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They’d been at it for nearly ten minutes, and in that time Danny had relearned what ‘Too Close for Comfort’ meant. He’d learnt it with elbows mostly, but also an extremely sharp chin which had prompted him to lecture Steve on the varieties of food that existed in the world because clearly someone needed more meat on their bones. Especially if they ended up in this kind of awkward situation ever again. There were no plans for that, but Danny knew his life and the chances of another armed grave robber forcing them into the smallest mausoleum known to man were depressingly high.
That been said after the initial ten minutes of flailing limbs and mild concussions, they settled into some sort of comfortable configuration that Danny was resolutely not thinking about at all.
Steve, as always, ruined it. “This counts as cuddling right, Danny?”
Danny dug his elbow back into Steve’s abdomen a little harshly. “No, Steve.”
“You are sitting in my lap,”
Urg.
“-my arms are around your waist,”
Just, seriously?
“-and you are leaning against me.”
“Steve,” Danny began in his angry voice, “no.”
They fell into silence at that, and Danny forced himself to focus on Steve’s breathing. The chest below him rising and falling in a steady pattern he made himself replicate. In and out, and in and out. Don’t think about the walls, or the door, or the locked door, which was locked.
Danny cursed loudly. The fingers at his hip twitched fractionally. Danny braced himself for the inevitable.
“Really, I don’t see why you’re against it. This is clearly cuddling.” Steve grumbled chin resting on the top of Danny’s head.
Danny made himself focus on the man wrapped around him. “The difference, Steve, is intent.”
“Intent?” Steve mocked lightly.
“Intent.” Danny nodded into the mottled darkness of the tomb. “This is not cuddling, because cuddling requires intent.”
“It took a while to get like this, that’s intent right?”
“Are you being deliberately obtuse?” Danny’s voice began to rise, “We are sitting like this because there are dead people boxes on three sides of us and barely enough room to breathe-“ his tone registered and he cut himself off before the hysteria could let itself out.
The arms around him tightened, “Dead people boxes?” Steve fished, and Danny was so desperate to not think about space and air and how two people in a sealed tomb could only last for so long without running out of both of them that he replied.
“That’s what you’re taking out of that?” Danny hand hit the granite wall on his right, “I don't know what their called. And don’t say coffins. They are not coffins. They are walls with dead people in them.”
“They’re called wall crypts.” The smugness could not be ignored.
Danny boggled, “How do you know that? How could you possibly have need to know that? Was one of your covert ops to disguise yourself as an undertaker?”
“Really Danny, it’s just common knowledge.”
Danny twisted out from under Steve’s chin, hit his leg on one wall of wall crypts and pushed his back against the other. It put him sideways on Steve’s lap, and cramped, but he did not care. “That, my friend, is not common knowledge. That is uncommon knowledge. Absolutely no-one besides you knows that and I’m a little suspicious that you’re making it up.”
Steve threw a hand up, and did not hit the walls. “Why would I make that up Danny?”
“To distract me.” Which was a little too close to home, but Steve just rolled his eyes impatiently.
“I’m not trying to distract you Danny, I’m trying to get you to admit that we are cuddling.” He squeezed those arms, pulling Danny back in against his chest, and Danny allowed it without resistance. “Is that so hard to do?”
“Yes it’s hard! Because this isn’t cuddling.”
“Because of intent?” Steve repeated.
“Exactly! Intent is important Steve. And I don’t intend to be cuddling you!”
Danny took a moment to focus on breathing, because his had sped up again, so it took some time to realise that the silence that had fallen wasn’t Steve giving him space to get himself under control, it was Steve emotionally retreating. Danny allowed himself several more long pulls of stale air while he worked out what exactly he’d said to shut Steve down. Fortunately it wasn’t hard to see where he’d gone wrong, and it didn’t take him long to decide on how to fix it.
The first step was to pull Steve’s arms from where they’d retreated to back around his waist. Steve tried to resist, so Danny clung hard.
“Intent, babe.” He used his soothing witnesses voice. “I didn’t intend to be forced into a room with less space and less ambiance than a closet by a gun wielding maniac. I didn’t intend to find myself having to choose between sitting in your lap or risking messing up my knee again. I didn’t even intend to go on a chase through a graveyard today, that was all on you buddy.” He squeezed Steve’s hands, still trapped around Danny where he’d put them. “And,” he took a fortifying breath and soldiered on, “I don’t intend our first time cuddling to be squashed on the floor of a dirty mausoleum while in the middle of hunting down grave robbers. So we are not cuddling, we are waiting patiently for someone to notice that we are missing, so that we can be rescued, so that we can go to our respective homes, shower, and then if I am not exhausted from the emotional horror of the day we can sit on a couch, maybe watch a movie, and if the mood takes us, we can cuddle. With intent.”
He felt Steve smile, felt the tension easing away as if it’d never been there. And he relaxed once more back into his partner. “Sure thing Danno.” Steve promised, and Danny was just fine with that.