Hoahanau [NC17ish] Chin/Kono
Title: Hoahanau
Author: queenklu
Pairing: Chin/Kono & Steve/Danny, because...impulse control, i have thee not.
Rating: NC17
Word Count: 4605
A/N: Hoahanau means 'cousin,' which they are not, for the purposes of this fic. Also, eta&facepalm: This was all written for tjournal's lovely Kono Fest, even if it's unforgivably late.
A lot of the Hawaiian phrases are either repeated in English or explained, but just for a reference, if you'd like, click here:
kolohe - trouble
okole lolo - crazy ass (swearing is hard in Hawaiian, and also? She's 12.)
Uoki - stop
tita - a very tough female who is willing to fight
An den - what’s up?
da kine - the best
Kala mai ia'u - I’m so sorry
Nau wale no - just for you
Apologies in advance for any mistakes. I am so, so sorry.
~*~
Hoahanau
“Thank you, Auntie,” she says, with a quick nod of her head before she peels off from the witness.
Instantly Danny’s flanking her, Chin already to her right. “You cannot be related to everyone on the island,” he says in that borderline halting tone he uses when Steve does something particularly Hawaiian. “It’s just not actually possible.”
“Oh, she’s not related, brah,” Chin says before she can.
“’Auntie’ is a term of respect,” Kono explains, “Same way as saying ‘sir’ or ‘miss.’”
“That’s just too weird.” Danny shakes his head. “None of my aunts made me respect anything but just how freaking crazy they are. Wait.” He stops, and Kono sighs, bracing for it as she and Chin turn in tandem. “Are you two really…?”
“We’re family,” Chin says, a blurred but still dangerous edge to his tone that Danny takes note of with a quirk of his eyebrow. And if he doesn’t notice-or chooses not to notice-it’s not exactly an answer, well. Kono’s not going to throw Danny to the sharks.
~*~
Kono can’t remember who used the word first. Probably one of their parents-her mother and Chin’s grew on the same street, in the same schools, falling for their high school sweethearts and starting a family round about the same year. Everyone thought they had Chin and Kono’s older brother Maleko pegged as the boys who were going to tear up this island, kolohe from the time they were born. No one saw Kono coming.
Kono has copies of the most incriminating of their childhood photos tucked into the bottom of her desk drawer, and one slipped into a secret nook in her wallet-for blackmailing purposes, is what she told herself. Denial isn’t her strong suit, but everything likes to slip sideways where Chin is concerned.
She remembers the day the picture in her wallet was taken, where Chin was still growing into his ears and baby fat filled out the angles in his face, but he still seemed so big to her, six years older and so much smarter. Kono was six herself, roly-poly in her hibiscus flowered swim suit, crouched and gently prodding at a starfish where it had washed up on shore. Chin had knelt down beside her just as the picture was taken, nudged her shoulder and grinned gap-toothed, and the instant the flash had burst she shoved him just hard enough to send him toppling into the surf, grabbed that starfish and tore off down the beach, shrieking in laughter as he spat out salt water and chased her down.
She remembers squealing, “Cousin, cousin, cousin, stop!” and he did like it was a game. Three times she said the word he’d freeze, three more times he could run at her again. She’d creep closer to make it more fun, drawing out the word so long she’d lose count, until they were covered in sand and the starfish was forgotten.
So yeah, she definitely knew it by then.
~*~
By the time Kono was twelve Chin was a permanent fixture in her life, like a limb or a scuba mask, something necessary for staying alive in the water. Maleko was always gone, always with his buddies, surrounded by an increasingly rough crowd. He didn’t have time for Kono, and she didn’t miss something she’d never really had. Not with Chin around.
She tried to call him brother once, just to see, but his eyes looked at her sideways and she didn’t try again. Everyone was everyone’s brother on Hawaii. Chin was closer than that. Close like family.
And it was easier to say “cousin” than “my mom’s best friend’s son,” and easier to explain to adults who worried about her hanging out with an older boy. No one looked twice at a cousin. “Cousin” made Chin near invisible, which is how he liked to be.
Except.
One day Chin came to pick her up from school on one of the last days before he started University, with a girl hovering near his arm: Sally MacNeal, a haole just in from the mainland.
“Oh she’s so cute!” Sally said the instant Kono warily trudged within cooing distance.
At least Chin looked embarrassed. Kono had a hard time believing that other people found her cousin hard to read, but she’d heard people call Chin ‘expressionless’ too many times to just write them off as being stupid. (Which she did, too, but on top of other things.)
“Howzit, okole lolo,” Kono said, “You get a sand facial or you always look like that?”
“Uoki,” Chin frowned, “Be nice, cuz, she just got in.”
“In with the tide, maybe,” Kono grumbled, and tried not to feel better when Chin ruffled her hair.
“Yes, you’re a big tita, Kono,” he said, “You want a shave ice?”
She would not be bought with cold sugary goodness. Not unless it was Kamekona’s shop, at least. He let her put on six different flavors because she was family (real family, not like Chin) and he only charged half for hers, full price for Chin Ho and the haole, who would not stop pointing and giggling and touching Chin’s arm.
Kamekona took one look at Kono’s face and added a seventh flavor, no charge.
“Is it always so bright here?” Sally asked as they sat down, fanning herself a little nervously while she stripped off another layer, down to her bright pink camisole. Kono took one look at her pasty white skin and the redness already creeping in on her cheeks and hid an evil grin behind her shave ice.
“Kono,” Chin said, almost sharply-her head snapped up, automatically guilty, but he just brushed a bit of cherry ice off her nose and said, “I’m allowed to have friends my own age.”
Is that all Kono and Chin were? ‘Friends’ felt all wrong, made her squirm under the baffled gaze of Sally as Chin squatted down to be eye-to-eye with Kono where she was sitting on the bench. She had friends--Friends moved away or just stopped being interesting and if Chin ever lost interest in her she wouldn’t know what to do.
“So can you be pleasant,” he continued, teasing, “while I go buy Sally some sun screen?”
“Oh, you really don’t have to,” Sally started, but Chin just gave her this smile, the one he’d learned to hide his gap teeth behind and never grew out of, and she stammered to a stop.
“Yeah,” Kono grumbled, “Okay.”
Chin nodded to her, and asked her to pound it; she bumped his fist with hers before he moved away.
“Your cousin’s very…nice,” Sally said a little awkwardly, in this voice Kono knew from adults talking to infants, and she just couldn’t stand it.
She pushed her ice at Sally, untangling her legs from the bench as she asked, “Watch this?” and then added, “Um, you can try the grape flavor, if you want,” because Chin had told her to be pleasant, and then she took off at a run.
Kono found him by a booth just down the street, pocketing the change as one of Kamekona’s many brothers handed him a small white bottle of spf 50, and it took everything she had not to tackle him like she was six again. His eyes were wide when he met hers, curious, friendly, a rainbow of expressions. “An den, Kono,” he said when she nearly ripped her flip-flops skidding to a stop. “What’s wrong?”
“We’re not just friends, right?” she blurted, not quite able to lift her face enough to hold his gaze. “W-We’re family?”
“Oh, Kono,” he said, taking his time with the words as his arm slipped around her shoulders. “You and I are da kine ohana. The very best.”
Four years later when he graduated college he enrolled in the police academy, but not without her express permission (even if it was maybe just a formality). She made him promise to visit every weekend, and sometimes she’d sneak him a bag of malasadas on the days she knew they had him doing lots of boring paperwork. Sally fell out of his life, and Chin didn’t even seem to miss her. When Chin met Malia, Kono didn’t really think much of it.
And then they got engaged.
~*~
Kono couldn’t stand Malia, and the feeling seemed to be mutual from the moment they set eyes on each other. She was old blood, true Hawaii, not the slant-eyed tourists left behind in the war, like Chin and Kono’s various ancestors. She shouldn’t have looked twice at Chin, and she definitely didn’t look twice at Kono.
Fine, whatever. Kono had the championships coming up, free time eaten by hours spent in the surf, in a weight room, training training training until she felt unsteady without a board beneath her feet.
It was a rogue wave. Everyone said so. Even Coach told her he hadn’t seen it coming, tears welling up above the craggy plains of his face as he sat with her in the hospital and gave her the doctor’s diagnosis in terms of her suddenly nonexistent surfing career. The wave had scrunched her up like a napkin and wrung her out, twisting her leg with no regard for muscles or tendon or bone.
When Coach told her she was out of the game Kono blacked out. She’s not proud of it, but it happened, and it’s better than her second urge (which was just screaming until someone put a pillow over her face to make her stop).
When she woke up again, pulled up from the blackness like she’d never really left the ocean, Chin was there. She was smiling before she could think to stop.
“Hey,” she slurred, fingers reaching for him through a haze of drugs. “Howzit, hoa?” Short for hoahanau, ‘cousin,’ abbreviated only because she couldn’t quite feel her face. It took her a second to realize that hoa by itself meant ‘partner.’ Which just felt even better. “Hoa,” she hummed again, and Chin Ho took her hand in both of his.
“Hoahanau,” he corrected, something soft and broken in his tone even as he tried to smile for her. “You gonna wear a badge and be my partner?”
“Maybe,” she grinned, cheeky.
“Oh Kono,” he sighed, head bent down over her reef-scraped knuckles. “Kala mai ia'u.”
“What’re you sorry for?” She wanted to stroke his hair, but her other arm was pinned down with tubes. It didn’t stop her wanting. A weird sort of laugh thumped in the back of her throat. “You controlling the waves now, brah?”
“I would never let you get hurt if I did.” His words were quick, rapid fire, and everything was so blurry in her head. She pushed her thumb against his, pad to pad, soft little nudges until he had to look up at her again.
But she couldn’t really remember what she wanted to say, and she knew bad times were lurking in the periphery waiting to tear her apart, but looking at Chin? She couldn’t do anything but smile at him, and that wasn’t too bad.
~*~
Kono’s folks moved to Oahu a few years back-supposedly because her Dad had to oversee construction in a new location-conveniently right around the time every last thing in Chin’s life got stuffed in the barrel. Kono’s mom would have stayed, stuck by the family even when association brought them down, but her father owned the business, and it’s expensive living in Hawaii.
Kono was already a year into the academy when things started going wrong, or they probably wouldn’t have accepted her application. As it was, they might not have given her a diploma if she’d really been related by blood. The first she heard of anything was the first time she got grilled by I.A.-and it took her too long to realize what it meant that I.A. reached her before the rumors did. Chin always kept his mouth shut, especially when it came to his own problems. It might have saved his career if he’d asked for help.
It probably wouldn’t have saved his engagement.
The day she got word Chin was off the force-she had to hear it from her boss, not Chin, and he still wouldn’t pick up his cell phone after nearly two weeks of avoiding her, so she grabbed a bottle of tequila and a case of whatever the Kona Brewing Company had on display and drove to his house, and if he was still hung up about the fact that she’d been old enough to legally drink for a couple years, now, then screw him, she’d pin him to the couch and force it all down his throat until he started talking to her.
Malia was on her way out. Malia was dressed to the nines, not a hair out of place, suitcase rolling along behind her four inch stilettos. Malia was lighting a cigarette with a bic lighter caught in her deadly pink nails and Kono almost punched her.
She says almost because Chin saw her coming. Not because she had the self-control required to stop.
His arms looped around her and pinned her in place, the tequila bottle smashing against the pavement when she dropped it to try and swing with her left. She knows she was screaming, probably “What the fuck are you doing?” because Malia’s eyes were the size of sand dollars under her neatly trimmed eyebrows, and then, “Let me go, let me go, let me hit her,” because Chin had been blacklisted from a job he loved and abandoned by a woman he wanted to be family and someone needed to be hit. Badly.
“Go, just go,” Chin murmured, his head tucked down almost to Kono’s shoulder, and it took a second for them both to realize he was talking to Malia.
She spat out the crumpled remains of her cigarette where she’d clutched it too tight between her lips, snapped, “You can have him,” with a hard, frightened quaver in her voice, and clicked off into her waiting taxi.
Kono still couldn’t tell you why she started to cry, except someone had to, and Chin just wouldn’t. He made her hurt with just how much he wouldn’t, how badly he was shaking with it, deep down where nobody but Kono could see.
She twisted in his arms and he let her, and she cradled the back of his head and the nape of his neck and said, “Sorry, I’m so sorry, I don’t know what to do but I’ll do anything-“ until words stopped making sense and she just dropped her head against his chest. He’d taken it all without a word, without anything, and for the first time she understood what people meant when they said they couldn’t get a read on him.
Finally he sighed and took her hands away, his touch around her wrists so light she felt like she might drift out with the tide. “Such a violent tita,” he said, and his voice still had that subtle glow he used just for her, a tired sort of smile.
She didn’t say she sometimes felt like she had to be violent enough for the both of them, because Chin is so damn good at making people think he’s mild mannered and not able to flatten a man with one thumb. He’s always so calm, stoic-“Vulcan,” she’d used to tease him. But he could take care of himself. It just hadn’t been enough this time.
Kono hated Malia so much sometimes it hurt to breathe; she kind of wonders if that’s what Danny feels like on a day-to-day basis, but he’s from the mainland and mainlanders are allowed to be angry. Kono should know how to let the ocean wash it off her by now. But there’s only so much good the waves can do, and when Malia left Chin Kono had let that grudge burn.
Not that she’d particularly wanted Malia to stay, but. God, she’d said yes, she’d said yes to Chin, and that made her family whether the papers were signed or not. That Malia could and had turned her back on family? If Malia fell in a volcano Pele would spit her back out. But probably not alive.
Kono took up kickboxing and a couple extra kinds of martial arts to bleed out her aggression. It sort of worked. Now when she gets angry, she knows how to hit people without getting caught.
~*~
Kono hates her apartment, but it’s a fond sort of hate, now. She’d bet half a year’s salary that Danny feels the same way about his apartment (and probably, to some extent, Steve). And she can legitimately afford something better now that she’s with the Five-Oh. But she got in a sort of habit of hanging out at Chin’s house when her apartment gets too dreary, and if she buys a better place she might…not have that excuse to fall back on.
Because Chin is better company than most everyone she knows. Because sometimes she just wants to hang out with a guy and not have to think about whether he finds her charming or attractive or sufficiently girly-Chin is a guy who will watch bad adventure movies with her without complaint, who will gently save her baking disasters without turning it into a Thing, who will sit and let her talk or not say anything and it’s always comfortable, always right, and if she moves-
So she’s on Danny’s side of the whole Bad Apartment Argument, even (maybe especially) since she suspects Steve of secretly moving Danny in with him, through stealth and minor thievery and one day Danny is going to wake up and realize all of his unpacked boxes have miraculously migrated into Steve’s garage and half his shirts (though none of his ties) are taking up space in Steve’s closet. And he will actually be surprised, which is sad.
“Half your things are in my house,” Chin points out when she brings up the subject over dinner. Chin is cooking something amazing. Kono hopes it’s tuna. It smells like tuna.
“Because your place is closer to the beach? And work. And I surf a lot. Ow,” she states mildly when he smacks her hand away from-whatever the hell is in the white bowl. Kono is really bad at determining what food is until it’s staring at her from a plate.
Chin smirks and stirs something he’s sautéing on the stove. “Maybe you’re the one who has been secretly moving in with the unsuspecting.”
She scoffs. “Yeah, like I could pull one over on you.”
“Well maybe I’ve been secretly moving you in. So secretly-” He taps the air in front of her with the spatula. “-that I’ve even tricked you into thinking it might have been your subconscious idea.”
“…No,” she says after a moment, “I think that’s something I would notice.”
“That you think you’d notice. Maybe I’m just that ninja.”
Her grin is wider than it feels like it’s ever been, matching Chin Ho’s inch for inch as he leans back against the sink. She hasn’t seen her cousin this cheeky in…feels like forever. She steals a taste from the white bowl while he’s busy ducking his head. “You know,” she says, “I think that Detective Williams is a good influence on you.”
It tastes like butter the color of plumeria, creamy and bright and salty sweet where it’s wrapped around her finger. She doesn’t mean to make an appreciative sound, but really, she can’t help it. “This is good!” she tells him, surprise cutting off at the look on his face.
It’s gone in an instant. His eyes are too good at keeping secrets, darting away, back to the stove. And she’s so sure he’s going to make this disappear, this precarious wave they’re riding, leaving them high and dry out in the reef.
“It’s not Danny,” he says instead, loud and clear. His head is down again, fingers tugging at the curls at the nape of his neck before his arms move gently down to his sides. “It’s you, Kono. You have to know it’s all you.”
She gets this weird sinking feeling in her gut, like every time Steve mentions helipads. “What do you…” Her fingers curl uselessly, torn between touching Chin’s arm and curling into a fist. “Chin… You’re the one who got me on the task force. You got me through my surf career going belly-up, your recommendation got me into the academy, you-you fight for me harder than anyone. So don’t go telling me I did you any favors. You got yourself here. I’m just tagging along, like I do.”
Her shoulders shrug but she knows her smile isn’t sad. As long as Chin wants her around, she won’t want life any other way. That’s just true.
Chin’s mouth slips open, but no sound comes out until he can turn back to the stove and clear his throat. Something just shifted, something big and silent, and if neither of them says a word it will still be different, quietly changed. Maybe it should scare her. Probably it shouldn’t make her heartbeat thrum along with the steady adrenaline that comes from stakeouts spent patiently waiting with a sure mark at the end.
“Go set the table,” Chin orders, smiling though his eyes are busy with other things. “And try not to taste too many things before they’re on your plate.”
She hesitates, but it’s the ball-toe rock of someone never planning to go anywhere.
“Can I try something?”
“Kono, I told you, the food-“
She kisses him. Her fingertips are on the shell of his ear, slid up under his jaw, and his lips are against hers, open in a quivering gasp. She slides back, and his hands settle on her hips like an afterthought, barely there enough to feel.
Kono has always loved his eyes, the stunning cat-like slits of them, but they aren’t telling her anything now. This came out of left field; it has to be making his head spin. Maybe she screwed up. Maybe she screwed up bad.
Chin’s hand moves so slowly, brushes her hair away from her face, tucking it behind her ear, and it should be cousinly, he’s done it hundreds of times, it should be his way of saying she will always be that little girl on the beach, too close to not call family and still not close enough.
It should. His fingers curl down, slip under her chin, down the skin of her neck, and she shivers like a rough surf in winter, twining their fingers together. And his eyes are shining as she takes his hand, like he doesn’t know what to do, like he doesn’t know how to have what he wants.
“Nau wale no, Chin,” she tells him, thumb brushing over the strange beautiful shape of his eyelid. “Just for you.”
He turns his face away, but into the palm of her hand. “Kono,” he sighs, breath slipping out against her wrist. “This is something… You have to be so sure, hoa.”
“So I’ll be sure,” she tells him, smile bright, voice steady. “I’ll be sure enough for two.”
Any last traces of his mask slip off and disintegrate into nothing. “Kono-“
And she kisses him again. And again, until he opens and it’s a slick hot tangle of tongue and teeth and lips; and again, until his hands capture her hips and tug her close enough to feel how much he wants her; and again, and again, and again, until the food gets cold, until the sun sinks low, until her shirt is gone and he’s nuzzling her breast through her bra as he spreads her out on the bed, until she grabs two lean handfuls of his ass and pulls him to her, barely giving him enough room to slip on a condom before she flips him over and climbs on top, until she’s full of him and god, so wet for him and so, so, so in-
His quick, calloused fingers find her clit and she’s gone, gone, shaking apart like a wave cresting against a reef, over and around him, clinging to his arms as her head falls back, throat contracting around a few high, happy sounds. Chin comes with a groan below her almost instantly, bucking against her thighs, tugging her down close enough to kiss. Her hair is all around them like a curtain, hiding her grin as she melts it with kisses into his mouth, until he’s smiling too, all the way to his eyes and shining outward, wrapping them up tight in his glow.
“Unf,” he grunts when she stretches out on top of him, and she wriggles, unrepentant. “How are you all elbows, hoa?”
She elbows him in the ribs on purpose, then kisses it better to let him know just how much she doesn’t mind when he uses that word. “Mmm. The real question-“ Another kiss, higher up near his nipple, and he sucks in a breath with no attempt to hide it whatsoever. “-is how we paired up-“ She licks it, curious, and breaks off into a delighted giggle when he growls and rolls her off him, following an instant after until his forearms frame her face. “-before Steve and Danny,” she wraps up quick, squirming with laughter as he bites ticklish kisses all down her neck.
“I can not-“ He huffs out a sigh. “How do you even think of these things? Danny and Steve are not romantically interested in each other.”
“Yeah,” she scoffs, looping her arms around his shoulders, “and you and I are blood related.”
She’s ready for the pause, so she has a patiently challenging Are You Going To Freak Out On Me Face all prepared, just like Steve has been practicing in the mirror, but Chin pulls his equivalent of an eyeroll and ducks back down to kiss her, sweet and thorough, everything that Chin has always been.
~*~ Three Weeks Later ~*~
“Guys,” Danny says, coming into the war room at a half-run. “We’ve got a problem. Boxes-entire boxes, mind you-of my winter gear is missing. Someone broke into my apartment-“
“You should get better security,” Steve mentions, oh-so-casually crossing his arms.
“Or a better apartment,” Kono adds, accepting her boss’s stealthy and appreciative wink as straight-faced as she can.
Danny stops in his tracks, blue eyes narrowing to Steve with a frankly shark-scenting-blood-in-the-water-like focus. “What,” he grinds out, “Did you do. McGarrett.”
Steve shrugs, but his beaming, stupidly fond grin starts shining through. “Nothing.”
“Oh my god,” Chin chokes around his morning coffee, and Kono has to clap him a couple times quite hard on the back before he can breathe right. She does not, however, have to leave her hand there, fingertips slipping under the collar of yet another atrocious Hawaiian shirt Chin manages so effortlessly to make look good. He glares at her, though if it’s because he’s finally been thwacked over the head with the clue bat vis-a-vis Danny, Steve, and The Love Tonight, or whether it’s because she keeps brushing over the hickey she left this morning-well, anyone’s guess.
“I’ve been thinking of subletting my apartment,” Kono announces to the room at large.
“You have?” Danny asks.
“You have?” Steve warns.
“Really,” is all Chin says, but he leans back against her when he does, beaming up at Kono in a way that reminds her-
She has ninja in her family.
THE END
comments are ♥
Author: queenklu
Pairing: Chin/Kono & Steve/Danny, because...impulse control, i have thee not.
Rating: NC17
Word Count: 4605
A/N: Hoahanau means 'cousin,' which they are not, for the purposes of this fic. Also, eta&facepalm: This was all written for tjournal's lovely Kono Fest, even if it's unforgivably late.
A lot of the Hawaiian phrases are either repeated in English or explained, but just for a reference, if you'd like, click here:
kolohe - trouble
okole lolo - crazy ass (swearing is hard in Hawaiian, and also? She's 12.)
Uoki - stop
tita - a very tough female who is willing to fight
An den - what’s up?
da kine - the best
Kala mai ia'u - I’m so sorry
Nau wale no - just for you
Apologies in advance for any mistakes. I am so, so sorry.
~*~
Hoahanau
“Thank you, Auntie,” she says, with a quick nod of her head before she peels off from the witness.
Instantly Danny’s flanking her, Chin already to her right. “You cannot be related to everyone on the island,” he says in that borderline halting tone he uses when Steve does something particularly Hawaiian. “It’s just not actually possible.”
“Oh, she’s not related, brah,” Chin says before she can.
“’Auntie’ is a term of respect,” Kono explains, “Same way as saying ‘sir’ or ‘miss.’”
“That’s just too weird.” Danny shakes his head. “None of my aunts made me respect anything but just how freaking crazy they are. Wait.” He stops, and Kono sighs, bracing for it as she and Chin turn in tandem. “Are you two really…?”
“We’re family,” Chin says, a blurred but still dangerous edge to his tone that Danny takes note of with a quirk of his eyebrow. And if he doesn’t notice-or chooses not to notice-it’s not exactly an answer, well. Kono’s not going to throw Danny to the sharks.
~*~
Kono can’t remember who used the word first. Probably one of their parents-her mother and Chin’s grew on the same street, in the same schools, falling for their high school sweethearts and starting a family round about the same year. Everyone thought they had Chin and Kono’s older brother Maleko pegged as the boys who were going to tear up this island, kolohe from the time they were born. No one saw Kono coming.
Kono has copies of the most incriminating of their childhood photos tucked into the bottom of her desk drawer, and one slipped into a secret nook in her wallet-for blackmailing purposes, is what she told herself. Denial isn’t her strong suit, but everything likes to slip sideways where Chin is concerned.
She remembers the day the picture in her wallet was taken, where Chin was still growing into his ears and baby fat filled out the angles in his face, but he still seemed so big to her, six years older and so much smarter. Kono was six herself, roly-poly in her hibiscus flowered swim suit, crouched and gently prodding at a starfish where it had washed up on shore. Chin had knelt down beside her just as the picture was taken, nudged her shoulder and grinned gap-toothed, and the instant the flash had burst she shoved him just hard enough to send him toppling into the surf, grabbed that starfish and tore off down the beach, shrieking in laughter as he spat out salt water and chased her down.
She remembers squealing, “Cousin, cousin, cousin, stop!” and he did like it was a game. Three times she said the word he’d freeze, three more times he could run at her again. She’d creep closer to make it more fun, drawing out the word so long she’d lose count, until they were covered in sand and the starfish was forgotten.
So yeah, she definitely knew it by then.
~*~
By the time Kono was twelve Chin was a permanent fixture in her life, like a limb or a scuba mask, something necessary for staying alive in the water. Maleko was always gone, always with his buddies, surrounded by an increasingly rough crowd. He didn’t have time for Kono, and she didn’t miss something she’d never really had. Not with Chin around.
She tried to call him brother once, just to see, but his eyes looked at her sideways and she didn’t try again. Everyone was everyone’s brother on Hawaii. Chin was closer than that. Close like family.
And it was easier to say “cousin” than “my mom’s best friend’s son,” and easier to explain to adults who worried about her hanging out with an older boy. No one looked twice at a cousin. “Cousin” made Chin near invisible, which is how he liked to be.
Except.
One day Chin came to pick her up from school on one of the last days before he started University, with a girl hovering near his arm: Sally MacNeal, a haole just in from the mainland.
“Oh she’s so cute!” Sally said the instant Kono warily trudged within cooing distance.
At least Chin looked embarrassed. Kono had a hard time believing that other people found her cousin hard to read, but she’d heard people call Chin ‘expressionless’ too many times to just write them off as being stupid. (Which she did, too, but on top of other things.)
“Howzit, okole lolo,” Kono said, “You get a sand facial or you always look like that?”
“Uoki,” Chin frowned, “Be nice, cuz, she just got in.”
“In with the tide, maybe,” Kono grumbled, and tried not to feel better when Chin ruffled her hair.
“Yes, you’re a big tita, Kono,” he said, “You want a shave ice?”
She would not be bought with cold sugary goodness. Not unless it was Kamekona’s shop, at least. He let her put on six different flavors because she was family (real family, not like Chin) and he only charged half for hers, full price for Chin Ho and the haole, who would not stop pointing and giggling and touching Chin’s arm.
Kamekona took one look at Kono’s face and added a seventh flavor, no charge.
“Is it always so bright here?” Sally asked as they sat down, fanning herself a little nervously while she stripped off another layer, down to her bright pink camisole. Kono took one look at her pasty white skin and the redness already creeping in on her cheeks and hid an evil grin behind her shave ice.
“Kono,” Chin said, almost sharply-her head snapped up, automatically guilty, but he just brushed a bit of cherry ice off her nose and said, “I’m allowed to have friends my own age.”
Is that all Kono and Chin were? ‘Friends’ felt all wrong, made her squirm under the baffled gaze of Sally as Chin squatted down to be eye-to-eye with Kono where she was sitting on the bench. She had friends--Friends moved away or just stopped being interesting and if Chin ever lost interest in her she wouldn’t know what to do.
“So can you be pleasant,” he continued, teasing, “while I go buy Sally some sun screen?”
“Oh, you really don’t have to,” Sally started, but Chin just gave her this smile, the one he’d learned to hide his gap teeth behind and never grew out of, and she stammered to a stop.
“Yeah,” Kono grumbled, “Okay.”
Chin nodded to her, and asked her to pound it; she bumped his fist with hers before he moved away.
“Your cousin’s very…nice,” Sally said a little awkwardly, in this voice Kono knew from adults talking to infants, and she just couldn’t stand it.
She pushed her ice at Sally, untangling her legs from the bench as she asked, “Watch this?” and then added, “Um, you can try the grape flavor, if you want,” because Chin had told her to be pleasant, and then she took off at a run.
Kono found him by a booth just down the street, pocketing the change as one of Kamekona’s many brothers handed him a small white bottle of spf 50, and it took everything she had not to tackle him like she was six again. His eyes were wide when he met hers, curious, friendly, a rainbow of expressions. “An den, Kono,” he said when she nearly ripped her flip-flops skidding to a stop. “What’s wrong?”
“We’re not just friends, right?” she blurted, not quite able to lift her face enough to hold his gaze. “W-We’re family?”
“Oh, Kono,” he said, taking his time with the words as his arm slipped around her shoulders. “You and I are da kine ohana. The very best.”
Four years later when he graduated college he enrolled in the police academy, but not without her express permission (even if it was maybe just a formality). She made him promise to visit every weekend, and sometimes she’d sneak him a bag of malasadas on the days she knew they had him doing lots of boring paperwork. Sally fell out of his life, and Chin didn’t even seem to miss her. When Chin met Malia, Kono didn’t really think much of it.
And then they got engaged.
~*~
Kono couldn’t stand Malia, and the feeling seemed to be mutual from the moment they set eyes on each other. She was old blood, true Hawaii, not the slant-eyed tourists left behind in the war, like Chin and Kono’s various ancestors. She shouldn’t have looked twice at Chin, and she definitely didn’t look twice at Kono.
Fine, whatever. Kono had the championships coming up, free time eaten by hours spent in the surf, in a weight room, training training training until she felt unsteady without a board beneath her feet.
It was a rogue wave. Everyone said so. Even Coach told her he hadn’t seen it coming, tears welling up above the craggy plains of his face as he sat with her in the hospital and gave her the doctor’s diagnosis in terms of her suddenly nonexistent surfing career. The wave had scrunched her up like a napkin and wrung her out, twisting her leg with no regard for muscles or tendon or bone.
When Coach told her she was out of the game Kono blacked out. She’s not proud of it, but it happened, and it’s better than her second urge (which was just screaming until someone put a pillow over her face to make her stop).
When she woke up again, pulled up from the blackness like she’d never really left the ocean, Chin was there. She was smiling before she could think to stop.
“Hey,” she slurred, fingers reaching for him through a haze of drugs. “Howzit, hoa?” Short for hoahanau, ‘cousin,’ abbreviated only because she couldn’t quite feel her face. It took her a second to realize that hoa by itself meant ‘partner.’ Which just felt even better. “Hoa,” she hummed again, and Chin Ho took her hand in both of his.
“Hoahanau,” he corrected, something soft and broken in his tone even as he tried to smile for her. “You gonna wear a badge and be my partner?”
“Maybe,” she grinned, cheeky.
“Oh Kono,” he sighed, head bent down over her reef-scraped knuckles. “Kala mai ia'u.”
“What’re you sorry for?” She wanted to stroke his hair, but her other arm was pinned down with tubes. It didn’t stop her wanting. A weird sort of laugh thumped in the back of her throat. “You controlling the waves now, brah?”
“I would never let you get hurt if I did.” His words were quick, rapid fire, and everything was so blurry in her head. She pushed her thumb against his, pad to pad, soft little nudges until he had to look up at her again.
But she couldn’t really remember what she wanted to say, and she knew bad times were lurking in the periphery waiting to tear her apart, but looking at Chin? She couldn’t do anything but smile at him, and that wasn’t too bad.
~*~
Kono’s folks moved to Oahu a few years back-supposedly because her Dad had to oversee construction in a new location-conveniently right around the time every last thing in Chin’s life got stuffed in the barrel. Kono’s mom would have stayed, stuck by the family even when association brought them down, but her father owned the business, and it’s expensive living in Hawaii.
Kono was already a year into the academy when things started going wrong, or they probably wouldn’t have accepted her application. As it was, they might not have given her a diploma if she’d really been related by blood. The first she heard of anything was the first time she got grilled by I.A.-and it took her too long to realize what it meant that I.A. reached her before the rumors did. Chin always kept his mouth shut, especially when it came to his own problems. It might have saved his career if he’d asked for help.
It probably wouldn’t have saved his engagement.
The day she got word Chin was off the force-she had to hear it from her boss, not Chin, and he still wouldn’t pick up his cell phone after nearly two weeks of avoiding her, so she grabbed a bottle of tequila and a case of whatever the Kona Brewing Company had on display and drove to his house, and if he was still hung up about the fact that she’d been old enough to legally drink for a couple years, now, then screw him, she’d pin him to the couch and force it all down his throat until he started talking to her.
Malia was on her way out. Malia was dressed to the nines, not a hair out of place, suitcase rolling along behind her four inch stilettos. Malia was lighting a cigarette with a bic lighter caught in her deadly pink nails and Kono almost punched her.
She says almost because Chin saw her coming. Not because she had the self-control required to stop.
His arms looped around her and pinned her in place, the tequila bottle smashing against the pavement when she dropped it to try and swing with her left. She knows she was screaming, probably “What the fuck are you doing?” because Malia’s eyes were the size of sand dollars under her neatly trimmed eyebrows, and then, “Let me go, let me go, let me hit her,” because Chin had been blacklisted from a job he loved and abandoned by a woman he wanted to be family and someone needed to be hit. Badly.
“Go, just go,” Chin murmured, his head tucked down almost to Kono’s shoulder, and it took a second for them both to realize he was talking to Malia.
She spat out the crumpled remains of her cigarette where she’d clutched it too tight between her lips, snapped, “You can have him,” with a hard, frightened quaver in her voice, and clicked off into her waiting taxi.
Kono still couldn’t tell you why she started to cry, except someone had to, and Chin just wouldn’t. He made her hurt with just how much he wouldn’t, how badly he was shaking with it, deep down where nobody but Kono could see.
She twisted in his arms and he let her, and she cradled the back of his head and the nape of his neck and said, “Sorry, I’m so sorry, I don’t know what to do but I’ll do anything-“ until words stopped making sense and she just dropped her head against his chest. He’d taken it all without a word, without anything, and for the first time she understood what people meant when they said they couldn’t get a read on him.
Finally he sighed and took her hands away, his touch around her wrists so light she felt like she might drift out with the tide. “Such a violent tita,” he said, and his voice still had that subtle glow he used just for her, a tired sort of smile.
She didn’t say she sometimes felt like she had to be violent enough for the both of them, because Chin is so damn good at making people think he’s mild mannered and not able to flatten a man with one thumb. He’s always so calm, stoic-“Vulcan,” she’d used to tease him. But he could take care of himself. It just hadn’t been enough this time.
Kono hated Malia so much sometimes it hurt to breathe; she kind of wonders if that’s what Danny feels like on a day-to-day basis, but he’s from the mainland and mainlanders are allowed to be angry. Kono should know how to let the ocean wash it off her by now. But there’s only so much good the waves can do, and when Malia left Chin Kono had let that grudge burn.
Not that she’d particularly wanted Malia to stay, but. God, she’d said yes, she’d said yes to Chin, and that made her family whether the papers were signed or not. That Malia could and had turned her back on family? If Malia fell in a volcano Pele would spit her back out. But probably not alive.
Kono took up kickboxing and a couple extra kinds of martial arts to bleed out her aggression. It sort of worked. Now when she gets angry, she knows how to hit people without getting caught.
~*~
Kono hates her apartment, but it’s a fond sort of hate, now. She’d bet half a year’s salary that Danny feels the same way about his apartment (and probably, to some extent, Steve). And she can legitimately afford something better now that she’s with the Five-Oh. But she got in a sort of habit of hanging out at Chin’s house when her apartment gets too dreary, and if she buys a better place she might…not have that excuse to fall back on.
Because Chin is better company than most everyone she knows. Because sometimes she just wants to hang out with a guy and not have to think about whether he finds her charming or attractive or sufficiently girly-Chin is a guy who will watch bad adventure movies with her without complaint, who will gently save her baking disasters without turning it into a Thing, who will sit and let her talk or not say anything and it’s always comfortable, always right, and if she moves-
So she’s on Danny’s side of the whole Bad Apartment Argument, even (maybe especially) since she suspects Steve of secretly moving Danny in with him, through stealth and minor thievery and one day Danny is going to wake up and realize all of his unpacked boxes have miraculously migrated into Steve’s garage and half his shirts (though none of his ties) are taking up space in Steve’s closet. And he will actually be surprised, which is sad.
“Half your things are in my house,” Chin points out when she brings up the subject over dinner. Chin is cooking something amazing. Kono hopes it’s tuna. It smells like tuna.
“Because your place is closer to the beach? And work. And I surf a lot. Ow,” she states mildly when he smacks her hand away from-whatever the hell is in the white bowl. Kono is really bad at determining what food is until it’s staring at her from a plate.
Chin smirks and stirs something he’s sautéing on the stove. “Maybe you’re the one who has been secretly moving in with the unsuspecting.”
She scoffs. “Yeah, like I could pull one over on you.”
“Well maybe I’ve been secretly moving you in. So secretly-” He taps the air in front of her with the spatula. “-that I’ve even tricked you into thinking it might have been your subconscious idea.”
“…No,” she says after a moment, “I think that’s something I would notice.”
“That you think you’d notice. Maybe I’m just that ninja.”
Her grin is wider than it feels like it’s ever been, matching Chin Ho’s inch for inch as he leans back against the sink. She hasn’t seen her cousin this cheeky in…feels like forever. She steals a taste from the white bowl while he’s busy ducking his head. “You know,” she says, “I think that Detective Williams is a good influence on you.”
It tastes like butter the color of plumeria, creamy and bright and salty sweet where it’s wrapped around her finger. She doesn’t mean to make an appreciative sound, but really, she can’t help it. “This is good!” she tells him, surprise cutting off at the look on his face.
It’s gone in an instant. His eyes are too good at keeping secrets, darting away, back to the stove. And she’s so sure he’s going to make this disappear, this precarious wave they’re riding, leaving them high and dry out in the reef.
“It’s not Danny,” he says instead, loud and clear. His head is down again, fingers tugging at the curls at the nape of his neck before his arms move gently down to his sides. “It’s you, Kono. You have to know it’s all you.”
She gets this weird sinking feeling in her gut, like every time Steve mentions helipads. “What do you…” Her fingers curl uselessly, torn between touching Chin’s arm and curling into a fist. “Chin… You’re the one who got me on the task force. You got me through my surf career going belly-up, your recommendation got me into the academy, you-you fight for me harder than anyone. So don’t go telling me I did you any favors. You got yourself here. I’m just tagging along, like I do.”
Her shoulders shrug but she knows her smile isn’t sad. As long as Chin wants her around, she won’t want life any other way. That’s just true.
Chin’s mouth slips open, but no sound comes out until he can turn back to the stove and clear his throat. Something just shifted, something big and silent, and if neither of them says a word it will still be different, quietly changed. Maybe it should scare her. Probably it shouldn’t make her heartbeat thrum along with the steady adrenaline that comes from stakeouts spent patiently waiting with a sure mark at the end.
“Go set the table,” Chin orders, smiling though his eyes are busy with other things. “And try not to taste too many things before they’re on your plate.”
She hesitates, but it’s the ball-toe rock of someone never planning to go anywhere.
“Can I try something?”
“Kono, I told you, the food-“
She kisses him. Her fingertips are on the shell of his ear, slid up under his jaw, and his lips are against hers, open in a quivering gasp. She slides back, and his hands settle on her hips like an afterthought, barely there enough to feel.
Kono has always loved his eyes, the stunning cat-like slits of them, but they aren’t telling her anything now. This came out of left field; it has to be making his head spin. Maybe she screwed up. Maybe she screwed up bad.
Chin’s hand moves so slowly, brushes her hair away from her face, tucking it behind her ear, and it should be cousinly, he’s done it hundreds of times, it should be his way of saying she will always be that little girl on the beach, too close to not call family and still not close enough.
It should. His fingers curl down, slip under her chin, down the skin of her neck, and she shivers like a rough surf in winter, twining their fingers together. And his eyes are shining as she takes his hand, like he doesn’t know what to do, like he doesn’t know how to have what he wants.
“Nau wale no, Chin,” she tells him, thumb brushing over the strange beautiful shape of his eyelid. “Just for you.”
He turns his face away, but into the palm of her hand. “Kono,” he sighs, breath slipping out against her wrist. “This is something… You have to be so sure, hoa.”
“So I’ll be sure,” she tells him, smile bright, voice steady. “I’ll be sure enough for two.”
Any last traces of his mask slip off and disintegrate into nothing. “Kono-“
And she kisses him again. And again, until he opens and it’s a slick hot tangle of tongue and teeth and lips; and again, until his hands capture her hips and tug her close enough to feel how much he wants her; and again, and again, and again, until the food gets cold, until the sun sinks low, until her shirt is gone and he’s nuzzling her breast through her bra as he spreads her out on the bed, until she grabs two lean handfuls of his ass and pulls him to her, barely giving him enough room to slip on a condom before she flips him over and climbs on top, until she’s full of him and god, so wet for him and so, so, so in-
His quick, calloused fingers find her clit and she’s gone, gone, shaking apart like a wave cresting against a reef, over and around him, clinging to his arms as her head falls back, throat contracting around a few high, happy sounds. Chin comes with a groan below her almost instantly, bucking against her thighs, tugging her down close enough to kiss. Her hair is all around them like a curtain, hiding her grin as she melts it with kisses into his mouth, until he’s smiling too, all the way to his eyes and shining outward, wrapping them up tight in his glow.
“Unf,” he grunts when she stretches out on top of him, and she wriggles, unrepentant. “How are you all elbows, hoa?”
She elbows him in the ribs on purpose, then kisses it better to let him know just how much she doesn’t mind when he uses that word. “Mmm. The real question-“ Another kiss, higher up near his nipple, and he sucks in a breath with no attempt to hide it whatsoever. “-is how we paired up-“ She licks it, curious, and breaks off into a delighted giggle when he growls and rolls her off him, following an instant after until his forearms frame her face. “-before Steve and Danny,” she wraps up quick, squirming with laughter as he bites ticklish kisses all down her neck.
“I can not-“ He huffs out a sigh. “How do you even think of these things? Danny and Steve are not romantically interested in each other.”
“Yeah,” she scoffs, looping her arms around his shoulders, “and you and I are blood related.”
She’s ready for the pause, so she has a patiently challenging Are You Going To Freak Out On Me Face all prepared, just like Steve has been practicing in the mirror, but Chin pulls his equivalent of an eyeroll and ducks back down to kiss her, sweet and thorough, everything that Chin has always been.
~*~ Three Weeks Later ~*~
“Guys,” Danny says, coming into the war room at a half-run. “We’ve got a problem. Boxes-entire boxes, mind you-of my winter gear is missing. Someone broke into my apartment-“
“You should get better security,” Steve mentions, oh-so-casually crossing his arms.
“Or a better apartment,” Kono adds, accepting her boss’s stealthy and appreciative wink as straight-faced as she can.
Danny stops in his tracks, blue eyes narrowing to Steve with a frankly shark-scenting-blood-in-the-water-like focus. “What,” he grinds out, “Did you do. McGarrett.”
Steve shrugs, but his beaming, stupidly fond grin starts shining through. “Nothing.”
“Oh my god,” Chin chokes around his morning coffee, and Kono has to clap him a couple times quite hard on the back before he can breathe right. She does not, however, have to leave her hand there, fingertips slipping under the collar of yet another atrocious Hawaiian shirt Chin manages so effortlessly to make look good. He glares at her, though if it’s because he’s finally been thwacked over the head with the clue bat vis-a-vis Danny, Steve, and The Love Tonight, or whether it’s because she keeps brushing over the hickey she left this morning-well, anyone’s guess.
“I’ve been thinking of subletting my apartment,” Kono announces to the room at large.
“You have?” Danny asks.
“You have?” Steve warns.
“Really,” is all Chin says, but he leans back against her when he does, beaming up at Kono in a way that reminds her-
She has ninja in her family.
THE END
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