This is terribly, terribly unbetaed.

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WILD HEART (WALK THE THIN BLUE LINE)

BadActs

Sometimes there are no right decisions; only ones you can live with. And sometimes there isn't even that.

Knife

There is a danger in some people that is more than training or unpredictability.

Danny, of course, was trained how to use a gun. He can kill people with it, has killed people, and it never gets easier, okay, even criminals have people who love them. And yeah, he's dangerous to the right people – or the wrongs one – but he isn't in general. In general, he's a loudmouthed cop with a short temper and a tendency to talk more than your average man.

McGarrett is different in that. Everyone is shaped by their experiences: Danny is hard wood whittled to a stabbing point, enough to injure but not just good for that either. Steve is honed metal, blade sharp and unyielding. SEAL school might have made him that, everyone he's loved and lost contributing to an edge that could slice air, but that doesn't change the fact that he has always been steel to the core.

Danny wonders, sometimes, what Steve was like as a teenager. Whether the death of his mother acted as alchemy or whether he was always like that a little, leaking peril from every pore. Whether those eyes have always been slightly harder than those of the others around him. Whether the physical activities – the surfing, the football – have just been ways of draining the kinetic energy that makes him impossible to look away from.

He wonders if the metal of Steve is malleable enough to take the hits he's been dealt lately, or whether he's just becoming brittle enough to break.

Honour

Steve has only been exonerated for a week when he gets the news that one of the men in his old SEAL team was killed in a car accident in San Diego.

He doesn't intend to go until the man's wife calls and asks him to come specifically. Danny knows that Steve's still raw with the knowledge that he's not a part of the Navy anymore – an honourable discharge is the best that a SEAL who has spent time in prison can expect, even if he was proven innocent. He also knows what it's like to lose a buddy, a brother, and he can see perfectly well why Steve would be torn.

It doesn't really hit home, though, until Danny walks into Steve's silent, solemn house to find the man staring at his dress uniform like it's the worst he's ever faced.

"They'll understand," Danny says into the dust-mote-filled air, swallowing the stillness of it to calm his turbulent insides. Because there's always a chance that they won't, that they won't take him back, and Danny knows what it's like to be on the outside looking in on something you love, too.

Steve turns with one side of his mouth jacked up, a smile that looks like it hurts him more than it hurts Danny. "It's not that."

Danny cocks his head, leaning one hip against the doorway of the house he scrubbed down for Steve to come home to, only to realise he should have just burnt it to the ground.

"Do you know," Steve says, and then swallows, "I went straight into the Navy from high school, and then into the SEALs as soon as I could after that. So…every funeral I've been to since I was eighteen, I've worn a uniform."

"I happen to know that you own a suit, though," Danny says, and then he gets it. The last time Steve wore a suit to a funeral was his mother's, his first. Well, in for a penny, he supposes. "It's a nice suit, for the record. Appropriate."

"So says the king of suit and tie," Steve replies, with a better smile this time, a bit of teeth, warm eyes.

"You'd better believe it," Danny says, and he could say the clothes don't make the man or it's not who you are. He doesn't, because he doesn't have to.

Early

Steve's first night out, Danny falls asleep on the SEAL's couch in front of the game with Steve's bulk heating the air next to him. It's more comfortable than he has been in a while.

He wakes up as the sun is pinking the horizon with a crick in his neck and a blanket thrown over him to ward off the night's chill. He's not sure, for a moment, what it is that's bought him to the land of the living at this hour – and then he hears the near-silent pad of Steve's footsteps out on the wood of the lanai. It sounds like the man is walking back and forth, jittery, and that more than anything is a worry.

Danny sticks his – ruffled, he's sure – head out to see what's going on, and finds Steve pacing restlessly within the bounds of the porch. His eyes are fixed ocean-ward and there's an expression on his face of the kind of longing people write songs about. He's even wearing his swim trunks, and Danny gets it quite suddenly in the way that he gets lots of things about McGarrett.

Steve never could cope with any kind of comfort offered to him; it makes sense that accepting this freedom is a stumbling point, where he figures out how soothing the relentless force of the ocean really is.

"What are you thinking about?" Danny asks, low, and Steve doesn't jump at the sound of his voice. It's one of those questions that you ask even though you know the answer.

"Nothing," Steve responds absently, pausing to press his palms to the railing.

Danny smirks. "No different from usual, then." Steve flicks him a glance over his bare shoulder, and from that angle the rising sun catches on his skin, outlines every rib, dip and hollow. He looks amused, a little.

"Go," Danny says, with an expansive wave that covers the whole ocean. "What are you waiting for?"

He knows the answer to that, too. Steve smiles and jogs down the steps, disappearing into the waves within a matter of seconds.

Danny stays on the lanai and watches him for a long time.

Freak Out

Danny is asleep when his phone goes off with an unrecognised international number. He gropes his way across the bedside table until his fingertips come in contact with it, juggling it so he can answer it.

"Williams." His voice is gruff with sleep and snappish with it.

"Daniel," and that's Rachel's voice, tenuous like she's on the point of melting down, and Danny is suddenly wide awake.

"What's up, babe?"

"I need – I need to explain a lot of things to you, but I can't, not right now, we aren't safe," she forces out, more wild than Danny has ever heard her sound.

Danny is on his feet, grabbing his pants from where he tossed them when he fell into bed last night and pulling them on with one hand. "Where are you, Rachel? Where's Grace?"

"In New Jersey. A street corner," Rachel raps out. "Grace is with me. They threatened us, said we'd be safe if we left, but you didn't come so they broke into our hotel room and ripped it apart-"

"Easy, Rach. Easy," Danny soothes, grabbing the landline in his other hand and calling the cops. "Stay on the line. I'm going to call the police to come pick you guys up, okay?"

He may have been pathetic during the divorce, perched on a ledge and determined to jump, but he never lost friends on the force. They understood the fine line between the family inside the bullpen and the family outside it, so he hadn't burned a single bridge when he'd followed Gracie out here. It's easy to co-ordinate his old partner to pick them up before anyone else can.

He talks to Rachel the whole time, keeping her calm and stopping his own head from spinning. He doesn't hang up until he hears Carlos's familiar voice down the line, and only then so he can book the next flight to New Jersey.

He packs one suitcase only, leaves everything else as is – he knows he'll be back. There's a line between his two families, and he thinks he might have already pitched over to one side of it. He just isn't sure which side it is right now.

Quitting

Danny can tell even once he's in the car that Steve is waiting for him to start ranting. That's why he isn't talking; he's actually so pissed that he can't even imagine what he's going to say here. He doesn't know what he can say to make Steve realise how stupid he's being.

Steve's sitting there with his sprained wrist above his heart, leaning to one side to avoid jarring his broken ribs. He's wearing a mute expression, which says that he's waiting for Danny to give him his cue on how he should act.

"You're a fucking moron." Oh, look, words. Apparently he can manage them. "You're an insane, psychotic idiot, and if you do anything like that again I'm transferring back to the HPD."

He isn't surprised when Steve looks like he's been gut-punched, and it's not like Danny wants to say it cold and even like he never is. He doesn't want to go, but he will.

"I have a daughter, McGarrett. And you may think that you know your limits, and that you know mine, but I don't want to be the one to tell Gracie that Uncle Steve died because he went a little too far this time in the line of duty," Danny continues, words like steel in his mouth. "You misjudged it today, but you were lucky. You won't always be."

He flicks Steve a glance and doesn't like what he sees; the man looks wild behind the stoic set of his jaw, the twitching of his good hand all desperation.

Steve says, "okay. Okay." And Danny doesn't know whether to feel relieved that he's finally gotten through or frightened that a threat like that could hit the SEAL so hard.

Ignite

In the end, it happens like this:

Their first case back is an absolute doozey. It doesn't help that they aren't so solid, now. Kono is more restrained, the memory of her suspended badge still fresh in her mind. Steve is the opposite – he's wilder than he was when he first came home to Hawaii, electric with the energy he couldn't work off in prison. Chin is quieter now, Jenna a little less forthright but no more sensible.

Danny feels caught in the middle, somehow the sun they all revolve around where it used to be Steve. He's not different, or at least not in any way that matters; for all his expression, the way he wears his heart on his sleeve, everything lately is locked up behind his face. It works better that way. At least one of them has to pretend to be sane, especially with the new governor riding them like the last never did.

They're investigating a police cruiser that was rigged to blow when the driver started the car – and really, if Danny has to see that expression on his partner's one more time, he's going to do something drastic. There are too many parallels, and it's all getting mixed up in their heads even though it's nothing to do with them.

It turns out that it's just an ordinary crim who planted the explosives as revenge, and Danny takes pleasure in cuffing him and reading him his rights. Five-0 disperses afterwards, tired and unable to find an excuse to stay together in the face of their recent history. Well, almost: Steve drives Danny home and then doesn't leave, shadowing him to the door.

And when Danny half-turns in the doorway, Steve is so close to right there. It's been a while, a long while, since Danny actually realised what this thing was between them. Steve has been so close the whole time, but never closer than he is right now, in this still moment that means nothing to anyone but them.

Danny is sick of waiting, sick of being afraid of the repercussions when he can read Steve's own want out of almost every word and gesture. So he kisses Steve without even letting him all the way into the apartment.

It's enough, shocking Steve into realisation, into movement, and Danny can tell right now without even looking that he has finally gotten with the program.

Thank God, Danny thinks, briefly, and then focuses instead on learning Steve's taste, the feel of all that energy cupped within the arc of his arms.

Painful

Danny remembers how unbearably agonising bullet wounds are, and this one is no different from usual – a graze on his side where his vest ends, thin and bleeding more than it has any right to.

And Steve, okay, Steve looks like he just took a shot to the belly, like he's bleeding into his lungs where the whole time he was well out of range. His eyes are unnervingly vacant, and he's never this subdued when Danny gets hurt. Usually he turns into Danny's mirror image when any of the team is injured, all expansive hand gestures and rapid-fire sentences like he learnt how to mother-hen from Danny. It's probably not far from the truth; before that, Steve almost certainly told the SEALs under his command to stick a band-aid on it and stop bitching.

Even the wide-eyed horror from Danny's sarin poisoning was better than this wilful blankness. The smoke is still settling, the final echoes of the gunshots fading to nothing, and the two of them are frozen. Thank god Kono and Chin are moving to check the crims – corpses, now – to make sure they aren't going to peddle any more drugs or put any more holes in cops.

"Shit," Steve breathes. "Danny, are you – you're bleeding, fuck, fuck-"

Danny catches Steve between his hands when the man steps close to find the source of the blood. "Easy, big guy. It's a scratch, okay?"

Steve jitters between his palms, wound way to tight. He looks like he doesn't have the words for this, whatever it is that he's feeling. "Okay. Okay."

"Yo, D!" Kono calls. "EMTs are waiting outside – go get checked out, brah."

Danny makes Steve come with him, because he's of no use to Chin and Kono like this. The SEAL paces back and forth on the sidewalk by the ambulance while Danny's wound is cleaned up and bandaged. Danny feels a bit like this is their first day together over again, but the differences are the incredible part; the fact that Steve cares this much, the fact that he can let himself, the way such an insignificant injury can push him to the edge.

Steve is quiet and pale on the way back to HQ, driving like someone on their first day behind the wheel: tentative and hands precisely at ten and two, eyes fixed forward. It takes Danny a little while to figure out that he's only holding himself so taut to keep himself from shaking.

Danny says, "pull over," in his firmest, most no-nonsense tone. Steve flicks the indicator on immediately and turns into a side road, brakes gently and pulls to a gentle stop. Once the car is in park and off, he finally turns to face Danny – turning to face him rather than turning to look because his eyes are so frighteningly distant as to be almost alien.

Danny palms the back of his neck, pulls him in until their foreheads rest against one another. At the touch Steve gasps like he's been holding his breath this entire time, unsteady, and Danny feels his own throat tighten in sympathy.

"It's okay, babe," he says. "Hey, I've got you. It's okay."

Renegade

Wo Fat should have known better than to try to get to Danny through his family.

In the end, with Chin and Jenna's help, he pulls the entire empire down around the man's ears. It's satisfying to know that with more than a little determination – and perhaps a little judicious use of McGarrett's usual techniques on the job – Danny can wipe out the entirety of an Asian crime ring so massive that even the Hawaiian governor was an ally.

And it's no struggle to put a bullet in Wo Fat, especially when the man is staring wild-eyed down the barrel of a gun at him. And the dull hit he takes to his own side, pushing him to one knee? He can shrug it off to put the guy in cuffs while he curses and bleeds across the floor: enough to put him out of action but not enough that he's going to die any time soon.

Then Chin is hauling the fucker – finally, finally – to his feet, and it doesn't matter that Kono is pushing him down, peeling his vest and shirt away so she can stop Danny from bleeding out. The pain's not something on his mind when he feels this high with success, and now more than ever he gets how Steve does this. It's not mind over matter – it's instinct, adrenaline, his brain and body so focussed on one thing that there's no room for anything else. Especially not weakness.

"Yeah, Danny. Yeah," Kono is saying in that soothing voice that he taught her, and he realises that he's been talking the entire time. We got him, we finally got him, over and over in a voice too thin to be his. Because even if Wo Fat's lawyers are good enough to talk him out of all the other charges, there's no way he can avoid the fact that he just shot a cop in front of half of the HPD.

"Stay with me, brah," Kono is urging, and Danny wants to, he really does, but the relief is making him weak and he can't quite convince his eyes to stay-

Dangerous

In his quieter moments, Danny will admit that he and Steve – it's a them now, for real, made up of sex and shared spaces, a few quiet declarations and a few loud ones – are probably not the best together.

It's not so much that they don't match. They do, the same way they do on the job. It's more that Danny can foresee a day where they sacrifice their jobs for their personal lives, choose to let someone else take a risk rather than being reckless with each other. Chin, Kono – they are the ones set to take the fall if this ever goes wrong.

In the end, there's a possibility that the body count could be higher than just Steve and Danny. And not just in the literal sense, either – if it turns to shit, their jobs are on line, the jobs that they fought so hard for.

It's hard. Danny loves being with Steve, maybe even loves him, but sometimes his more rational brain tries to talk him out of it. He can admit that he's afraid of the consequences.

However, Danny has never been afraid of walking the fine line between beyond all reason and too far. He's become used to flirting with the drop at his toes after all this time, taken on some of McGarrett's wildness where Steve has softened to the point where he could almost be assimilated into normal society.

He just has to hope that the cost of this, of them, isn't lives.

Recoil

Rachel, rendered impossibly beautiful by the winter light pouring through the window, looks at him across the table with eyes as bright as stars. "We can't do this."

"I know," is all Danny can think of as a reply. "Yeah, I think I realised that about when you told me that this was all a ruse to get me off the islands."

All the blood drains from Rachel's face like she just took a hit to the belly, her indrawn breath a hiss. Danny holds out a hand like he can stop her train of thought, his own stomach knotted so tight that he could be sick. "Not – I didn't mean it like that, Rach. It's just…I wanted this back so badly, I needed – something, okay, something, and the fact that you could lie about that, even to keep Grace safe? To keep me safe? That means that what we had is broken beyond repair."

"You still love me," she says, quiet. Danny shakes his head in weariness.

"I'll always love you. That isn't in question. But I don't think either of us has changed enough to ensure that it would work any better the second time than it did the first."

Love isn't enough, Danny thinks, which could really be his motto in life. His love, overpowering and possessive, isn't enough to help him keep Rachel – and it isn't enough to save Steve, either.

He has to rely on his body for that: his instincts, his brain and his racing heart. Which is why he says, "you have to stay here with Grace until this is all over, do you understand? Until it's fixed, I know that you won't be safe in Hawaii."

"Is this the kind of thing that is even fixable?" Rachel asks, and she doesn't ask if Steve did it, for which Danny is grateful. "With people like this standing against you?"

Danny feels hard as stone, unyielding, a cooler kind of anger that is patient and all the more dangerous for it infusing every part of his body. He figures that this is closer to what Steve feels like all the time, because this way – he thinks that he could do pretty much anything with this force

Harm

Danny is still in hospital when Steve gets out of prison. He's weak and pissy about it, terminally exhausted by the pain that even the simplest of things sets off. He can safely say that his friends are the only things that have kept him clinging to sanity in the wake of his run-in with Wo Fat, especially with infection threatening to keep him bedridden for even longer than the doctors had initially anticipated.

He ends up signing himself out on another perfect Hawaiian day, sitting on the bench to await his ride home. He'd called Chin with the news that he was finally being discharged and the man had offered to pick him up. That's why he stares absently past the familiar face striding alone the sidewalk. Well, he could blame it on the hardcore painkillers he's taking, too.

"Aren't you supposed to be a detective? Observant, at least. I'd take observant," Steve says from five metres away, rapidly gaining ground.

"Holy shit." Danny has to stand up – slowly, stiffly – and then Steve's there with a hand under his elbow, so careful. "Holy fucking shit."

Steve looks cautious, for all his voice is full of humour. "How are you feeling?"

"Not – no, terrible, actually," Danny manages. "Better now I've seen you, though. How long have you been out?"

"About-" Steve checks his watch, "as long as it would take for me to get from the prison to here?"

"You know what, I'm not gonna break, big guy, come here-" Danny finally manages to get his good arm around Steve's neck, pulling them to a height and burying his face in Steve's chest. He's wearing the same clothes he was last time Danny saw him, though they fit differently on his frame. He's lost weight and muscle, too lean all over.

"I can believe those fuckers didn't tell me," he mutters, and if he had the energy to feel at all self-conscious right now, he'd probably be blushing. Steve's presence has filled a gap in his chest he hadn't realised the full depth and extent of, and the relief is staggering.

"I can't believe you did it," Steve murmurs into his hair, his hands tentative on Danny's body like he is bruised all over.

Danny pulls back, although probably not far enough for any sort of plausible deniability. On the other hand, it isn't like they haven't been hugging for an awfully long time for two men. Plus there's what he is about to say, too.

"I did it for you, goof. I said I would, and I did."

Will

Eventually, Steve tells him to go.

It's something that Danny is accustomed to, McGarrett pushing away all the things that he loves. He watched Steve load Mary onto a plane from a distance, but this is Danny, and Steve is in prison, so he can't make him go.

And there might be something calling him home, something besides his mother who calls him every night. There's Grace, and Rachel who won't speak to him anyway. There's this child who is meant to be his.

But here in Hawaii, there's Chin who would drown under the weight of this alone. There's Kono, bright and beautiful and in a career where an arrest sits your ass behind a desk for the rest of your life. There's Steve.

Steve, who stares at him through the glass of the visiting booth with a bruise on the left side of his face from jaw to hairline, with eyes so vacant that Danny can hardly control his own fury.

"What kind of man would I be if I left you in here, huh?" Danny asks, and his voice must seem almost unbearably gentle.

"A smart one," Steve replies, hot and dry as a million miles of sunbaked Hawaiian asphalt even through the speaker. Danny wants to say but not a good one, except that sometimes he finds himself confused with good and bad now that the best man he knows is behind bars.

"Then maybe I'm dumb." Low and intent, something that Steve would know about pretty well. "But when I said I'd get you out of this, I wasn't lying. So shut up, you can't make me go, we're in this together, all of us."

Steve says, "I could never make you do anything," and Danny could laugh until he choked at that. He doesn't, though.

"Perhaps not. But you can ask me for anything." And the timing isn't at all right, but he can just about see Steve reading for everything out of those words, and knows that for one they're both on the same wavelength.

Devotion

Danny wakes to the shift of the bed before the alarm goes off, just like every morning. He still isn't sure why Steve insists the alarm be set, seeing as the man has a freakishly accurate body clock, but it's routine now. He listens to Steve throwing on his board shorts and heading out before he heaves his own ass out of bed, dressing in his running gear.

It's a good run down the beach and into the streets, one that he does most days. Rarely he'll head up the mountains with Steve – even more rarely, he'll brave the beach just to see the expression on his partner's face. Right now, though, he's just relishing the burn in his muscles, the hot strain of his lungs and heart, the inability to think too much.

Right now it's just him, just Danny. But when he gets back to the McGarrett house – home, for both of them – it'll be a them. They'll share breakfast, both of them having the grain cereal Danny only eats because Grace and Steve are both obsessed with his heart health. They'll ride to work together in the car that is still Danny's, if only because it's signed out under his name at HPD. They'll bicker, banter and have each other's backs all day, only to fall into bed together at night.

And tomorrow will start the same way, unless Steve waits for Danny to wake with that soft look in his eyes Danny had worried that he'd lost after everything, his touch too gentle to describe. This ease they have now is so welcome to Danny, who had lived tender-hearted and afraid of this sort of togetherness for too long.

Danny can live like this: this balance, his little girl and his partner, his family put together from the broken pieces of others. He can live with this, and he can love it, too.

Heartbreaker

Danny makes Steve come with him to pick Grace and Rachel up from the airport. Steve drives because Danny is still one-handed after his run-in with Wo Fat, and any worries Danny has about scaring his daughter with the injury fades in comparison to his need to see her again. Not that Steve wouldn't drive anyway: there's nothing like a few months behind bars to make a man crave control, as if he wasn't bad enough before hand.

When they pull up at Honolulu airport, Steve makes noises about waiting by the car for them, except that Danny won't hear of it.

"My little girl is very intelligent," he informs him firmly. "She realised that there was something wrong when I didn't follow them, and I wasn't going to not tell her why. I don't think there's anyone who she'd rather see right than you."

"Except for you," Steve corrects, but he follows Danny into the terminal like the obedient puppy he is.

Danny can't help but watch the man while they wait in the midst of the bustle. He stands more like Danny remembers, now: not like the sky is about to crash down on his head, like he did at first. There is still iron in his spine, unbowed – there was the whole time – but the proud tilt of his jaw is back, his stare level and direct. It's amazing, how little he has really changed after so much has happened.

And then the passengers of the flight from Newark are disembarking, and Danny is distracted by the hot anticipation in his belly. He sees Grace before she sees him, and the way her entire face lights up is just about more than he can bear.

"Danno!" she shrieks at something approaching dolphin pitch, throwing herself into Danny's arms. And god, she's a hellion, so unreserved for a kid who has experienced so much in her short life. She's beautiful. Her grip is tight, and all he can do for a moment is hold her and breathe, barely.

Then she's wriggling, squeaking, "Uncle Steve, Uncle Steve," so Danny lets her go again. He knows like he always does that Rachel is right there, looking tired and stunning despite it. However, he is distracted by the fact that his unyielding partner has just all but fallen to his knees – in the middle of arrivals, no less – so that Danny's little girl can wind her arms tight around his neck.

Danny's throat closes a little at the sight of Steve's expression. His eyes are tight closed, his entire face taut like he is unbearably close to his own overturning moment. Danny has never been gladder that he stayed in Hawaii for Steve than he is in this tiny, quiet moment.

"Perhaps I understand better now," Rachel's gilded voice says softly in his ear.

She's not the only one, either.

- badacts