'I felt you, blue flower,
In my soul
You got me longing…
Now I want somethin' more.

Where are you, blue flower?
Come back and stay.'

"Blue Flower" ~ The Gray Havens

~OL~

Look, there's coffee and then there's coffee.

Steve will stand by this opinion at gunpoint, though attempting to explain it would probably get him shot anyway. Certain things just have to be done right. He's not aware of his pickiness until the day Tani offers him a take-out cup of coffee from a collection she bought for the team.

He drinks some of it—let the record show for anybody who claims otherwise later.

"Hey, thanks." Steve offers Tani a warm smile for the gift, the caffeine a necessity since they're about to chase a madman through the warehouse district at six in the morning. The paper sleeve warms his hands. "I didn't have time to make any this morning."

Tani smirks back. "Gotta stay sharp, boss."

"Copy that."

Steve proceeds to take a few swigs. It's black, not the way he usually takes it, but since he's Navy that's what everyone assumes. The roast is good, something richer than gas station coffee; Guatemalan dark, perhaps. The fancy stuff Junior likes.

Danny arrives a few minutes later, since he had to swing by and drop off Charlie first. "Oh man. I wish I'd known you were bringing some, Tani, or I wouldn't have bothered."

Steve glances away from the hood of his truck and warehouse blueprints they're circled around. Danny joins the group huddle, tall thermos in one hand, a stack of Styrofoam cups in the other.

Junior grabs at it greedily. "Are you kidding? We need all the caffeine we can get."

Danny grins, the hyper specific one that means he's pleased whenever someone eats or drinks something he made. "Easy, tiger. One cup at a time."

"I finished the stuff Tani brought."

"Already?"

"Yup."

Lou barks a laugh and Danny pours Junior a cup. "You see what you did to these nice people?"

It takes Steve a beat to recognize that the playful admonition is directed at him. "Some might call me a good influence."

"They've never seen you drive."

Steve is about to snipe back as good as he gets…when Tani sighs.

Danny turns to her. "There's enough for you too."

She flails a hand at Steve. "No, now he'll never drink my coffee. I never have a shot when you make it for him."

"What are you talking about?"

"Yeah," Steve echoes his partner. "Danno makes terrible coffee. I drink it out of pity."

"You're like an old married couple." Tani flicks the thermos. A dull, metallic ring fills the air. "I can never make it the way you do."

Danny rolls his eyes, still half lidded with sleepiness. "You're seeing things, kid. Steve doesn't drink my coffee if he can help it. He hates it."

And Steve does. Very much. It's always got this charred, burnt taste as if Danny somehow managed to overdo coffee like everything else in his life. It's why they had two separate coffee pots in the office at one point.

"You're delusional if you think that's true," Junior chimes in.

Danny lets out his own laugh. "Is that the pot calling the kettle black?"

Everyone groans at the terrible pun, but Steve's mind is off on a different tangent altogether.

Steve is used to the married jokes. They've been the brunt of so many over the years it's laughable. Like a fly buzzing around his face before it's gone.

For some reason, his brain refuses to bypass it today.

He hides the odd blip in his chest by checking his pistol clip again.

The debate is interrupted, of course, by their first gun for hire suspect showing up earlier than anticipated. Everyone ducks for cover to wait for the second.

Across the lane from him, behind some old shipping crates, Junior chugs back his second cup of the day. His other hand is steady on the rifle across his knees.

It prompts Steve to take a sip of his own cup. His brow furrows to taste something sweeter than ink black coffee, tinged with just the right amount of cinnamon and sugar but no cream. He looks down at his hand—

It's the coffee Danny made. He didn't even register picking it up.

"Steve?"

Steve rouses himself from the stunned moment at Lou's voice. "What do we got?"

"Our kingpin has arrived."

And they're off, with no time to think about coffee or anything else.

Now that Steve's consciously caught it, he notices himself doing this all the time. It happens again and again over the following weeks, choosing Danny's coffee over whatever is lying around in the office.

Maybe he really doesn't hate it. Maybe Danny's begun to take better notes on Steve's coffee preferences than anyone noticed.

Either way, it's troubling.

It's also very asinine, is what it is. Steve loses actual, precious sleep trying to decipher what's going on. Why he'd care so much about laundry and coffee and flowers.

I'm losing my mind. It's the only explanation, however oxymoronic, that feels logical.

(He never does find out what happened to Tani's coffee.)

~OL~

It's not just coffee. The married jokes keep happening, just like they always do.

Taxes, death, Danny's whacky socks, and married jokes. The most predictable constants in the world.

But no matter how much Steve ignores the detritus inside his head, creeping down to his lungs, he can't make sense of it. Granted, there are a lot of feelings he doesn't have names for these days.

The funeral is done, they buried his mother beside his father, but somehow Steve knows a part of Doris—and him—never came home.

Danny is good about this.

Danny is so good about this that sometimes Steve thinks if his friends are a bank account, he has to be overdrawn by now. There must be some point at which he's become too much of a handful to manage, to love.

The team has their own way of showing they care, everything from cookies, quiet words of comfort, to keep going, and movie nights. Steve hasn't cooked for himself in weeks. If someone is sad, you cook them food; a cross-cultural norm the world over.

Danny just…Danny is just there.

He doesn't do anything particularly special for Steve when he's down, save to sweep the floor or feed Eddie on nights that Steve forgets. They don't do the whole sharing-a-box-of-tissues thing when in the throes of grief.

Danny exists in Steve's space. That's it.

And yet somehow this is the most unsolvable puzzle the universe can possibly offer.

Steve ponders it with a furrowed brow while pushing his cart down the spice aisle. He's been circling the supermarket for ten minutes now, just to pretend he's not stuck like a broken record on this worrying fact. Whether he should feel guilty about it.

Steve is sad and Danny is there.

What's he supposed to do with that?

"Excuse me? Umm, excuse me, do you know where I can find hibachi seasonings?"

A chipper voice wakes Steve from the fugue. He blinks to see a pretty blonde across the aisle from him, a surfer, by her rash guard and salt teased hair.

"Sorry." Steve raps a quick set of knuckles on his temple, to show he got lost in his thoughts, before pointing up the aisle. "I think they sell Japanese spices by the cardamom."

The woman beams. "Thanks! You just look like someone who'd know about that sort of thing."

Steve throws her a wry expression. "I'm not the best at cooking, actually. That would be my partner's arena."

Her expression dims a little. "You're in a relationship, then. Congratulations."

"No, not at the moment."

The smile returns with a generous heaping of hope. "So you're single?" Then she seems to catch herself, flushing. "Sorry, I'm never this forward."

"That's okay. I'm flattered." Steve isn't sure he's following the conversation at all. And not sure he knows how to answer. "No, I'm…I'm not really. At the moment."

"At the moment?"

Steve tries to smile back. He really does. It comes off as more of a twisted-up frown, something Danny would probably call aneurysm face. "Longer than a moment, if I'm honest."

The woman squints, looking as confused and overwhelmed by this response as Steve feels. They both need a roadmap for Steve's emotions. "You mean you're not…available."

"Something like that."

This time Steve actually frowns. That doesn't seem like what he's supposed to say. Back on shore leave, you relished what sparse attention you got from a woman.

His SEAL buddies would tease him for a month if they could see this baffling interaction.

"No, it's alright. Sorry for asking." She offers a little wave and another easygoing smile. "Thanks for the spice help!"

"No problem." Steve watches her retreat up the aisle, then looks down only to see a measly two items in his cart. After thirty minutes of being here.

He really needs to stop going to grocery stores.

~OL~

The headache to end all headaches bubbles up at a red light.

The red light lasts—not a word of a lie—three minutes.

Three minutes does not sound like a long time, but if you're Steve McGarrett after spending the entire day working a cold case they somehow didn't manage to solve, with harsh yells from the victim's family…that's a long time. A hundred and eighty seconds go by before Steve realizes something's wrong with the grid and all the lights are paused.

A cop comes to manually direct traffic around a powerline truck, making sure no one careens into an accident today, and somehow it all goes smoothly. Steve finds it in himself to thank the officer through the window on his way by.

No harm, no fuss.

He's still home on time. It's still a sunny evening with just the right amount of wind to keep the air cool. Eddie's still cheerful as ever when Steve lets the dog out for a bathroom break. He's still looking forward to finally grilling that haddock.

Steve still closes the door and bursts into tears.

It's quite impressive, really, and around the shock of wet on his face and wadded up drywall in his throat, some part of him toasts to not doing things halfway. All or Nothing McGarrett, that's him. Raise your glasses.

Well…Steve's version of 'bursting into tears' is mostly just one muted dry sob and a few oversized tears. But this kind of foul-ball-to-the-face style crying, where he can't see it coming, hasn't happened in years.

Too many years.

He stands there in the living room, chest a dying fish, not sure what set off the reaction. His building headache? The long day? Angry, unkind words from the grieving family? The way the mother of the victim had sounded like Doris for an icy moment?

Steve decides that's enough thinking for now and stumbles towards the couch. He doesn't even have the energy to take off his boots. He collapses onto the couch literally and metaphorically, so hard his weight bounces a little. His legs refuse to hold him up another second.

Strange shivers assault his arms. Just his arms.

Despite this, he's sweating at the back of his neck and along his hairline. Cold and hot. Ice and fire.

A whittled battering ram makes swift work of his skull, as if he's a wooden door rotted clean through. Splinters gather behind his eyes. Steve shifts so that he faces the back of the couch and can cry in peace, tears soaking the corduroy. Stutters over several more ragged breaths. Wraps both arms around his ribcage.

The splinters gouge up past his eyelids and down his cheeks in hot prickles.

Steve doesn't hear the door open ten minutes later, doesn't register hands shimmying the boots off his feet.

Only when a damp washcloth touches his neck does he open his eyes. The heat of the fabric hits him like the sun in a cave and stops his shivering at once. He lays there, breathing, on edge, and tracks the hands where they check his forehead. Hot air balloons lift off in his belly, their ropes knotted around each rib.

"Havin' a hard crash, huh?"

Steve's breath hitches again.

"Yeah. Let it out, man. Just let it out." The hands stroke his back. "You'll feel better after."

Steve does, but only because he's kind of powerless at the moment. These incidents scare him the most, when his body overrides his brain like mutiny on a warship. His mind is his captain. If he can't trust the crew of his body's reactions, then how is he to get anywhere?

"C'mere." One hand pushes at Steve's chest, trying to get him to roll onto his back. "You've got a headache too, I'm guessing. Laying on your side will make it worse."

Steve is all set to ignore this advice and hide in his ball of misery—until Danny gets his elbow involved and Steve realizes he will bodily roll him over if he has to. Danny's mother-henning knows no bounds and isn't something to be trifled with.

Steve follows the pressure on his chest, Danny's right hand directly over the desert spot. It melts some of the sand into glass, crystal clear and blinding.

Twisting onto his back is immediately rewarded by the cloth being dunked in fresh hot water and placed across his forehead and eyes. It's instant relief, both the warmth and blocked evening light. The ram recedes by a furlong.

An inhuman noise comes out of Steve's mouth; not really a whimper, not really a sob, not really a whine, but somehow borrowing from all three.

"Got that right," says Danny, as if Steve said something intelligent using actual words. "Today sucked. We'll figure it out, Steve."

Steve makes another embarrassing noise.

Both men go still, both of them only just noticing that Danny's been running his free hand through Steve's hair for the last few minutes. It pauses. Then starts up again. Danny's thumb catches on those silky grey hairs around Steve's temple and scratches gently through them, like a trade wind against the fire.

"I'm here," he whispers. Nothing more.

That's the root of it all. The insufferable part that Steve would have lived in blissful ignorance about until someone pointed at it.

Danny doesn't offer platitudes or pet names or try to get to the bottom of this meltdown. He just sits on the floor by Steve, elbows on his knees, and keeps dunking the washcloth in a bowl on the coffee table…wringing it out…rubbing Steve's head…

He's here.

And suddenly Steve sees why his body mutinied.

"'S the…" Steve winces at the broken sound of his own voice. "It's the first time I've come home to an empty house. In over a year."

"Okay, uh." Danny's hand and the cloth stop, his brain apparently recalibrating.

Something in the air between their body swells—stark realization from Steve, sympathetic pain from Danny.

He palms at Steve's cheek this time. His voice resets, louder than before but soft enough that more tears fountain from Steve's eyes. "Okay. We can address your raging codependence at another time."

Normally Steve would go along with that. At a certain level Danny is perfectly in the right.

But codependence is just another word. Like single. Like couple. They all sound so cheap, rendering gold into pyrite.

"Felt like I was fourteen again," Steve confesses. His ears throb with the tempo of a slow heartbeat, ocean waves against stone. "Walking through that same door when my dad…he…"

Danny's brain competes with his mouth, a mile a minute. It takes him seconds to deduce what Steve means, his face falling, and that simple motion is Steve's undoing. No one sees inside him that fast.

He hides his eyes behind his hand, even though they're already halfway covered by the edge of the cloth. Tears seep between his fingers.

Danny sets his hand overtop of Steve's and pats it, just like he did with the hoodie. "It felt like the day you came home and your dad told you what happened to Doris."

"I know it's stupid, since she didn't actually—"

"Do you want me to smack you with the cloth? Because I will smack you. We are not calling our emotions stupid in this house."

Steve shuts his mouth, but Danny's all talk. Before his last grumpy word ends, he's tracing tiny circles at the base of Steve's neck.

"Then you came home and I wasn't here."

Steve grits his teeth against a flash of cranial pain. "Sort of."

"I can work with sort of."

They both do, better than they'll admit.

Danny's had a long day too, been yelled at just like Steve, so he leans against the couch and rests his head on Steve's bicep.

Reality dictates that the pressure of his cheek is not, obviously, warmer than the steaming washcloth. But to Steve it feels that way. Like a hot kiln on frozen skin. It weaves up his shoulder into his head, banishing the last of his pain.

Steve shimmies his right arm out and around Danny's chest. It's long enough to clasp Danny's opposite shoulder. Danny lifts his cheek and nuzzles it on Steve's shoulder joint instead.

They inhale and exhale together in wordless harmony.

There's something very sobering for Steve about cradling the entire weight of Danny's head and neck. Being trusted not to drop him.

"You're such an idiot," Danny breathes, so tender it's almost a prayer. The beginning of a smile creeps across Steve's face, despite his crying. "Freaking martyr."

Kettle, meet pot.

Then Danny dips down and pecks the hairy part of Steve's forearm. His lips are just as warm.

"I'm here, Steve. I'm here."

Steve pumps Danny's shoulder in reply.

And this, too, is like breathing. It's not as easy, the give and take of someone else's ideas and wants and fears, but it's unconscious now. Steve would be stuck in a waking nightmare to live only inside his own head without company or challenge on it.

"Stop overthinking." Danny's hand reaches back to eclipse Steve's eyes, replacing the cloth. His gun callouses shift along the corner of Steve's left eye. "I can smell the smoke."

"S'just I'm…sorry. For…" Steve waves his free hand. "Freaking out. About you not being here."

"Steve." Danny hesitates, which is positively unheard of. "You didn't just freak out about the empty house."

Steve is back in the grocery store, confused by people telling him things from the outside looking in. "I didn't?"

"No, babe." There's a fragile quality to Danny's voice Steve has heard maybe three times in their friendship. Danny's hand lifts away from Steve's eyes, flooding him with light. "You're re-writing what this house means to you. Not to mention the grieving process and whatever that looks like. There's no 'right' way to heal, okay?"

Steve gets the distinct impression that Danny just avoided something. Something patent, like the feel of Danny's fingers reaching up to curl around Steve's wrist. His body rests further against Steve's arm. Steve tightens his grip to gladly brace it.

"Okay," he says, because Danny is sitting here soothing Steve's emotional breakdown and cleaning his puffy face. The least Steve can do is let him dodge for a minute. "I'm glad you're here—I want you here. You know?"

Danny stays quiet, but Steve feels a low hum against his skin, deep in Danny's chest.

Though Steve isn't sure when he closed his eyes, thanks to the soupy after effects of a near-migraine, he feels the exact moment Danny lets go of his own tension. He rolls his forehead into Steve's shoulder, mushed, sleepy. His lips are still warm, but this time they press and stay when Danny hides his own face.

They sit like this long after the sun sets.

~OL~

A shower is not the most original place for an epiphany, but at this point Steve will take what he can get.

He's just started in on shampoo when it cuffs him across the face.

The epiphany, not the shampoo.

In some ways it's kind of nice, that the old man from his thoughts has been replaced by a pretty blonde lady. Much easier to think about when ruminating on how other people view this whole living-with-your-best-friend thing.

Steve has figured out two for-sure statements amidst all these nameless feelings—

One, Danny moved in to keep an eye on him after Doris died, the last in a long line of straws on Steve's back.

Two…this is not why Danny is still here. Months and months later.

It's a team effort really, like most things in their partnership. Danny is at fault for refusing to leave and Steve is at fault for getting so used to his presence that the thought of living here by himself is nothing short of appalling. Peace time will always be the scariest thing for someone who's seen as much combat as him, has known such violent loss.

But right as shampoo hits his hand, Steve thinks the question that switches everything on its head.

What if it was Junior?

Not a very shocking question, considering Steve did live with Junior for a year. Junior is Steve's protégé, his hope for the next generation. He's a walking, talking reassurance that the island will be protected long after Steve is gone.

What if it was Junior? Or Lou? Or Quinn?

The answer is that his life would be predictable and Steve would be excited for his house guest to get a place of their own. The thought of Danny leaving makes Steve want to microchip him or lock the doors or something else suitably insane that will keep him here.

It's not fair.

But it's the truth.

And it hits Steve that what bothers him so much all of a sudden about the old man and the brave surfer who shot her shot is that they're not wrong to ask about his relationship status. His answer was correct, the complete truth—he isn't single. He isn't available.

These just aren't the right words.

Steve can't claim the feeling if he doesn't even know if it's…if it's right. Maybe Doris dying broke him somehow and he's having a mental collapse.

Because Steve knows what he wants now.

Wonder crashes over Steve as the epiphany continues in a domino effect. He finishes his shower on autopilot, dressing without seeing any of it. Normally he takes his time on the weekend, but a nascent, fizzy urgency keeps Steve moving.

Like a dream, he wanders down the stairs. Danny's puttering around, mumbling to himself about ingredients and what to eat before Grace's video call.

Steve announces his findings to the mostly-empty kitchen, sweaty palms and all:

"I don't want to date other people."

There.

Said it out loud and everything.

There are no fireworks or gasp track for these words, spoken with the punctuated finality of a TED talk. It's…rather anticlimactic.

Steve says it in rumpled shorts and two socks that don't match to one other person. On a Saturday. After a shower. Hair dripping.

"Mmm…sounds good." Danny drawls it out while he stands over the open fridge door, eyes locked on its enthralling view inside. Arctic air wafts through the kitchen.

He's not listening. Steve's jaw coils. He knew this was a weird thought. Why did he have to go blabbing it anyway?

But then Danny turns to him with one hand on his hip, his other still propped on the door. "Don't want to date as in…"

"Anymore," Steve clarifies. "Ever."

"I meant, as in, you don't want to date because of the people you've been dating or because you just…don't want to? Is it the people part or the actual activity we call dating?"

This gives Steve pause. Not due to the words themselves, though these are also interesting. No, Danny sounds patient in that bland way, like they're discussing the weather instead of Steve's internal crisis.

"No more dating and no more people." Steve's tone is adamant, if smaller than he would prefer.

"Gotcha. No more Brooke or the pretty veterinarian then."

Steve doesn't shake his head, but his eyes pinch at the edges.

Danny nods like he hears the words anyway. "Alright, babe. You got it—no more dating. Also we're out of milk." He goes to pat Steve's chest but isn't looking, so ends up patting Steve's belly instead. "Make sure to get some on your next grocery run."

"Okay?" Steve asks, not even sure what he's asking.

Danny stops, glances back. "Yeah, it is."

"Okay."

"Okay." Danny snorts at them both and perhaps the world at large. "How do you feel about eggs for breakfast?"

"You just said we have no milk."

"I can make some with the last of the kefir."

Steve hardly knows what to do with himself. It's an odd sensation. He half expected someone to arrest him for not wanting to date. How could he, a healthy adult male, not want to give it a shot with the beautiful surfer? It's blasphemous, is what it is.

He stands in the middle of the kitchen and dumbly watches Danny dig out a pan and carton of eggs. Steve's arms sit slightly out from his sides, as if he can tackle this feeling head on, sweat pooled in the hollow behind each knee.

His stomach rope is tangled.

"Okay?" Danny asks without turning around. There's no judgement in the tone, no secret laughter or teasing.

The knots loosen a little.

This time Steve nods, and it feels real. "Eventually."

"Cool, cool. You're still an animal, by the way—your shirt's on backwards."

~OL~

Steve examines this unnamed desire over the next few days, whenever he gets a rare, hushed moment to study its forbidden-ness in the safety of his own thoughts.

He told Danny. About something outrageous he wants. That's got to be one of those healthy things therapists recommend.

It's five in the morning before a swim when Steve notices the neat little hole in the stairway wall. A nail has been fitted into it, upon which is hung an empty picture frame. Not too big. Rectangular, about the length of his hand.

Steve blinks at it. Shiny glass shows him nothing but his own open-mouthed reflection.

Man on a mission, he marches back up to Danny's room and doesn't bother knocking. He doesn't need a light either, this entire house long since memorized.

Danny lays on his stomach in the narrow guest bed, his second preferred sleeping position to being curled up, fetal style, on his side. Only a tuft of golden hair and Danny's closed eye peek out from the duvet cover.

Some rational part of Steve's brain informs him that this is not a life-or-death issue. It's a picture frame he doesn't recognize. An empty one, at that. It can wait until morning. Actual morning-morning and civilized hours.

But he's long since learned to pay attention when it comes to Danny and jumbled emotions—like the fluttery ones he's having now.

"Danny. Hey, Danny." Steve shakes his side.

Danny garbles a swear word and the eye slowly opens. "Wh't? 'M sleepin' here."

"I see that." Steve's chest constricts. "Why is there a picture frame?"

"Huh?"

"On the wall along the stairs."

Danny turns and sits up on his elbow, frighteningly lucid in a complete one-eighty from the grogginess. As if the words electrocuted him.

This catches Steve off guard, even though he's the one who stormed in, so much so that he takes a step back. He has a hunch that if he were to take Danny's pulse right now, he'd find it flying.

"Grace, on her last visit, she…" Danny wipes sleep from his eyes, but they're locked on Steve. "She thought the house felt kind of sterile. She's hoping to put up some photos."

Steve doesn't realize he has Danny's shoulder in a death grip. Then it shrugs and he lets go. "Oh. For Grace? Sure, that's alright."

"It is?" Danny stares at him with wide eyes, searching for something. Probably the same something that made Steve's breath catch when he saw the promised memory to be hung.

"Of course, Danno. That's sweet of her. Just wasn't expecting it."

Danny loses all his air in one rush. It's almost soundless, but the abject relief on his face makes Steve a little nauseous. On instinct, he replaces his hand on Danny's shoulder and rubs it, a switch of the comforting role done with hardly a word.

Steve doesn't ask about any picture frames that pop up after that.