Disclaimer: I do not own any recognizable characters in this work of fiction, and am not making any profit, monetary or otherwise, through the writing of this.
A/N: Crazy AU. I was going to write the wedding for, "Ho oku i," and this is what happened instead. I don't really know why, other than maybe I needed a break from some of the student essays I was reading. As you read this, think of the old TV series, "Starsky and Hutch," or, "Miami Vice". It's kind of 70's/80's in vibe, or maybe I'm off. Also, I finished this when I had a major headache, but I did have a friend look it over, and she didn't think it was horrible. Please forgive my errors, as I do forgive others theirs.
The timing isn't ideal, but then, with the two of them, it never is. They have to take what they can get, when they can get it.
A shotgun wedding on the beach, at midnight, during the lunar eclipse, is apparently what they're getting, like it or not. And, really, it could be worse. It could be taking place in the middle of the Pacific ocean, on a dinghy.
Danny decides that they'll just have to roll with it, pray that someone will be able to locate them before the loonies who've kidnapped them can do more than marry them off at the business end of a shotgun. They'd been planning on getting married soon anyway.
Danny shrugs, gives Steve a lopsided grin that's more of a grimace, and raises their handcuffed hands between them, rattling them as though they were chains instead of cuffs.
"Just which one of us is the ball, and which one of us is the chains in this marriage?" Danny nearly groans at his really, really bad pun that borders on being little more than a terrible attempt at a joke.
Right now, he'd give just about anything, though, to see something other than the cold-hearted steely look that's reflected in Steve's eyes. Hatred does not suit a wedding at all, even if that hatred is directed, not at him, but at the idiots who kidnapped them.
Why the cloaked group seems to be hell-bent on binding he and Steve in holy matrimony on the beach, on a night when the moon is blood-red, is a mystery to Danny, though his imagination is working overtime in supplying him with a number of different scenarios as to why this is happening. Each scenario, is, of course worse than the initial ones he's managed to come up with in the couple of hours that the group - now eerily chanting - has had them.
The handcuffs aren't ideal, nor is the blood staining the sleeve of Steve's white dress shirt - he'd resisted, and only a threat against Danny's life had made Steve stop resisting. Of course the, 'It's just a graze, Danny,' to his shoulder had also been a strong deterrent to further resistance.
They won't be able to return the rental tuxedos, which should make Danny's mother happy. She'd wanted them to purchase them anyway. Though, she had also wanted to be at the wedding ceremony as well. That's not happening, Danny thinks wryly.
"What island are we on anyway?" Danny asks no one in particular, making a show of looking around, though he can't really see anything other than dark outlines of palm trees. He doubts that he'll really get an answer, and wonders if Kono and Chin have figured out a way to find them, wherever it is that they are.
The leader walks up to him and slaps him across the face, hard, and Danny almost laughs. The slap stings, and Danny knows that, come tomorrow, provided that he and Steve survive this little ceremony, he'll have a bruise in the shape of the man's hand on his face.
Steve's hissed out breath is ignored, and Danny grasps his partner's hand in a bid to keep him quiet. He can handle a slap across the face, and the coppery taste of blood that floods his mouth as a result. He's not even dizzy.
"You have been chosen by the gods," the leader says. His voice is distinctly monotone, his dark eyes sparkle in the darkness. "Chosen to be our bountiful sacrifice. Bound in love and marriage, you shall be offered to the gods, appeasing their anger, their need for blood."
The red of the moon offers little by way of light, but Danny finds it oddly comforting. He doesn't hold his laughter back this time. The group is certifiably crazy, and he doesn't mind pointing that out to them.
"You are lolo," Danny says, using his free hand to circle his temple with his index finger. He shakes his head, shares a look with Steve, who shakes his head, eyes widening slightly before they narrow into dangerous slits.
"Danny." Steve keeps his voice low. It's a warning. Danny's used to hearing his name uttered this way by his partner, but right now he chooses to ignore Steve's warning in favor of seeing just how far he can push their captors. Maybe, if he pushes hard enough, they will lose their cool and he and Steve will be able to find a way to escape. It's probably a bad idea, and one that, again, if they survive this, he'll never hear the end of, but Danny's willing to chance it, because he really wants to marry Steve, but not like this.
"The lot of you," Danny says, using one hand to encompass the whole group, who have not faltered in their creepy chanting, not willing to draw his injured partner into the foolishness of his actions, though they're bound at the wrists. "Stark, raving mad. Lunatics. Certifiable. Absolutely -"
This time the slap is so hard that Danny loses his balance, takes Steve down with him as he falls to his knees in the sand. It's cold, this time of night, and the sand is oddly unforgiving, like concrete. Still, Danny laughs. It's an outright act of defiance that earns him a third, and then a fourth slap across the face.
He's dizzy, blinking stars that aren't set in the sky out of his vision. The stars wink at him, and stay firmly in place. Steve's lips are against his ear, and he's pleading with him to, 'Shut the fuck up, Danno.'
Shut the fuck up, Danny thinks, and he shakes his head, purses his lips, and turns to face his partner, holding up their mated wrists between them. "For eternity, Steven," Danny grounds out between teeth that are so tightly locked together that only Steve can hear and understand him, and he knows that he's not making any sense.
"For eternity, Danno," Steve agrees, nodding, pressing a kiss to Danny's lips, tasting the blood that's coating the inside of Danny's mouth.
"Get them up!" the leader shouts, and a pair of chanting acolytes grabs Steve and Danny underneath the armpits and hauls them to their feet.
Danny shakes his 'helper' off, winces in sympathy at the look of pain that briefly crosses Steve's face before he quickly pushes it away, making his face an unreadable mask. Danny glares at the young man who'd grabbed Steve's injured shoulder, but there's no reaction from the robed figure, and Danny's choler is short lived as he's held firmly in place at a nod from the leader.
"Wake up now, Danno," he whispers to himself, because this has got to be a dream. He's had too much to drink, and just needs to sleep it off. He closes his eyes, hoping that when he opens them next, he'll wake up, lying next to Steve, their abduction nothing more than a whacky nightmare brought on by too much alcohol.
"Let the ceremony begin!" The leader claps his hands. The chanting stops, and it's as if the ocean itself is holding its breath.
Danny opens his eyes. Steve's bathed in the red glow of the moon, his face creased with concern for his partner. Steve squeezes Danny's hand, and Danny musters a smile. The gun is still pointed in their direction as the group's leader reads the traditional wedding vows aloud.
It's absurd, and laughter bubbles up inside of Danny's chest, because these freaks are definitely not Catholic or Protestant, or members of any kind of religious group that should recognize these types of wedding vows. Steve's grip on his hand is crushing now, and Danny reins in his mounting insanity, but just barely. He snorts, covers it up as a cough, and takes a deep breath.
The leader is looking at him expectantly, and Danny frowns, casts a look at Steve who raises an eyebrow and mouths, 'I do,' at him. Shaking his head, Danny turns to face Steve, because no way is he going to do any of this facing the leader of this madness.
Danny clears his throat, laces his fingers with Steve's, and searches his partner's eyes. His heart stutters in his chest, and he nearly loses his footing at what he sees there - the all-encompassing, mind-blowing love and trust - and in that moment, everything seems to disappear. It's suddenly just him and Steve and the blood-red moon shining down on them.
"I do," Danny's voice sounds rough to his own ears, the pounding of his heart, the lapping of water against the shore, nearly drown out his voice.
He knows there are tears in his eyes, and he hates that, only because he doesn't want to share this moment with anyone other than his 'ohana. Doesn't want these outsiders to see how much he loves Steve, and how much Steve loves him; that the love these freaks have chosen to sacrifice to whatever gods it is that they serve is the real deal. If Danny had doubted it before now, there's no doubt left.
"I do," Steve intones, dead serious, and Danny realizes that he's missed a whole slew of words spoken by the whackjob leader who had taken him and Steve.
Danny can no longer hear the leader, the water lapping at shore, his own heart beating. There's only Steve, and then suddenly there's a spark of blinding light, and then nothing, not even the red of the moon.
Dark nothingness holds Danny for a time. It's quiet and still. Relaxing. He could stay here, maybe forever, but something won't let him. A something that he can't see. It has a voice. No. Not a voice. A presence that is all-encompassing.
Memories roll across Danny's mind like digital pictures on a timed slideshow. He gets glimpses, and most of them don't make sense, because they're memories that haven't happened yet: standing beside Steve on a blacksand beach, watching the most gorgeous sunset he's ever seen; Grace standing on her tiptoes to kiss some handsome young teen's cheek, while Steve watches, and glowers, from the front window; holding hands with Steve, muscle's taut in anticipation as they await the birth of their son; lying sick and fevered in bed, Steve's cool hand pressed to his sweaty forehead..
"C'mon, Danno, wake up," Steve's voice is calling him. It's soft, yet urgent. Danny knows that tone, it's just shy of starting to belong to annoyed-Steve, which means that Steve's not happy about something pertaining to him.
Nothing new there, Danny thinks, maybe says aloud, because Steve chuckles, places his hands on either side of Danny's head and presses their foreheads together.
"Open your eyes," Steve commands. His voice is a Siren's call - gentle and coaxing, even as it demands immediate compliance. Danny's never really been all that good with complying, and at the moment his eyes prefer to remain closed.
"Danny." Steve's lips move across Danny's, like a strawberry being dragged across a lover's lips.
Weird analogy, Danny thinks. Steve's lips taste nothing like strawberries, feel like a sunburn and a nail file as they part Danny's lips. Ordinarily this is a great way to wake up, minus Steve's dry lips, but Danny's head hurts, and he has a vague memory of something decidedly not good happening just before he'd closed his eyes in the first place and doesn't relish the thought of opening them to find that Steve's dead, and it's the man's ghost trying to wake him.
Ghost Steve, Danny muses, remembers the Universal movie featuring Bill Cosby, and wonders if Grace would be unhappy if, when he died, he returned as a ghost to watch out for her, make sure that she's always protected from beyond the grave. He sighs, and nearly sputters when Steve pinches him.
"Someone had to do it, Danny," Steve says, and Danny opens his eyes to glare at the man that he loves. He has no idea what Steve means, and some of his confusion must show on his face, because Steve frowns at him. A look of unconcealed concern that is atypical of the former Navy SEAL.
"You were dreaming Danny," Steve explains, eyebrows bunching together. "Muttering crap about ghosts and dads and analogies...something about strawberries." Steve's cheeks flush, and his eyes dart toward Danny's lips.
Danny blinks, moves to sit up, nearly bonks Steve's head in the process, because his partner is actually straddling him, not giving him any space whatsoever. Danny's feeling slightly claustrophobic, and his head is still pounding, though a little less than it was before.
"Wha-" Danny's lips move, and a partial question slips out, but Steve places a finger on his lips and gives his head a slight shake. Danny furrows his brows, and that's when he notices that he and Steve are not alone, and that he's lying, not in Steve's bed, but on cold, hard sand. The ocean is off to his right, if his ears aren't deceiving him, and there are several robed figures surrounding the two of them. He can't make out any of their faces.
"Tell us what happened," one of the robed figures says, and Danny's mind finally catches up with where he is and what's going on, though he has no idea how to answer the question.
"What did you see?" another robed figure asks.
Danny's tongue can't catch up with the thoughts running through his head, the memories that are not memories are as fleeting now as they were when he'd been stuck in the nothing. Dizzy and cold, Danny locks his gaze onto Steve, trying to communicate silently what his tongue can't seem to wrap itself around.
He's seen the future. The, "in sickness and in health," part of a life that he'd share with Steve, and he wants it so badly that he can taste it as the cliche goes. Cliches suit him and Steve. Cats and dogs. Oil and water. Peas and carrots. Hand-grenades and Navy SEALS...
"Marry me?" Danny asks in a whisper. It's moot, and several - hours, decades, minutes - too late. Their life together - crazy, gun-toting, robed fiends aside - is fated. Written in the stars, just another grouping of constellations - the lovers, in Greek, or Hawaiian.
Everything's a blur after that. The whump, whump, whump of helicopter blades, Steve's hands hot and calloused on his face, his arms, his chest, touching and pulling and moving him, the familiar pop, pop, pop of gunshots, the grim, determined faces of Chin and Kono, the copper scent of blood mixed with the salt-spray of water, and then, again, the nothing that carries Danny down into darkness.
This time there are no visions. It's just an empty nothingness. No otherworldly presence that lingers at the edges of Danny's unconscious mind.
He does, though, wake once again to the sight of Steve's concerned face staring down at him. Worry lines where the man's skin used to be smooth. It's both disconcerting and heartwarming, and Danny has no words. He pulls Steve to him, kisses the man breathless, senseless, and loses track of time and the world around them. They are a new constellation flung out across the darkening evening sky, each entwined in the other - no beginning or ending.
Weeks later, they're on a different beach. It's daylight for a few minutes longer - no blood, red moon, no shotgun pointing at them - and their toes are digging into the cooling sand. Danny's only got eyes for Steve, and some cheesy retort sitting on the tip of his tongue.
Gone are the robed, gun-toting fanatics. Danny and Steve are surrounded by their small family, not only of blood, but of mettle. There's a gentle breeze, and the tops of the palms chitter like birds, providing the wedding ceremony with a backdrop of peaceful sound.
"I do," Danny says, the vow taking on new meaning as he speaks the words to Steve. They take on weight in his heart.
They finish their vows, kissing to seal their words, as the sun dips low on the horizon, meeting the ocean with a bright array of oranges, purples and reds.
"This ain't no shotgun wedding," Danny says when he can breathe again. "But I guess it'll do."
If you don't know what lolo is; it's 'stupid/crazy/feeble-minded'. I figure Danny, being a word guy, would be familiar with this Hawaiian word. It's rather handy, as is okole (butt, to be polite), and puka (hole) - they're words I use at times. I use puka in class, but I wouldn't call a student lolo. I might think it, but wouldn't say it.
Too cheesy? Stupid? Should I quit? Feedback would be nice. Mahalo :D