rome, and gave up.
Bare-chested, he made his way back to Steve and peered over his shoulder. Steve had finished oiling the small knife and was playing with it idly, tracing patterns on the dark wood-lightly, not hard enough to mar the veneer.
“Hey,” Danny said, reaching around and closing his hand over Steve’s.
He meant to say something like “give it a rest, okay?” or “time to put away the toys and call it a night,” but he never got the words out, because Steve caught Danny’s wrist in some kind of ninja grip, and jerked him up and almost over. The knife skittered away hard, driving a jagged scratch into the wood.
“Shit.” Danny was teetering on his toes, smashed against Steve’s back. Somehow he’d managed to startle his partner-which never happened. Another measure of how messed up Steve was-as if Danny needed any more. “I’m sorry, okay? But seriously, dude, chill.”
“Yeah,” Steve said. “Yeah.” But he didn’t let go for a long moment. Then Danny could sense him forcing himself to relax, feel the long ragged breaths coming of him. He let go of Danny’s wrist, and reached for the knife, cradling it loosely in his palm. The steel blade glinted a little in the dim light, its shine a contrast to the dull black of the grip. Steve ran a finger lightly along its edge.
“Danny,” he said slowly, not looking at him, but nudging into his body a little, the suggestion clear. “Have you ever--?”
“No-No.” And it was true. For all his fantasizing, he’d never-never done what he was sure Steve was asking about. But the words came out too sharp, too abrupt-didn’t express what he was thinking at all.
Steve withdrew anyway, hunching back into himself. “Right,” he said, in a flat tone Danny wouldn’t have recognized as hurt a couple of months ago. “Sure.”
He sounded so sad that Danny risked putting his hands on Steve’s shoulders. “But that doesn’t mean I haven’t thought about it,” he offered. “I just don’t think now is a good time-what with the way you’re feeling …”
Which turned out not to be the right thing to say at all. Steve pushed his chair back, jamming it hard into Danny’s stomach. “Feeling?” he spat out. “Feeling?” He stood and stalked a few feet away, turning to face Danny. “That’s the whole fucking problem. I’m not feeling anything. Absolutely fucking numb. Except that I keep seeing Nick falling into the water. Over and over again, like some stupid CNN news clip.”
He scrubbed a palm over his face, and then let both hands fall to his sides as if for once in his life he didn’t know what to do with them. He looked at Danny, eyes dark, maybe even pleading.
And Danny gave up, started acting on instinct.
He grabbed the small knife off the table and closed the distance between them. Cupping Steve’s left elbow in one hand, he raised his partner’s arm. Knife in hand, he ran his fingers lightly, almost tentatively, down the length of Steve’s forearm. Steve drew a shallow, shuddering breath. Sucking in a gulp of air himself, Danny drew the flat of the blade along the same path, tracing the twisting veins from the dip of the joint to the pulse point at Steve’s wrist. He bore down a bit against the flesh--not hard enough to cut, but indenting the skin as he went all the same.
“You feel that, sweetheart?” he asked. “You feel that?”
“Yeah.” Steve’s voice sounded small, barely steady. “I feel that.”
Danny swallowed hard, trying to wrap his mind around the fact that this particular wish might have been in Steve’s letter to Santa too. Every inch of him was itching to go forward, to find the limits, but he forced himself to pull back, to drop the knife to his side.
“Okay. Okay, then. Let’s have some rules.”
Of course, Steve hated that; Danny had known he would. “Rules?” He jerked his hand away. “The fuck, Danny? We’re going to have sex. Sex involving a knife. There’s gonna be blood. And with any luck it’s going to hurt really, fucking good. What more do you wanna know?”
He had a point. In fact, Danny was so a-thrum with desire and anticipation he had to cross his arms over his chest so that Steve wouldn’t see them shaking. But he stood his ground, cocked his head.
“Huh,” he said-amazed that his voice sounded so level, given the way his gut was quivering. “It’s like you don’t know me at all. No rules-no knife. No way.”
Steve turned away sharply, like that was a deal-breaker. But then he looked back-and Christ, he must’ve wanted this badly, because he said, “Okay. Shallow cuts. Nothing on the face, neck or hands.” Nowhere that couldn’t be hidden by street clothes, Danny translated. “I say stop, you stop, and vice versa.” He took a breath. “And you hold the knife. I only like being on the other end.” He jerked his chin up with the last bit, as if he expected Danny to be surprised by it.
But Danny wasn’t, wasn’t at all-maybe he was getting to know Steve McGarrett a little better after all.
“There. There you go: rules.” Danny smiled, trying to sound more confident than he felt. “See? That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
They stood frozen for moment, awkward in a way they hardly ever were around each other anymore. And then Danny moved. Still holding the knife at his side, he crowded into Steve, a hand on his hip and his mouth on his collarbone, urging him backwards until Steve’s shoulders met the wall.
Steve went with him, accepting direction for once. He even allowed Danny to turn him around and nudge a knee between his legs, so that Steve was more or less spread-eagled, slightly bent over, his ass grazing Danny’s belly and the inside of his thigh brushing maddeningly against Danny’s hardening dick.
Danny palmed Steve’s hips and leaned into him for a moment, enjoying the heat of being so close. Then he ran his fingers over Steve’s back, exploring more carefully than he ever had before-the indent of an exit-wound scar just above his right shoulder blade, the cording of swimmer’s muscles along his sides. The dim light made it hard to tell for sure, but Danny thought he saw a run of short, faint, parallel lines in the dip of Steve’s lower back-marks that might have been made with a knife like the one Danny was holding.
A sharp, unexpected surge of fury went through him, thinking that someone else had cut those lines. He-or she-couldn’t possibly have done it with the care he was about to take-would never have tried so hard to make it good for Steve.
“What are you doing, Danny?” Steve’s voice was a rasp, a growl. “You gonna pussy out on me? Now?”
In answer, Danny positioned the knife, not over those old marks, but a little higher up, just beneath his ribs, and broke the skin. It felt weird, terrifying, to knowingly cause pain, but satisfying, too, to lay claim to Steve’s body in this primal way. Blood beaded up along the line, Steve’s body releasing its secrets to Danny’s hand.
Under him, Steve let out a soft, shaky sound-feathery, wondering. His knees gave a little, too, and Danny reached a quick hand around his chest to support him. Shh, he murmured, comforting, encouraging, shh.
Emboldened, Danny made another cut, then a third, and was rewarded with deeper moans, guttural sounds that went straight to his groin, made him involuntarily rock against Steve’s ass, seeking friction.
Curious, he shifted the knife so that he could rub his thumb along the cuts, feeling the tear in Steve’s flesh, the opening. The blood smeared across Steve’s skin. “That hurt?” Danny asked.
“Yeah,” Steve gasped. “Yeah.”
And that was it. Danny couldn’t resist running his hand over Steve’s stomach, pushing past the waistline of his cargos, until he could get his fingers around Steve’s dick, rock-hard and already leaking.
“Come on,” he said, jacking Steve with one hand while the fingers of the other hand pressed into the scored flesh of Steve’s back, seeking the join, the gateway, between inside and outside, between surface and interior.
“Come on,” he said again, and he couldn’t tell whether he was saying it to Steve or to himself, because he was close now, too, the heavy ache of his cock his only anchor in a welter of sensation.
He came, and the force of it knocked him into Steve, the blood on Steve’s back hot on his own chest, lubricating the slip and slide as he rode out the waves of orgasm. And then Steve was shooting over Danny’s hand, cum running down his legs, indistinguishable from his own.
In the aftermath, they collapsed. Two pairs of legs turning simultaneously to jelly.
“Oof,” said Steve, as he sprawled clumsily over Danny, and the ordinariness of the sound, after everything that had come before, made Danny laugh.
“You can say that again,” he said. And Steve laughed too.
And suddenly, there was nothing Danny wanted more than to stay in this ungainly heap forever, tacky with blood and cum and sweat, Steve’s limbs heavy and warm on top of him.
But he mustered one last stab at responsible behavior, and disentangled himself.
“You’re an ox, McGarrett,” Danny said, tugging on Steve’s arm to get him to stand up. “Anyone ever tell you that? A goddamn ox.”
But Steve just gave Danny a genuinely goofy grin, clearly blissed out beyond words, and landed a clumsy hair-mussing hand on Danny’s head as he staggered past him to belly-flop onto the bed.
Shaking his head, Danny stumbled into the bathroom, tried not to look too closely in the mirror as he sponged the worst of the mess off his chest and legs and shucked the ruined sweats. As he’d suspected, the first aid kit under the counter was military grade-he probably could have carried out open-heart surgery with the supplies in that thing, if the need arose (and who’s to say it wouldn’t someday, given the way things were going). But he just took some antibiotic ointment and cotton swabs, wet another washcloth, and brought them back to the bedroom.
Steve, finally, seemed to have decided it was safe to lose consciousness, though he managed to divest himself of his cargoes before passing out. He was facedown, stark naked and boneless, snuffling contentedly into a pillow.
Figured,Danny thought, most men would have needed to feel less pain to get to sleep after a night like that. Stood to reason that Steve McGarrett would need to feel more.
“You are one meshuggeneh son of a bitch,” he murmured, and was kind of glad Steve wasn’t awake to hear the naked affection in his voice.
He set to work with the washcloth and cotton swabs, removing the blood, cleaning the cuts and disinfecting them. None were deep enough to need dressings. Steve barely stirred under his hands.
When he was done, Danny pulled the sheet up over both of them, rested a hand in the warm hollow of Steve’s back, and let the steady rise and fall of his breathing lull him into sleep.
Rating: NC-17, but mostly for kink.
Pairings: Danny/Steve, established relationship.
Word Count: ~3.7K
Spoilers: through 1.09.
Warnings: painplay, bloodplay, knifeplay: all RACK (risk aware consensual kink). Sensation play, not power play.
Summary: Coda for 1.09. Most men would need to feel less pain in order to sleep after a night like that. Stood to reason that Steve McGarrett would need to feel more.
a/n: For this prompt, though I didn’t end up following it all that strictly. I thought it would be a quick, porny fill, but it got away from me a bit. Not sure what it is now, except for it’s probably the sappiest bloodplay fic you’re ever likely to read. The kink seems relatively mild to me, but not so mild that I’m not asking you to please heed the warnings.
a/n: title from Wilco, “I am trying to break your heart.”
a/n: a big thank you to calamitycrow for the beta!
Take It from the Inside
In the end, they compromised.
Danny was all for Steve coming home with him. Heck, he was even willing to spring for a room at one of the fancy downtown hotels-it would have been worth it for the mini-bar and the Jacuzzi fixtures in the bath.
Steve, however, seemed to think that the sensible thing to do was to stay up all night getting a jump on the home repairs. The team helped him board up the windows, because, yeah, that did need to be done, but when he’d started digging out the tools for more projects, Chin literally blocked his path, a hand flat against Steve’s chest.
“Take a knee, Boss,” he said, with the look he reserved for Steve at his most batshit. “For all our sakes, okay? Take a knee.”
Steve stared at him for a long moment, caught uncharacteristically off-balance. But then he carefully put the hammer back in the tool box and nodded.
Chin and Kono left soon after. Danny didn’t know if they explicitly knew what was going on between him and Steve, or if they just figured Steve was Danny’s responsibility now regardless. Part of Danny was silently saying, thank you very fucking much, guys, but the rest of him wouldn’t have had it any other way.
So they compromised. Steve got to stay in the house, but Danny coaxed and bullied him upstairs, into the relatively undamaged master bedroom. He started to grab a couple of beers from the fridge before going up, and then thought better of it.
“You got anything stronger?” he asked.
Steve reluctantly pulled a half-full bottle from the freezer. Apple-flavored Smirnoff’s. He made a face. “Left over from Mary Ann.”
“Any port in a storm, babe,” Danny snorted mirthlessly. “Any port in a storm.”
++++++
So here he was: sitting propped up against the headboard of Steve’s bed, a water glass of too-sweet vodka going warm in his hand, watching Steve pace. No-pace was the wrong word: watching Steve prowl around the room, restlessly rearranging objects and examining surfaces, never coming to a halt.
Steve hadn’t bothered to put his shirt back on after the EMTs had treated his injuries, and he looked a little wild, traces of soot and powder, a couple of random scratches along his ribs. The medics had put a butterfly bandage over the cut on his forehead, and six stitches in the knife wound on his bicep. The gash was covered now with a clean white dressing. Both bandage and dressing would be gone by morning, Danny knew.
The night was warm enough that a shirt wasn’t strictly necessary, and clearly ex-Navy SEALs had no truck with things like shock. But Danny still kinda wished he’d cover up. Steve being so-so naked-was distracting Danny from-from whatever it was a truly responsible partner-slash-lover would be doing right now. Not that he knew what that was. The endless firefight, plus the vodka, plus whatever painkillers the EMTs had doled out, would have had any regular person flat out by this point, not prowling around like a mountain lion that had lost its deer carcass. Danny was starting to think the caring thing to do would be to cold-cock Steve with the butt of his own gun, just to get him to sit still for a minute.
Worse, Steve’s display of flesh wasn’t getting to Danny for any of the reasons a body like that would get to 99.9% of the population-the chiseled abs, the tattooed arms-nice as those were. The thing was-the thing was-and Danny could barely admit it, even to himself-he had to keep jerking his eyes away from Steve’s wounds, from the traces of blood at his hairline, the red dotting the otherwise pristine bandage on his arm.
And it wasn’t as if he’d hadn’t seen Steve’s blood before-saw it every fucking week, seemed like. But it was like the repeated exposure had raised some kind of sensitivity in him, the way some people got more and more reactive to bee stings over time. So that what had once just made him feel mildly protective now felt a lot like-well, like an allergic reaction-his pulse ramping up, his throat constricting, sweating breaking out on his palms. Except he was pretty sure he wasn’t having a lethal auto-immune response. It felt more like--
Well, he wasn’t sure what it felt like. And that worried him. He’d chewed the whole thing over ‘til it just about made him crazy. He was like a dog with a bone with these things, Rachel always said. And he didn’t think it was Steve’s pain that was turning him on-or at least, not mostly. It was more like seeing Steve laid open made Danny want to touch him in the weirdest and most inappropriate ways-made him want to explore the line where the inside met the outside, stake a claim to what lay beyond Steve’s perfect surfaces. The urge was visceral, territorial-and had nothing at all to do with the companionable, mutually satisfying thing they had going on.
A thing Danny had no desire to jeopardize with this strange new possessiveness.
Danny had only realized just how bad it had gotten the week before, when Steve had bullied the whole team into getting complete physicals. Because it turned out that as much as he loved throwing himself-and the rest of them-into crazy amounts of danger at regular intervals, Steve was the kind of boss who wanted to ensure that everyone was otherwise healthy. Healthy enough to withstand the shitstorms he tossed them into, Danny supposed. It made sense, in a McGarrett kind of way.
As luck would have it, their exams had finished at the same time, and Danny had found himself sitting across from Steve in a spindly plastic chair as a matronly nurse drew blood samples from each of them in turn. Steve first, and Danny had tried not to stare-it didn’t seem entirely polite to watch a syringe going into someone else’s body. But he kept darting little glances back. He couldn’t help himself.
The nurse had tied a piece of blue plastic above Steve’s elbow, tapped the flesh on the inside of the joint expertly. “Nice veins,” she’d said, in that offhand tone nurses have, and Steve had smiled vaguely, as though he were used to be complimented about such things. But Danny had been riveted-the whole world narrowing and slowing. The pull of red out of the narrow rope of blue had seemed like the emergence of a secret, like it could tell Danny all the truths about Steve he’d never dared to ask. For one hot, strange moment, he’d wished it were his hand plunging in the needle, holding the syringe. A jolt of desire had slammed through him, hard as a pile driver. Shit, he’d thought, shit.
“It really doesn’t hurt at all, Hon’,” the nurse had said, and tapped Steve on the shoulder. “Tell your buddy it doesn’t hurt.”
“Wha’?” Danny had been startled back into awareness. “I know-I know it doesn’t hurt.”
“Uh-huh. ” The nurse had clearly decided he was bluffing. “I just thought you might be a little bit anxious, that’s all, the way your eyes went all wide like that. Happens to lots of people, nothing to be ashamed of--”
“That’s right, Danno, nothing to be ashamed of,” Steve said, with that special brand of smug amusement that made Danny want to smack him. “I bet there’ll be stickers and lollypops if you’re a brave boy for the nurse.”
“Fuck you, McGarrett,” Danny had grumbled, sticking his arm out, while the nurse muttered “Language, gentlemen, language” disapprovingly.
And God knew they’d tried out a whole bunch of things in bed by now-and in the car, and even once or twice in the alley behind HQ-but this was one set of interests Danny vowed right then to bury deep.
++++++
And yet here he was, feeling his skin prickle as Steve absently-mindedly rubbed his wounded temple. That is not what he needs, Danny told himself sternly-he needs to settle down and get some rest, not have you perving on him like some Jersey version of Edward Cullen.
“I’m taking a shower,” he announced, swinging his feet off the bed, suddenly hating the smell of adrenaline and powder residue on his clothes and hair. Hating Hawaii and Steve McGarrett for good measure, for giving him some crazy kink he could fucking well do without.
Steve waved a hand at him, and Danny stalked into the bathroom.
++++++
When he came back, Steve was cleaning his weapons-and not in any metaphorical way Danny could get behind. In an absolutely concrete, intense, and overly-focused way that made the tension in his back and shoulders visible from across the room.
Steve had already dismantled his gun, the pieces neatly lined up on the small round table the served the room as a desk. Next to them lay Steve’s bowie knife.
The knife he had used that evening to kill an old friend.
And Danny was pretty sure that he himself would have thrown that knife as hard as he could into the Pacific, but here Steve was, cleaning it as meticulously as any other weapon. Sometimes Danny felt he didn’t know the guy at all.
Steve was now running a chamois cloth over a different knife, one Danny hadn’t seen before, but which he was sure had emerged from some recess of Steve’s lunatic tac vest-Danny wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d pulled a nuclear warhead or a samurai sword out of that thing. This knife was smaller-the type of thing they would have called a shiv back home, though probably the Navy had a more technical term for it.
Danny sighed. He remembered how much Rachel had hated sleeping in a room with weapons in it. Steve probably wouldn’t be able sleep in a room without them. Not for the first time, he wondered what he’d gotten himself into. Padding over to the dresser, Danny rummaged in Steve’s drawers until he found some sweats-too big, but blessedly clean. He started looking for a shirt, too, but then figured when in Rome, and gave up.
Bare-chested, he made his way back to Steve and peered over his shoulder. Steve had finished oiling the small knife and was playing with it idly, tracing patterns on the dark wood-lightly, not hard enough to mar the veneer.
“Hey,” Danny said, reaching around and closing his hand over Steve’s.
He meant to say something like “give it a rest, okay?” or “time to put away the toys and call it a night,” but he never got the words out, because Steve caught Danny’s wrist in some kind of ninja grip, and jerked him up and almost over. The knife skittered away hard, driving a jagged scratch into the wood.
“Shit.” Danny was teetering on his toes, smashed against Steve’s back. Somehow he’d managed to startle his partner-which never happened. Another measure of how messed up Steve was-as if Danny needed any more. “I’m sorry, okay? But seriously, dude, chill.”
“Yeah,” Steve said. “Yeah.” But he didn’t let go for a long moment. Then Danny could sense him forcing himself to relax, feel the long ragged breaths coming of him. He let go of Danny’s wrist, and reached for the knife, cradling it loosely in his palm. The steel blade glinted a little in the dim light, its shine a contrast to the dull black of the grip. Steve ran a finger lightly along its edge.
“Danny,” he said slowly, not looking at him, but nudging into his body a little, the suggestion clear. “Have you ever--?”
“No-No.” And it was true. For all his fantasizing, he’d never-never done what he was sure Steve was asking about. But the words came out too sharp, too abrupt-didn’t express what he was thinking at all.
Steve withdrew anyway, hunching back into himself. “Right,” he said, in a flat tone Danny wouldn’t have recognized as hurt a couple of months ago. “Sure.”
He sounded so sad that Danny risked putting his hands on Steve’s shoulders. “But that doesn’t mean I haven’t thought about it,” he offered. “I just don’t think now is a good time-what with the way you’re feeling …”
Which turned out not to be the right thing to say at all. Steve pushed his chair back, jamming it hard into Danny’s stomach. “Feeling?” he spat out. “Feeling?” He stood and stalked a few feet away, turning to face Danny. “That’s the whole fucking problem. I’m not feeling anything. Absolutely fucking numb. Except that I keep seeing Nick falling into the water. Over and over again, like some stupid CNN news clip.”
He scrubbed a palm over his face, and then let both hands fall to his sides as if for once in his life he didn’t know what to do with them. He looked at Danny, eyes dark, maybe even pleading.
And Danny gave up, started acting on instinct.
He grabbed the small knife off the table and closed the distance between them. Cupping Steve’s left elbow in one hand, he raised his partner’s arm. Knife in hand, he ran his fingers lightly, almost tentatively, down the length of Steve’s forearm. Steve drew a shallow, shuddering breath. Sucking in a gulp of air himself, Danny drew the flat of the blade along the same path, tracing the twisting veins from the dip of the joint to the pulse point at Steve’s wrist. He bore down a bit against the flesh--not hard enough to cut, but indenting the skin as he went all the same.
“You feel that, sweetheart?” he asked. “You feel that?”
“Yeah.” Steve’s voice sounded small, barely steady. “I feel that.”
Danny swallowed hard, trying to wrap his mind around the fact that this particular wish might have been in Steve’s letter to Santa too. Every inch of him was itching to go forward, to find the limits, but he forced himself to pull back, to drop the knife to his side.
“Okay. Okay, then. Let’s have some rules.”
Of course, Steve hated that; Danny had known he would. “Rules?” He jerked his hand away. “The fuck, Danny? We’re going to have sex. Sex involving a knife. There’s gonna be blood. And with any luck it’s going to hurt really, fucking good. What more do you wanna know?”
He had a point. In fact, Danny was so a-thrum with desire and anticipation he had to cross his arms over his chest so that Steve wouldn’t see them shaking. But he stood his ground, cocked his head.
“Huh,” he said-amazed that his voice sounded so level, given the way his gut was quivering. “It’s like you don’t know me at all. No rules-no knife. No way.”
Steve turned away sharply, like that was a deal-breaker. But then he looked back-and Christ, he must’ve wanted this badly, because he said, “Okay. Shallow cuts. Nothing on the face, neck or hands.” Nowhere that couldn’t be hidden by street clothes, Danny translated. “I say stop, you stop, and vice versa.” He took a breath. “And you hold the knife. I only like being on the other end.” He jerked his chin up with the last bit, as if he expected Danny to be surprised by it.
But Danny wasn’t, wasn’t at all-maybe he was getting to know Steve McGarrett a little better after all.
“There. There you go: rules.” Danny smiled, trying to sound more confident than he felt. “See? That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
They stood frozen for moment, awkward in a way they hardly ever were around each other anymore. And then Danny moved. Still holding the knife at his side, he crowded into Steve, a hand on his hip and his mouth on his collarbone, urging him backwards until Steve’s shoulders met the wall.
Steve went with him, accepting direction for once. He even allowed Danny to turn him around and nudge a knee between his legs, so that Steve was more or less spread-eagled, slightly bent over, his ass grazing Danny’s belly and the inside of his thigh brushing maddeningly against Danny’s hardening dick.
Danny palmed Steve’s hips and leaned into him for a moment, enjoying the heat of being so close. Then he ran his fingers over Steve’s back, exploring more carefully than he ever had before-the indent of an exit-wound scar just above his right shoulder blade, the cording of swimmer’s muscles along his sides. The dim light made it hard to tell for sure, but Danny thought he saw a run of short, faint, parallel lines in the dip of Steve’s lower back-marks that might have been made with a knife like the one Danny was holding.
A sharp, unexpected surge of fury went through him, thinking that someone else had cut those lines. He-or she-couldn’t possibly have done it with the care he was about to take-would never have tried so hard to make it good for Steve.
“What are you doing, Danny?” Steve’s voice was a rasp, a growl. “You gonna pussy out on me? Now?”
In answer, Danny positioned the knife, not over those old marks, but a little higher up, just beneath his ribs, and broke the skin. It felt weird, terrifying, to knowingly cause pain, but satisfying, too, to lay claim to Steve’s body in this primal way. Blood beaded up along the line, Steve’s body releasing its secrets to Danny’s hand.
Under him, Steve let out a soft, shaky sound-feathery, wondering. His knees gave a little, too, and Danny reached a quick hand around his chest to support him. Shh, he murmured, comforting, encouraging, shh.
Emboldened, Danny made another cut, then a third, and was rewarded with deeper moans, guttural sounds that went straight to his groin, made him involuntarily rock against Steve’s ass, seeking friction.
Curious, he shifted the knife so that he could rub his thumb along the cuts, feeling the tear in Steve’s flesh, the opening. The blood smeared across Steve’s skin. “That hurt?” Danny asked.
“Yeah,” Steve gasped. “Yeah.”
And that was it. Danny couldn’t resist running his hand over Steve’s stomach, pushing past the waistline of his cargos, until he could get his fingers around Steve’s dick, rock-hard and already leaking.
“Come on,” he said, jacking Steve with one hand while the fingers of the other hand pressed into the scored flesh of Steve’s back, seeking the join, the gateway, between inside and outside, between surface and interior.
“Come on,” he said again, and he couldn’t tell whether he was saying it to Steve or to himself, because he was close now, too, the heavy ache of his cock his only anchor in a welter of sensation.
He came, and the force of it knocked him into Steve, the blood on Steve’s back hot on his own chest, lubricating the slip and slide as he rode out the waves of orgasm. And then Steve was shooting over Danny’s hand, cum running down his legs, indistinguishable from his own.
In the aftermath, they collapsed. Two pairs of legs turning simultaneously to jelly.
“Oof,” said Steve, as he sprawled clumsily over Danny, and the ordinariness of the sound, after everything that had come before, made Danny laugh.
“You can say that again,” he said. And Steve laughed too.
And suddenly, there was nothing Danny wanted more than to stay in this ungainly heap forever, tacky with blood and cum and sweat, Steve’s limbs heavy and warm on top of him.
But he mustered one last stab at responsible behavior, and disentangled himself.
“You’re an ox, McGarrett,” Danny said, tugging on Steve’s arm to get him to stand up. “Anyone ever tell you that? A goddamn ox.”
But Steve just gave Danny a genuinely goofy grin, clearly blissed out beyond words, and landed a clumsy hair-mussing hand on Danny’s head as he staggered past him to belly-flop onto the bed.
Shaking his head, Danny stumbled into the bathroom, tried not to look too closely in the mirror as he sponged the worst of the mess off his chest and legs and shucked the ruined sweats. As he’d suspected, the first aid kit under the counter was military grade-he probably could have carried out open-heart surgery with the supplies in that thing, if the need arose (and who’s to say it wouldn’t someday, given the way things were going). But he just took some antibiotic ointment and cotton swabs, wet another washcloth, and brought them back to the bedroom.
Steve, finally, seemed to have decided it was safe to lose consciousness, though he managed to divest himself of his cargoes before passing out. He was facedown, stark naked and boneless, snuffling contentedly into a pillow.
Figured,Danny thought, most men would have needed to feel less pain to get to sleep after a night like that. Stood to reason that Steve McGarrett would need to feel more.
“You are one meshuggeneh son of a bitch,” he murmured, and was kind of glad Steve wasn’t awake to hear the naked affection in his voice.
He set to work with the washcloth and cotton swabs, removing the blood, cleaning the cuts and disinfecting them. None were deep enough to need dressings. Steve barely stirred under his hands.
When he was done, Danny pulled the sheet up over both of them, rested a hand in the warm hollow of Steve’s back, and let the steady rise and fall of his breathing lull him into sleep.