Disclaimer: See initial chapter.

A/N: I'm not even sure what inspired this. I wanted to write some fluff so that I could post a chapter that has a bit of angst in it.


Steve has a splitting headache. He's been staring at the same two sentences in the paperwork Chin had sent to him several days ago for several minutes now, and can't seem to make heads or tails of it.

The sound of mad barking is the only warning that Steve gets before Stitch launches himself into the room, Danny on his heels.

"Daddy." Danny's voice is breathless, as he comes running into Steve's office.

Skidding to an ungainly stop that sends him careening into the wall as he can't seem to get his four feet to work properly on the floor, Stitch leaves a trail of sudsy water across the hardwood floor.

Steve blinks at the duo, and has to do a double-take to make sure that he's seeing what he thinks he's seeing. Danny is just as wet and sudsy as the dog who has, thankfully, stopped barking as it sits on the floor, long legs akimbo, tongue lolling. Stitch is as far away from Danny as he can get.

"What happened?" Steve asks, pinching the bridge of his nose, hoping that it will help ease some of the pain in his head.

"Um, I was giving Stitch a bath, and he kind of escaped," Danny says. He's inching his way toward the aforementioned escapee, who is jockeying for a position beneath Steve's chair, not that the overgrown puppy will fit there no matter how hard he tries.

"I see," Steve says, though he really doesn't, and his pounding head is making it difficult for him to follow this conversation.

"Can you help me?" Danny asks, tilting his head to the side and looking up at Steve through his long eyelashes. There are suds in his hair, on his chin, his nose, and elbows, and it looks like Danny was actually in the tub, fully clothed, with Stitch, while attempting to bathe the animal.

Steve glances at the important paperwork that Chin is expecting him to complete within the next day or two, and the words blend together into squiggly black lines before his eyes, making his head throb and his vision swim.

"Stitch is slippery-er than I thought he'd be," Danny says, tilting his head even further to the side to better glimpse the escaped dog on the other side of Steve's chair.

"Danny, I..." Steve trails off when Danny's shoulders droop. The little boy looks at the floor, and his feet shuffle, and Steve is suddenly feeling like he deserves the shitty headache that he has.

Sighing, Steve puts the paperwork face down on his desk, and, in a move that he'd used countless times in his service with the SEALS, and on certain missions as a gun for hire, Steve twists and drops to the floor, and manages to capture a very unhappy, wet, wriggly dog. He hoists the squirming dog in his arms, thankful that he'd decided to wear one of his old tee-shirts and a pair of sweats today.

The dog stops struggling when it realizes that Steve isn't about to let it go, and it proceeds to make a high pitched whining sound that grates on Steve's eardrums and nerves, and makes his headache even worse. Then, when Steve starts moving toward the door, Danny in his wake, the thing has the audacity to lick his hand, and then his chin, and it wriggles until it can reach more of Steve's face to bathe it in a series of puppy kisses that make Steve grimace. It's a wonder that he does not drop the dog on the way to the very messy bathroom.

There is water everywhere, and the towels (Steve counts four of them) are soaked through. There doesn't appear to be a dry spot in the bathroom, and Steve has to take several calming breaths before he can ask Danny to get some more dry towels from the linen closet.

Danny races from the room at a speed that is dizzying, and is back in record time, a stack of fluffy towels threatening to topple from his arms. Danny moves to place them on the floor.

"Put them over here, on the toilet seat," Steve directs, just in time. Oddly, the toilet seat appears to be the driest surface in the bathroom. Even the mirror over the sink has splashes of water on it.

Danny's breathless, but smiling. The dog is now clinging to Steve, eyes wide as it avoids looking directly into the tub that's partially filled with sudsy water. Steve has a feeling that three-quarters of the bathwater that Danny had started out with is currently on the bathroom floor and in the hallway and on the stairs.

"Close the door," Steve says, and Danny slams it shut; the sound reverberates through Steve's skull like a hammer taken to a bell.

Steve lowers the dog toward the tub and is met with no small amount of resistance as Stitch tries to climb him in an effort to escape. Steve curses, low enough that he hopes Danny doesn't hear, as he gets a mouthful of wet dog paw. Stitch attaches himself to Steve's head, like an octopus, which should not be possible.

"Danny, get in the tub," Steve says. The boy's already wet, and he hopes that if Danny's in the tub, the dog will go to him.

Danny strips down, hops into the tub, and Steve attempts to pry the dog from his face and place him in Danny's waiting arms.

"Hold him tight," Steve says, once his mission's accomplished and the dog is finally in the tub, still jockeying to get free.

It feels like hours have passed since Stitch and Danny thundered into the office. The dog's tail is between its legs. Its normally perky ears are drooping. The dog is shivering almost violently and it gives Steve a look of utter betrayal, brown eyes imploring and sad. Steve feels like he's been kicked in the stomach.

Danny, however, is smiling, and talking softly, encouragingly to the dog, telling Stitch some kind of story about how he used to hate baths, too. Danny shows Stitch that there are toys to play with as Steve reaches around the pair to turn on the water, testing it against his wrist to make sure that it isn't too hot or too cold. He lets it run until Danny's covered in bubbles and water, and then turns it off.

"See, Stitch," Danny says, running his fingers through the dog's wet fur, and eliciting an almost contented sigh from the animal that is now sitting in his lap. "Daddy's good at giving baths. He never gets soap in my eyes, and he got me all of these cool toys to play with, and he sometimes even plays with me," Danny says the last bit in a whisper, lifting one of the drooped ears to do so.

"He's really good at submarine, and ship captain," Danny says. "On account of he's a seal, and he's real good at swimming."

Steve kneels on the wet tiled floor, not caring that he's getting soaked, and that there's important paperwork waiting for him in his office. Danny's smiling at him, even as he continues to talk to Stitch, calming the dog's nerves.

Steve soon discovers that bathing a dog is not unlike bathing a squirrelly little boy, except it's twice as hard. Stitch doesn't like having water poured over his head (Danny cups a hand over the dog's eyes and snout to help out), and he doesn't like suds (they make him sneeze, and Danny giggle hysterically), and he doesn't like sitting still in a tub, or being wet.

He does, however, like bounding out of the tub and shaking water all over the place and does so several times, in spite of Danny holding onto him with all of his might. The dog is slippery, and surprisingly sneaky and wily, and Steve will be happy to never have to do this again. He will happily pay to bring the dog to a professional groomer for any future bathing that it may require.

Finally, Stitch is clean, and so is Danny. Steve's state of cleanliness is a different matter entirely. He is covered nearly head to toe in sudsy water, and he feels like he's wrestled an alligator rather than a six year old boy and an energetic puppy.

Mindful of the wet bathroom floor, Steve carries both puppy and boy into the bedroom to dry them off with the almost, but not quite - thanks to Stitch's multitude of failed escape attempts and shaking - dry towels that Danny had gathered for him. Danny giggles when Steve towels him dry, and Stitch shakes with delight, entire body wiggling as he's dried off, rubbing his face into the damp towel, and moaning when Steve starts working on his ears.

Danny races to his room to get dressed and is back in record time with Stitch's collar, which is dripping wet. Steve carefully places the wet collar on one of the towels that he's discarded. Stitch's fur is starting to fluff now that it's drying, and Steve tosses the final towel aside when it's apparent that Stitch has had enough of his ministrations and is more interested in playing with the towel, biting at it and shaking it side to side as though it's some kind of small prey that he's caught.

Steve arches his back, cracking it, and tilts his head from one side to the other, cracking his neck. He should be exhausted; he isn't. His headache should be at jackhammer levels by now, but it's not. In fact, it's barely there. Steve can just feel vestiges of it now.

There's a bathroom that's got to be cleaned; he's got to take a shower before getting dinner ready for him and Danny; and then there's the paperwork that Chin sent him to read over and potentially sign.

Danny's settled on his stomach in the middle of Steve's room, he's got one end of a rolled up towel in his hands; the other end is in Stitch's mouth. Stitch is on his belly, too, and the two are playing tug-of-war. Little growls are escaping past Stitch's curled up lips, and giggles are bubbling out of Danny.

It hits Steve like a punch to the gut that these are the kinds of moments his aunt has been telling him about. Moments that he shouldn't miss or take for granted. Moments that are here and gone in the blink of an eye.

Steve pulls his (thankfully waterproof) phone out of the pocket of his sweats and captures as many images as he can of Danny and Stitch's battle before it's over; Danny gives up his end of the towel and lets Stitch win.

Steve captures Danny's eyes lit up in mirth, and Stitch's body wriggling with happiness when Danny pulls him to his side and hugs him close, whispering something into the dog's ear that Steve doesn't catch. Steve captures it all on camera, and vows not to miss other moments like these.

Steve ushers both dog and boy out of the room, leaving wet towels and bathroom, as well as thoughts of a shower and healthy dinner behind, in favor of popcorn, junk food and movies watched from the close confines of a blanket fort pitched in the living room.

Danny falls asleep in the middle of the second movie, head pillowed on a sleeping Stitch's flank, one hand still buried deep in a bowl of buttery hurricane popcorn, the other tucked beneath his head. It's another moment that Steve captures on camera before cleaning up and moving Danny into a more comfortable position with an actual pillow underneath his head, and a blanket tucked around him, Stitch curled up beside him.

All traces of his headache are gone. Steve isn't sure when it completely disappeared, but suspects that it happened sometime between Danny's forfeited game of tug-of-war, and his son's (it doesn't feel strange to think that anymore, though Steve believes that it should) happy dance when Steve announced that they were going to have a movie night. Whenever it disappeared is far less important than knowing that, had Steve turned Danny down when he asked for help bathing Stitch, he'd probably still be nursing the head splitting pain.