Rhyme and Reason, 1/1
Title: Rhyme and Reason
Author: somehowunbroken
Fandom: H50
Characters: Steve/Danny, Victor Hesse
Word Count: 2,572
Rating: R/NC-17, kind of toes the line there
Notes: For ciaimpala, who bought me in the help_nz charity auction. Thanks for supporting a great cause, and I hope you like it! Thanks to camshaft22, who looked this over for me.
Danny has had a wedding day before, okay, so he knows how these things are supposed to go. And yeah, sure, he knows that this wedding is, in every way imaginable, nothing like his last. For one, he’s wearing khakis and a button-down; for another, the minister is in flip-flops. And, well, yeah, there’s no bride in sight, no fluffy dress faintly reminiscent of a pastry anywhere around, not even Gracie’s flower girl dress. No, he’s marrying his freakishly tall, ridiculously over-muscled, unfairly attractive partner, who is also wearing khakis and a button-down, and Jesus Christ, a tie. Danny thinks he might die before the ceremony is over, because dear sweet Mother of God, everything about this is insane.
Of, course, he thinks as he ducks back behind the table he’s behind, he might also die because of all the bullets, but, you know, details.
Because only this wedding would be crashed by criminals, criminals bearing loaded firearms and nasty tempers; only the union between Danny and Steve would draw this kind of unwelcome attention. He’d lost track of his husband-to-be (fuck civil unions and their politically correct terminology, he thinks for the thousandth time, this is a wedding, he’s getting married, Steve will be his husband - not the time, Daniel, really not the time) when the first bullet had sounded, because Steve had dived for Grace and hustled her towards the house, and Danny is one hundred percent sure that Steve is still with her, keeping her safe from whoever the fuck decides it’s a good idea to crash a wedding, and there’s really nowhere Danny would rather Steve be than protecting his little girl.
“Ah, Detective Williams,” someone says above him, and Danny has just enough time to connect voice with face with memory and think shit shit shit before there’s a bright flare of pain at the base of his skull and everything snaps to black.
-0-
Danny jerks back to consciousness cuffed to - something, maybe a pole, maybe a pipe, something cool and rounded and metallic between his body and the cuffs. He tugs at his hands, rolls his feet around, and quickly realizes that he’s well and truly trapped.
Time for Alternate Plan B, then: getting more information.
Danny swings his head carefully to the side, watching the room tumble and sway around him. “Fuck,” he mutters, closing his eyes and willing the world to right itself again. He opens a cautious eye a moment later, relieved to find that things are mostly staying in place. It’s still not a good sign, he thinks as he attempts to take in his surroundings again. He probably has a concussion.
There’s nothing to see, he realizes when he gets the room to focus. It’s a standard basement, concrete floors and walls and a dilapidated washer/dryer combo beneath the stairs.
Okay then. Alternate Plan C: get irritated.
“Hesse,” Danny shouts, or tries to; his voice is hoarse, and he wonders how long he’s been out, for it to sound like that. There’s a small window in the top of the wall, and there’s light streaming through; either he hasn’t been out for long, or he’s been out for way longer than is any sort of good news. He clears his throat and tries again. “Hesse, you son of a bitch, I know you’re here somewhere.”
“Temper, temper,” Hesse’s voice comes from the top of the staircase, and it’s only the nausea that churns Danny’s gut that keeps him from swinging his head toward the sound. “That’s no way to talk to the man who holds your life in his hands.”
“Fuck you,” Danny says conversationally as Hesse makes his way down the stairs. “What’s your deal, Hesse? I mean, escaping from jail, okay, I can see where you’re coming from with that one, but why the fuck would you not just - oh, I don’t know - leave the island-”
“I would have missed the wedding,” Hesse replies, a smile on his face that doesn’t in any way reach his eyes. “I was saddened to realize that you hadn’t thought to invite me. I am, after all, the one who brought you two together, am I not?”
In a bizarre, twisted kind of way it’s true, but Danny doesn’t give the thought time to coalesce. “McGarrett is going to kill you. You know that, right?”
“I’m counting on your husband tracking us both here,” Hesse says matter-of-factly. “It will be quite amusing to see his face when I put a bullet through your head.” He pauses and smirks. “Or should I say fiancé? I do believe I got there before it was declared official.”
“Steve’s going to kill you twice if you hurt me more than you already have,” Danny says levelly.
Hesse just smirks at him. “He’s already killed me, though, hasn’t he?” he quips, like it’s hilarious. “Consider this evening the slate.”
“Fuck you,”” Danny spits, struggling against the cuffs and the nausea and the rage. “Fuck you six ways to Sunday, Hesse, fuck you with a fork-”
Hesse laughs as he climbs back up the stairs, leaving Danny alone.
-0-
The basement leaks.
Danny finds this out on what he’s calling his fourth day there, mostly because he doesn’t want to think about having been unconscious for more than a couple of hours on that first day, when he woke up here. There’s a sudden freak rainstorm, like Hawaii tends to have in the afternoons, and after a few minutes, he can hear the telltale sounds of water dripping to the floor.
“Great,” Danny gripes to nobody in particular. “This is just the icing on the cake, y’know? Water in the basement. As if I haven’t already forfeited getting the deposit back on the tux.”
There’s no answer, though, and it’s no fun to rant if there’s no one there to hear it.
-0-
Danny’s days go like this: wake up when the sunlight through the window lands on his eyes, spend a few minutes cursing the fact that he can’t get his hands up to rub at his face, endure some taunting from Hesse, eat what Hesse has one of his flunkies feed him with a spoon. Then it’s more taunting, several hours of mind-numbing boredom, yet more taunting, and sleep.
It’s day eleven by Danny’s estimation before there’s a break in the routine. There’s noise from above during the stretch of the day that Danny has put aside for seeing how much of his college trig class he can remember (answer: not much), so he brings his mind fully back to the present and pays attention. It’s an argument, he realizes, between Hesse and someone else; Danny can’t make out the words, but he knows that tone. It culminates in shouting, and then one of the men storms out of the house and slams the door.
Ten minutes later, Hesse walks down the stairs, a grim look on his face. “There’s been a change of plans,” he announces to Danny, as if Danny has knowledge of what these plans were and therefore needs to be informed about said change.
“I’m assuming this has something to do with the lover’s spat you and Bozo the Clown just had,” Danny replies, more to irritate Hesse than anything else.
Hesse’s face splits into something that’s either a smile or a grimace, maybe both, and he pulls his handgun. “I’d thought to wait until McGarrett was here to do this,” he says, mock-sorrow in his voice as he levels it at Danny. “I’ll just have to imagine the look on his face when he finds your dead body chained to a pipe in a house less than a mile from his own, though.”
Danny feels remarkably calm, all things considered, even as Hesse takes a step forward. “Any last remarks, Detective?”
Danny looks thoughtful. “I hope Steve makes your death really, really painful,” he decides. “Also, fuck you with a fork. Again. Just for good measure.”
Hesse laughs, sounding utterly delighted and incurably insane as he nods, and then he pulls the trigger.
-0-
There’s a shattering sound, a scream, and then thundering footsteps in the upper part of the house.
-0-
Suddenly there’s also the sound of a familiar voice shouting, “Five-0!”
Danny grits his teeth against the pain in his shoulder as he stares at Hesse’s body and gathers every ounce of strength he’s got left after being handcuffed in the same position for eleven days. “Steve!”
Danny hears the footsteps above his head stutter, and then there’s the distinctive sound of size elevens tearing across the floor. “Danny?”
“Basement,” Danny croaks out, then drops his head to his chest, trying to keep himself from crying out from the pain. He hears the basement door open so violently he’s surprised it doesn’t tear off into the room upstairs, and then he can see Steve’s feet, his legs, his arms, and then, God, Steve’s face, worried and astonished and - fuck, he’s crying, those are tear tracks on his beautiful miserable face, and he’s dropping to his knees in front of Danny and reaching a shaky hand to trace the edge of Danny’s face.
“You’re dead,” Steve tells him unsteadily. “We got one of Hesse’s - and he said that Hesse-”
“Babe,” Danny says, turning his face a little into Steve’s hand, “I’m not dead, okay? I’m here, I’m alive, I’m fine-”
Steve wraps himself around Danny and nearly crushes Danny to his chest, and Danny cries out. “Okay, okay, fine is an overstatement, bastard just shot me,” he wheezes out.
Steve pulls back in a flash and seems to notice the state Danny’s in for the first time. He moves behind Danny and there’s a soft scratching sound, and then agony as Danny’s shoulders are finally able to relax from the position they’ve been held in for nearly two weeks. The blood starts flowing from the hole in his shoulder again, steadier this time, and Steve swears even as he’s stripping off his tac vest and shirt to press the garment to Danny’s shoulder.
“Come on,” he says softly, standing and hauling Danny to his feet. “Hospital, Danny, c’mon, you’re bleeding and probably dehydrated and-”
“Give me your gun,” Danny interrupts, leaning heavily against Steve.
“What?” There’s a definite note of confusion in Steve’s voice.
“Gun, Steve, give me your gun,” Danny instructs, holding his left hand out and awkwardly grasping at it. Steve’s hand comes up almost automatically to steady his grip, and together they point the gun at Hesse’s body and shoot him twice in the head.
-0-
Danny’s in the hospital for four days, all told, mostly because he keeps tearing his shoulder stitches hugging people until the doctor tapes his arm to his side to keep him from moving it and refuses to undo it until the stitches mostly take. Danny thinks it’s annoying; Steve - well, it’s the kind of thing that Steve would find hilarious, if he didn’t seem so amazed by the fact that Danny’s alive to be annoyed by it.
Danny finally gets the whole story out of Chin and Kono in the hour it takes Steve to go home and shower on the second day. The shootout at Steve’s had ended shortly after Danny had been abducted; it had taken three agonizing days to get any sort of answers. Day nine had brought about some definitive results when they’d managed to capture one of Hesse’s men, who had smirked and told them that Hesse had already killed Danny when asked what he knew. He’d eventually given up the location of a house in Steve’s neighborhood, after some questioning that Danny’s positive he never wants the details of, and the team had spent a day staking the house out before making their move. Kono had been the one to shoot Hesse through the window; “I didn’t even know it was him, just that there was a guy with a gun in the basement and I had a clean shot,” she shrugs when Danny thanks her, but Danny knows that it was Kono putting a bullet through Hesse that had probably saved his own life, making Hesse’s aim waver those few precious inches between painful shoulder injury and deadly shot through the chest.
Danny checks himself out of the hospital about an hour after the doctor frees his arm. Steve’s there to lead him to the car and ease him inside; Steve’s the one to guide him into their house, miraculously already free of reminders of their not-quite-wedding day; it’s Steve who lays him down in their bed and helps him out of the loose clothing he’s wearing.
“When I thought you were dead,” Steve says in the small, pained voice that Danny hates hearing from him, “Danny, I just - I had no idea what to do.”
“I’m fine,” Danny tells him helplessly as they curl into each other. He knows words; words are a part of him like breathing and eating and sleeping, but he doesn’t know what to say to relieve the bone-crushing grief he knows Steve must have been facing. “Babe, God, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t,” Steve says roughly. “Danny, do not apologize. Do not.”
“Okay,” Danny replies quietly, tucking his head into Steve’s shoulder and settling his left hand low on Steve’s hip. He wants to wrap himself around Steve, to hold him close and make everything better somehow, but the stitches still kind of hurt, so this is the best he can do. “Hey. I love you.”
“God,” Steve mumbles into his hair, “I love you so much that I’m pretty sure my heart actually stopped when that asshole said you were dead.”
Danny pulls back a little and smiles softly as he pokes Steve in the chest. “Bet I love you more.”
Steve laughs, and it sounds a little startled as he smiles back. “You think so?” he asks, his tone much lighter as his eyes crinkle at the edges. “Allow me to demonstrate exactly how much I love you, here, and we can compare notes, okay?”
He moves gently, slowly, until Danny’s on his back. Steve props himself up over Danny’s torso and kisses him softly, running a hand through his hair and down his face and around the back of his head. Danny sighs as Steve mouths a path down his body, pressing kisses as he goes, until he’s mouthing at Danny’s cock, pulling it into his mouth and doing every little thing he’s learned that Danny likes, fingers and lips and tongue moving in perfect time. It’s not long at all before Danny’s on the edge. Steve knows it, Steve has always been able to tell, and he looks up even as he moves his head down, pulling every last spasm from Danny’s body like each is precious. He draws his head back when Danny finally slumps back into the pillow, pressing a soft kiss to Danny’s hip before he groans through his own release.
Steve pulls himself back up and puts his head on Danny’s chest after a few minutes, and Danny wraps his arm up around Steve so he can bury his fingers in Steve’s hair.
“I love you,” Steve says again, just as quietly as he had before, but he sounds less crushed this time.
“I love you, too,” Danny replies, running his hand through Steve’s hair almost absently, and that’s how they fall asleep, curled together and alive and in love.
Author: somehowunbroken
Fandom: H50
Characters: Steve/Danny, Victor Hesse
Word Count: 2,572
Rating: R/NC-17, kind of toes the line there
Notes: For ciaimpala, who bought me in the help_nz charity auction. Thanks for supporting a great cause, and I hope you like it! Thanks to camshaft22, who looked this over for me.
Danny has had a wedding day before, okay, so he knows how these things are supposed to go. And yeah, sure, he knows that this wedding is, in every way imaginable, nothing like his last. For one, he’s wearing khakis and a button-down; for another, the minister is in flip-flops. And, well, yeah, there’s no bride in sight, no fluffy dress faintly reminiscent of a pastry anywhere around, not even Gracie’s flower girl dress. No, he’s marrying his freakishly tall, ridiculously over-muscled, unfairly attractive partner, who is also wearing khakis and a button-down, and Jesus Christ, a tie. Danny thinks he might die before the ceremony is over, because dear sweet Mother of God, everything about this is insane.
Of, course, he thinks as he ducks back behind the table he’s behind, he might also die because of all the bullets, but, you know, details.
Because only this wedding would be crashed by criminals, criminals bearing loaded firearms and nasty tempers; only the union between Danny and Steve would draw this kind of unwelcome attention. He’d lost track of his husband-to-be (fuck civil unions and their politically correct terminology, he thinks for the thousandth time, this is a wedding, he’s getting married, Steve will be his husband - not the time, Daniel, really not the time) when the first bullet had sounded, because Steve had dived for Grace and hustled her towards the house, and Danny is one hundred percent sure that Steve is still with her, keeping her safe from whoever the fuck decides it’s a good idea to crash a wedding, and there’s really nowhere Danny would rather Steve be than protecting his little girl.
“Ah, Detective Williams,” someone says above him, and Danny has just enough time to connect voice with face with memory and think shit shit shit before there’s a bright flare of pain at the base of his skull and everything snaps to black.
-0-
Danny jerks back to consciousness cuffed to - something, maybe a pole, maybe a pipe, something cool and rounded and metallic between his body and the cuffs. He tugs at his hands, rolls his feet around, and quickly realizes that he’s well and truly trapped.
Time for Alternate Plan B, then: getting more information.
Danny swings his head carefully to the side, watching the room tumble and sway around him. “Fuck,” he mutters, closing his eyes and willing the world to right itself again. He opens a cautious eye a moment later, relieved to find that things are mostly staying in place. It’s still not a good sign, he thinks as he attempts to take in his surroundings again. He probably has a concussion.
There’s nothing to see, he realizes when he gets the room to focus. It’s a standard basement, concrete floors and walls and a dilapidated washer/dryer combo beneath the stairs.
Okay then. Alternate Plan C: get irritated.
“Hesse,” Danny shouts, or tries to; his voice is hoarse, and he wonders how long he’s been out, for it to sound like that. There’s a small window in the top of the wall, and there’s light streaming through; either he hasn’t been out for long, or he’s been out for way longer than is any sort of good news. He clears his throat and tries again. “Hesse, you son of a bitch, I know you’re here somewhere.”
“Temper, temper,” Hesse’s voice comes from the top of the staircase, and it’s only the nausea that churns Danny’s gut that keeps him from swinging his head toward the sound. “That’s no way to talk to the man who holds your life in his hands.”
“Fuck you,” Danny says conversationally as Hesse makes his way down the stairs. “What’s your deal, Hesse? I mean, escaping from jail, okay, I can see where you’re coming from with that one, but why the fuck would you not just - oh, I don’t know - leave the island-”
“I would have missed the wedding,” Hesse replies, a smile on his face that doesn’t in any way reach his eyes. “I was saddened to realize that you hadn’t thought to invite me. I am, after all, the one who brought you two together, am I not?”
In a bizarre, twisted kind of way it’s true, but Danny doesn’t give the thought time to coalesce. “McGarrett is going to kill you. You know that, right?”
“I’m counting on your husband tracking us both here,” Hesse says matter-of-factly. “It will be quite amusing to see his face when I put a bullet through your head.” He pauses and smirks. “Or should I say fiancé? I do believe I got there before it was declared official.”
“Steve’s going to kill you twice if you hurt me more than you already have,” Danny says levelly.
Hesse just smirks at him. “He’s already killed me, though, hasn’t he?” he quips, like it’s hilarious. “Consider this evening the slate.”
“Fuck you,”” Danny spits, struggling against the cuffs and the nausea and the rage. “Fuck you six ways to Sunday, Hesse, fuck you with a fork-”
Hesse laughs as he climbs back up the stairs, leaving Danny alone.
-0-
The basement leaks.
Danny finds this out on what he’s calling his fourth day there, mostly because he doesn’t want to think about having been unconscious for more than a couple of hours on that first day, when he woke up here. There’s a sudden freak rainstorm, like Hawaii tends to have in the afternoons, and after a few minutes, he can hear the telltale sounds of water dripping to the floor.
“Great,” Danny gripes to nobody in particular. “This is just the icing on the cake, y’know? Water in the basement. As if I haven’t already forfeited getting the deposit back on the tux.”
There’s no answer, though, and it’s no fun to rant if there’s no one there to hear it.
-0-
Danny’s days go like this: wake up when the sunlight through the window lands on his eyes, spend a few minutes cursing the fact that he can’t get his hands up to rub at his face, endure some taunting from Hesse, eat what Hesse has one of his flunkies feed him with a spoon. Then it’s more taunting, several hours of mind-numbing boredom, yet more taunting, and sleep.
It’s day eleven by Danny’s estimation before there’s a break in the routine. There’s noise from above during the stretch of the day that Danny has put aside for seeing how much of his college trig class he can remember (answer: not much), so he brings his mind fully back to the present and pays attention. It’s an argument, he realizes, between Hesse and someone else; Danny can’t make out the words, but he knows that tone. It culminates in shouting, and then one of the men storms out of the house and slams the door.
Ten minutes later, Hesse walks down the stairs, a grim look on his face. “There’s been a change of plans,” he announces to Danny, as if Danny has knowledge of what these plans were and therefore needs to be informed about said change.
“I’m assuming this has something to do with the lover’s spat you and Bozo the Clown just had,” Danny replies, more to irritate Hesse than anything else.
Hesse’s face splits into something that’s either a smile or a grimace, maybe both, and he pulls his handgun. “I’d thought to wait until McGarrett was here to do this,” he says, mock-sorrow in his voice as he levels it at Danny. “I’ll just have to imagine the look on his face when he finds your dead body chained to a pipe in a house less than a mile from his own, though.”
Danny feels remarkably calm, all things considered, even as Hesse takes a step forward. “Any last remarks, Detective?”
Danny looks thoughtful. “I hope Steve makes your death really, really painful,” he decides. “Also, fuck you with a fork. Again. Just for good measure.”
Hesse laughs, sounding utterly delighted and incurably insane as he nods, and then he pulls the trigger.
-0-
There’s a shattering sound, a scream, and then thundering footsteps in the upper part of the house.
-0-
Suddenly there’s also the sound of a familiar voice shouting, “Five-0!”
Danny grits his teeth against the pain in his shoulder as he stares at Hesse’s body and gathers every ounce of strength he’s got left after being handcuffed in the same position for eleven days. “Steve!”
Danny hears the footsteps above his head stutter, and then there’s the distinctive sound of size elevens tearing across the floor. “Danny?”
“Basement,” Danny croaks out, then drops his head to his chest, trying to keep himself from crying out from the pain. He hears the basement door open so violently he’s surprised it doesn’t tear off into the room upstairs, and then he can see Steve’s feet, his legs, his arms, and then, God, Steve’s face, worried and astonished and - fuck, he’s crying, those are tear tracks on his beautiful miserable face, and he’s dropping to his knees in front of Danny and reaching a shaky hand to trace the edge of Danny’s face.
“You’re dead,” Steve tells him unsteadily. “We got one of Hesse’s - and he said that Hesse-”
“Babe,” Danny says, turning his face a little into Steve’s hand, “I’m not dead, okay? I’m here, I’m alive, I’m fine-”
Steve wraps himself around Danny and nearly crushes Danny to his chest, and Danny cries out. “Okay, okay, fine is an overstatement, bastard just shot me,” he wheezes out.
Steve pulls back in a flash and seems to notice the state Danny’s in for the first time. He moves behind Danny and there’s a soft scratching sound, and then agony as Danny’s shoulders are finally able to relax from the position they’ve been held in for nearly two weeks. The blood starts flowing from the hole in his shoulder again, steadier this time, and Steve swears even as he’s stripping off his tac vest and shirt to press the garment to Danny’s shoulder.
“Come on,” he says softly, standing and hauling Danny to his feet. “Hospital, Danny, c’mon, you’re bleeding and probably dehydrated and-”
“Give me your gun,” Danny interrupts, leaning heavily against Steve.
“What?” There’s a definite note of confusion in Steve’s voice.
“Gun, Steve, give me your gun,” Danny instructs, holding his left hand out and awkwardly grasping at it. Steve’s hand comes up almost automatically to steady his grip, and together they point the gun at Hesse’s body and shoot him twice in the head.
-0-
Danny’s in the hospital for four days, all told, mostly because he keeps tearing his shoulder stitches hugging people until the doctor tapes his arm to his side to keep him from moving it and refuses to undo it until the stitches mostly take. Danny thinks it’s annoying; Steve - well, it’s the kind of thing that Steve would find hilarious, if he didn’t seem so amazed by the fact that Danny’s alive to be annoyed by it.
Danny finally gets the whole story out of Chin and Kono in the hour it takes Steve to go home and shower on the second day. The shootout at Steve’s had ended shortly after Danny had been abducted; it had taken three agonizing days to get any sort of answers. Day nine had brought about some definitive results when they’d managed to capture one of Hesse’s men, who had smirked and told them that Hesse had already killed Danny when asked what he knew. He’d eventually given up the location of a house in Steve’s neighborhood, after some questioning that Danny’s positive he never wants the details of, and the team had spent a day staking the house out before making their move. Kono had been the one to shoot Hesse through the window; “I didn’t even know it was him, just that there was a guy with a gun in the basement and I had a clean shot,” she shrugs when Danny thanks her, but Danny knows that it was Kono putting a bullet through Hesse that had probably saved his own life, making Hesse’s aim waver those few precious inches between painful shoulder injury and deadly shot through the chest.
Danny checks himself out of the hospital about an hour after the doctor frees his arm. Steve’s there to lead him to the car and ease him inside; Steve’s the one to guide him into their house, miraculously already free of reminders of their not-quite-wedding day; it’s Steve who lays him down in their bed and helps him out of the loose clothing he’s wearing.
“When I thought you were dead,” Steve says in the small, pained voice that Danny hates hearing from him, “Danny, I just - I had no idea what to do.”
“I’m fine,” Danny tells him helplessly as they curl into each other. He knows words; words are a part of him like breathing and eating and sleeping, but he doesn’t know what to say to relieve the bone-crushing grief he knows Steve must have been facing. “Babe, God, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t,” Steve says roughly. “Danny, do not apologize. Do not.”
“Okay,” Danny replies quietly, tucking his head into Steve’s shoulder and settling his left hand low on Steve’s hip. He wants to wrap himself around Steve, to hold him close and make everything better somehow, but the stitches still kind of hurt, so this is the best he can do. “Hey. I love you.”
“God,” Steve mumbles into his hair, “I love you so much that I’m pretty sure my heart actually stopped when that asshole said you were dead.”
Danny pulls back a little and smiles softly as he pokes Steve in the chest. “Bet I love you more.”
Steve laughs, and it sounds a little startled as he smiles back. “You think so?” he asks, his tone much lighter as his eyes crinkle at the edges. “Allow me to demonstrate exactly how much I love you, here, and we can compare notes, okay?”
He moves gently, slowly, until Danny’s on his back. Steve props himself up over Danny’s torso and kisses him softly, running a hand through his hair and down his face and around the back of his head. Danny sighs as Steve mouths a path down his body, pressing kisses as he goes, until he’s mouthing at Danny’s cock, pulling it into his mouth and doing every little thing he’s learned that Danny likes, fingers and lips and tongue moving in perfect time. It’s not long at all before Danny’s on the edge. Steve knows it, Steve has always been able to tell, and he looks up even as he moves his head down, pulling every last spasm from Danny’s body like each is precious. He draws his head back when Danny finally slumps back into the pillow, pressing a soft kiss to Danny’s hip before he groans through his own release.
Steve pulls himself back up and puts his head on Danny’s chest after a few minutes, and Danny wraps his arm up around Steve so he can bury his fingers in Steve’s hair.
“I love you,” Steve says again, just as quietly as he had before, but he sounds less crushed this time.
“I love you, too,” Danny replies, running his hand through Steve’s hair almost absently, and that’s how they fall asleep, curled together and alive and in love.