AN: We're halfway through the story now! I've got 11 chapters written and edited. Thank you to everyone who's reviewed and been so kind with leaving their thoughts. Time for an ice cream and feels break!

'I've heard it said that
Beauty is when scars become art
'Cause I wanna love you for good,
For good or for bad.

So take my hand
I wanna grow old with you beside me.'

"When Scars Become Art" ~ Gatton & Brooke Young

~OL~

This whole driving in the middle of the night hobby happens a few more times. And it really is a hobby, by all definitions.

If Steve's rolled over on his left side, facing the door, a tender, tired weight will nudge at his spine. A forehead's pulse against his back. Reaching behind for Danny's hair, he'll feel the brush of eyelashes on folds in his palm, that Danny isn't asleep either.

They'll sit there for a while, just feeling each other breathe, until by wordless agreement they both get up.

Sometimes Steve is the one who pulls Danny close and feels his heartbeat under a hand along his stomach, how it quickens as he wakes. They still have a weird, preternatural tether to each other, one they've never talked about. Steve doesn't see the need to, though it never fails to surprise him when Danny can get a read on his emotions even asleep. He'll wake up right as Steve starts to battle tears. He can usually gulp them back by the time Danny's eyes open.

They drive. Sometimes Danny holds his hand. Sometimes Steve reaches across the stick to touch the side of Danny's neck. Knuckles skim his jaw.

There is nothing frantic about these nights, no sense of needing to make up for potentially short time together or destructive patterns or any of the other behaviours his therapist expects. None of the doctor's pamphlets have an explanation for such weird pockets of calm. In fact, these moonlit drives are often the most serene part of Steve's day. With the lack of agenda and clock to watch, his blood pressure is lower than ever.

No traffic, just Steve and Danny driving around the coast to bad radio. He hopes heaven consists of something like this.

But just when this new habit seems to be something they can pretend is normal, Steve glances over and catches Danny staring at his shirt, where the incision lies underneath, or Steve himself turns off the music just so he can hear Danny breathe when he falls asleep in the passenger seat.

They drive. They stay close to each other. They try to keep moving.

And it is on one of these driving nights, void of moon and black as velvet, hand on Danny's arm over the stick where he can feel a steady beat, that Steve opens his mouth.

It shocks him, the sudden impulse. There's a funny pressure in his lungs too, with the demand to be used up. Nothing comes out, of course. His jaw snaps shut at once, embarrassed and not sure why.

No, not embarrassed…scared.

A slithery fear lurks underneath, the ghosted periphery in his mind's eye of his father and a disapproving frown. It's the same feeling he used to get crying in his naval academy bunk some nights, a heartsick seventeen year old ill with loss and nightmares about the car bomb. Nauseous from a sense of home being obliterated. Searching on phone calls with his father for just a hint of sympathy.

So it's an easy, familiar thing to brush off the impulse, the same one he experiences while fishing and cooking and tinkering with the car. He finds some portion of normalcy left within himself to laugh it off. He lets the radio make noise for him, a gentle Bryan Adams ballad.

Good thing Danny isn't looking over at him to see this latest madness. He's worried enough as it is.

But then Steve wakes up in bed one night and Danny isn't there.

Steve's back tenses in an instant, rung like a gong from his molars down to his heels by the emptiness in his arms. It's the most awful sensation he's had in six months of living here. The similarity of those same teenage memories to now is a night terror unto itself. The absence of someone's heat nearby lurches him into a dark past with a violence that makes his heart leap.

He faces Danny's side of the bed, the covers barely pulled back, as if Danny rolled out. Steve listens, but his gut tells him before his ears—their room is empty.

"Danny?" he murmurs anyway.

The bed has cooled too, likely the stimulus that woke Steve in the first place.

He rushes to his feet. This feels completely justified. He's not sure why exactly—but that same preternatural tether yanks on his stomach and hastens his steps, and ignoring it isn't an option. Rushing is the only logical course of action his mind will entertain.

"Danny?" No sign of him in the bathroom or on the floor either, like that one awful nightmare.

Steve bolts out into the hallway…

And pauses at a strange sound…quiet shuffles mixed with cloth sliding down a wooden surface. The muted thump of the freezer door.

Heart a magnet, Steve lets it draw him to the kitchen. Pitch dark envelopes the room with the continued lack of moon, but there's still enough ambient light for Steve to stop dead at what he sees:

Danny sits sprawled between the sink and island, no socks, sweatpants riding up on one leg. Holding an entire gallon of ice cream in his lap. Steve only knows because the package is milky white, stark against Danny's black shirt.

Somehow it's the most gorgeous and heartbreaking thing Steve's ever seen.

Danny's small, deflated frame, gazing up at Steve with implicit trust, nearly brings Steve to his knees. He'd tear down countries for this sight. There is no more precious treasure to his name.

"Hey," he says, so sotto voce it's more sound than word. Each word is pulled up from his diaphragm by a tenterhook of love. "Having a party without me?"

Danny doesn't say anything and the tether cinches.

With their lights still out, Steve is grateful now for the candles and flashlights they left everywhere. He opts for a pineapple ginger one on the counter instead of the giant halogen light. After lighting it and a few more around the room with their grill starter—he chose this candle because it smells like Kamekona's food truck—he comes back only to see Danny just now blinking.

"S…Steve?"

"Yeah." Steve crouches by Danny's leg. He pokes soft cartilage at the bottom of Danny's one bare knee with a smile. "Can't get rid of me that easily. I'm right here."

Without another word, Danny stretches up to twine both arms around Steve's neck. They're wiry—and trembling. His fingers spasm at the top of Steve's shoulders.

A jolt rips through Steve. He's surprised by this unabashed display of affection. Of need.

He only loses a beat frozen in place before he reciprocates. Danny fits perfectly in the hollow of Steve's arms, the right size for him to tug closer, until Danny has to bury his nose in Steve's Henley.

Danny's heart hammers against their chests.

"Hey, hey." Steve cups one hand around the back of Danny's head. Props his chin on the golden bedhead. "Easy, Danno. We're alright, huh? We're alright, you're okay. Easy."

Only then does he hear a repeated litany, muffled against his sternum. "I'm sorry, didn't mean to. 'M sorry."

"What're you sorry for?" Steve genuinely has no clue about what would cause such strung out guilt. "A midnight snack? We're both a little stressed out, I get it…"

He trails off when Danny shakes his head. Somehow he tenses further.

Then he takes one hand off the death grip in Steve's shirt and points to his feet.

Steve blanches.

"Don't know how I got here," Danny whispers.

There's no need for it now, but Steve constricts his hold around Danny anyway. As if that will keep him safe from his own subconscious. "You…?"

Danny nods. "Woke up when you came in."

Blowing out a messy breath, Steve hopes Danny can't hear the way his own heart thuds a triplet of unease. "I'm sorry then."

This must be unexpected for Danny, who lifts his head and sits back enough to gaze at Steve with distraught eyes. A fearful cast glimmers in the candle's light. This resemblance to Steve's own face in the mirror sometimes makes his throat tight.

"For not catching you when you left our room," Steve explains. "I should have heard you leave."

"Not your fault."

"Still. I'll stop and wake you next time."

Danny rubs his eyes. "There wasn't even supposed to be a this time."

Steve's jittery heartrate agrees, in the sense that he is stunned at this relapse. That it should start now, four days after the biopsy. Danny, even in meager lighting, wears a neon sign of guilt, like this diagnosis is somehow his fault and he's made it worse with the sleepwalking episode.

At least he didn't get farther than the kitchen and their freezer. Steve shudders to think what would have happened if Danny opened the front door, fumbling out into the road or ocean while slumbering away.

"I'm closing our door at night from now on," Steve decides. "Then at least the sound will wake me if you try to unlatch it."

He tacks on, as a tease, "Maybe we can put a bell on the handle."

Danny's voice is barely there too. He doesn't banter back. "Sounds like a plan."

Steve settles in next to Danny and there is just the right amount of space for Danny's temple to hover near Steve's shoulder and for both of their feet to stretch out against the cupboard door under the sink. Steve's arches touch, but only if he bends his knees.

He holds a few fingers to the underside of Danny's wrist, pleased to feel the panicked racing of earlier gone.

It hits him then, that Danny didn't sleepwalk out of guilt at all.

A bobbled edge climbs Steve's chest, jagged yet cheery shapes as if Charlie's building a Lego tower in there. He breathes to shrink it down and the process doesn't do a lick of good.

His eyes are on Danny, who sniffs at the ice cream.

"Let me see that." Not waiting for an answer, Steve pilfers the tub. It's from a local ice cream company, complete with pastoral photo of cows on the front. "Fudge brownie swirl. I don't remember buying this."

"You didn't." Danny sighs and the Legos slice at Steve's heart. "Dylan gave it to me as a Christmas gift, a thank you for all the popsicles this summer. Bought it with his own money and everything."

"He still doing lawn work for people around the neighbourhood?"

"You bet. I offered some tips for trimming Isabelle's hedges."

"I'll have to hire him for our wilted lily beds."

After his own precursory sniff, Steve deems the ice cream safe to eat. He grabs a spoon off the drying board above their heads—a soup spoon, too big and round and indulgent.

But then, well, nutritional health is not exactly on Steve's top list of concerns right now.

The ice cream is soft from sitting in Danny's lap for the last ten minutes, so the spoon carves it up easily.

"'S yummy," Steve slurs out around a mouthful of chocolatey goodness. It's not too sweet, thanks to the cocoa accents, with lots of chewy brownie pieces. "Got some caramel in there too, I think. Kid has good taste."

He holds out the spoon to Danny. His nose wrinkles before he snorts and accepts it. He scoops out a more modest bite than Steve but eats it just as fast.

"This is so bad," says Danny, though Steve's not sure whether he means the spoon and germ sharing or the ice cream's fat content. Either way, he smiles. "I love it. I can't believe I'm saying this out loud, but this tastes better than Delano's homemade gelato."

"No!" Steve gives an exaggerated gasp. "I'm telling him during our next dinner reservation."

"Don't you dare."

They trade the spoon back and forth. This homely ablution is far more comforting than it has any right to be. Slurping in mellow quiet, the two men calm down from the sleepwalking scare, and Steve's belly hums with sugar and a peculiar sense of contentment.

His many doctors probably couldn't explain this, something he's never read about it in all those articles. Contentment? That's for healthy people. People who aren't living on a knife's edge of the unknown.

Maybe he is healthy, in the ways that actually matter.

He looks down at Danny again, excavating a large brownie chunk just like Grace does with her ice cream. One twist this way, another that way, Danny's tongue flipped to one side of his mouth all the while. Steve thinks he might burst, even at this silly picture of a man he never knew he needed. His insides glow with warmth.

"I love you, Danno. Always."

"Love you too," Danny replies, automatic. Then his endearing little quest for the brownie pauses and he meets Steve's eyes. "I think that's the part of this that's killing me."

A shudder wracks Danny's frame, all the way up to Steve's own shoulder. The contentment lingers, but it's stabbed clean through with regret. Regret also makes no sense, since Steve didn't do anything wrong. He didn't ask for any of this to happen and he plans to fight whatever diagnosis they give him with every breath in his body. Anything to stay with his family.

Logic, however, isn't on the menu lately.

Steve checks to see if Danny is still calm, that he won't flinch when Steve gently picks up his hand—and puts it over the incision scar. Steve's shirt acts as a buffer between skin and hand.

As predicted, Danny violently lurches back before his fingers reach full contact, even with the fabric. "Steve—"

"You don't have to find me, Danny. You're not losing me." Steve doesn't override Danny's taught arm, doesn't force him to do something he's not ready for. He just strokes the wrist in both hands. His thumbs glide over clammy skin until Danny isn't holding himself like a blasting cap sits next to him instead of a diseased liver.

Danny's eyes burn. "Yes, I am. You're right here but you're not and I…I don't…"

"No, Danny. What I mean is you're not losing me because I won't leave you."

"You can't control that." Danny drops to a whisper. "Don't pretend you can stay just because you want to."

A riptide wraps around Steve's throat. He swallows a few times, then leans down to kiss Danny's temple.

"I'm in this foxhole with you no matter what, remember?"

Danny flops his head back against the cupboard. "Til the end."

"Til the end, that's right. Even if the end happens sooner rather than later."

The fridge's droning is the only sound for a time. Danny pokes half heartedly at the brownie while they both ignore the fact they're fighting tears. It's a tranquil night, no wind. Even the mini palm trees aren't swaying, fronds still, stars more visible through the window across from them.

The pineapple candle wafts around the room in helix harmony with the vanilla scent of the laundry detergent Danny's started buying. Steve unwinds from the earlier scare and thinks that even if the only way he got to spend time with Danny is on a floor in a moonless night, he'd take it.

"Did I ever tell you about the time I accidentally sliced my eyebrow open?"

Danny blurts it out of the blue, no holds barred.

"What? No. When was this?" Steve stiffens, already angry with himself for missing this injury. Probably acquired during a stressful case.

But Danny surprises him again—"Back in Jersey. I was ten and trying to tie my bike to the car trunk."

"You…" Steve huffs a faint laugh. "How'd you manage that?"

Danny shrugs, but for some reason he's back to smiling. "With a bungee cord. The hook snapped off and I didn't duck out of the way in time."

"Bet your folks loved that."

"Oh yeah." Danny chuckles at remembered scenes. He finally frees that brownie chunk and presents it to Steve. "They lost their minds, even when we got to the hospital and had my eye stitched."

Steve doesn't bother removing his hands from Danny to take the spoon; he simply bites off the brownie whole.

"Animal," Danny grouses. Despite this, he continues feeding Steve, scoop by scoop. "There was so much blood. It was crazy how much one little boy's eye can bleed."

"You got a scar?"

"Sure do."

"No way. I would have seen that after all these years."

"I'm serious. Here, look." Danny sets down the spoon to peel back his eyebrow hair in the wrong direction.

And wonder of wonders, Steve spies a broad, milky lump of scar tissue. It blends in well with Danny's feathery eyebrow hair and lashes, uncannily parallel to the top curve of his brow. Sure, the scar looks small now, but Steve's had enough lacerations over the years to know how wide and deep that cut must have been at the time to create such a lasting mark.

"Kids and injuries, man," Steve says, to cover up how oddly shaken the thought of tiny Danny's face covered in blood leaves him.

Danny gives a wry head tilt. "More like kids and their twelve speed bikes."

The motion sends his head somewhere in the ballpark of Steve's shoulder. It's a warm weight, just like Danny himself, the ballast that keeps the ship of Steve's soul from capsizing.

"Come here. Get over here." Steve bodily hauls Danny closer with an arm around his back and down to his opposite elbow. Danny's bad knee ends up on top of Steve's and now, at least, his shoulder blade is against the liver scar. Small victories.

The incision site is sensitive sometimes, especially now after the biopsy. He imagines three itty bitty blobs in there. So harmless in radiology pictures, tiny white specs on the film.

Steve feels them sometimes. Not necessarily in a literal sense, although if Steve probes just right, a stubborn spot meets his fingertips. He feels the tumours more in the sense of how tired he is, how he can't touch the liver scar at all or Danny will get pale…

In the sense that they're beating Steve, one minute at a time. One after the other in a procession he is hopeless to stop. He has rarely failed a mission in his life, he's proud to say, but here he is, possibly failing the one person he cannot afford to leave.

Then, in an absurd effort to hide the real reason for this move—"You're hogging all the ice cream."

Danny elbows him. "I am not!"

"Oh? You're not monopolizing all the caramel swirls in here?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

They squabble for the spoon, until Danny starts to giggle that hysterical giggle he does when coming down off a stressful moment and at the sound Steve breathes properly again. Danny loses the spoon battle, mostly because Steve has longer arms and Danny's too tired to put up much of a fight.

There it is again—the strange urge to open his mouth.

Steve wrestles the impulse back where it belongs, safe and untouched inside his heart's hidey hole. He feels sad, childish, and fizzy all at the same time. Steve makes a mental note to ignore this feeling at all costs and he sets the ice cream on the floor for an excuse to dispel nervous energy in his hands.

"My parents fed me ice cream after the hospital visit when I got woozy from low blood sugar," says Danny, head slumping back against Steve's shoulder. Hair tickles his chin. "Caramel chocolate, kind of like this one. That's what made me think of it."

Ice cream is not what made Danny remember this story, Steve recognizes full well, but he nods along to Danny's fib just the same. Wraps both arms around him and fishes for his stomach.

Danny sighs again. "We're just a coupla old fools, huh?"

"Sure, but I'm an old fool with you. That's the part I care about."

So flush together, Steve feels the exact moment Danny misses a breath, a beat. His heart does too, against Steve's palm.

They sit together in contented silence, both savouring the presence of the other. Neither relaxes enough to doze off, yet Steve senses that they're resting in a different way, one they need more than sleep. If Danny shifts just right, Steve can feel his partner's own liver incision, the bottom tail of it.

He drinks in the warm weight that is Danny Williams and it makes him believe that grace might be sufficient after all, that maybe he's fulfilled his mission in ways he can't see yet but have been there all along.

Maybe you're not failing.

"Can I touch it?" Steve asks, hushed. "The eyebrow scar?"

"Mmm…" Danny deliberates, as if he has the high ground and isn't sitting half in Steve's lap. Physically, when Danny is worn like this, it would be laughably easy to overpower him.

But Steve wouldn't dare. If he says no, Steve will respect it.

Thankfully Danny nods, just once.

Steve takes his hand off Danny's stomach to reach up for his eye. Careful fingers brush back the hair and hesitate…then land on the scar.

It's firmer under the pad of Steve's index than he expected, the scar hardened by follicle growth around it and time. Danny's lashes flick his wrist, his breaths hot on the underside of Steve's arm. Steve waits to see if Danny will get uncomfortable or overwhelmed by Steve's hand so close to his face, but he simply gazes out the window overhead.

Funny, Steve asking for something Danny himself doesn't want.

And maybe they're both out in a boat, miles away from shore. Lost without direction. But together, together in this boat adrift from certainty and together for however long they have left. There's no greater wonder in Steve's life than this.

Danny closes his eyes, a relaxed thing as if he enjoys the warmth of Steve's hand, and Steve feels the strangest sense of peace. Of hope, not that the future will be long necessarily, but that it will be good because they're together, and it's the only important priority anymore.

Contentment wells inside his chest again to the point that he finds himself…happy. Real happy, not the temporary kind that lasts only for a good day.

"Kids and their scars," Steve echoes. He removes his hand to pat Danny's chest instead. "I'm glad that if it…if I have to go through this, at least I'm not alone. I'm doing it with you."

"It's an awful scar." Danny's tone comes out quiet, paper thin. He isn't talking about his eyebrow.

"Yeah, but it represents being given a second chance, loved to the point of sacrifice. Can't beat a visual reminder like that."

Neither is Steve.