AN: Thanks for coming along on the ride!
'Then my fear began to ease,
From far away whispered a breeze
Telling me to move along,
Move along there's nothing wrong.
So I cornered my resolve—
Took a breath and took a step.'
"Underground (Live)" ~ Cody Fry
~OL~
"Eddie's eating all the lobster sliders."
Steve scoffs while clapping his hands free of charcoal dust. The grill is primed and ready to go for tonight's ohana dinner. They've been looking forward to this Saturday soiree all week.
"No, he isn't!" Steve yells back.
"How do you know that, Steven?"
Steve is not, in fact, inside the house at all. So Danny might be right. But then he's not technically inside the house either.
"Our dog is better trained than that!"
A muffled crash answers, presumably Danny trying to drag lawn chairs out from the garage. "Your dog is a menace to polite society."
Steve gasps in over the top offense. "That dog saves lives!"
Then he comes in from the lanai to defend canine honour and what do you know—Eddie is indeed licking lobster sliders off the counter. Steve scolds him soundly, not able to resist a quick rub of the velvet ears.
How Danny even knew this was happening without being in eyesight of the kitchen should be downright astonishing, but Steve is used to this seemingly psychic ability.
Danny doesn't say 'I told you so' when he too comes inside but he throws an oily rag at Steve's face, which is kind of worse.
(Though he also, it must fairly be noted, gives Eddie an ear rub.)
Said tiny domestic is the reason Steve and Danny end up going for a last minute supply run before guests begin arriving in an hour.
At least this time Steve isn't in the grocery store by himself. He's more pleased by this improved state of affairs than he should be. This particular grocery store has one of those hardware outlets attached at the back, so after buying their supplies, Danny insists on a circuit of the granite section.
"…Cause they're outdated," he's in the middle of explaining. "I'm sorry, Steve. But your countertops are old. I don't make the rules."
Steve grins. "Apparently you do. Danno, there's nothing wrong my countertops."
"At the very least you need to re-varnish them." Danny makes a face. "They've still got bloodstains from the time an assassin tried to kill you in the kitchen."
"You…might have a point there."
"Of course I do." Sweeping his hand, the one not carrying two bags of lobster and brioche, Danny admires a counter display as they pass. "The stains are off putting. As is the reminder that you almost died at home, of all places."
Steve steals a closer look at Danny, but he's reading an info card on marble prices. His T-shirt is dirty from the garage, grease smudge across the back of an elbow, jeans rolled up on one ankle and falling down on the other.
Home.
The word trails them everywhere, it seems. Steve's eyes prickle.
"Can I help you folks?" A hardware employee in a red pinnie vest comes over. Her steel toed boots stop just shy of the display. "There's a great sale on sink fixtures to go with the countertops."
Danny nods politely at her. "We're just exploring our options, thanks."
She's gone with another offer of help, but not before an interesting glance between the two of them. It lingers a hair longer than is normal for stranger interactions. Danny misses it completely, still muttering about how much it would cost to redo the kitchen in blue tone granite or marble.
Steve doesn't.
"I don't like you," he declares, then wants to kick himself in the teeth.
Danny straightens until he's at his full height. His eyes flash with a tinge of amusement and something else hard to read. "Mean, but okay."
"That's not what I was trying to…I just…" Steve drags a hand down his face. "Never mind."
"You don't like me like that, I get it." Danny rolls his eyes with a smile, like this is some underhanded joke. He's just as aware of the married jabs as Steve.
"No, but there is no one else I'd rather go grocery shopping with," Steve says, in a way that's not joking whatsoever.
The words pull Danny up short. It's his turn to give Steve a scrutinizing look. That something tucked away at the back of his eyes glows to the forefront and he places a hand on Steve's jaw for a short tap.
"Glad you're figuring out what you want, babe."
The interaction does nothing to allay what the employee probably thinks of them, arguing over countertops and touching each other so casually. But Steve finds he doesn't care. Maybe he never has.
"What if I want to buy another dog?"
Danny slashes his arms to either side. "Absolutely not."
~OL~
Duty is an important word.
People treat it like a scandalous term these days, the idea of being beholden and responsible for something purely out of morals, but Steve's working world orbits this concept.
Not even just his working world.
He sits with Tani on the beach when she's near tears and frustrated over almost losing a suspect. He makes sure Duke's grand daughters know what a heroic man their papa is. He never lets Rachel get away with snide remarks about Danny around Charlie.
Duty means putting the safety and wellbeing of others first.
So when Steve comes down before dawn on a Thursday and finds Danny shaking at the dining room table, the first thing he does is race for a blanket.
Tucking it around Danny's shoulders, he eyes fading cuts around Danny's neck and arms. Ugly turpentine bruises bedazzle the skin of his fingers. They're more visible where they cradle his forehead, elbow propped on the table. Eddie watches worriedly from the kitchen doorway.
Steve kneels next to Danny's chair. "Same dream?"
Danny nods. He's having one of those wiry, silent reactions to his own memories, where his jaw seals shut and all he can do is tremble.
"I'm so sorry, Danno." And Steve is. Terribly, ache-in-his-naval sorry for all that Danny had to go through, both that day and with the horrors he's suffered on the job. "Joanna wouldn't blame you."
He—and everyone else for that matter—has said these words to Danny more times than he can honestly recall. The coroner's report and basic medical fact back this up, that even if Danny had somehow managed to flag a car or call an ambulance right after the accident…
She still would have died.
Internal bleeding, the autopsy showed, only gave her about thirty minutes to live.
This doesn't help Danny much, and Steve understands. Completely. Freddie was the exact same tune, someone Steve couldn't save but for whose death he blames himself anyway.
Broken honour…failed duty.
Danny veils his face behind the battered fingers for a moment. Though he's not weeping, Steve gets the sense that whatever he feels is worse than straight out sorrow. A complex jigsaw puzzle of emotions skews what little Steve can see of Danny's expression, the scrunched nose and drooping mouth.
"Y'can go back to bed," says Danny at length, wooden. "I'll be alright in a minute."
Steve could, it's true. He could give his friend the usual shoulder squeeze, a glass of water, and walk back up the stairs to his comfy bed. Or maybe go for a run. He's fulfilled his duty of checking on his friend's physical and mental health.
But…but Danny is not a duty. This isn't the right word for him at all.
It smacks Steve abruptly, like that sensation of rooting around the house for something only to see it's been in plain sight the whole time.
Danny is a want.
Danny is a want.
The reclassification takes Steve a second to process. He blinks, first at Eddie sneaking closer, then Danny's shaky effort to pull himself together.
"You don't have to do that." Steve blurts it without thought. In some ways it's a direct parrot of what Danny said when Steve's emotions went haywire on the couch last week. "I don't care if you cry. Just grieve, Danny."
Danny stares at him.
He opens his mouth, but what comes out is not the deflection or 'how mature of you' Steve expects—
"She wasn't it."
Steve's hand pauses around petting Eddie. His other grips Danny's knee with urgent fingers. For a long minute they just breathe, which affords Steve time to try and decode this statement.
"I joked on the phone later with my sister, that she was the one." Danny swallows. "But I just said that because…"
"Because you thought you were supposed to."
Because that's what normal looks like. That's what people with healthy emotions do.
Danny shrugs one shoulder, much less wonderstruck by this than Steve. These are the same feelings he's been battling for decades and here is Danny, saying the exact same thing.
"She was great, just…I didn't…"
A barbed wire twists inside Steve's throat. His grip switches to Danny's arm, soft and grounding. "You don't have to do this right now or punish yourself. You don't have to justify what you're feeling."
He's quite proud of himself for remembering that quote from the therapy pamphlet.
Danny glances away, out the lanai windows. In the gray murk of this pre-dawn moment, he looks like he's made of marble, clay smudges of bruising across his body. Back slumped. Hair sepia in the sun's slumbering absence. Only his eyes afford any real colour, half lidded moons of waning turquoise.
Steve has stopped breathing, he notes distantly.
"I lived that day," Danny whispers.
"Yeah, and I'm bloody glad you did."
At the words, Danny meets Steve's eyes.
"I lived," Danny says louder, an accusation. As if it's evidence for why Steve should be disgusted with him too.
"You're going to keep on living." Steve stands to wrap Danny in a stooping hug, because he's not having Danny think that way a second longer. Danny, for all his self bitterness, reciprocates at once. His arms are tight around Steve's back, face buried in his chest. "Especially if I have any say in it."
"Exercising our control issues, are we?" the muffled voice asks.
"You better believe it." And this quip doesn't quite get off the ground. Steve finds himself equally shaken by the thought of Danny dying in a ditch somewhere.
Danny must feel the shiver for he rubs a slow, broad circle on Steve's shoulder blades.
When their tears finally come, just a few each, Steve realizes it's the first time he's grieved with someone else. That he's grieving for both of their pain at the same time.
He cries for his mom, for himself and the childhood or normalcy he never got to have. He cries for how the world keeps beating on Danny, how his own search for peace has come up empty. Time and time again. He grieves over an uncertain future—for both of them.
It's…nice. Not pleasant, the anguish inside Steve's heart too sharp for that, but cathartic in a way he hasn't experienced before. His tears thread through golden strands.
Danny is just there when Steve suffers.
Steve can be just there too. He rather likes the feeling.
They hold each other for a long time, Steve's nose cold on Danny's neck, Danny's fingers tangled up in Steve's T-shirt, his elbows a tender bracket, their bare feet brushing each other. When Danny shifts his head to the side with a congested sniffle so he can breathe, Steve cups it and in that moment…its weight fills a jagged void in his heart. Eddie rests his fuzzy cheek on Danny's knee.
"I'm here, Danno."
The wet spot on Steve's shirt front grows, but he thinks he feels Danny's lips twitch. "I know."
Duty is an important word—
But Steve would throw it out the window in a heartbeat for this.
~OL~
Steve doesn't fully get it until the discussion about paint colours.
"What do we think about seafoam gray?"
"It's an abomination," Danny answers without missing a beat.
He hasn't even glanced away from neat slicing and rolling of the homemade spaghetti. Watching him twirl two separate strands in each hand is deceptively impressive. Steve's seen him wield two rifles at the same time, but that's somehow still not as cool as Danny spinning four ropes of spaghetti dough in perfect sync.
Steve holds up a paint chip. "You haven't seen it!"
"I did, when I sorted through the pile you brought back. We are not painting our kitchen or living room that mud colour."
"It's calming," Steve argues.
"If you're in a nursing home. Come on, let's give the house some life at least."
Maybe at this point a smarter person might have examined the defining moment. The subtle acceptance in Danny's phrasing of it.
As is, it takes Steve a full ten seconds to catch the word—
We.
Our.
Joint words for partnered people and their possessions. The last and most important term Steve is forced to digest in one rapid slap.
Their whole scenario is confusing and messy. And normal.
Which is, in itself, the confusing part.
Steve might be the slightest bit in over his head. Lost inside the gumbo of his own brain and the words it fixates on, the emotions it insists upon barfing all over him at random moments.
Like now.
Talking about paint colours.
Steve's heart skips a beat.
He must have missed some important Danny Williams diatribe, because now he looks up from the spaghetti. Flour all over his stupid face. Eyes earnest and round and too perfect. Shirt sleeves rolled up his stupid elbows.
"Steve?" Danny drops the teasing, though he sounds ready to go at it again if this is just a zone out on Steve's part. "Whatever you want is okay. We can do the kitchen in ugly mud gray, if it's that important to you. This is your house."
It occurs to Steve when his jaw twinges that it's slack; he's gone boneless without actually moving. His legs start to feel funny. A bit gloopy.
"What I want is okay."
"Yeah," says Danny. "We established this, be it paint colours or not dating or whatever. Surprise, Steve: wanting things is human and, shocker, not illegal."
"Like home."
Danny rocks back on his heels a few inches. "Sure, like home. That's why ohana's so big for you, right?"
Steve shakes his head. "It's not my house."
An S-shaped divot creases the side of Danny's mouth. He cants his head as if the divot pulls him down. "You wanna elaborate on that?"
"What you said earlier, that it's my house. It's not just mine."
Danny blinks. It leaves lash imprints in the flour on his cheek. "Mary's got her name on the house deed too? I don't think she'll mind you painting."
For once, Danny doesn't get it.
But Steve does. Now, anyway. After much strategizing only to realize that the answer's been in front of his face the whole time.
It's new. It's a new idea for someone of his generation.
For the first time, he begins to see the root of Danny's insecurity in all this. That unlike Steve, he allowed himself to want something but kept it a secret, a bright firefly in the darkened jar of his heart.
"We're both kind of stupid," says Steve.
Danny opens his mouth with a scowl. Steve, however, rolls on before he can—
"I want to put your name on the house deed too, if you want it. Permanently."
Danny's mouth closes. His eyes, on the other hand, somehow get a little bigger.
"I don't know if this is a feeling I'll be able to explain." Steve exhales through his nose to build up some courage. With it, the fear leaks out of him. "But I'm done with the dating game."
"You said that," Danny points out. Mostly, Steve can tell, so that he has some solid ground when he feels so adrift himself.
"Right, because I've already got a committed thing going on. I don't need another one."
Danny tries to smile. It's too unsteady to pass for the real thing. "Thought you didn't like me like that."
"I don't. I've never truly liked anyone like that." Steve looks around the kitchen, all the paint chips and flour and Eddie's hair everywhere…and wonders just when he stopped letting himself be human. When he let his career and loss dictate what he 'should' want. "But you're my best friend. I think that's enough for me."
Danny deflates with a hand braced on the countertop, as if he expected a very different conversation. His face now matches the tomato sauce. "Steve, newsflash—I figured out your priorities on that front years ago."
Steve looks back through his younger days, the dates and the women and how unfulfilling it all was. How he wanted Catherine for her friendship and not for romance's sake. "I probably should have too."
"You lied to that stress therapist."
"About my sex life? Yeah. Absolutely."
Danny watches him with steel trap eyes. "Not into that stuff, huh?"
"I'm…" Steve fumbles for how to verbalize it. It's the first time he's ever admitted this out loud. "I'm figuring it out. That's why things didn't work with Lynn either."
Then he looks at Danny and still sees that flicker of something. The shifty eyes. Spasmodic fingers where they adjust and readjust his sleeves. The curling in of his shoulders.
Steve's voice hushes several notches, raspy and gentle. "Grace didn't put up that photo frame, did she?"
Danny's voice is small too. "…No."
Steve wants to ask why, but he thinks he already knows.
"You're figuring it out," says Danny. "And you don't like…people. Figured I'm in the way or on borrowed time living here, you know?"
A cold wave splashes through Steve. "I'm not going to kick you out, Danno."
Just the thought is abhorrent and Steve's internal hackles raise. He'll quite literally shoot anyone who suggests otherwise.
Danny's gaze flicks up, so that he's half eyeing Steve from behind his lashes. His knuckles are white around the counter and spaghetti towel.
Compassion socks Steve squarely in the gut. It propels his steps forward, into Danny's personal space. "You've felt this way for months, long before me."
Danny shrugs in a display of nonchalance that's not remotely nonchalant. "Didn't have a name for it either. Thought it would spook you, being the macho SEAL sharing his space with another dude. Then Junior came…"
"I don't want to fight over paint with Junior like I want to with you."
It gets an itty-bitty bark of laughter out of Danny.
"The seafoam gray is still awful."
Steve grins. "You still have no décor taste."
Danny sets the towel down, crossing his arms over his chest. Steve doesn't like the defensive posture one bit and shifts so that he can lean his hip on the counter next to Danny. Both of them stare out into the living room, at paint samples taped all over the wall and Eddie asleep on the couch. His front feet twitch, dreaming.
Steve thinks of last Thursday morning, finding Danny a trembly mess at the table. How they held each other until sunshine seeped through the windows. Nothing matters quite so much anymore, not the job or his reputation or even the duty of protecting this island.
The desert in Steve's chest begins to rain, sluiced away by love and the peace of this one mellow, prosaic moment.
"I want this to be our home."
Finally saying the feeling—the right words!—out loud cures it.
Not by halves.
Not in sliver increments—all at once, silencing Steve's inner turmoil.
He still has no idea how he's going to explain this to the team or his family, but their opinions don't matter to him as much as the man standing beside him. Elbows bumping. Slowly relaxing against each other's sides.
"Ours?" Danny's guarded tone starts to unfurl, just like the flower at this back. Like he's learning this word too, even though he said it already without noticing.
"Ours," Steve says, final. "It's our home, nobody else's. I just want to do life with you until we're old, boring bits and all. I think it's what you want too."
"Oh, I…"
"Yeah."
"Okay." Danny's arms hover at his sides, just like Steve's did that morning he announced the second in a long line of epiphanies.
Steve steals the opportune timing and reaches down for Danny's hand. Danny doesn't react at the grip, save a startled little ripple through his arm when Steve squeezes their fingers. He lets go after a brief half minute, just long enough to stroke his thumb across the back of Danny's hand a few times.
"Home." Danny's tone lilts with wonder.
Steve hears the hint of a question and nods. "Yeah, Danno. We're home. For good."
And they could still say that even if they were stranded in an actual desert, so long as it was together.
"I love you a lot, you know that?" Danny rubs a hand across the bridge of his nose, and it's wet. "Even if you are dumb sometimes."
Steve loops an arm around Danny's neck and tugs him closer until his lips are buried in Danny's hair. "Love you too, Danno. You're officially stuck with me."
"Wonderful," Danny deadpans. But his arm snakes around Steve's ribs and his head tips into the side hug.
Steve smiles.
(He loses the argument about paint colours after all, at least in the kitchen. It ends up a sunny lemon yellow, courtesy of Danny. Steve gets to pick the living room colour—he decides on a muted blue…
Almost the exact same shade as the poinsettia.)
~OL~
Just like it took Steve an absurdly long time to figure out that wanting to grow old with your best friend is, in fact, a viable option, likewise it takes Danny a hot second to believe Steve would actually choose to do so with him.
The clearing the air part is done.
The whole letting-it-sink-in-for-real part takes another week or two.
Nothing really changes, which is a monumental relief and infuriating somehow at the same time.
Steve swims. Danny sleeps in. Eddie goes into Danny's room to wake him up and demand food. Steve makes eggs. They go grocery shopping together and argue over cheese brands. Danny folds laundry. Water is wet.
But sometimes Steve catches Danny sneaking in more of his clothes and belongings from the other house he finally sold, like he doesn't want to be too much of a hassle or Steve will change his mind. Danny narrows his mug collection down to one tiny corner in the cupboard. He cuts down on shower times. Even his footsteps are muted when he walks around.
It's ironic, that he's never been this considerate in five months—not until an express invitation to live here as long as he wants.
Steve doesn't realize how upset he is about all of this until the night a football game and one of Danny's latest obsession nature documentaries are on at the same time. Something about penguin colonies.
"Just DVR it," Danny says with a lazy flap of his hand. He's halfway through folding a basket of towels and pauses to text, voice absent. "I'll watch later. Who's playing tonight?"
It's a tiny thing to trip over, not even worthy of an argument. But Steve glares at Danny beside him on the couch, scrolling through his emoji list for just the right dog one to send back to Quinn, apparently, and suddenly can't stand it.
"Nope."
Danny whips his head around. "Nope, what? What are you talking about?"
"Flowers belong in houses," says Steve. "Plants don't."
Danny does that 'neck sliding back a bit in conjunction with his eyebrows going up' thing reserved for making fun of Steve's mental state. "Should I call an ambulance or are you just talking to hear yourself talk?"
But Steve's made up his mind now.
He stands and grabs Danny by the forearm. "Come on. Work with me here. If a poinsettia is in a planter, it usually goes inside. If it's not…"
Danny splutters. He resists the bossy grip just for show; he's keeping pace with Steve and so is Eddie, trotting along at their heels.
Steve marches into the kitchen where the poinsettia still sits on their—new, blue granite—countertop. A cloudless sunset is at just the right angle that their already buttery yellow kitchen gleams with peacock blue and green accents as lacy shafts of light hit the blossoms.
With careful but insistent fingers, Steve guides Danny around to face the pot. "This is your flower."
Danny stares at Steve like he's genuinely worried for his sanity now. "Maybe that concussion grenade yesterday scrambled your brains after all."
"Danny."
"You gave the poinsettia to me as a gift, so I assume it is."
"It belongs to you." Steve nods, waiting for Danny to do the same. "Ergo, we should plant it in the garden."
"Ergo?"
"That's the part you're hung up on?"
"I just didn't think you even knew such a big…"
Steve gets the enormous pleasure of watching a bell ring over Danny's head once the words sink in, though he tries to hide it. He can't mask a dusting of pink along his ears.
"Sure there's room?" Danny asks. The touched note in his voice makes Steve's knees goopy again.
Steve almost says, 'for you? Always' before deciding on a less sappy answer. "The whole garden's yours, if you want it. I haven't had time to maintain that jungle. Take up all the space you want."
Danny flips his hand around so he's clutching Steve's wrist. Despite Danny's calm voice, Steve feels his heart racing on a pulse point.
"It would have to be permanent, as poinsettias don't do well transplanted."
"You'd have to water it often."
Danny's fingers tighten. "Almost daily, really."
"And keep a close eye on it in case it wilts."
"I don't think it will…not anymore."
It's twilight, with barely any light left by the time they get outside, but Steve and Danny make the most of it. Steve has never seen anything so breathtaking as Danny digging a little hole using Doris' old trowel, with help from Eddie of course, filling it with fresh soil, and lovingly patting his poinsettia into the bed.
It shimmers in the dark, luminescent by moonlight.
Steve echoes the motion by patting Danny's back. His hand lingers and the heat underneath morphs that dry patch of real estate in his soul into an oasis.
"There." Danny sits back where he's crouched on his heels. Eddie licks their faces until they laugh. "It's perfectly content."
~OL~
Later that week, Steve mounts the stairs after a long day, bones weary, and does a double take at the wall—
In the photo frame now sits a picture of Danny and Steve at one of Lou's cookouts.
They're in lawn chairs pushed flush against each other, as usual. Steve is half doubled over, hand on Danny's arm, which itself is slightly blurred from him talking with his hands.
Steve takes a moment to just drink in the sheer joy captured in that moment. Both men dishevelled, faces flushed from belly laughing, teeth on display. Barefoot. Fan lines around their eyes.
They look carefree.
They look at peace.
It's infectious even now. Steve knocks Danny's door on the way by. "Goodnight, Danno."
All he gets is a snore in reply—but he falls asleep with a matching smile on his face.