H50: Hoa (Chapter 1) - Steve/Danny

[waldos_writings]

Title: Hoa (Chapter 1)
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Steve/Danny
Length: Total: 9004  This Chapter:
Written for:  Yuletide 2010
Summary:   “You’d rather that, for the sake of my sixty-something-year-old parents we keep the definition of ‘my partner’ to mean ‘that guy I work with who periodically tries to kill me with his stunt driving’?”

Danny wants to take Steve back to Jersey for Thanksgiving.

Hoa Chapter 1  on LJ  |  on DW  | on AO3
Hoa Chapter 2  on LJ  |  on DW  | on AO3
Hoa Chapter 3  on LJ  |  on DW  | on AO3




Family was everything, or damn near to it, for Danny. Steve had learned that on their very first case. It was why he’d been surprised that he’d had to spell out for him a few weeks ago that while Grace may be his only blood-relative on the island, his team was his new family. At least here in Hawaii. Steve had heard all about the sister and two brothers, both parents and the assorted great aunts and whatever back in Jersey. One afternoon he’d even walked in to the weirdest case of one-upmanship as Chin and Kono and Danny had been going over not only the large number of cousins they had but how many were in jail (mostly as staff in Chin and Kono’s case, mostly as inmates in Danny’s).

Yet somehow he was still surprised at Danny keying into his own lack of family. They’d been on their way to the scene of the armored car heist when Danny had casually thrown out, “You know, Grace and I are going back to Jersey for Thanksgiving, since Rachel has her for Christmas this year. You said Mary was back in California for a while, so you could come with us unless you have, like, a maiden aunt I don’t know about or something to have turkey dinner with.”

Steve was sure he’d given Danny a face that Danny would later give a name to, and very probably a diagnosis. Fortunately, they hit the crime scene before Steve could feel obligated to give an answer. It wasn’t the time or the expense of flying all the way to the east coast… he just wasn’t sure their relationship had hit the point of ‘meeting the in-laws’ yet.

He made a different face, glad that Danny was already climbing out of the car and not looking at him, when he realized that while he might have to walk that particular gauntlet sometime soon, Danny never would. For the first time in a while, Steve missed his dad. It wasn’t the usual feeling of rage at Victor Hesse – whose ass he would rake over the coals some day soon – that he usually felt, but this time it was a keen ache for the actual loss of his dad.

As they caught up with Kono and Chin, Steve pushed all that aside and refused to get distracted by the fact that he was looking at his first holiday season without his biological family or his Navy family.

He watched the two native Hawaiians move through the crime scene. Ever since the case that had sucked in yet another of their cousins, Sid, Chin had started making a few inroads with his own family. Steve was pretty sure Kono was leading that particular charge, so he was reasonably sure they had plans for the long weekend. Not that he wasn’t absolutely sure that if anyone were to remind them that Steve was alone that they wouldn’t only invite him over, they’d suck him in with the force of a hurricane.

Which brought him back to Danny’s invitation. He didn’t have other plans, he wasn’t even sure who he could make plans with if he wanted to conjure up an excuse, but he still couldn’t imagine sitting around a table full of Dannys and not feeling weird.

Once in the car, Danny was quiet other than suggesting they hit Side Street. It wasn’t lost on Steve that Danny was watching Rachel’s place in the side mirror until he finally rounded the corner. He let Danny brood as he drove, figuring he could try a tactful question or two that hopefully wouldn’t end up with him getting a chip-bag crinkled in his ear piece and Danny’s bullshit excuse that their extremely high tech earwigs were wigging out, once they had beer.

He told Danny to get a table while he went up to the bar to grab the drinks. He was pretty sure Danny was already weaving a little as he made his way to a booth in the corner. It was about two in the afternoon and they’d been running since they found out about the armored car heist. Yesterday morning. Danny sat facing the wall, leaving Steve the seat that would let him keep an eye on the door. Steve wondered when Danny figured out that it did, in fact, make him a bit twitchy to leave his back to a room of people. Even people whom he had no reason to consider a threat whatsoever.

It was almost a dozen minutes later when Steve made his way over and slid into his side of the booth. He raised an eyebrow about the fact that Danny hadn’t come chasing after him and doesn’t even ask what the hell took so long to get two beers.

Steve carefully set down the large plate of wings between them and set one of the beers next to Danny’s left thumb, tapping him out of his fugue with the cold glass.

“You okay?” he asked, laughing a little when Danny had to literally shake himself back to the moment.

“Yeah. You know, it wouldn’t kill you to look like you’ve been up for at least thirty-six hours, because, you know, we have.” He dragged his hand over his face, wincing at the nearly full beard that had sprung up.

Steve slid the plate a little closer to Danny. “I’m pretty sure I feel at least as bad as you look,” he snarked. “Eat something. Drinking on an empty stomach is pretty suicidal right now.”

“What are they?” Danny asked, absolutely certain they couldn’t be as innocuous as they looked.

“Spicy chicken wings. I figured even a guy from New Jersey would recognize chicken wings.”

Danny found the energy to flip Steve off with one hand as he reached for a wing with the other.

They were half way through the plate of wings and Steve had gone up for sodas for the both of them, realizing that any more beer on top of their sleep deprivation was less than brilliant, before Danny spoke again.

“What the hell is your problem?” he asked when Steve shifted uncomfortably in his seat for the fifth time in three minutes.

“Nothing, I just… nothin’. Never mind.”

Danny dropped the bone from his wing on the plate before glaring up at Steve. “So help me, McGarrett, if you don’t spit it out…” he wasn’t sure where he was going with that threat, so he let it hang.

“I just…” Steve stopped and thought, trying to be tactful. He wasn’t used to having to be gentle with Danny, and he wasn’t sure he wasn’t going to get belted for trying it now, but even he knew that coming at this like a freight train wasn’t going to end well for him. “Rachel wasn’t what I expected.”

Danny poked at the ice floating in his Sprite with his straw. “Yeah, I got that a lot when we were married.”

Steve sighed again. Now that Danny was talking and not telling him to fuck off, he was burning to ask the question, but he still couldn’t find a way to do it without being ridiculously crass. He tried poking around the edges of the issue hoping Danny would catch on. “So how… I mean… you said part of the problem was that a cop’s salary wasn’t quite what she… what? What she expected it to be? She had to see that coming, right? You were already a cop when you two met, so…”

Danny shrugged. “Yeah, I was. But I guess she thought she was okay living in an eight-hundred dollar a month apartment in the suburbs of New Jersey… until she met someone who could give her a mansion in the middle of a tropical paradise.”

There it was; the question Steve didn’t know how to ask. “So… she…” The subject was hanging between them, but Steve still wasn’t sure how to actually say the words.

“She left me for him? Yeah.”

“Ouch,” Steve said. “That really sucks, brah.”

“Tell me about it. I think I need another beer.”

“You’re half-asleep where you are, I don’t think so,” Steve told him. He knew he was driving, but he didn’t relish the idea of carrying Danny either out to or out of the car.

Danny slumped in his seat. “I won’t say things were great before that. Rachel went back to work once Grace was in school full time. But then Grace started getting sick a lot for a while and we were having problems with scheduling who would be off when to stay home with her and fighting over whose job took priority. Most of her work was contract stuff, so with the economy tanking, people weren’t hiring high-end financial planners much. Which you would think would solve the first problem, but it didn’t because she would have meetings in, I don’t know Zurich or something that would inevitably come up just as I got a big case, and she felt like she had to take any client she could get so…” Danny slumped in his seat, tracing patterns in the condensation on his glass.

“ Grace was starting to think she lived with my sister she was there so much. Rachel kept wanting to take Grace to the U.K. for Christmas and didn’t understand that cops can’t just take off every holiday, every year. Not to mention we really couldn’t afford to fly across the ocean every six weeks or whatever, just because she wanted to show Grace some damn thing or another from when she was a kid.”

Danny was warming up to the subject now and Steve was wondering if he shouldn’t have brought it up at all. When Danny paused for a breath and looked up, Steve gave him a look that clearly said that Danny didn’t need to go into details. And if he did, possibly he might not do it quite so loudly.

“Anyway,” Danny’s voice dropped back down, “She met Stan at some meeting she had out here with some client. She says she never slept with him until after the divorce was finalized, but I know there were tons of phone calls and emails. She came back out here two more times - supposedly on business, but I’m still not sure that was true. After the last time she came back she said she was leaving me. Four months later the papers were signed, a month after that she had packed up Grace and moved her out here, a month after that she was remarried. Her lawyer so kindly informed me that if I wanted to avail myself of my visitation rights I could either pay for the airfare to ship Grace back and forth across the planet or I could move to where she was.” Danny shrugged and poked at his ice again, wishing again that he were drinking something stronger. “So here I am.”

Steve couldn’t deny that he’d wondered how fast things had happened. He’d gotten the impression that everything had gone down quickly. He’d seen plenty of parents working out custody issues after a separation, and he knew that the first couple of years tended to be dicey, but eventually patterns emerged and long-standing compromises became habits and the kind of short-notice issues Danny was still going through ironed themselves out. Yet somehow he was surprised to learn that the whole thing had gone down in less than a year.

Steve rubbed his face with his palms. Christ, this had to have started over the holidays last year, he realized. And Rachel had somehow wrangled Grace for their first Christmas apart. He made a mental note to try and find something for him and Danny to do if they weren’t hip deep in a case. If nothing else they could both get really, really drunk and try to pretend it didn’t hurt like hell to face your first holiday without your family.

Without warning Danny stood up. “I should get home. I’m really tired and getting maudlin.”

“Maudlin?” Steve repeated. He wasn’t sure why, but Danny using that word cracked him up. He filed it away with ergo.

Danny glared at him. “You want to go six rounds of who has the weirdest vocabulary right now?”

Steve stood up, feeling a little odd to not need to pay the tab or leave a tip, but he’d handled everything at the bar. “I really don’t,” he conceded.

He caught Danny mumbling something about “at least I use all twenty-six letters in the alphabet in mine,” as he fished his wallet out of his pants pocket.

Steve let the slam go and put his hand over Danny’s. “I got it at the bar.”

“I said this one was on me.”

“Yeah, but I owe you for the two times I forgot my wallet. It’s paid, don’t worry about it.”

Danny squinted up at him through one eye, trying to figure out if Steve was up to something. Ultimately he must have decided that even if he was, it wasn’t worth sorting out at that point, and shoved his wallet back in his pocket and headed for the car.

As they got in and buckled their seatbelts, Steve reached over and squeezed Danny’s hand. “Come back to my place?”

“I need to sleep, man, seriously.” They’d been having sex pretty regularly for a few weeks now. They seemed to almost always end up at Steve’s and for the first week or so, Danny had scrounged around for his clothes after and left. More recently he’d been staying over, but only after they’d sex; he’d never stayed just stay. Just to not sleep alone.

“So do I,” Steve agreed. “But we have to wake up eventually.” He raised an eyebrow at Danny suggestively.

“Fair point,” Danny agreed, and smiled at him for the first time since leaving Rachel’s place.