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After they sell the restaurant, Kamekona doesn’t keep the name they gave it. Neither cops nor sentimentality fit the brand he’s been building, but that doesn’t prevent the Five-0 team from still referring to it as Steve’s in internal communications (read: their text group chat), which after a few crossed wires morphs into Kamekona’s Steve’s to distinguish it from the McGarrett home, or – as Tani has dubbed it for reasons of either clarity, further confusion, or both – Danny’s Steve’s.
So when Steve shows Danny a text from Tani that reads Danny’s Kamekona’s Steve’s tonight? followed by a spaghetti emoji, Danny responds by loudly complaining to Steve while scrubbing the dirt from an afternoon of gardening from under his nails, and then they both hop into the Camaro for some unscrupulously shrimp-truckified Italian food.
It’s really good. A couple of things on the menu might even be better than anything Danny could ever have come up with, but that’s the sort of compliment he will take to his grave.
They get their favorite table out on the tiny little terrace behind the building, where there’s shade and not too many other patrons. Junior comes as a package deal with Tani these days, and Lou shows up on his own, because Renee is still on the mainland visiting friends. That might be part of why Tani suggested this dinner in the first place: as much as Lou may say that he likes having all the time in the world to go on extended fishing trips, it’s always plain to see after just a few days that he does miss his wife, and isn’t entirely used just yet to having an empty nest on top of that.
All of the above might be a contributing factor to why, once they’re all pleasantly overstuffed with the results of ambitious fusion cooking and they’re nursing their very normal after-dinner beers, Lou uses a lull in the conversation to turn to Steve and Danny and say, “So when are you two getting hitched, hm?”
Junior almost chokes on what seems to be mostly air, but Steve finishes taking a leisurely pull from his beer before he answers, pretending at very mild confusion. “Did we not do that yet?”
“Damn,” Danny says, playing into it. “I knew we skipped a step somewhere.”
Tani, between Junior and Danny at their circular table, stops patting Junior’s back to hit Danny on the arm as if to say he can leave it to her. “Lou, you can’t ask them that. If one of them has a proposal planned, you just made it awkward.”
Lou shrugs, not only unconcerned but a little impish. It’s a thing he pulls off with shocking ease for such a big man. “Or I may have just heightened the tension a little bit. It’s been such a long time coming, they seem to need it.”
“We don’t need anything, because there’s not going to be a proposal,” Danny informs the both of them, and Junior too, if he wants to know. Since regaining his composure Junior has been paying attention, but hanging back, just nursing his Longboard.
Tani’s head swivels around, and Danny knows that they’ve just lost her to Lou’s camp. “What? Why not?”
There’s something about the way they’re all looking at him and Steve that gives off the impression they would be less surprised if he told them they’d been married in secret all along. Danny is not exactly sorry to disappoint, because if there were any expectations, that’s on them. “We’re not getting married.”
“What?” Tani repeats, but as less of a question now, and more of a shocked exclamation.
Lou’s eyebrows have shot up too. “Steve? Is that true?”
All eyes turn to Steve, who snorts. “I think I’d have a hard time marrying Danny if I were trying to do it down a one-way street. What do you expect my answer to be here?”
“You’re still allowed to have feelings about it, babe,” Danny tells him. It’s the sort of thing Steve needs to hear from time to time.
Steve is unimpressed by it now either way. “Sure.” He shrugs. “My feeling is that we talked about it years ago, and neither of us cared for it then, and that hasn’t changed.”
Lou tilts dangerously forward in his chair, and gestures with his beer like he’s about to throw it. “Marriage? You don’t care for marriage?”
“Don’t take it personally, Lou.” It’s been a while since Danny has seen Lou this worked up. It would be baffling, if it weren’t a little predictable – most of his family in Jersey would probably respond the same way. “Of course we care for your marriage very much. Easily one of my top five favorite marriages.”
Some days, Lou just can’t take a compliment. “But you’ve been at the altar before. Is this Rachel’s doing? One bad experience soured you on the whole institution?”
Danny doesn’t need to consider that before shaking his head at it. “It’s not.” Not anymore, at least. “Things were different then. Things are different now.”
What he has with Steve is hard to compare to what he used to have with Rachel. Both are real, but he was trying so hard back then that it felt like he was constantly hanging on by his fingernails, growing ragged and bloody and tender over time no matter how good anyone’s intentions were at the outset. With Steve, it’s always been effortless, like getting pulled up by a full-handed grip.
“Thank God,” Steve says. When that yields him a look from Lou, he answers it head on. “Did you forget that Danny and Rachel aren’t together anymore? Their relationship sort of infamously didn’t work out.”
“Not because they got married,” Lou argues.
“Well, definitely not the second or third time, no,” Steve agrees, talking around the lip of his beer bottle. It’s the sort of cockiness that would force Danny to roll his eyes if there weren’t something stupidly important to him hidden away in how publicly Steve will gloat about their relationship.
As things stand, Danny contents himself with a tiny shake of his head. “It didn’t not work out because we said I do, but it didn’t fix anything either.”
“But don’t you want a ring on your finger?” Lou asks. They really seem to have hit a nerve with him. It’s slowly getting very funny.
“Not really. What’s that going to tell me that I don’t already know?”
“It’s a symbol.”
“Of what?” Steve asks, and somewhere in there might be a key to another crux of the issue. There are a few angrier, more painful arguments to be made – until far too recently, their particular match would not only have gotten them laughed out of a courthouse, but also left Steve very rapidly unemployed – but if Steve isn’t bringing that up, then neither is Danny.
“Your commitment,” Lou says, well-meaning and oblivious. “Your love for each other.”
“Eh,” Steve says, with a one-shouldered shrug. He’s blatantly trolling by this point, and going by the way Tani’s mouth drops open, it’s working.
Steve’s knee knocks into Danny’s, and it’s all Danny can do not to laugh.
“A symbol that’s easy to lose,” he points out, partially to distract himself. “I’ll take symbolically poached eggs instead.” He’s not looking to ever repeat that day he and Rachel had a stupid fight in the morning and a few hours later he couldn’t find his ring anywhere, and he had to wonder if that was a symbol, and if Rachel would even believe him if he told her it was an accident – until he realized he didn’t have his wallet either, and he’d left both safely stored in his locker at the gym.
“They’re poached literally, Danny,” Steve says, because he’s a very annoying man. To everyone else, because he’s also annoyingly happy, he adds, “He likes them that way, so I learned how to do it. I prefer mine literally any other way.”
“Oh, and that’s a legitimate use of literal, is it?” With that, Danny earns himself a look from Steve that holds somewhere in the middle between you are my favorite person on earth and God, I can’t stand you.
But skewed way to the left. Steve’s a sap.
Lou buts in again, and he’s gone back to targeting Danny. “Don’t you want a ring on his finger, then? Show people that he’s taken?”
Danny almost makes the mistake of assuming that’s a joke. “Come on, buddy,” he says, when he sees Lou’s face and realizes it’s not. “Now you’re just getting desperate. People thought I took him before I was even so much as contemplating getting a shopping cart.”
Steve nudges his wrist. He doesn’t have to move very far to do it. “In this metaphor, you bought me in a store?”
“Sure, yeah.” Why not? It’s no more nonsensical than the rest of what they’ve been talking about. “Be glad you weren’t on sale, or I would have stocked up.” A little harem of Steves doesn’t seem like such a bad thing. He’d have more poached eggs than he’d know what to do with.
“How much did I go for?” Steve asks, still interrogating Danny’s wholesome human trafficking tale.
There’s a moment where Danny fully knows he could say something incredibly sweet and mushy, like my heart. “Two ninety-nine,” he deadpans.
Steve grins like that’s the most romantic answer he could dream of. “Well, I’m glad you got a good deal out of it.” He leans towards Lou, pointing at Danny as if he were a tourist posing with a famous landmark. “See, this is a guy you can build a life with. He knows how to budget.”
Lou looks at them like they suddenly started meowing at him. “What about all the legal stuff that comes with a marriage certificate?”
“We had all that on lockdown before we even started dating,” Steve says.
“The party? Getting to invite your whole family over?”
Danny takes that one. “We throw parties anyway. Who needs a reason, or added pressure to plan all the stuff that comes before the fun?”
Parties, somehow, seem to be where Junior draws the line, or maybe they’ve just been inching towards it all the while. “Guys, please don’t make too good of an argument against marriage,” he says, mildly, but not exactly joking.
Lou throws up his hands, beer bottle and all. It’s the second time it almost goes flying. “Ah, see! There’s a man who gets me.”
“It’s not really that,” Junior says, and then he’s scooting forward to put something on the table. It fits in his palm until he sets it down, when it immediately makes Tani spill some of her beer because she kicks her own knee into it as she yells and shoots up in her seat.
They’re all detectives here, but it doesn’t even take that to figure it out: it’s a ring box.
“Junes!” Tani exclaims. Danny carefully extracts the forgotten bottle from her hand, because that first spill came dangerously close to his pants, and foamy beer is not the kind of fun white substance that makes getting clothes dirty and sticky worth it. Tani doesn’t even look over, far too transfixed by first the box, and then Junior, who has a goofy smile on his face at her response. “That’s for me?”
Junior seems pretty pleased with this reception, to say the least. “Yes, it is.”
Tani takes it from the table like it might explode, though that could be projection on Danny’s part. Like it might disappear, would be a more fitting descriptor – but with a care born from reverence, not fear. She turns the little box so it’s facing her way, and then her eyes shoot up to Junior. “Can I open it?”
He’s leaning into her so much that his holding the arm rest of her chair, not his. It’s dentist-enrichingly sweet how excited he is that she’s excited, even though he clearly knew she would be. “Not yet. I have a whole thing planned.”
Tani visibly melts, her mouth actually dropping open while she makes a grab for her heart. “You do?” Her other arm, the one holding the box, has fallen to her own leg, forgotten. Junior very gently circles fingers around her wrist and folds her hand open, and by the end of it he’s left holding the box, and she’s slipped her fingers through his, holding on.
The ring goes back into a pocket; Tani isn’t paying attention, because she’s watching Junior’s face. She has a look Danny has seen lots of times, just on someone with a little more stubble on their jaw.
“What’s the plan?” Tani asks, dreamily.
“I’m not telling you yet,” Junior says. He’s wearing a smile that seems under constant threat of slipping into a helpless grin when he looks at Tani, and he’s doing that a lot. “It’s a surprise.”
“God, I fucking love you.” Tani uses her free hand to grab him by the front of his shirt, as if he’s not falling into her already, and they share the sort of kiss that gets Danny to look at Steve just to share an eyebrow raise. When he looks back at the younglings, they’ve just broken it off, and Tani is playing at innocence as she says, “Alright, I guess I can wait a few more days before I say yes.”
Junior stumbles his way into a laugh. “We’re both trained in the same interrogation techniques, remember? You’re not getting anything out of me.”
“I hoped I might catch you slipping.” She gives the front of his shirt a last tug, and then she sighs, steals her beer back from Danny without acknowledgement, and sinks into her chair, finally looking at the rest of them again. “I’ll just have to wait.” She says it like it’s some terrible chore, but she’s glowing, and so is Junior. They still haven’t let go of each other’s hand.
Lou has been looking on in obvious bafflement since Junior pulled out the box, and now he shakes his head, like he just can’t believe it. “What the hell are you doing, boy? That’s not how this goes. You can’t show her that you’ve got it and not drop to one knee right then and there.”
He’s immediately hushed by Tani. “I like it. Shut up.” She’s firm about it, but apparently smiling too big to stop.
Danny shakes his head. It’s a head-shaking sort of situation all around. “I’m beginning to think you want everyone to follow the exact same relationship steps you did, Lou.”
Lou holds up his ringhand and wiggles the finger in question, like a challenge. The gold glints even in the full shadow of an evening sun that’s sunk behind surrounding buildings. “They were good steps. Two decades and counting, baby.”
Danny doesn’t just wiggle one finger, but his whole hand. “By certain measures we’ve got a decade under our belt, too. You might need to consider that there’s more than one way to do this.”
“Sure there is. It’s just that mine is best.”
Danny probably would have kept arguing just for fun – and maybe, because it’s Lou and not Steve, eventually agreed to disagree – but that’s when their server reappears. After she’s verified that they’re all very happy and don’t want anything but the bill, an altogether different, far more money-oriented discussion breaks out. Junior, clearly high on love, offers to pay. Lou tells him that considering the impending happy news they obviously can’t let him do that, Danny takes the time to rehash his very old complaint that if Kamekona didn’t have a piggybank for a heart they’d all be getting their meals for free anyway, and Steve takes a radically different approach, and says it’s on him.
Just maybe, lovesickness is a little contagious.
After Danny pays – a trick for which he resents Steve about fifty percent less now that in practice they only ever use their shared bank account anyway – and Steve uses the wallet he definitely did have on him to leave a handsome cash tip as well, their group disperses. It was a sweet, long, comfortable evening, but shutting the Camaro doors and hearing the noise from the world outside dim is just as sweet.
It’s a familiar little universe, the inside of this car, with Steve to Danny’s left behind the wheel. For once, even Steve doesn’t seem to be in any particular hurry, and when Danny turns his head, Steve mirrors him. “They seem happy,” Danny says, not because he thinks Steve might not know that, but because it’s the sort of thing that’s nice enough to be worth noting out loud even if it’s completely superfluous.
Steve grins at him. “They really do.”
Because he is who he is, Danny has to prod a little. He’s forever sitting on a tree branch, bouncing up and down to see if it will hold. “Did that inspire anything in you? Any particular desire?”
“Yeah.” Steve’s grin widens, just that little bit. “To take you home and have wild unmarried gay sex until we fall asleep, and then wake up and make you a poached egg and some toast and do the same thing all over again.”
It’s the sort of talk that still, after all these years, knocks the breath right out of Danny. “I fucking love you,” he tells Steve, and draws him in by the scruff of his neck for a kiss, because straight people might have some good ideas about romance, sometimes.
Steve laughs into his mouth with the same surety of being and ease of heart those words always give him, and when they separate he darts back in for another peck, and then he turns the key in the ignition to take them home. It’s the smoothest ride Danny’s ever been on.