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2879 days after Steve meets Danny
It starts out stupid, like so many things between them do. “So why did stuff with Lynn go down the toilet, anyway?” Danny asks.
They’re sitting on Danny’s tiny terrace, bellies full of good lasagna and sweating beers in hand. A gentle breeze is ringing in the evening, literally, because it makes the beaded wind chime sing that Charlie arts-and-crafted for Danny last year.
Steve has been thinking only pleasant thoughts, which is probably why he answers a little too honestly. “She wanted something casual. That’s not really my speed.”
Predictably, Danny shakes his head in disbelief, and Steve’s stomach drops. “Why not? Hot woman who does a lot of yoga essentially tells you she wants to have semi-regular sex with you and you don’t even have to do anything for it or watch Desperate Housewives with her, and you turn her down?”
He snorts and pretends it doesn’t echo in his chest because he suddenly feels hollow. “I’d rather watch the Housewives.”
“Jesus, McGarrett, what kind of a man are you?”
That’s a sharp jab at an old bruise. He swallows enough of his beer at once that he almost chokes on it, and bites the inside of his cheek to stop the coughing.
He studiously keeps his eyes fixed on the trees that border Danny’s backyard, which rustle in the wind like they’re laughing at him and his silly human problems. Trees have it good. No dating or feelings involved in their reproductive process.
Danny sighs. It sounds more like a well, fuck sigh than a damn you one. “Steve, hey. I’m sorry, okay? Wanting to cuddle up on the couch at the end of the day doesn’t make you any less of a man. It was a really bad joke. Grace would have my head if she’d heard me say that.”
The mention of Grace softens him up more than the apology. It’s hard to stay stony when Danny invokes his daughter. “It’s okay,” he says. It should be – he’s heard these things often enough, so there’s no reason it should be this much worse when it comes from Danny. Besides, he’s probably the one who has a screw loose, anyway. “It just sucks.”
“What does?”
“Have you ever noticed that our society is really, really focused on sex?” He makes a sweeping gesture that indicates Danny’s darkening backyard, which might be the one exception. “It’s pervasive. Everywhere, all the time.”
Danny shakes his head. “No, it’s not. That’s the problem, for most people.”
“Guess I’m not most people.”
Danny watches the side of Steve’s face right until it’s starting to make Steve nervous, but then he says, just before it gets really noticeable, “Well, we all knew that. Big whoop, nothing new there.”
Steve huffs a weak protest and pours all of his attention into draining his beer.
*
2881 days after Steve meets Danny
It’s fine. Danny has seen him at his weakest and hasn’t told him he’s a freak for having to be half carried out of North Korea or Afghanistan or a torture room where he just shot the guy that his mother faked her death for, so in comparison, this newest slip-up is nothing. Danny’s not even going to remember, Steve tells himself.
Steve is wrong.
The worst part is that he doesn’t even suspect it. He doubles his workouts all weekend to shake off some of the lingering nervous energy that comes with the feeling that he’s said too much, but by the time Monday rolls around, it’s working. His mind is focused on other things, especially when they get a call from Duke. When Danny is oddly subdued during the drive over to their latest crime scene, Steve parks the Camaro close to the house that’s buzzing with HPD, as usual, but turns to Danny instead of getting out immediately.
“Are you okay?” he asks, expecting any number of things, from a brush-off to a rant about either Rachel or Danny’s landlord, two of the people that bug Danny most in life.
He does not expect Danny to purse his lips and ask, “Have you ever considered you might be asexual?”
Steve’s mind goes blank with panic. He miscalculated – this is not a let’s-talk-about-Danny’s-problem situation, which he’ll actively encourage any time, it’s a let’s-talk-about-Steve’s-problem one, which he needs to shut down as soon as possible. “Don’t,” he says, through gritted teeth.
“Don’t what?” Danny asks, because of course he doesn’t even pretend to respect Steve’s very readable stop sign. His persistence is what makes him such a great Detective and an awesome friend, but sometimes, Steve wants to hit him for it. “Ask you perfectly inoffensive questions? Spend a night going down a spiral of internet research and realize I don’t know shit about human sexuality or gender? Because it’s too late for that.”
Steve stares at the steering wheel, straight ahead and down, but he sees nothing. “Either one. Both.”
There’s a silence. He uses it to brace for whatever is next.
“Okay,” is what Danny says. “If that’s what you want.”
Steve is still glaring at the dashboard when next to him there’s the sound of a seatbelt unbuckling and a car door being thrown open. He looks over, warily, and Danny is already out of the Camaro, leaning down to peer at him through the open door.
“You coming, or what?”
Steve swallows. He shakes off the shame.
Never look a gift horse in the mouth: if Danny wants to pretend nothing happened, that suits him just fine. “Yeah, coming,” he says, and follows Danny out of the car.
If he keeps his hand a little closer to his gun than usual because he’s still twitchy, at least nobody is going to say anything about it at a crime scene.
*
He makes it through the entire day with Danny at his side. They visit Noelani at the ME’s office, go over what they have so far with the rest of the team, question two different witnesses and chase one potential suspect for two city blocks, only to discover the guy knows nothing and took off because he bought something off a dealer that he thinks is pot. After Danny takes a careful sniff of the bag, he pronounces it to be hibiscus, which leaves their ex-suspect annoyed and out some money, but with zero criminal charges.
It’s at the end of the day, when Danny has just said goodbye and is leaving for the elevator, that Steve can’t take it anymore. “Actually, I think I’m going to pack it in, too,” he tells Lou, and doesn’t wait for an answer or glance back at Lou’s probably rightfully offended face when he hightails it out of the office. He makes a run for it down the hall and catches the elevator doors just as they’re about to close with Danny on the inside.
“What are you doing?” Danny half-yells at him, in that way he has that makes everything a personal offense. The doors slide open again to showcase Danny’s angry face in its entirety. “That’s dangerous! Don’t do that. You could lose half your hand that way.”
Steve ignores all of that and goes to stand next to him, facing the door while it closes again. He puts his hands, entirely whole, on his belt. “I’m not a plant,” he blurts.
He knows that’s stupid, but this whole thing is. Danny is doing exactly what Steve thought he wanted by acting like everything is fine. It’s been a full ten hours and a little bit, and Danny still hasn’t tried to bring the subject up again, not even by hinting at it, and for a guy who talks as much as he does and who’s as pushy and impatient as he is, that’s quite the feat.
And now Steve feels cheated, because he’s been waiting for certain doom all day, and it just wouldn’t come, and he didn’t get to be mad at Danny for meddling in his business, and really, it’s just very rude of Danny not to give him that opportunity.
Yeah. That’s what he’s going with.
“Yes, thank you,” Danny says, doing a squinty frown thing. “Did you happen to hit your head at any point today?”
“I’m not asexual. I can have sex.”
“Ah,” Danny says, like something just clicked. “See, that’s the fascinating thing. Having sex, yes or no, has surprisingly little to do with it, and your capacity to perform even less.”
Steve, for all that he knows he’s the only one to blame for getting himself into this particular mess of a conversation, doesn’t really know how to respond to that. He’s in way over his head.
“Plants don’t, either,” Danny adds. “I’ll email you some stuff. How about that?”
The elevator, which only takes them down three levels, opens up to the first floor. “If you feel you have to,” Steve says, making sure to sound dubious about it. Plausible deniability is what it’s all about when you’re hiding in plain sight.
“I do,” Danny says, firmly, and then redirects the conversation back to steadier ground with shocking ease by saying, as they exit the elevator, “You just focus on not losing any of your fingers, alright?”
*
The email comes in half an hour after Steve gets home. The subject line reads (no subject) and the body is nothing but a dozen or so clickable urls. He taps one at random, but then gets hit by a wave of mortification so bad he slams his phone on the dining room table, face down, before the page has even finished loading.
He leaves it there for the rest of the evening.
*
2882 days after Steve meets Danny
“Babe,” Danny says, mightily annoyed because Steve has already had to ask him for the time three times at one crime scene, “where the hell is your phone?”
“Forgot it at home,” Steve says, absolutely certain that Danny will be able to read the lie in a huge, well-spaced font across his face. Probably Calibri or Times New Roman.
It seems Danny either can’t, or refuses to. Or maybe it’s in Wingdings, after all. “Then buy a watch,” Danny snaps. “You know, those old-fashioned things that go on your wrist and give you the exact thing you keep asking me for? You might have heard of them.”
“Why would I do that if I have you here, my very own alarm clock that never stops shrieking?” Steve asks, purely to watch Danny slip a little further into annoyance.
Well, that, and to distract himself from the fear, roiling in his gut.
*
2883 days after Steve meets Danny
He needs his phone to do his job. He wants to do his job, because it’s what he’s good at, and his sense of duty is far too strong to keep shirking responsibility. It’s dangerous in a very real way, too, because if the Governor calls and he misses it because he’s being a wuss, he might be playing with the lives of other people, and there’s no way to justify that.
He very briefly considers buying a new phone, but then he gets so disgusted at himself and his own quivering avoidance that he’s stomping down the stairs with his charger before he’s even made the conscious decision.
He picks up the phone, which as expected is dead by now, plugs it in, and heads into the kitchen to pour himself a bowl of cereal and grab a banana. He carries his breakfast back out to the dining corner, where pulls a chair over to the wall so he can reach his phone while it charges. Then he starts systematically opening links.
They mostly send him to general info pages (What is asexuality?) and articles (Here’s What It’s Like To Identify As An Asexual Person), but there’s also a forum run by the Asexual Visilibity and Education Network (a thing that seems to exist), and an official Wikipedia page. Asexuality is the lack of sexual attraction to others, or low or absent interest in or desire for sexual activity, it says, and then goes on like that for far more words than he would have thought possible when talking about the absence of something. The very last link takes him to a quiz which he doesn’t fill out because he’s spent enough time with Jerry to be suspicious of anything the internet wants to know about him.
It’s nothing entirely new. There are terms he’s unfamiliar with, but he’s never been as into language as Danny. Words are useful, but not necessary, because it’s not like he’s planning on talking about this anyway.
Still, once he breaks through his initial reluctance, it’s unexpectedly nice. Nice in a scary, confrontational way where it feels like he’s reading about himself sometimes, and nice in a way that aches because some of these articles are years old and he never knew, but still nice enough that he gets so engrossed he forgets about his food until the cereal is a soggy mess and he has to wolf down the banana during his commute to work.
*
In the end, he does talk, even if he doesn’t use any of his newly acquired vocabulary. Damn Daniel Williams and the effectiveness of his meddling.
They spend an hour or two at the office, but their current case hasn’t given them a lot of leads so far, so by mid-morning Steve decides it’s time to take a second look around the victim’s apartment and see if that turns up anything. Danny shrugs and agrees and they end up in the car, with Steve driving, as usual.
Danny contents himself with staring out the windows for maybe a minute, but then he starts looking at Steve, and when Steve doesn’t give him attention, asks, “What’s up?”
“What do you mean?” Steve counters, feigning naiveté. It seems like the best course of action, but it ends up drastically ramping up the slight discomfort that’s been growing in his chest since this morning, because naive, yeah, that’s a really bad word right now.
Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Danny open his mouth for some no doubt wonderfully snarky response, but he suddenly doesn’t want the conversation to get derailed from Danny’s genuine concern into bickering over nothing. He cuts Danny off, because it’s not like he isn’t already aware Danny knows him well enough to pick up on his moods and that’s how he knew to ask. There’s no mystery there.
“I read through that stuff you sent me. From the email.”
“Ah.” Danny politely ignores the first part of the double answer. “That’s good. Educating yourself is important.” It doesn’t escape Steve’s notice that there’s no direct mention of him in there, which has to be a careful omission. To Danny’s credit, it sounds only a little bit awkward.
Steve spares a moment to appreciate the attempt at caution and then voids Danny’s hard work by taking the dive. Off a cliff, into freezing water, without knowing for sure there won’t be pointy rocks just below the surface. “I don’t want you to think I’m, I don’t know, some innocent who needs to be protected.”
Of all things, Danny snorts. “Steve, I’ve personally watched you kill people. You annoy me more than any person on earth, and I tell you so daily. You used to store grenades in my car. You really think I’m going to treat you like some fragile desert flower if I know what you do or do not think is sexy?”
Steve figures he probably shouldn’t tell Danny the grenades aren’t as much a case of “used to” as Danny seems to think. “Okay,” he says instead. That sense from this morning is back, the unexpected niceness, and it might be even nicer now. It’s comfort. A feeling that, even if nothing has fundamentally changed about the world or his own life, he’s less alone than he was yesterday. “Because I can still do my job just the same.”
“Who the fuck said you couldn’t?” It’s a way to say yes, obviously, but it also sounds like a somewhat serious question, and one that signals Danny is totally prepared to get mad if he deems it necessary.
Steve is kind of touched and reassured by that. They’re both things he’s come to expect from their partnership, and that familiarity is even more reassuring. “No one,” he tells Danny, because for the moment he’s done talking about the awkward and heavy stuff. He blinks at the road and doesn’t clear his throat, because that would be too much of a giveaway. “Hey. What the hell did you even Google, anyway?”
Danny huffs and starts fiddling with the radio. Music is a sign he accepts the serious part of the conversation as over with and that they both realize they’re mostly just shooting the shit now. “You wouldn’t believe how many hits ‘my friend doesn’t want to have sex’ returns. Not all of them helpful, but that’s the internet for you.”
Steve is surprised to feel himself grin at that. It’s genuinely a little funny, though. “How many of them were porn?”
“Probably more than I realized.”
“That is the internet,” Steve agrees, still grinning.
*
2884 days after Steve meets Danny
He doesn’t know what comes over him next. Maybe he’s high on this newfound bit of freedom, or maybe more words have been stuck in his throat for years and they’ve finally been shook loose, or maybe he just briefly succumbs to that dangerous part of him that’s always yearned to tell Danny everything that’s ever happened to him in his life ever because Danny is the only person alive who Steve really, instinctively trusts to maybe make it all okay.
Or maybe, and perhaps most likely, it’s a combination of all three of those things and about a dozen more, topped off with an unhealthy dose of the urge to defend himself against things that rationally, he knows aren’t insults, or things Danny would look down on him for.
Either way, they’re in the waiting room of a shrink that they want to question – the irony of this location will not be lost on Steve, when he thinks back on it later – and they’re alone, because the psychiatrist is held up with a patient and her receptionist excused herself because she needed to file some papers in an office in the back. They’re in a public place, but all the doors are closed and there are no cameras, and it’s not really a conscious choice, anyway, when he blurts out, “I have had sex before, you know.”
Danny tears his eyes away from the calming abstract round shapes of the artwork on the wall opposite their chairs, which he’s been staring at for so long that he must have either been attempting meditation or well on his way to an upright nap. The second seems more likely. “Oh yeah?” he asks, like Steve told him something interesting, but on the whole not that surprising. He does appear awake, at least, thank God.
“Multiple times,” Steve says, and suffers through a battle against cringing visibly at his own words, because they have a touch too much braggy teenager to them. He hasn’t been that in a long time, and even then his heart was never in it, anyway. Mostly because all of his claims from back then were bald-faced lies, which distances it even further from the present, because there’s only truth to what he’s saying now.
“So what did you think?” Danny asks. That’s probably a weird question for one friend in his forties to pose to another friend in his forties – what do you think of sex, which you have had, multiple times? – but Steve is the one who brought the topic up, so once again, it’s on him.
He runs through different responses in his mind, until he finds one that accurately captures his feelings without having to put too much out there. “Meh.”
“Meh,” Danny repeats, and he sounds like he can’t believe what he’s hearing, but also like he thinks it might be darkly hilarious. “Meh, he says, about the act that gave us all human life.”
Steve feels confident enough to shrug at that. “You asked my opinion.”
“I did, and you gave it to me. Very good, babe. I’m proud of you.”
If Steve feels a little glow of approval at that, even though he knows it’s meant in jest, he’ll keep that to himself.
*
2887 days after Steve meets Danny
Two whole days go by like nothing ever happened. In the privacy of his own mind, Steve will admit he treats it as a test to see if Danny is really as chill about all of this as he pretends to be, even though chill is generally not a word that ever has or will apply to Danny Williams. Danny does still yell about everything and nothing, but that just means things are right in the world. Steve drops down into a building through the skylight on Friday, not bothering to put on his vest because time is of the essence, and that gets him an epic rant that pretends to be about protocol and the one-time-only nature of liver donations, but really just means “you scared me, you total jerk that I really care about”, so privately it makes him grin and feel fond, even though he’s smart enough not to let that show too obviously when Danny can see.
The important part being, if Danny has any thoughts about something related to recent discoveries, none of the thousands of words he says over forty-eight hours even hint in that direction. It’s almost enough to weird Steve out a bit, but only almost, because for the most part it’s a relief.
Any storm in his mind has had some time to settle down by the time Danny finally does say, “Can I ask you something?”
They’re both lounging on Steve’s couch after beer and too much pizza. They found the original Jurassic Park on some channel Steve didn’t even know he had, but it’s playing on low volume, mostly as background noise.
Steve, as a guy who spends most of his time solving murder puzzles for a living these days, is not entirely stupid, so he realizes the vague direction of where Danny is headed. He finds he doesn’t really mind, especially because Danny was so thoughtful as to ask for permission, but he’s not going to make it any easier on Danny, either. “You just did.”
If that was any obstacle at all, Danny hops over it. He seems to be taking it more as permission than anything. “I’ve known you for eight years. I know you look at some people.”
“Hmm,” Steve says, vaguely.
Again Danny takes that – to be fair, rightfully – as permission to continue. “So is it just the aesthetics?”
Steve ignores the conspicuously gender-neutral phrasing of it all, because questions about any of this are hard enough without freaking out over yet another thing Danny might have figured out. “In part,” he says. “Some people are pretty. I’m not blind.” It’s deeply ironic, really, that he’s looking at Danny while he says that, like Danny is just some people.
Danny tosses his head from left to right without moving out of his slouch. “I’d hope not, with how much you shoot that gun of yours.”
“But I’m also-” He stops, there. He hadn’t really meant to go on.
Danny is sitting quietly, watching him. He doesn’t do that a whole lot, so when he does, it means something. It makes Steve want to talk.
“I’m also playing a part.”
Danny frowns. “Right. But why?”
“Because I have to.”
“Why?”
“Because,” he repeats, and he fervently wishes he could leave it there. He can’t, and it’s not because Danny wants to understand, but it’s because he irrationally needs Danny to. He lets his head sink back against the couch and stares at the ceiling, at the even spaces between the wooden beams. He should spend a weekend repainting all of it one of these days; the white isn’t what it used to be.
He can feel Danny’s eyes on the side of his face, but it’s weirdly comforting to know he’s got Danny Williams’ attention. A lot of things aren’t what they used to be.
“C’mon,” he tells the ceiling, “you’re not that bad-looking.” The voice coming out of his mouth is not his own. “You’re just a pussy. Drink a little and you’ll loosen up. We’ll find you a girl, nice and sleazy, or better yet, we’ll all chip in and buy you one, then you’ll know how a professional does it. Then you’ll learn to like it. You don’t want that? Are you crazy? Are you a fragile little flower? Are you some religious freak? Are you gay?”
The T-Rex on the screen roars, but Danny is quiet for a moment, and that seems louder. “That wouldn’t be the worst thing.”
“That would’ve been the end of my career.” He carefully says my career and not my life, but there’s a good chance Danny hears it anyway. “Don’t ask, don’t tell, and don’t let them think you might not want to fuck a woman for any reason.”
“Shit,” Danny says, and that’s such a neat summary Steve nearly smiles about it.
“And it’s not just the military. Most people think it’s weird. Easier to pretend everywhere.”
The nineties dinosaur roars some more. Danny seems to wait until it’s done. “I get it, but I hate that you feel you have to.”
And Steve thinks, fuck it. “I don’t when I’m around you.” He doesn’t look, but he doesn’t need a visual to confirm Danny’s expression is going to be extremely skeptical. That’s understandable, so he amends, “Not anymore.”
When he gathers up the courage to roll his head around, Danny has an elbow on the back of the couch, head resting in his hand. He’s watching Steve with soft eyes, and when Steve looks back, he gives a small nod. “That’s good. I’m really glad.”
“Me too.”
“Thank you,” Danny says, which doesn’t make a lot of sense to Steve, but he accepts it anyway.
*
2888 days after Steve meets Danny
The next morning, Steve goes on both a run and a swim, even though it’s Monday and he only slept four hours at most and he usually sticks to an either-or approach for his weekday workouts. Danny lets him get away with grunting most of his replies from the moment Danny walks into his house without knocking until they step out of the elevator at HQ, when he stops him with a hand on his arm and an aggravated look. “You’re being weird. Why are you being weird?”
Steve is pretty much cornered, because Danny is between him and the rest of the hallway. Neither fight nor flight seem like an option, so he’s forced to invent a third possibility, which turns out to be blunt honesty. His brain hasn’t gotten enough rest to expect it to put forth creative solutions. “I’m- Sorry for yesterday. I shouldn’t be dumping all of this on you.”
“That’s stupid. If not me, then who?”
That’s a good reason for someone to have to dismantle a bomb or track down a serial killer – inescapable cold hard realities. It’s not as strong when it comes to emotional crap he could just as well swallow down so nobody would have to be bothered by it at all. “No one,” he says, which doesn’t exactly explain his reasoning, but summarizes the key point.
“Exactly,” Danny says, flapping a hand, like a completely different point has been made. He might be seeing a comma, even, because he just keeps going. “Look, you’d do the same for me.”
“Yeah.”
Danny can obviously sense that Steve’s not convinced yet, because he just keeps flapping that hand. “You know about my lingerie kink, ever since that one case. I don’t feel weird about that.”
“That’s not the same thing,” Steve says. There’s something he’s sure of, at least.
Danny deflates. “No, you’re right. It’s really not.” He puts his hands in his pockets and it looks like he’s going to say something else, but then he doesn’t. He just stands there, staring at a fixed point on Steve’s shoulder.
Steve checks to see if he’s wearing his breakfast, but he’s not. “What?”
“Nothing. Just-” Danny looks at Steve’s face and then away. He draws a circle of uncertainty with his upper body without taking his hands out of his pockets. “I’ve been known to, on occasion, be attracted to, you know-”
Steve shakes his head, genuinely clueless as to where Danny is taking that sentence. Supermodels? Victoria’s Secret catalogues? Anime characters?
Danny makes a noise of frustration. “Men, Steve. Attracted to men.”
The feelings that wash over Steve are one jumbled mess, so it’s hard to tease them apart and put a name to them. There’s surprise; stomach-dropping appreciation for Danny sharing this with him; joy, chased by a bittersweet jealousy. “Okay,” he says, after a beat. He sounds a little breathless. “So, so does that mean you’re-”
“Bisexual,” Danny says. He gives a little nod after, like confirming that’s the right word. “I don’t really talk about it.”
“Yeah, I know what that’s like,” Steve says, before he can think the better of it.
It can’t have been that bad of a response, because Danny grins at him. He finally takes his hands out of his pockets just to put one of them on Steve’s shoulder as they make their way down the hall.
*
2891 days after Steve meets Danny
Things return to the status quo for a few days. Then they go a little too quo, because Danny asks, over morning coffee in Steve’s kitchen before carpooling to work, “So do you ever think about, you know, dating again?”
Steve had kind of expected the whole asexual thing to at least finally put an end to Danny’s incessant pushiness about his love life. “Nah. I’m good.”
“So should I assume you’re aromantic, too?”
He knows what the word actually means, because it got mentioned in some of the asexuality resources Danny sent him, but they’ve had conversations close to this one before and it’s easier to emulate one of those. “Hey, I’m plenty romantic. I like romance.”
Danny picks up on the cue. “I’m sure Catherine can vouch for that, after you took her on all those dreamy loco moco takeout dinners in your truck.”
“Our ideas of romance just didn’t match up as much as we’d once hoped.” Among other things, but he’s not going to tell Danny about that, too. He already knows more than enough.
They finish their coffee and Steve thinks their bit of sexuality talk for the day is done, but when they put their mugs in the dishwasher and get ready to go, Danny says, “You could, you know.”
Steve doesn’t ask what he’s talking about and instead steals the car keys from the kitchen island. It’s not a particularly daring theft, because Danny leaves them there on purpose most days if they carpool because he has come to accept that Steve’s going to demand them eventually, but Steve makes a run for it anyway. He’s pretty sure he can hear Danny roll his eyes behind him.
*
Running away from stray thoughts that pop up all during the day – over lunch, during paperwork, when he’s brushing his teeth before bed – is a lot harder.
And why does Danny have to go about reawakening hopes Steve had long ago made his peace with putting to rest, anyway? When he and Cath broke up he’d shot those domestic ideals in the head, execution style, and Lynn put another round in them for good measure, and now here Danny is, playing at being the kind of sketchy faith healer that promises to bring your loved ones back to life. Steve knows that stuff is always fake, and he still wants to believe.
*
2892 days after Steve meets Danny
Things always go to hell in the blink of an eye. One moment they’re entering what seems like an empty house, the next they’re getting shot at, and the third he’s at Queen’s Medical, watching Danny get his right arm stitched up after a bullet grazed him pretty nastily. Admittedly, hell could be far worse – sarin gas, Colombian prisons and Danny bleeding out in a quarantine room spring to mind – but Steve would rather not dwell on that. Over the years, he’s come to accept that even this counts as a close call.
“Hey,” he says brightly, when Danny winces and tries to turn his head again to see what the doctor is doing. She doesn’t tell him to keep still this time, but her warning look conveys the message clear as day. “Now you’ll have a scar to match the graze on your other arm.”
Danny glares up at him from the bed he’s perched on, which means the distraction works as intended. “What, the one from when you got me shot the day after I met you, you mean?”
He grins and crosses his arms. “Yeah. That one.”
“You’re the worst.” Danny winces again as the doctor does something, but it’s less bad, and he doesn’t take his eyes off Steve. “Tell me something embarrassing. Something I can mock you for, so maybe my day won’t be a total waste.”
He could easily say no. That’s probably what Danny is counting on, because then they can argue over it and that would be a fine diversion all on its own. But he’s still relieved that their bad guy of the week was a terrible shot and he’s feeling kind of fond about Danny’s grumpiness and he has their first meeting on his mind after the brief reminiscing, so he goes with something else. “I’ve been measuring my life in the number of days since I met you.”
Danny’s eyebrows go up. “That doesn’t seem efficient. How many?”
“Two thousand eight hundred and ninety-two. Precisely.”
“Well, fuck me metaphorically. You weren’t kidding.”
“And you’re done, Detective Williams,” the doctor says. She looks between them, and there’s an amusement in her eyes Steve recognizes by now, because people always get the wrong idea when they watch him and Danny interact normally. “This is usually when I would give you instructions on how to take care of the stitches, but it seems you have some previous experience.”
Danny gives Steve a significant look. “Unfortunately, yes.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” the doctor says, but she’s fully smiling now. She does end up reiterating the bullet points of wound care just in case, but then she leaves them alone in the room, off to her next patient.
Danny points at the door just after it shuts behind the doctor. “You know she thinks we’re a couple now.”
Steve looks at the door, then at Danny, and then shrugs. “She wouldn’t be the first.”
“No, she would not.” Danny hops off the bed, carefully slips his ruined shirt back on and starts buttoning it up. “Now take me home, please.”
Some jokes are just too obvious. Steve gestures up and down at Danny, half-dressed and ordering him around. “See, that’s why people think that stuff.”
Danny stops buttoning for a moment to hit him in the shoulder.
*
2893 days after Steve meets Danny
It’s a nice day, and it’s not like there’s a shortage of those in Hawaii, but that’s no reason to let it go to waste. That’s Steve’s reasoning when he calls Danny over with the twin lures of burgers and beer, but he didn’t count on the trifecta of manliness being completed by talk about women.
“So I ran into Ellie yesterday,” is Danny’s opening gambit. It’s a sneaky one. Steve goes boxing and hiking with Ellie, so first and foremost, he associates her with good things.
He’s relaxed and unsuspecting, therefore, when he flips the burgers. “Oh?”
Danny wags his beer bottle. “Yeah. And she told me she has some friends-”
Obviously, Steve catches on at this point. “Danny-”
“-who all sounded pretty awesome when she described them to me.”
“Great.” The burgers are pretty much done. He spears them with his fork maybe a little more viciously than necessary when transferring them to a plate. “You date them, then.”
“Are you crazy? I bet every single one of Ellie’s friends would try to make me eat green salad and go running with them. They’re your type more than mine.”
Steve really doubts it. He also really doubts that Danny has forgotten that he met Lynn because Ellie set them up, too, so he knows it probably won’t do him any good to try to point to the failure of that relationship with hopes of ending this talk. “I don’t think I’m their type.”
Danny has to swallow beer before he speaks, and he ends up gesturing at nothing with the neck of his bottle when he does. “What, none of them want a really great guy who both looks and acts like he’s literally Superman?”
“You know that’s not what this is about.”
Danny must have finished off the beer, because he plants it on the table next to the burgers that are going ignored for now. He takes a little too much care with it, like he’s kind of angry. “Steve, admittedly you’re broken as a human being in about a dozen and one different ways, but you realize this is not one of them, right? Why am I getting the feeling that you don’t think you deserve love? Because I’ll have you know that pisses me off.”
“It’s not a question of deserving,” Steve argues. It’s not; lots of people deserve all kinds of things they never get. “It’s realistic thinking.”
“And realism means you can’t have a stable long term relationship how?”
Steve put the fork down with the plate. He’s growing tempted to pick it up again and stab Danny with it. “Because I know who I am. I do, I know, and in the end it’s not who other people want me to be.”
That, for some reason, gets Danny to throw up his arms like he’s asking God for just a smidgen more understanding, please. “You’d be surprised.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means that there are whole communities out there for you to explore!” Briefly, Steve imagines himself venturing into some cave with a torch and a treasure map, searching for the mythical hidden land where nobody fucks. Then Danny continues, “There are websites.”
The thing about being friends with Danny is that it’s easily the best thing Steve has ever done in his life, but it’s also fraught with these little moments where it seems like they might not even be speaking the same language. Steve feels impossibly tired and weary at just the thought of dating websites, even ones that wouldn’t carry the usual expectations with them. “I don’t want websites.”
“Well, the alternative would of course be that you open your goddamn eyes for a second and look at what’s right in front of you, but since that doesn’t seem to be happening any time soon, what’s the use in even telling you that, huh?”
Now that, that’s a strange thing to say in any language.
So Steve looks. He sees Danny, angry and stubborn and underneath those two uncharacteristically nervous. Nobody’s shooting at them and there are no small spaces nearby – none of what Danny is saying or the faces he’s pulling make sense, unless-
Steve feels the bottom of his stomach give way. “Oh,” he says.
Danny rolls his eyes extravagantly. “Great, oh. That’s just what a guy wants to hear.”
“Sorry. I really wish-” Oh, how he wishes. If wishes were horses, getting what he’s wanted for years wouldn’t suddenly put him in the middle of the most difficult conversation he’s ever had. “But it’s not going to work.”
“Aha, you’ve decided that? That’s fun. Do I get to know why?”
Maybe he wasn’t clear enough when he said it before. It seems unlikely, but whatever. “You like sex. I don’t.”
“Yes, we’ve been over that,” Danny says, twirling a hand like Steve is getting caught up in the details and he wants him to get on with it.
“That means I’m not going to have sex with you.” They’re hard words to force out. He doesn’t say the rest out loud, which is that he does see the obvious solution, but he’s not sure he’s selfless enough when it comes to Danny that he could let him that close and stand aside when Danny gets certain things he needs from someone else.
“Right,” Danny says, like on some level he expected all of this, but he’s annoyed by it anyway. “And what if I have other priorities? I’m a multifaceted human being. You ever think to ask me what I want?”
“How could that change anything?”
“How could-” Danny does a quarter spin in place, rubs a palm over his jaw, plants his fists in his sides hard enough that it has to hurt, and turns back to Steve. He holds up his right hand and gives a little wave. “Okay, see this? It works beautifully. Doesn’t really need any help – not like it’s been getting any lately, anyway, and I’ve been doing just fine. Now this, here-” He uses that hand, the same one Steve is still staring at a little speechlessly, to tap his own chest. Left side of his ribcage, right where a certain vital organ sits. “This? It really wants you, any way it can get you. It’s not that picky. Believe it or not, it’s starting to convince itself it needs you, more than pretty much anything except the kids’ health and happiness. Do you see? Do you see how that could change some things?”
This time, it’s the bottom of Steve’s heart that drops away. “Low standards, I gather.”
“The opposite, if you ask me. Just-” Danny’s hand on his own chest curls into a fist and then spreads out, moving in Steve’s direction, a supplication. “At least give this a try, okay? Please.”
Steve feels a swell of affection that threatens to sweep him clean off his feet. It makes his throat close up, so he has to swallow before he can speak. “Hey. I really love you, you know?”
“Ditto,” Danny says. Something in the lines of his face relaxes and God, Steve’s an idiot. He should have been seeing that from the start, but he didn’t. “If you paid attention, you’d notice that that’s what I’m trying to say here. So was I not clear enough, or-” Danny rolls to a stop. He looks at Steve like he’s considering him, and Steve lets him, because he’s suddenly pretty sure whatever is about to follow will be good. “Steve?” Danny asks, voice neutrally questioning. “How do you feel about kissing?”
He was right. “Good. I like it.”
“Right. Okay.” Danny puts his hands in his sides again, but not as forcefully as before. It just makes him look confused and hopeful. “In that case you should know I’m a little offended you’re not kissing me right now.”
“You haven’t stopped talking long enough to give me a chance,” Steve shoots back. He gives Danny enough time to scoff in response, because he’s that much of a gentleman, and then steps forward, breaching Danny’s personal space, and ducks down to press their lips together. Danny pulls him closer and is pushy and demanding about taking control of the kiss and doesn’t try to grab his ass even once.
They eat cold burgers, that night. Steve has never had a more satisfying meal.
*
1 day after Steve kisses Danny
“I think I have a new system of measurement,” Steve says, lips brushing Danny’s shoulder on every word.
Danny doesn’t move. Not to open his eyes, not to lift his head from the pillow, and not to change anything about the way he’s curled around Steve like he plans on making someone pry him off with a crowbar if they want him to get out of bed now. “Hmm,” he says.
That’s fine. Steve will tell him later.