Work Text:
Steve woke from a sound sleep, the vestiges of his less than pleasant dream dissipating in the rush of adrenaline. In the blink of an eye he was on high alert and had rolled out of bed into a defensive crouch. He was just about to slide out the door, knife in hand, when he recognized the stumbling shuffle of feet and the muffled curse as a toe was stubbed on a door frame. The grip on his knife relaxed and all the pent up air in his lungs left his body in a quiet exhalation of relief. Right, it was just Danny making his way to the bathroom in the dark.
His partner seemed to be under the mistaken impression that turning on a light would be more likely to wake Steve up unpleasantly than making unusual sounds in his normally silent house. He was really going to have to put a nightlight in the hallway so Danny’s nightly ritual stopped freaking him out. He was used to revving high at the slightest provocation, but this jolt to awareness from complete unconsciousness couldn’t be good for him and would eventually dull his responses through repetition, so yeah; nightlight.
He put his knife back in the sheathe he had rigged to the headboard of his bed and lay back down to wait out the last few seconds of his heart beating at triple time. He could hear Danny flushing the toilet and washing his hands before quietly opening the door and making his hesitant way down the hallway back to his room, his fingertips making a whispering sound on the wall as he navigated in the gloom. Steve smiled to himself at Danny’s less than stealthy maneuverings. His partner would never make a decent commando that was for sure, but Steve wouldn’t have him any other way. It was reassuring to be able to pick up where Danny was because even when sitting still, the guy somehow seemed to make noise. It was comforting to Steve to know he was in the house just a few rooms away.
Because the one thing he hated most about coming back home after his father’s death, other than the actual fact of his father being dead, was the ringing quiet of being the only person in his rather secluded house. The neighborhood Steve lived in had a healthy amount of distance between residences and the everyday sounds of his neighbors were muffled by the screening foliage that surrounded all the homes. There were an infinite amount of examples over the last few months of him feeling like he was going to go insane from the oppressive solitude with nothing but the sound of the ocean and his own thoughts to disturb the stillness. He had felt an empty and echoing nothingness where his memory knew there should be the noise of life and family. There was no sound of Dad watching the game or tinkering in the garage, no Mom humming in the kitchen over home cooked meals, and no Mary talking on the phone for hours or listening to music too loudly.
He had spent his entire adult life on bases and in barracks surrounded by other people. In fact, before he had returned home one of the marks of luxury to him had been the little snatches of privacy he could occasionally manage between missions. Once, he had even spent an entire week of leave time camping in blissful solitude in the middle of the vast wilderness of the Bridger-Teton National Forest in Wyoming. It had been the most remote place he could think of while staying inside U.S. borders and he hadn’t seen another human being during the entire trip. At the time, the silence and solitude had been a relief.
Now he couldn’t imagine wanting to do that ever again. He wasn’t used to having a bathroom to himself let alone three. He had rarely eaten a meal alone in ten years and even though his position of command had kept just that little bit of separateness from his men, he had still had their habits and quirks to meld and overlap with his own. He wasn’t used to the sheer space afforded to him by his vacant childhood home.
Now Danny was here. He had been here for two weeks ever since his apartment had washed away in a flood of
bathwater and detritus due to his neighbor’s forgetfulness in filling her tub. Steve felt a guilty gratefulness to old Mrs. Peters and her absentmindedness. He had been steadily losing his own mind in the silence of his house, trying to fill in the yawning spaces with repairs and working on the Marquis or by exhausting himself with 10k runs and recklessly long swims in the ocean. Nothing had been working and he had even started to entertain the borderline suicidal idea of taking in a renter or something when Danny’s apartment had collapsed in a soggy heap.
Steve had of course offered his guest room as a purely altruistic show of sympathetic solidarity, but it hadn’t taken him long to realize that having Danny around would banish some of the ghosts he lived with. Now there was someone to have dinner and a beer with after work. Someone who would make coffee in the morning and leave the television droning to itself in the living room because Danny was too lazy to turn it off when he went to the kitchen to make a snack. There were dirty dishes in the dishwasher and a different brand of shaving cream in the medicine cabinet in the upstairs bathroom.
And always there was noise. Danny mumbling to himself in the morning as he got ready for work, his voice from the lanai as he had his nightly phone call with his daughter, or just his breathing as he sat and read work files or did research on his laptop. Even when Danny wasn’t home, had gone to the store or to pick up Grace, Steve could still feel his presence, had memories of Danny in every room and the soothing expectation that he would be back soon. Steve thanked his lucky stars that Danny had needed a place to live.
Steve yawned and took a look at his bedside alarm clock. It read 3:28 in glowing red numbers, too early to get up even by SEAL standards. Steve took a moment to listen to the darkness. There were no sounds of a threat and through the open windows of the master and guest bedrooms he could hear the weird huffing noises a sleeping Danny made that weren’t quite loud enough to be called a snore. The first few nights that heavy breathing had nearly driven Steve to violence, but now he listened for a few seconds with fondness. Danny was asleep and safe in the next room and Steve yawned again, smiled in satisfaction, and closed his eyes. It was barely ten seconds later that he was fast asleep.
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Steve emerged from the ocean after his morning swim in the pink dawn light. He shook his head in an attempt to dislodge the seawater from his ears and jogged up to where he had left his towel draped over the back of a chair on the lanai. As he scrubbed the moisture from his hair and body he could hear the sounds of Danny moving around the kitchen making coffee and breakfast while the TV told itself the news from the living room.
He ambled into the kitchen in his damp board shorts and leaned against the door jamb, taking pleasure in the fact of another person’s morning ritual. Danny was at the stove turning eggs over easy in a frying pan as whole wheat bread toasted in the toaster oven. The coffee maker was gurgling through its last few seconds of brewing and Steve inhaled the enticing aroma of a meal he hadn’t had to make himself. After a few moments of watching his partner he crossed over to where Danny had set two places at the kitchen table and sat in his usual chair to pick up the paper left next to his plate. Then he took a few more seconds to observe Danny before diving in to the day’s accounting of tragedy and mayhem.
Danny was mostly dressed for work in creased khakis and a light blue button down. Steve had noticed that while Danny spent the day in his spotless professional armor, in the morning he waited to pull his garments close around himself until the very last minute. Morning Danny’s sleeves were rolled to the elbow and the top two buttons of his shirt were undone so a hint of chest hair and the curved white neck of his wife-beater undershirt peeked out. His tie choice for the day was lying abandoned and ignored over the back of his chair, waiting to be picked up and knotted expertly before the front room mirror as they left for work. His hair had been styled in its usual bouffant manner, making Steve think of a shorter, blonder version of Ray Liotta from Goodfellas, but his face was open and relaxed in way it never was on the job, as if he put on his air of hawkish suspicion at the same time as his tie throttled around his neck. It gave Steve a warm feeling in his chest that Danny trusted him enough to let him see him like this.
Steve lowered his eyes to the paper as Danny started to turn from the stove with the frying pan in his hand. Then he frowned as he realized the paper wasn’t folded to the front page as usual. Instead, he was left looking at the classifieds, several individual boxes circled in red. A sense of apprehension overtook him as he realized he was looking at ads for apartments for rent.
Danny had slid two eggs apiece to each of their plates and was returning with his stack of toast by the time Steve felt his expression was close enough to polite interest that he could look up from the paper without displaying the turmoil of emotions he was feeling. He watched Danny sit down across from him and pick up his knife to slather butter over his toast. He decided that a cautiously offensive volley was called for.
“So, you trying to tell me you’re fed up with living with me already?”
Steve let a small smile curve his lips despite the anxiety that was starting to quiver in his stomach. Suddenly the eggs on his plate didn’t smell so appetizing. Danny looked up from his toast and nodded with a definite air of determination around his eyes.
“It’s not that I don’t appreciate the hospitality, because I really, really do, but I can’t keep mooching off of you indefinitely, man. It’s been two weeks already and I haven’t so much as looked at a single apartment. I’m going to remedy that now. I figure this week or next week I should be able to find something decent and then you can have your house to yourself again.”
Steve looked down at the paper, half of his brain absorbing the details of the places on offer while the other half concentrated on quelling the low level panic his body was feeling at the thought of having to cope with an empty house again. He beat down the fluttery feelings ruthlessly and concentrated on what he was reading. His brows knit together even as his heart slowed down.
“Danny, these places are awful. This one here is like a mile from the airport; you’d have to nail down everything breakable every time a plane went overhead. This one is in the middle of Triad territory and this one is a fourth floor walk up with only one bedroom. Where would you put Grace?”
He slapped the paper back down on the table and looked over to see Danny watching him with an expression Steve could only describe as wry.
“What?”
“Nothing, Steve. I just had a thought. So what would you suggest? You know this island like the back of your hand right? So help me out here. I need to find a place to live pronto, or we’re going to have to start talking about what you need from me in regards to rent.”
Steve blinked in surprise.
“Rent? Why would I charge you rent? You’re my partner, you can stay here as long as you need or want to. Plus you can’t live in any of these places Danny. You’re a cop for Christ’s sake, what are you going to do when the Triads realize you’re living in the middle of their turf?”
Danny closed his eyes and pressed his thumb and forefinger into them.
“Look, partner, I can justify to myself crashing here for a couple of weeks while I get my shit together, but that is it. My shit is now gotten. I have first, last, and security saved up, my wardrobe is almost completely replaced, and my daughter has had her one weekend at Uncle Steve’s house. I am officially back on my feet and it is time I moved out and got out of your hair. This was supposed to be a temporary arrangement, if you will recall, and the acceptable time of imposition on a friend has now lapsed. So you gonna help me or what?”
Danny removed his fingers from his eyes and looked up with belligerent challenge written all over his face. Steve knew Danny was making sense, at least if he took into account how something like this would normally work, but Steve didn’t want Danny to find someplace else to live. He liked having him here where he could see him and know that he was safe and right there to talk to or check up on without any effort. He didn’t feel imposed upon or taken advantage of and he didn’t see the need for Danny to move into another shithole apartment when having him here was an optimal solution for everyone involved. He decided to try another tack.
“Look, Danny, you don’t need to pay any rent. My dad paid off this house ten years ago and all I need to cover is taxes and repairs. If you want we can go over the utilities and groceries and stuff and split it down the middle. Seriously, you’re not going to find a better place than your last apartment without some kind of miracle involved, and we all know how that ended, so why don’t you just stay here?”
Danny’s eyes widened before they narrowed in speculation and his head tilted slightly. He stared hard at Steve in silence for a few seconds and Steve was just starting to feel a little uncomfortable when Danny started speaking again.
“So, what, you just want to be roomies forever then? Have you forgotten everything I said when you first offered to let me stay here? I need to leave, Steve. Even the governor is going to start asking for an invite to the wedding soon. This arrangement can’t go on indefinitely.”
Danny heaved a big sigh.
“Look, once again, I appreciate everything you’ve done, but the whole honeymoon glow is going to fade pretty soon. You’re what, thirty-four, thirty-five? What happens the next time your Navy chick hits land? You planning on leaving a sock on the front doorknob as a warning, because let me tell you, that crap got old my freshman year of college and I’d rather not revisit that. You really want me cramping your style on your next booty call?”
Steve could feel his eyebrows raise a few inches up his forehead.
“I think Catherine and I could manage to get together without offending your delicate sensibilities. It’s not like we fuck in every room of the house. I think my bedroom is sufficient, it always has been in the past.”
Steve could feel his amusement start to grow as Danny scowled at him from across three feet of polished wood. Danny obviously didn’t have a solid argument if this was the best he could come up with and Steve could smell victory around the corner.
“Look, I think we can manage that kind of thing like adults. We get into far more awkward situations at work; I think having Catherine around occasionally isn’t going to cause the world to end. I’m not saying you have to live here forever, just that you may as well live here until you can afford a house of your own that is suitable and safe for you and your daughter to live in.”
As the boss, Steve knew exactly how much Danny made and, thanks to the mandatory background check he had needed to do to get the detective approved to the taskforce, he knew the expenses Danny had, which included the mortgage on his and Rachel’s old house back in New Jersey. There had been a reason Danny had lived in such a dumpy apartment to begin with. Steve knew it would be years before Danny could afford his own house, especially if he couldn’t sell the Jersey house anytime soon, and that was just fine with him. Hopefully enough time would go by that inertia would just take over and they wouldn’t have to ever have this conversation again.
Danny shoved away from the table and picked up his empty plate and mug. He turned to bring his dishes to the dishwasher.
“All I’m saying Steve is that it goes both ways. Say I meet someone I want to start a relationship with; you really think I want to navigate treacherous dating waters for the first time in over ten years with you sleeping in the room next door? No, Steven, the answer to that question is a resounding no.”
The dishwasher door slammed shut with authority.
“What happens when I want to bring someone home for a romantic dinner or something? You going to hide in your room with your iPod cranked to eleven so you can’t hear what’s going on in my room? You think I want to be doing that when Catherine or the next friend with benefits you have shows up on the doorstep? We’re not in our early twenties anymore Steve, this kind of thing is not kosher. Yeah, I’m still a little fucked up over the divorce and everything, but I really hope that isn’t a permanent condition. I would like to find someone to spend the rest of my life with and I can’t do that while living in limbo with you.”
Danny stood in the middle of the kitchen with his hands on his hips and gave a shell-shocked Steve a hard glare for few minutes before throwing up his hands and grabbing his tie.
“Okay, you think on that for a few minutes, sunshine, while I go finish getting ready for work. Don’t think too hard though because you still need to shower and get dressed and I do not want to be late for the fiasco du jour, so get a move on.”
With that final demand Danny swept out of the room and headed up the stairs to do whatever arcane things he needed to do before starting the day. Steve mechanically scraped his untouched breakfast into the garbage and headed up the stairs, shut himself in the bathroom, and turned on the shower. His thoughts jumbled crazily as he stripped off his shorts and got in under the warm spray of water.
He couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of this before Danny mentioned it. Sure, he knew Catherine was due into port in the next couple of weeks, but he honestly hadn’t spared any brainpower to the logistics of her staying with him while Danny was here. Now he felt uncomfortable with the idea of trying to have sex with Cat while Danny made his sleeping noises in the room next door. It seemed wrong somehow, which was ridiculous since he had mastered the art of jerking off silently in a room full of people during basic.
But even weirder was the squirmy feeling he got in his guts at the thought of Danny fucking some faceless woman while he tried not to listen from his own room. His thoughts were caught on images of Danny sliding a plate of eggs and toast in front of Steve’s place at the kitchen table, but with someone other than Steve sitting there. He pictured Danny with his arm around a petite figure on the couch or his big laugh mixing with a dainty giggle on the lanai.
He didn’t like it.
Steve shook water out of his eyes and grabbed his shower gel from its spot next to Danny’s on the shelf. As he started to wash the dried salt from his chest he frowned at the tiles.
Why didn’t he like it?
Steve knew in the abstract that Danny was single and free to start a new relationship with someone. Just because Steve had met Rachel and Grace and thought of them as Danny’s family didn’t mean there wasn’t room for another woman in Danny’s life. In fact, it would be weird to assume that Danny wasn’t interested in trying again. So why was Steve assuming it?
He rinsed off the suds and reached for his shampoo, knocking off Danny’s conditioner and automatically stooping to scoop it up from the floor and putting it back in its proper place.
The truth was Steve had Cat to scratch an itch when she was around, but that was as far as it went. He didn’t need to call her every night to talk about their days or worry about what she would like for her birthday. Come to think of it, had he ever even known when her birthday was? Steve thought back for a moment, but no, he didn’t think they’d ever shared those details with each other.
Over all the months of stir crazy solitude he had endured upon coming home, he had never felt the need to pester Catherine with phone calls just to hear another person’s voice. When the silence had been too deafening he had gone for a swim or ripped out a wall or, when he had really needed to and thought he could get away with it, he had called Danny to go for a beer or to come over and watch a game.
In fact, he had Danny to do all of those everyday things with.
They argued in the car about Hawaii vs. New Jersey and they talked about Danny’s problems with Rachel or Steve’s latest disaster with internet shopping for parts for the Marquis. Over the past two weeks, Steve had just wandered into whatever room Danny was in when he felt the need for some company. Sometimes he poked at Danny just to provoke a rant, and sometimes he sat quietly with something to read and just enjoyed having another person in the room with him.
Shit, he was in a frigging committed relationship with Danny Williams, wasn’t he?!
Steve let his head thunk gently on the tiled wall in front of him as shampoo lather slid down his neck.
Yes, he was, he totally was in a relationship and he hadn’t even known it. No wonder Danny was always going on about the HPD rumor mill. Jesus, if you looked at it that way, then he’d been cheating on Danny with Catherine for months, and he’d been too stupid to realize it. Okay, fine, alright he could handle this. It wasn’t the end of the world. He could just calmly march downstairs and tell Danny he was right and then they could find Danny a place to live and it would all be perfectly fine.
Except….
Steve still didn’t want Danny to move out, in fact the thought made him feel hot and uncomfortable all over. The idea of Danny alone in another crappy apartment while Steve rattled around his house like the last cookie in the jar made his chest hurt.
So, okay, so Danny had to stay.
What to do about Cat then? Could he break it off with her, tell her he wasn’t interested in their arrangement anymore? Steve considered that for a moment. He felt a brief pang at the idea of losing a reliable source of great sex, but that was it. Alright then, decision made, he would end things with Catherine.
He ducked his head under the water and washed away the last traces of shampoo from his head before turning off the spray and stepping out of the shower reaching for a towel. He was toweling off his back when he froze in place.
Wait, had he just made a conscious decision to have a relationship with Danny? Danny who was a guy and his partner and had an eight year old daughter and enough baggage to choke Honolulu International Airport?
And what, was he just never going to have sex again in order to keep this living situation with Danny going?
Unless he wanted to start having sex with Danny of course.
Again his brain stuttered. Wait, ‘of course’? No ‘of course’! Steve was not going to entertain the thought of Danny and him in bed, it was too weird. Danny was short and loud and blond and, oh yeah, a man and that was just right off the table right there. He liked tall, leggy, brunette women with smooth voices and soft curves and Danny was the absolute complete opposite of that! There was nothing attractive about Danny, nothing at all. Sure he was funny and fun to get riled up and Steve had noticed objectively that Danny was in excellent shape for a civilian and his hands were kind of mesmerizing when he waved them around and his eyes were really, really blue, but he didn’t, you know, do anything for Steve sexually.
Right?
Steve tried to take a mental step back and brought up an image of Danny sitting across from him at the kitchen table that morning. Danny had been freshly shaven, his jaw a little pink from the razor and his teeth shiny and white from having just been brushed. The rolled back sleeves of his shirt had shown off the muscle definition of his forearms, the skin tanned and the hair on his arms glinting gold and soft looking. Steve’s brain supplied him with the memory of Danny’s open shirt collar, the other man’s Adam’s apple dewed with a slight perspiration as the heat of the day started to rise with the sun over the horizon.
Huh.
Steve looked down at himself, surprised to see the beginnings of an erection starting to perk up his cock from where it had been lying quiescent. His stomach was buzzing with a low arousal as more images of Danny flew through his head. He remembered Danny beside him on the couch, relaxed and smiling as they watched the New Jersey Devils game Danny had insisted on. He thought about having breakfast with Danny in the mornings, arguing over the radio station in the Camaro on the way to work, poring over case files in the living room after dinner. In all of those memories, Steve was surprised to realize he could recall every facial expression, every word and accompanying hand gesture, hell, he could even recall exactly what Danny had been wearing.
Steve looked up to his own stunned expression in the misty mirror in front of him. Maybe he was sexually attracted to Danny a bit. Okay, definitely attracted and more than just a little bit.
He rubbed a hand over his head and waited for the freak out to overtake him, except there was no hint of panic thrumming through his veins. Obviously his body was well acclimated to his attraction to his partner and had just been waiting for his conscious awareness to catch up. Fine, he could work with that. He wanted Danny and he needed to have Danny in his house and life in order to have any chance of having him. Therefore he needed a plan. Step one; under no circumstances could he let Danny find another place to live. Keeping Danny close would make it easier to feel out if his partner could possibly return his attraction.
Well, Danny had asked for his help to find a new place, so he would help him. He’d find the most unsuitable apartments he could and steer Danny clear of any possible candidates. He’d been Naval Intelligence, he could misdirect like nobody’s business. So step one was a go, now what the hell was step two?
Steve’s musings were interrupted by a heavy banging on the bathroom door.
“Yo, princess, get the lead out, we need to have left five minutes ago! I’m sure your make up is perfect, let’s go!”
Steve grinned.
“Be there in a sec! Go shellac another coat of hairspray on or something!”
He heard a snort from the other side of the door.
“Whatever funny guy, I’ll be downstairs ready to leave for work like a real live grown up. Try to find something to wear that isn’t wrinkled or bloodstained, okay? Keep in mind you need to fake a modicum of professionalism today; we have a meeting with the D.A.”
With that parting shot, Danny’s quick footsteps moved away from the door and clattered down the stairs. Steve wrapped his towel around his hips and made his way to his room to find something to wear that would throw Danny into a spluttering fit. He was already thinking about what the day would bring, but a part of his brain was busily whirring away on ideas for The Plan.
He could do this. He had stormed terrorist strongholds with nothing but a handgun and a prayer, he’d parachuted into hot zones with no back up and no clear exit strategy, and he’d even survived a professional review with the Secretary of the Navy and three Admirals with absolutely no sense of humor. He could totally figure out how to make one loudmouthed, opinionated detective, who already liked him, fall in love with him. This was cake.
Steve threw on a clean t-shirt as he tried to kill the butterflies in his stomach through the power of positive thinking alone. He took a deep breath, told himself to pull his shit together, strapped on his weapons and marched down the stairs to go to work.
Now, if he could just figure out how he was going to spend an entire day in public without broadcasting to the whole island that he was a complete idiot over his partner he’d call it a win.