Work Text:
The first time, they’re in bed, legs tangled and gradually coming down from a particular kind of high. It’s the type that can loosen the tongue and has made men say things they didn’t completely mean all throughout history, probably, but Danny is still ill-prepared when Steve murmurs into the pillow that he’s mashed his face into and says something that sounds suspiciously like, “Christ, marry me.”
He stops scritching his nails over Steve’s scalp. “What?”
Steve raises his head just enough to peer at Danny. His face is flushed and his hair is sticking up at odd angles. “What?” he echoes, so hey, maybe Danny misheard.
Or maybe he didn’t. He isn’t going to push either way.
*
The second time is in broad daylight, out in the open, and with no pillows to obfuscate Steve’s words. They’re bickering, as they do, while the whole team is gathered around a table at Kamekona’s and watching the back and forth like a game of Olympic beach volleyball.
Danny has long since forgotten what either of their original points were by the time Tani breaks in with a deadpan, “It’s so nice to see the fire is still burning after all these years of marriage.”
“It is, isn’t it?” Jerry asks. “Really gives one hope.”
Junior opens his mouth next, but Danny doesn’t catch what he says, because he’s distracted by Steve leaning in and telling him cheerfully, close to his ear, “We should get married for real. That’d show them.”
“Hardy har,” Danny manages, a little weaker than he would have liked. “Caving to peer pressure won’t make you cool, Steve.”
Steve leans back to where he originally was. “I’m already cool,” he asserts, which is pretty much just bait for another round of argy-bargy-ing, so Danny obliges by taking him up on it.
*
The third time is both more and less complicated.
When Danny gets back to his own office with the malasadas he’s been craving all morning, Steve is there. This, by itself, isn’t much of a surprise. The babysitter called in sick with the flu, so it’s an unplanned take-Charlie-to-work day, and Steve eagerly volunteered to keep an eye on him while Danny went on his coffee and Hawaiian donuts run. Even now that they’re living together and Steve gets to see the kids almost exactly as much as Danny does, he still jumps at any chance to spend time with them, and obviously, Danny both empathizes and approves.
So yeah – Steve in Danny’s office, no surprise.
Steve down on one knee in Danny’s office? That’s a surprise to the point where it’s a wonder that Danny’s shoes aren’t dripping with coffee right now. He’s holding on to the bag of malasadas so tightly his knuckles are white.
Steve isn’t even looking at him. The first person to spot him lurking in the door opening is Charlie, whose face breaks out into a huge grin. That’s gratifying, at least. “Danno! Hi!”
“Hi Danno,” Steve adds. He’s grinning too, but he’s still down on one knee, for whatever reason. He might be doing it just to make Danny nervous. At this point, Danny has to consider the possibility that Steve is doing all of this on purpose, as some kind of calculated, highly strategized attack. He is a SEAL. The US government might have brainwashed him into thinking any of this makes sense.
Danny rediscovers his voice. “Hi,” he says, belatedly. He’s starting to feel foolish, stuck propping the door open, so he steps into the office, carefully circles around Charlie and Steve on the floor, deposits the spoils of his trip on the desk and falls down heavily in his chair. It’s no good. He needs a bigger desk or a lower chair if he wants to block out what Steve’s doing. “What’s going on here?”
Steve looks at Charlie, who looks at him, so Steve takes pity on Danny and explains. “I’m a prince now. King Charlie just knighted me.”
For the first time, Danny takes notice of the ruler in Charlie’s hand. He’s brandishing it like it’s a sword he personally pulled from some old English stone, which seems mildly dangerous, but it’s not Danny’s main concern at the moment.
Steve is holding out a hand to him, beckoning. “C’mere. Charlie can marry us and you can be my queen.”
Contained in that sentence is the word Danny was trying very hard not to think about. This either really is part of some sinister plan on Steve’s part, or he must have read what Danny was thinking on his face. Occasionally, there are some drawbacks to how well they know each other.
“Danno’s not a queen!” Charlie crows, delighted at what he seems to think is a really good joke. At least one Williams is laughing. “He’s a princess. Princes marry princesses.”
Danny stays seated right where he is and pointedly ignores Steve’s reaching hand. “Thank you, buddy. That’s just the distinction I wanted you to make.”
“I could be the princess, if your masculinity is threatened,” Steve offers, and this, this is the point where Danny really has to put a stop to it before he starts screaming.
He grabs the bag of malasadas and rustles it as much as possible while folding it open. “Hey,” he says, “anybody hungry?”
Of course they are, because they always are. Kindergartners and Navy SEALs are remarkably alike in more ways than the average person would suspect.
*
The fourth time is far more straightforward, but has far worse timing. Tax season rolls around, and Danny complains about it like he does every year, and Steve’s brilliant comment, while he’s chewing on the end of a pen and frowning over his own numbers, is, “I bet this is less work for married people.”
“Yeah, well, we’re not married,” Danny snaps back.
Steve rolls his eyes. “I’m just saying.”
Which is exactly the problem, but Danny doesn’t share that thought out loud. He’s annoyed enough about all the paperwork, so he doesn’t need to add a fight with Steve to top it all off.
*
By the fifth time, Danny has had it.
Hawaii is not a place that lacks warmth, so hot beverages other than coffee and tea are rare. Danny, however, did not grow up on a tiny rock in the middle of the Pacific, so every once in a while, he gets a craving for something not that easily located in Hawaii. Usually it’s decent pizza, sometimes it’s disco fries, once in a while it’s chicken savoy, and occasionally, when the calendar starts running towards the end of the year and there should be a change in the weather that stays out, it’s his mom’s hot chocolate.
So, as a man of action, he whips up a pan full of it, steaming hot and making his mouth water from the smell, because out of all the things he misses, this is the one that is by far the easiest to replicate. It’s just some whole milk, heavy cream, sugar, a dash of vanilla and some melted dark chocolate topped with whipped cream, which is all stuff he has at home, anyway. There’s nothing overly fancy about it, but once Steve gets his hands on a mug, he responds to it like he’s just discovered the meaning of the word orgasm for the first time – which is ridiculous because Danny knows, from extensive personal experience, that that would be a blatant lie.
So Steve sits at the kitchen table and moans and Danny stands by the stove still uselessly stirring the mixture, until he eventually gives up. He turned off the heat minutes ago and he’s just playing pretend at this point, so he puts the lid on the pan and leaves it be. Instead, he watches Steve, half amused, half annoyed and half endeared and inappropriately aroused, because everything is always at least 150% with this man.
Steve is so caught up in his fluttery-eyed, chocolatey bliss, that it takes until he’s reached the bottom of his #1 uncle in the world!!! mug before he even realizes he’s being observed. He beams. “God, Danny,” he says, so wrecked it makes Danny kind of jealous of sugar and cacao and dairy, “you need to marry me. I want to keep you around forever.”
Danny licks his lips, because they suddenly feel very dry. Oh, hell. “Okay,” he says.
Steve pauses just long enough in the fellating of his spoon to laugh. “Good. Because I’m going to need you to make this for me every day.”
Danny needs something else, and that something else is death by chocolate. He hasn’t had a drop of his own concoction yet, so he turns back to the stove to pour himself a mug, too. It’s a custom made one that matches Steve’s, declaring him the #1 Danno – a present from the kids, but one that has Steve’s fingerprints all over it, which is not something he needs to be thinking about ten seconds after he’s finally been hit with the slowly growing awareness that he doesn’t just want to spend the rest of his life with Steve, but he wants to do the whole cheesy thing where he gets to openly declare this intention in front of all of their friends and family too, and he wants the ring, and he wants the anniversaries they can both pretend not to really care about because they’re men, and he wants the cake and the pictures and the terrible dancing and oh, God, he wants to call Steve his husband.
Steve startles him with how suddenly he appears, sliding his mug over the counter until it’s snug with Danny’s. “Got anything for me?” he asks, hopefully.
Danny does not say “yes, whatever you want”, because that would probably clue Steve in that some momentously huge things are happening in Danny’s brain. “Be careful or you won’t fit into your cargo pants anymore,” he says instead, because that’s obnoxious and normal enough.
Steve grins and reaches over to steal the already full Danno mug. “Worth it.”
Steve squirrels off to the living room, probably under the mistaken assumption that Danny is currently in possession of the power of will to fight back against brazen theft. Danny gets left behind with half a pan of hot chocolate, Steve’s empty mug, and the question whether Steve even realizes how heavy-handed the metaphor is that he just created.
*
The sixth time is not the sixth time so much as another first, because while Danny will happily blame all of it on Steve, it should be noted that in all fairness Steve is not the one who instigates it directly, this once.
“Steve,” Danny whispers.
No response.
“Steve,” Danny tries again, hissing into the darkness. He has tried to hold off, but he knows he’s not going to get a wink of sleep if he doesn’t do this. “Hey Steve, Steve, Steve. Wake up, it’s important.”
Steve does not, in fact, give off any signs of waking up, but burrows into his pillow a little deeper. Usually Danny takes some pride in seeing how much laziness and longing for a good night’s sleep he managed to sneak into the Navy’s programming, but this is the absolute worst timing.
He tugs on Steve’s pillow. Steve has to be awake by now, but he keeps his eyes closed and clings to the pillow like it’s the only thing keeping him afloat in the middle of the ocean.
“What?” he growls. “We’re not even on call tonight. If something happened, let the kids handle it.”
Danny lets go of the pillow. “Sure, I’ll go ask Junior if you want to marry me.”
That, finally, gets Steve to listen up. His eyes snap open and he pushes up until he’s propped on his elbow, mirroring Danny. His cheek is marred by pillow creases, but he looks more alert than could reasonably be expected. “What?” he repeats. He sounds a lot less surly this time, and a lot more like he might be holding his breath afterwards.
“Marry me,” Danny says, because it’s short and sweet and he’s not sure he’ll be able to get much else past the heart beating right in his throat. It’s the only truly relevant bit, anyway.
Steve gets moving again. He rolls and shuffles until he’s on top of Danny, straddling him with his elbows braced on either side of Danny’s head, staring down at him with a focus intense enough that it should probably be reserved for nuclear bombs with a ticking clock.
Not that Danny doesn’t feel like he’s going to explode, nuclear or not. Steve doesn’t seem to be running for the hills, but he hasn’t said anything, either.
After what feels like an eternity of scrutiny, Steve finally speaks up. “Are you serious?”
Danny resists the urge to squirm and makes a scoffing sound instead. “Would I wake you up in the middle of the night to ask you to marry me if I weren’t serious?”
It’s not an answer and Steve isn’t letting him get away with it. Steve keeps quiet, waiting.
“Yes,” Danny admits. “Yes, I’m serious, jerk.”
“Yes,” Steve says, with so many complicated emotions behind it that for a moment Danny thinks he’s echoing Danny’s yes and mad about it somehow, but then he realizes that that’s not anger, that’s not anger at all, that’s-
Steve is kissing him before he manages to put a word to it. That goes on for a while, and then it gets joined by more bodily contact and the actual kissing melts into something closer to panting into each other’s mouths, and then Danny tenses up and not much later Steve does, too, and they end up happily sprawled across the bed and each other.
“I didn’t think you’d want to,” Steve says after a while, softly, lips brushing Danny’s temple.
Danny keeps drawing aimless shapes on the inside of Steve’s arm. “Is that why you were dropping hints all over the place?”
“Hints?”
Danny would call Steve out on obvious bullshit, except Steve’s body is still boneless and his voice is the same nighttime whisper and he very simply doesn’t possess enough skill as a liar for any of that. Not here, not while Danny literally has his arms around him.
Which puts things into perspective. Danny very lightly scrapes his nail over the soft skin in the crook of Steve’s arm, and Steve shivers. Danny slips his fingers around Steve’s elbow, holding on. “So I may have thought you were passive-aggressively trying to get me to ask your hand in marriage for several months.”
“Several months? I don’t have that level of self-control when it comes to you, Danny.” Steve laughs, but cuts himself off with a yawn.
“Maybe it was subconscious,” Danny suggests.
“Or maybe you were thinking about it, but you wanted me to convince you.”
“Pah,” Danny says, “like I needed convincing.”
Steve drops a kiss to Danny’s hairline and Danny can feel that he’s grinning. “Sleep.”
“Old man,” Danny says, but he’s not even sure Steve hears him anymore, because he has that annoying superhuman ability to nod off between one second and the next.
Danny pulls the blanket a little higher and lets his own eyes fall shut, and what was already a near perfect night is also just generally a good night, because he too slips away quickly and without any real effort. He dreams of two old men on a beach. There’s a sense of déjà vu over it all, like this is not the first time he’s wanted it.