Archive of Our Own

“In the after
(and it is always the after for
naming it as after is only the beginning of
always)
there is sometimes the urge to scream
it.”

— Ruth Baumann
“Diagnosis”

There are two spots of blood on Steve’s pillow one morning when he wakes up. He notices them as he’s making his bed before leaving for work. His left hip is hurting so bad he’s almost limping and telling himself over and over, I do not have arthritis. I do not have arthritis. He’s been reassuring himself of that for about two weeks now after waking up on another morning so stiff and achy he could barely turn over.

He frowns at the bloody spots, stretching his leg out behind himself as he bends over for a closer look and sighs a little when his hip pops loudly, granting him a modicum of relief while he waits for his Aleve to kick in. The blood is dry, the two spots dark and rusty colored against the white of his pillowcase and he touches them lightly. Where the hell did it come from? Steve pats a hand along his face, starting at his chin and working his way up to his hairline, checking to see if maybe he has a zit. He doesn’t have a pimple and even at 36 he does occasionally get them, a revelation that had delighted Danny to no end the first time he ever had one, just a smallish red bump above his right eyebrow, but Danny acted like he’d hit the Give Steve Shit lottery. He’d cashed that ticket in all day until he’d popped it for Steve later that night.

“You wanna see?” Danny had asked.

“Yeah,” Steve had said like it should’ve been obvious.

Then they’d both cringed at the sight before Danny had washed his hands and the evidence of Steve’s pimple down the kitchen sink. Danny had informed him that his willingness to assist Steve with the alleviation of such a burden was a sure sign of affection.

Steve had believed him, no doubt. A week earlier he’d popped a nasty ant bite on Danny’s shoulder that he couldn’t reach. Maybe it is love after all.

Steve leaves the house snickering about that and goes to meet Danny who’s waiting out by the Camaro for him. He doesn’t give the blood much thought aside from thinking he’s going to need to change his sheets soon because he can’t leave it there to set in and permanently stain. He figures maybe he popped himself in the face during the night; it wouldn’t be the first time. He doesn’t say much about it and neither does Danny, whom he shares a bed with more often than not these days, but Steve has nightmares and some of them are brutal. Hell, the very first time Danny had slept over, Steve had kicked him right out of the bed and then spent the next few days making up for that and being sure Danny had ice for his black eye. It was, after all, his fault Danny’s face had met the corner of the nightstand.

So, he puts the blood out of his mind and concentrates what attention he can on willing his hip to stop hurting. By the end of the day that has mostly worked and the chewing ache of the pained joint has faded to an easily ignored throb.

The morning after that, there is more blood smeared on his pillow and a little pale red-brown streak of it above his top lip, but it’s still nothing to worry about. Steve’s right elbow hurts so damned bad though that it makes him gasp in surprised pain when he tries to bend it at first. Then his training kicks in and he soldiers through that, moving through the grinding ache as he finally strips his bed and tosses the sheets in the washer to soak while he’s at work. There’s a twinge of pain in between his L4 and L5 vertebrae, but he pays it no mind. It’s nothing compared to his elbow and his hip which has chimed in yet again, but he can deal with it.

One morning about a week and a half after he first noticed the blood on his pillow, Steve takes off running after a perp that’s trying to make a break for it. Even by his standards it’s too early for this shit and every jarring thump of his feet hitting the pavement makes pain scream through his knees, his hips—yes, plural, because the right one has joined the left in its chronic, bleating complaints. His elbow protests the back and forth pumping of his arms as he runs, but Steve grits his teeth and lowers his head like a charging bull as he closes the distance. Behind him, he can just hear the sound of Danny catching up, cursing between his panting breaths and then Steve sees his opportunity, draws himself in tighter and leaps for the perp.

He hits him full force from the back, arms wrapping around the guy as he tackles him, but they’re of a comparable height and weight and he doesn’t go down as smoothly as Steve had hoped. Instead, the guy hits his knees and rolls, taking Steve right along with him. His back hits an overturned cooler on the lawn they’re currently tumbling across and Steve snarls when the asshole throws an elbow and catches him right below one of his eyes.

Steve gets the guy subdued, but he was a fighter and Steve has to offer a small amount of grudging respect for that even if he is pissed off about what’s going to be a black eye. He’s got a rip right in the ass of his cargo pants, too and that means a trip back home to change. He can deal with a torn shirt, no big deal, but having everyone looking at his Sylvester the Cat boxers is a bit too much.

A car from HPD shows up to take the perp off their hands and Steve slides into the driver’s seat of the Camaro, intent on going back to his house to change. Danny is amused by the whole situation and is smiling beside him. Steve is not amused, he’s sore and bruised, his pants are torn and every major joint in his body is hurting now after falling. He doesn’t like this shit and he’s tired of hurting all the time; it’s been going on for over a month and he does not have arthritis, Steve McGarrett does not have fucking arthritis. He can’t, there’s just no way.

“I can’t believe… How did you rip your pants?” Danny says, cutting into his thoughts. “Oh, man, this is priceless. Wait ‘til I tell the others.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t take a picture,” Steve grumbles as he puts the car in reverse and clenches his jaw against the throbbing pains radiating from his knees and on up.

“Who says I didn’t?” Danny asks and Steve turns to look at him, mouth open to tell him to delete the picture if he did take one.

He’s so not in the mood right now; the constant pain is making him snappish and short-tempered lately and people have started to notice it, too. Danny looks like he wants to say something about the thunderous look on Steve’s face—he’s overreacting and they both know it, but then his eyebrows shoot up and his expression changes to one of concerned surprise.

Steve feels it a split second before Danny says, “What the hell?”

Steve swipes beneath his nose and stares at the bright red blood smeared across the back of his hand. “The fuck?” Steve says and feels more blood run out of his nose, creep-tickling over his lips and snaking its way on down his chin.

“Steve, hey, hello?” Danny says, waving a hand to get his attention and then he just reaches over to tilt Steve’s chin up and look at him.

“We can’t sit here like this,” Steve says too quickly as he pulls away from Danny’s grip on his chin before he can start mother-henning him to death. He wipes his nose again, that time smearing blood all over his forearm and face. “We’re in the middle of the street.”

He backs up the rest of the way and turns the car in the direction they need to go as Danny rifles in the console between the seats. “Here,” he says and passes Steve a Kleenex from a small pack he keeps there for emergencies.

“Thanks,” Steve says and presses it to his still bleeding nose and drives with one hand, wondering what the hell caused it. He’s not even thinking about the bloody spots on his pillowcases those couple of times; it just doesn’t register at the moment.

He hasn’t had a nosebleed since he was about eight years old, as far as Steve knows right then. He only remembers that because he’d been giving a book report to his whole class at the time and blood had just started oozing from his nose. He hadn’t even noticed until his classmates had begun shouting out loud proclamations of, “Ew!” and “Steve’s face is yucky!” (that had been from Miles Akamona, not the brightest crayon in the box). It’s one of those childhood embarrassments Steve keeps to himself, thanks so much.

“Since when are you prone to nosebleeds?” Danny asks and moves Steve’s hand away from his nose to check his face again when he brakes for a stop sign.

“I used to have them when I was a kid,” Steve offers as and turns his head better for Danny to have a closer look; giving up and letting Danny check him over after all just long enough to hopefully satisfy him before he pulls away again. “I’m fine, Danny.”

“That was still weird,” Danny says.

“Weird, but not unheard of,” Steve says. “I have a… history of them and just about anyone can have a nosebleed at anytime.”

“Is this sound, scientific fact?” Danny asks and Steve hears the sarcasm there, but doesn’t rise to the bait. He only tightens his jaw again when the mere act of accelerating to merge into traffic makes his knee throb with a sick pulse of pain.

“Sure,” is all Steve says and beside him, Danny scoffs.

“If you say so, Bill Nye,” he says.

“Who?”

“Just drive,” Danny says and flaps a hand.

Steve has nothing to say to that, so he just does it and before long they’re back at his place, he’s changed into rip-free cargos and taken four more Aleve from his new bottle that is quickly dwindling. He’s taking too many and figures he’s going to have to switch to Advil so the damned Aleve doesn’t end up giving him an ulcer. That would just be the icing on Steve’s, I do not have arthritis cake.

He’s adamant about that.

“Come on, beauty queen,” Danny calls from downstairs and it startles a grin out of Steve.

“Yes, dear,” he mutters and makes a note to never say that loud enough for Danny to hear him. He’d never shut up then.

So he just bolts back downstairs at his usual pace, joints aching and wobbly feeling from the pain with every jolting step of his feet on the risers.

Danny’s waiting for him and Steve messes up his hair just to distract him so he doesn’t see the way Steve’s hobbling before he manages to pull his shit together well enough to walk normally. If he winces a little then that’s fine, too, because Danny’s behind him, combing his hair back down and reading Steve the riot act.

Later that same night after all of the bad guys have been arrested for the day and the paperwork is all done (well, most of Steve’s is anyway) they make it back to the house. Danny doesn’t even allude to going back to his rat-trap apartment and Steve doesn’t try and pretend he’s going to. Honestly, they’re well past that point by now and the only people they’d be fooling if they tried to pretend otherwise would be themselves.

They just blunder their way up the doorsteps and into the house, tired down to the bone and in Steve’s case, hurting everywhere he has skin by that point. Up the stairs they go, walking like blind, drunk mice and bumping into the walls of the house even though they both know it incredibly well. They manage to kick their shoes off before they get into the bed; Danny belly-flopping down on the mattress with a groaned curse and Steve following suit more gingerly.

He lies out on his belly, too, because his back is throbbing and he hasn’t leaned back in a seat for about four hours; he’s sure as hell not going to lay down on it. That’s how they fall asleep, half tangled together and fully clothed, foreheads nearly touching.

The next morning, Steve cracks his eyes open to find Danny watching him blearily. “What?” he mutters.

“That’s a hell of a shiner,” Danny says and touches his cheek so lightly Steve can barely feel it in all honesty. It still hurts like a motherfucker though.

He just makes an unintelligible grunting sound and lets his eyes flutter closed again because he feels so, so tired; like he hasn’t slept at all.

Danny watches him for a minute and then blinks his eyes rapidly in an attempt to clear the sleep from them. He gets out of bed, still groggy and also thoroughly rumpled, rakes his fingers through his hair and then throws the sheet over Steve whose skin is prickled with goosebumps, which is weird. He’s too tired to give it much thought and just stumbles out of the bedroom half-blind and still about three-quarters asleep to go make coffee and hopes like hell Kamekona doesn’t drop in for a butt-crack-of-dawn visit this morning.

Two hours later Steve is shambling around his bedroom, trying to work out the stiffness all over his body and failing. He wants to pace and instead he’s barely managing a quick shuffle and he knows Danny is watching him, too. Steve still doesn’t feel rested even though Danny was so “kind” as to let him oversleep.

“I don’t see what you’re so pissed about,” Danny says and looks on as Steve strips yesterday’s t-shirt off.

“Late, Danny, late,” Steve says and stops to scald his tongue with some coffee, trying like hell to wake up, but the truth is he really wants to crawl back into bed and sleep another twenty hours or longer.

“Not yet and besides, you’re the boss, so no one cares,” Danny informs him and takes a bite of his candy bar. It had taken Steve nearly two weeks to figure out that he was hiding the candy in his freezer, but he’s had to replace the Snickers bar stashed behind the frozen shrimp twice, so he doesn’t say anything. Danny’s bad eating habits are rubbing off on him though, at least some. Still, he refuses to eat SPAM—that just isn’t going to happen—but that’s not Danny’s food… stuff… of choice anyway.

When he turns around again to get a clean pair of pants, he hears Danny’s sharp intake of breath. Steve looks over his shoulder with a raised eyebrow and Danny gestures at him. “Have you seen your back?”

“No, I have not seen my back,” Steve says. He knows it hurts like hell though and has for a few days, but especially bad since yesterday morning.

“You’ve got a bruise the size of Uruguay across the middle of it,” Danny says.

“Uruguay?”

“Uruguay. Hold on.”

He hears Danny fumbling with his phone, threatening it under his breath and a few seconds later he hears the sound of the phone’s camera snapping a shot. “Look,” Danny says and hands the phone to Steve.

Steve looks and frowns. The thing is huge, a purple-black smear across the width of his back. It’s less like Uruguay though and more like the shape of the cooler lid he rolled over yesterday. “It’s not that bad,” he says and hands the phone back to Danny.

“Are you serious? It looks like you went a few rounds with Ike Turner and lost,” Danny says as he looks at the picture and then at Steve’s back again even as he tugs his shirt down over the bruise.

“No, it doesn’t,” Steve says and there, he’s dressed. He grabs his coffee and the car keys, already walking out of the room, raising his arm with his watch on it, waving it around.

“Yeah, hint taken,” Danny says and goes with him.

“Besides,” Steve adds as an afterthought. “I could totally take Ike Turner.”

Danny coughs out a laugh and pats him on the shoulder. “Of course you could.”

His legs feel like they each weigh a ton and with every step his joints throb, but when Danny laughs, Steve smiles anyway.

Three days after that they catch a kidnapping case that keeps them running almost nonstop for 48 hours. Steve finds himself locked in the restroom trying to catch his breath after running to catch up with Chin before he made it to the elevators. He rubs his forehead and hisses in a breath at the pain in his still very black eye. He’s got a bruise on his left wrist that’s thankfully hidden by his watch band to go with the one on his face and back and there are more littered all over his body now in various shapes and sizes. He’s being extra careful not to let anyone see him in anything resembling a state of undress, which isn’t currently a problem, given the case and all. But it will be.

Danny’s watching him all the time with this funny look on his face and he’s asked him if he’s okay to the point Steve wants to grab him, shake him violently and tell him, yes. The thing is: Steve really doesn’t like lying to him.

The day they finally close the kidnapping case, Steve gives everyone an early weekend to celebrate it. They take off around 3:00PM Thursday afternoon and make plans to go to the movies that evening so they can all unwind together. It’s a festival of Elvis movies. Danny thinks they’re all insane for thinking that is anything at all like a good idea and loudly tells them so at great length, no less. Elvis he’s fine with, he even likes the guy, but he does not want to sit through six hours of The King either, he tells them. Chin and Kono look at him like he’s just cursed their ancestors and Steve, well; he’s quietly entertained by the whole thing.

Steve just hums the tune to “Blue Hawaii” to amuse and distract himself more from what feels like a full body toothache. He can feel his muscles quivering with exhaustion and he’s downed more coffee in the past few days than he usually does in a week or at least it feels like he has. It’s bad enough that he has a bona fide case of the caffeine jitters, hands shaking lightly like a junkie with the first fluttering signs of the DTs. He can barely seem to stay awake though and he’s pushed himself harder than he has in a long time just to keep going.

They get back to his house, Danny once more going on in with him and not a word said about it. Steve thinks he should just move in, but he’s not about to actually bring it up and when Danny calls first shower Steve is more than happy to let him have it. All he wants to do is lay down and sleep until they have to meet Chin and Kono at the movie theater.

He stretches out on his side on the couch and the next thing he’s aware of is Danny shaking him awake and telling him if he wants to shower before they go out then he needs to get with the program.

Steve doesn’t move an inch for at least five minutes because he’s honestly worried he’d cry out in pain if he did. He musters himself though and limps on to the bathroom, feeling Danny’s eyes boring into his shoulders until he’s out of the room.

At the movies that night Steve sits bolt upright in his seat because leaning back hurts too damned much. The Advil isn’t even helping the pain anymore, not even a smidgen of a little bit. It’s rude for him to do it and he’s aware; the guy sitting behind him muttering something about tall assholes thinking they own the place just before he moves only punctuates that. Normally Steve would be fine about slouching down in his seat so people could see over his head, but he can’t bring himself to do it. So he sits rigidly, trying to watch the films and failing because he’s so busy concentrating on using his SEAL training to ignore the pain he’s in. He doesn’t even really hear Danny’s remarks about the movies; is only aware of the laughter from Chin and Kono and the other moviegoers shushing him loudly.

Danny lightly touching his arm grounds him a bit and Steve focuses on the warmth of his fingers against his clammy feeling skin as yet another way to distract himself. It’s a comfort, too, but that’s one more thing he won’t say out loud. Danny is scarily perceptive sometimes, but in a lot of ways Steve has come to rely on Danny’s perceptiveness. He can sense what needs to be done, but he’s good enough to never say anything about it and he’s generous enough to offer it without Steve having to ask, which he would never, not in a million years, do because his pride won’t allow it.

It’s what makes Danny a good detective and also what makes him good at figuring Steve out, which is sometimes a bit of an irritation, Steve can admit that. He’s not used to someone knowing him and punching holes in his defenses just by being themselves because Danny doesn’t even have to try, he just does. In his more introspective moments Steve finds that he’s more than a little floored by that, too.

He relaxes some at last, but he still doesn’t lean back, he just focuses on Danny’s fingers against his arm and tries yet again to watch the movie. He’s managed to do it well enough at last when his nose starts to bleed again and okay, Steve thinks maybe he should worry. It’s still hard to really accept that there may be something wrong with him though. He’s not the kind of person to consider anything less than standing in a puddle of his own blood and feeling lightheaded as any kind of indication he may be in trouble.

The blood is thick and warm as it runs out of his left nostril and down its usual meandering path, over Steve’s lips and headed for his chin. He’s got a wadded up napkin on his knee, courtesy of Danny using him for a catch-all since he doesn’t have room for all of his concession purchases and accoutrements in his own damned lap. That’s Danny though, moving in and taking over and Steve lets him do it, too, which also surprises him. If it were someone else, he’d have their head for using him as a napkin holder. With Danny, he just doesn’t care and yeah, it’s odd and something he’s still learning to deal with in his quiet way. It almost makes Steve smile as he picks up the napkin, but the smell of his own blood in his nose quashes that reaction.

He picks up the napkin and wipes his face, inhaling the odors of stale chemical butter and popcorn as they mix with the scent of his blood. Something about the cheerful odors of things that say, fun and good times mingling with the copper tang of his blood makes Steve’s stomach flip unpleasantly. He just wipes his face again and feels his upper lip twitch involuntarily as the tickle of more blood creeps down his face.

“I’ll be right back,” Steve says and stands up before anyone can ask him what he’s doing.

He walks up the aisle of the theater with the napkin held to his face and out through the lobby to the men’s room to wash the blood off. By the time he gets there his nose has stopped bleeding, but there’s this feeling of shivering uneasiness somewhere in the middle of Steve’s chest as he splashes water on his face and try as he might, he can’t shake it.

The door opening makes him pick his head up and he sees Danny reflected in the mirror, standing there in the cold fluorescent glow of the overhead lights. Steve brushes the bloody napkin off the counter into the little trash receptacle set between each of the sinks so he doesn’t see it. Danny’s still watching him in the mirror and Steve sees him open and close his mouth a couple of times.

Finally, he blurts out, “What’s going on with you? And no, do not tell me you’re okay because you’re not. You haven’t been okay for about a month now, so what gives?”

“Nothing,” Steve says after running several possible answers through his head and finding that to be his best response. It’s lame and isn’t going to cut it and he knows it even as he turns around to look at Danny head-on and sees the way Danny narrows his eyes.

“Bullshit,” Danny says and he’s getting irritated, which isn’t a hard feat to accomplish at all, but the sound of his slightly-louder-than-normal voice echoing in the bathroom is still kind of jarring. “How’s your back?”

Steve presses his lips into a thin line and turns back around so he can watch Danny in the mirror again. He feels like a coward and hates it, but he really does not want to talk about this shit. “It’s doing better,” he says and wow, that’s a fucking lie and he does hate lying to Danny, but he doesn’t want something like a little (another lie there) bruise to become a thing as they are wont to do with Danny.

“I say again: Bullshit,” Danny says and crosses the room to grab the tail of Steve’s shirt.

“Danny…” he says, warning in his voice.

“Shut up, Steven, I’m looking and that’s all there is to it,” Danny says and yep, there goes the tail of his shirt inching up his back.

“Fuck,” Steve grumbles and he does not like this being coddled crap one bit and he doesn’t want to know what the bruise looks like now, not really at all.

“An eloquent understatement right there,” Danny says as he peers at Steve’s back. “This thing looks bad. How’s the pain?”

“Manageable,” Steve replies and he’s on a roll with the lying thing now that he’s gotten started. Except it is basically manageable for him because he’s been taught to deal with these things in a calm manner. It doesn’t change the fact that it hurts so, so bad though. He can ignore the pain, but he can’t actually block it out.

“You’re a liar,” Danny says and pulls his shirt back down for him. “But it’s okay; I understand your tendencies for living in denial about these things.”

“Do you now?” Steve asks, lips quirking a little bit.

“Indeed I do,” Danny says. “I could write a whole paper based on the denial tactics of one Steven J. McGarrett. It could make me famous.”

“Right,” Steve says and he’s still trying not to smile, but his face is threatening to crack anyway.

Then Danny says, “Seriously though, I think you need to go see a doctor.”

“I do not.”

“Yes, yes you do and I’ll tell you why—”

“Of course you will.”

“I will if you stop interrupting me.”

Steve does laugh at that and it eases some of the tension between his shoulders. He turns around again and looks at Danny with one eyebrow half raised. “So, by all means, illuminate your reasoning for me.”

Danny closes his mouth before he starts speaking to scowl and he points at Steve, earning a grin in return. Then he does start speaking while still pointing at Steve and he says, “Because you look like hell, which I am sure you haven’t noticed, what with being you and all, but you do. You have circles under your eyes competing with the bruise there already and you can barely stay awake. You’ve got the bruise that ate Godzilla and therefore saved Japan, but fucked you up in the process and there are even more to go with that one. You’re running on empty, I think and you’re only making things worse. Go to the doctor, get yourself some vitamins and when he tells you to take some time off and rest—which he will—you listen to what the nice man says to you. And the nosebleeds because yes, I noticed, I don’t even know what to say about those aside from I don’t accept your excuse of saying they’re normal; not like this they’re not.”

Danny has definitely noticed things no matter how hard Steve’s been trying to hide them. Although Steve actually has noticed that he looks like hell. He is stubbornly pleased though to realize that Danny doesn’t seem to have noticed him limping or how stiffly he’s been moving. That brief flare of pigheaded triumph is squashed though when he realizes that it’s more likely Danny just didn’t think to mention that part. Yet.

“Are you done?” is all Steve actually says.

“Are you going to go to the doctor?”

“I don’t know, are you going to get an apron and a pair of high heels to match your wifely tone?”

“Do you want me to run you over? Because I will. Now stop deflecting and answer me, please.”

“Maybe,” Steve concedes.

“Yes,” Danny insists.

Steve huffs a breath and thinks that the men’s room of a movie theater during an Elvis marathon is about the most ridiculous place to be having this kind of conversation. He wants to sit down anyway, standing up like he is seems to be making his back hurt worse and his knees aren’t liking the way he’s got them straightened out, putting his weight on them.

Still, in the name of not backing down, Steve says, “Maybe,” again then leans down and kisses Danny quickly to shut him up. He pulls away and walks out of the bathroom before Danny can wind himself back up.

He almost hunches his shoulders against the weight of Danny’s eyes on him once more, but he just waves and says, “Come on, I want to catch the beginning of Jailhouse Rock,” as he pushes the door open and heads into the lobby.

Friday afternoon Steve goes for a swim and is so out of breath when he gets out of the water he has to sit down right there on the beach until he can get his wind back. He’s caked with sand by the time he comes back up to the house and ends up just stripping off his wetsuit top and shorts in the backyard because there’s no way the sand is coming off until it’s dry and he sure as hell doesn’t want to have to sweep all that up.

He notices a bruise on his hip that kind of looks like Danny’s handprint. He’d grabbed Steve the night before to stop him from thrashing in his sleep. Danny had barely avoided getting head butted for the attempt. It’s something Steve feels kind of bad and vaguely embarrassed about now that he’s really awake, but grabbing him when he’s like that is never a good idea and if he’d been fully conscious himself then Danny would’ve known that, too. It was just a fuck up of a night overall, but their Friday has gone pretty well at least until Steve lost his breath like that.

He’s more preoccupied with the new bruise than thinking about telling himself he wasn’t going to let anyone see just how banged up he’s gotten lately. Because of that, he walks back into the house naked and when Danny sees him, he stares for a few seconds then says, “You’re going to the doctor. That’s the end of it.”

Steve actually doesn’t argue with him that time.

The rest of the weekend goes well and Danny keeps his fussing to a minimum. They go to dinner Saturday night and don’t call it a date even though they both know it is.

On Sunday morning, Steve talks Danny into having sex in the hammock and they nearly fall out of it. He laughs and Danny throws his socks at his head, but he’s laughing, too. It’s comfortable and they fit together so well that it’s terrifying sometimes for Steve who has always had friends with benefits, but never an actual relationship. Especially not one that crept along on silent little feet like some softly whispering ghost and took up residence in his life without him noticing until months after it happened.

He feels better than he has in a while and thinks maybe he did just need the rest. When he goes to bed that night with Danny, who has stayed the whole weekend since he didn’t have Grace, he thinks he may forget about going to the doctor after all. Then he wakes up on Monday morning sometime before dawn with his back and hips hurting so bad he can barely breathe because of that and he changes his mind.

That shivering uneasiness curls up in his chest again and doesn’t let go until he finally drifts off again sometime around sunrise after the pain has banked back down. Danny sleeps through it all and Steve is at least glad for that.

He calls and makes an appointment with his doctor the first chance he has that morning.

Steve goes in for his doctor’s appointment Tuesday morning at 10:00AM. The doctor notices that he hasn’t had his yearly physical yet and since he’s already there they just go ahead and get it out of the way. It hurts a hell of a lot, but Steve manages and he thinks he does fine. The doctor tuts over his bruises that have barely faded and tells Steve to try ice on them; says that if the one on his back doesn’t improve in a couple of days that he may need to have the blood trapped underneath his skin drained off. It’s an unpleasant proposal, but Steve’s not against the idea either. At this point he wouldn’t be averse to putting a couple of leeches on the thing, but he doesn’t tell the doctor that.

All in all, Steve thinks it goes pretty well and when the doctor tells him he needs to take some time off and rest, Steve can’t help grinning and that gets him an odd look.

“Have a nice day, Commander McGarrett,” is all the doctor says though and gives Steve a distracted smile before he turns away to go see to his next patient.

Friday morning rolls around and Steve’s getting ready for work as usual. He’s alone this morning and he’s not even trying to cover the way he’s limping around the house. Maybe he should take some time off, he thinks. The temptation dangles in front of him like a carrot—or a grenade, Danny would probably say—but Steve doesn’t like doing that either, so he thinks not

He’s on his way out the door when his phone rings. A glance at the caller I.D. shows the number for his doctor’s office and he accepts the call.

“McGarrett,” he says as he goes down the doorsteps, feeling like an eighty year old man, but feeling even less like falling down, which he thinks he would do if he tried to run down them like he usually does.

“Commander McGarrett, hello and good morning,” his doctor says and Steve stops on the next to last doorstep.

The doctor’s voice crawling into his ear makes that shivering knot coil up in his chest again and Steve swallows before he makes himself walk on out to his truck. “Doctor Miles,” he says as he unlocks the door. “What can I do for you?”

Doctor Miles is silent for a beat too long and Steve opens the truck door and gets in. Then he hears him take a deep breath before he says, “We got the results of your blood panel back and I was wondering if you could make time to come in so we could talk about it.”

“Sure,” Steve says and swallows again. He’s no fool and if the doctor is calling him instead of having his nurse or receptionist do it then he knows he’s not going to like whatever it is the man has to tell him.

“Is now a good time?” Doctor Miles asks.

“No time like the present,” Steve says and there’s so much false bravado behind those words that he would laugh at his own bullshit if not for that knot that’s growing tighter and colder with every second.

“Good, I’ll see you soon then,” Doctor Miles says.

“Yep,” Steve says and hangs up without saying goodbye.

He calls Danny to tell him he’s going to be late that morning and when Danny asks why, Steve tells him. He says he’ll see them all later though and no, he doesn’t want Danny to come with him; he’s a big boy now. Danny snorts at that statement and then they say goodbye.

It’s all very simple, really.

When Steve walks out of Doctor Miles’s office an hour later, he’s calm and steady as he goes back to his truck. There’s an irritating buzzing sound in his ears, but he’s cool; fuck, he’s golden, yes indeed. Bits and pieces of phrases like, starting treatment immediately is recommended and I can refer you to an oncologist here on the island that’s excellent are competing with that buzzing in his ears as he climbs back in his truck.

Steve just sits there once he’s in the truck, little sheets of paper with prescriptions clenched in his left hand. He stares out the windshield and across the blacktop parking lot, not really seeing it or the glint and gleam off the metal of the other cars there. He stares until the sun beating down cheerfully on the macadam turns the whole world into a fuzzy yellow-white glow.

Finally, he blinks and says, “Well.” Just like that, nothing more because there’s nothing more he can think to say. He’s not going to sit down and cry about it or rant to the heavens.

He calls in to the office and when he gets Kono he tells her that he’s taking the day off to do something. It’s all very vague and he dodges her questions easily. When he hangs up he just looks out the windshield once more.

“Well,” he says again and then punches the dash hard enough he skins his knuckles on the hard, molded plastic. It’s really a wonder that the airbag doesn’t pop out, he thinks in a detached way. Maybe it’s a factory defect. He should probably have that checked out.

Then he very calmly cranks his truck and at last pulls away from the doctor’s office, headed home because he can’t think of anywhere else to go right then.

Danny calls while he’s on his way and Steve doesn’t answer the phone, he can’t deal with talking to anyone right now. Mostly because he doesn’t want to, if he’s being honest.

When Danny shows up that night, Steve is in the living room and has been for about an hour. He tried to sit and watch television and had instead ended up on the internet, reading up on this newest enemy popping out bad cells like champagne bubbles. It hasn’t calmed him down at all—he doesn’t need to be calm, he is calm, he keeps telling himself. The information he found read like shit out of a nightmare and he hadn’t messed around for long because it was making him feel… weird.

He’d gone out to the garage for a while after that and messed around and then he’d walked around the yard, just trying to keep himself occupied. He can’t sit down and he’s been pacing in a crooked line from the couch to the doorway and back for who knows how long. He’s in pain still and worn out on top of that, the tiredness he’s been feeling so acute it’s almost tangible, but he doesn’t want to sleep and he doesn’t want to rest. Most of all he doesn’t want to be sick, but he is and it’s got him keyed up, moving around his own home like a penned up animal.

The familiar sound of the Camaro’s engine rumbling in the front yard makes him stop his pacing so quickly he sways. He’s panting, breath catching uncomfortably in his throat and he forces himself to even out his breathing. He knows about doing this, too and he’s fine, he’s fine. It occurs to him as he makes a beeline for the front door that he really was right—he doesn’t have arthritis and he laughs once, the sound brittle and sharp in the otherwise silent house.

He meets Danny at the door as he’s letting himself in and grabs him, not thinking at all and that’s even better—not thinking. Thinking is bad, which sounds insane, but he doesn’t care right now, he just kisses Danny and feels his questions on his tongue as he licks into his mouth. Steve makes a sound of negation in the back of his throat when they break apart and Danny opens his mouth to speak.

“Danny,” Steve says and he doesn’t need to say the rest; doesn’t need to add please. It’s in his eyes and on his face and Danny’s nod is barely perceptible as he pulls Steve down to kiss him again.

They make it to the bedroom and Steve straddles Danny’s hips, looking down at him; looking him in the eye as he lowers himself down. They don’t do it like this much because of the height difference, but Steve wants it this way right now and he really isn’t interested in questioning the why of it at the moment and maybe never because he knows anyway.

He moves and he’s so intent on the task at hand (distraction) that he doesn’t feel his pained joints or hear the way his voice cracks softly on even softer moans. He’s focused on feeling everything because he doesn’t want to hurt right now or think about being sick; he just wants to feel good. It’s so fucked up, desperate and like begging without words, but Danny’s hands smoothing over his ribs and bringing his face down to kiss him makes it a little more alright.

Later when they’re lying side by side, Danny turns his head and looks at him in the dark, his face a mass of Danny-ish shadows cast from the three-quarter moon filtering its light through the windows.

“So how bad is it?” he asks.

“Pretty bad,” Steve says.

“On a scale of one to ten how bad is pretty bad?” Danny asks.

“On a scale of leukemia,” Steve says and the sentence doesn’t even make that much sense, but Danny gets what he means.

“Shit,” he says and lets out a shaky breath.

“Pretty much,” is all Steve can think to respond with.

Danny scoots over closer, loops an arm around Steve’s waist and kisses him. When he pulls back a little, he says, “We’ll get through this.”

Steve knows he means it, too, that he means we and that makes him feel better, but only marginally so. Danny’s not the one with fucking cancer, but at least he isn’t running for the hills and he should’ve known he wouldn’t do that anyway.

All he says is, “Yep,” while he wishes for something else to punch. He moves closer to Danny instead, pressing up against him even more and Danny runs his hand down Steve’s arm, but leaves him to his silence for now; sharing it with him.

Steve goes in for his consult with the oncologist the following week. He goes alone, refusing Danny’s offer to go with him because they can’t both be running all over hell and back doing this shit. They have responsibilities after all. He hasn’t told Chin and Kono yet, has almost decided that he’s not going to say a thing about it, but hiding it forever isn’t an option either. It’s just not a conversation he wants to have.

How does he set the other two members of his team down and tell them, I have cancer and I may die? Steve doesn’t know and he turns that question over in his mind as he sits in the oncologist’s warmly decorated office and listens to his soothing voice telling him just how sick he really is and what his options are.

When he leaves, he has more prescriptions and a handful of pamphlets on the disease, the treatments; all of them loaded with helpful charts, diagrams and illustrations showing the disease-bearing cells in cheerful primary colors. He also has an appointment for his first chemotherapy treatment that Friday and Steve thinks at this rate he may start to really hate Fridays.

He takes his brightly colored pamphlets and little booklets home with him and starts reading them that night. He almost stops reading when he comes across a mention of mouth ulcers being caused by chemotherapy in a booklet entitled, Chemotherapy and You, but he plows ever onward through the wealth of information stacked on his tabletop. It’s like gathering intel on an enemy camp to Steve and this is a fucking war, no matter how it may seem to some people. Steve is a soldier and they like to know what it is they’re fighting; it makes the enemy easier to target and kill.

The whole time he’s reading, Danny’s sitting at the table with him doing the same thing. Steve finishes a pamphlet or booklet and it gets passed on to Danny. They do it all in silence, just the sound of slick pages with their glaring charts and graphs turning and turning and turning in the room.

When they’re finished, Steve gathers all of that handy-dandy information into a neat stack, picks it up and rises from the table. He gets a few more things he needs then goes outside and down to the beach, not even bothering to hide his stiff way of moving from Danny now because he knows and there’s no use in keeping up the pretense.

Once he’s out on the beach he starts a fire using those same pamphlets and booklets for kindling and additional fuel. He stands back and watches the flames eat up all the words and pictures that tell him his hair is going to fall out and he’s going to be eating pills like Skittles and puking for what could be months to come. He wanted it out of his house.

Danny comes out while he’s standing there and stands beside him, watching the flames crackle, too. He passes Steve a barbecue fork with a marshmallow speared on the end of it and holds out his own over the flames.

“Where are you hiding these?” Steve asks, the first words either of them have spoken in hours, which isn’t so strange for him, but it is for Danny.

“It’s not a hiding spot if I tell you,” Danny says and turns his marshmallow, watching as it blackens and starts to slightly droop off the two sharp tines it’s speared on.

“I guess not,” Steve says and holds his own marshmallow over the flames.

“No guessing necessary, it’s just not,” Danny says. After a while, sometime around his third marshmallow and Steve’s second, he adds, “I keep them in the bottom dresser drawer on the right.”

Steve laughs at that and takes a bite of his marshmallow as they stand side by side, leaning into one another without consciously realizing it. When they kiss in the dying light of the small fire, it’s gooey-sticky and their sugar-glazed mouths stick together a bit. The air swirling around them on the soft breeze smells like burning paper and the ocean.

Steve goes in on Friday as scheduled for his chemo treatment and he goes alone for it, too.

He sits in the chaise lounge-like chair and lets them hook him up to the machine. The chair is thickly padded though and it’s comfortable to his dully aching bones. He’s taking his painkillers, but not as prescribed; he’s taking them only when he can’t stand it anymore. Steve thinks as this goes on—in whatever direction it ends up heading—he’ll probably be taking them as directed. He doesn’t like that thought at all.

He makes himself relax back into his seat or at least presents the image of being so. Lazy and sprawling is a look he’s perfected over the years even if he’s wound tight as a clock spring inside. He keeps his eyes pinned to the clock on the far wall, counting the seconds down until he can leave. Steve wants to go back to work, but he can bide his time and this is necessary, he knows that. He breathes in and out; feels his lungs working and the way his chest is rising and falling in a smooth, calm rhythm.

Outwardly, Steve is still, but in his mind he is pacing around in circles, in straight lines and hexagons until he’s dizzy from so much thinking. He’s caged up in his head, moving like he did that first night in his living room. He thinks he can feel the medicine leaking through him, new and alien as it brings itself into the battlefield his traitorous fucking body has become.

He won’t let himself think about how utterly blind-rage angry he is about this happening to him though; the indignity of it that has him sitting here with a needle in his arm that may or may not carry the medicine needed for his survival. Fear is the background to all of it, but it’s not stronger than his rage, it is the sound of faraway thunder booming in his head; an undercurrent to the other feelings and feeding them.

On the far wall, the clock he has fixed his eyes on goes, Tick-tick-TICK. Steve can’t help it: he flinches at last from the sound and closes his eyes to finish his waiting.

The surprising thing—or maybe not so surprising given his fatigue lately—is that he dozes off once he closes his eyes, only waking up when a nurse comes to unchain him from the I.V. line.

He makes it back to 5-0 headquarters about two hours after he went in for his treatment and he’s just in time for lunch. Steve actually isn’t hungry, but he knows he has to eat and when he walks into the break room, it hits him—the combined odors of the others lunches.

Up until this point he’s been silently hopeful that maybe the chemo wouldn’t make him nauseous after all. He only fit about half of the criteria for being at high risk for it according to those hateful pamphlets he’d been given and he took one of the little pills they handed him like an after-dinner mint before he left the treatment center.

It still hits him like a kick and he gasps before swallowing thickly against the rush of saliva in his mouth when his stomach churns and then flips violently. Kono has sushi and he can smell the raw, sea-heavy smell of the fish, Chin’s eating what looks like a chicken salad sandwich and Danny’s got… well… Steve’s not sure because he doesn’t take the time to look. He turns before he’s even in the door good and walks out of the room, slowly breathing through his nose and telling himself not to puke on the floor; not to puke at all. He’s just going to get himself some water from the cooler to sip on and he’ll be okay, he just can’t handle the strong odors right now.

Which, he thinks as he goes for the cooler, how the fuck is he supposed to deal with crime scenes if this is going to be a problem after all? The rush of images and olfactory memories that come with that makes him heave slightly before he can stop himself.

“Shit,” he chokes out under his breath and swallows again.

He keeps walking though even as his stomach threatens to spill its contents all over the floor. Steve is focused on getting the water, any little task that he can use to keep him from thinking about how his gut is roiling will do and that’s the one most easily at hand.

Steve catches a whiff of something rich and meaty just before he hears, “Hey,” and Danny touches his arm lightly.

Steve turns to look at him and he doesn’t so much see Danny as he sees that Danny’s brought his lunch out with him—a meatball sub on a paper plate, oozing marinara and mozzarella like a hemorrhage streaked with pus. He stomach clench-flip-lurches and Steve tries to push past Danny, but it’s too late.

He hears himself say, “Fu—” Then that’s it; he’s puking all over Danny and his bloody sore of a sandwich.

Danny’s cursing and yelling, but he still reaches for Steve and grabs his arms, ruined sandwich hitting the floor, when he stumbles, still retching.

The rest of the day and most of the night, Danny spends looking after Steve. After the third trip to the bathroom, he gets a bucket and places it next to Steve’s side of the bed.

He drove Steve back to the house after the incident in the bullpen, minus a side trip to the bathroom about thirty seconds later. He had stood outside of the stall listening to Steve dry heave and make awful, urk, urk sounds and felt his own stomach turn. But it had nothing to do with Steve throwing up and everything to do with why he was throwing up.

Chin drove Steve’s truck back and Kono drove her own car so she could give Chin a lift after they were all done. Danny had needed to pull over about halfway there and Steve had barely gotten the door open to throw up again. There they had all sat; their own little convoy while their fearless leader puked up nothing but bile and little strings of bloody drool from ruptured vessels in his throat. Danny had held onto the steering wheel so hard his hands had cramped around it.

Now Steve finally seems about all puked out and it has been slacking off for hours after the first rush of it. Still though, Danny can’t remember ever making so many trips to the bathroom for cool cloths and cups of tepid tap water. He’s run his legs off even after getting the bucket for Steve to hurl into, but he doesn’t mind so much, it gives him something to do instead of sitting around and feeling helpless to do anything.

Steve’s sleeping now, laid out on his side with his cheek on the edge of the mattress, hovering above the bucket. He looks pale, drawn and he’s sticky with sick-sweat when Danny reaches out to touch his naked back because he can’t not touch him.

He feels like by not telling Chin and Kono still they’re doing something very wrong, but he knows that they’re really not. Steve doesn’t want the sympathy it would bring, all of the concerned looks and too-careful way of moving around him they’d unconsciously pick up if they knew. They’re going to have to know though, but… Danny just can’t think about them right now, not really; not the way he perhaps should. He can’t even think of himself here lately, all he can think about is, On a scale of leukemia and how it kills him to have to imagine what could happen.

He can’t stop thinking about it though and he’s worried he’ll say something out loud about it. He doesn’t want Steve to hear the things going on his mind, all of the, What if?s and How could I stand it?s. Because they don’t talk about it and Danny can at least be quiet and not offer hollow sympathy. He can buy a new shirt or wash the puke out of the one Steve barfed on and he’ll let him do it again and again if that’s what it takes.

Danny moves closer to Steve, thinks he feels feverish, which is to be expected. He wishes Steve would reconsider allowing himself to be hospitalized for this first round of chemo treatments, but he knows he won’t and if he’s being honest, Danny wouldn’t do it either. He’d still mentioned it and Steve had said, “No, Danny,” just before he’d gagged again, nearly losing the little bit of water he’d kept down.

“I know, babe, I know,” Danny had said because he did—does—know. Steve won’t do it if he doesn’t have to and he actually isn’t required to be there at all for this. The least he can do is be sick as a dog and feel like shit in the comfort of his own home.

There’s a light on in the hall and moonlight streaming through the open blinds when Danny lies down beside Steve, finally convinced that he’s done with vomiting for the night. He’s sleeping peacefully, snoring so, so softly every now and then and Danny kisses the back of his neck before he rests his own head.

A few hours later Steve comes to with a harsh retch and jerks so hard he would’ve fallen off the bed if Danny didn’t grab him. All he can do is murmur, “Shh, you’ll be okay, you’ll be okay,” while he holds on.

When Steve finally collapses back on the bed, he’s shaking and Danny’s shaking with him, just on the inside. He holds him until they fall asleep again and in the morning, Steve feels like eating and Danny thinks that’s a good sign; that it’s over for now. Then Steve gags at the smell of the scrambled eggs and Danny makes a note to throw the eggs out altogether. Steve does eat his bacon and pancakes though and he keeps them down. There is that at least.

They spend most of the day in bed together, talking and shooting the shit. Danny knows it’s because Steve feels too bad to get up and do anything, just like he knows Steve can’t really stand that at all, but is making the best he can of a fucked up situation.

Steve only throws up once, after lunch. Danny isn’t sure he can call it progress, but it is one hell of a step up from yesterday.

That evening he leaves Steve to go to a play Grace is in at her school. It’s why he doesn’t have her this weekend because, much as it galls him all the way down to the depths of his pride, Danny would not be any good at hustling his daughter around in a starfish costume that he wouldn’t have the first idea of how to get her into in the first place and he knows it. Rachel has kindly promised him two weekends in a row if he wants them and of course he does.

He doesn’t know what to tell Gracie about Steve though because he’s not up to being quite the rambunctious—sometimes too rambunctious, in Danny’s opinion—human jungle gym Grace has grown used to. He can’t very well see himself telling Grace to stop hanging on Steve because she may bruise him or something. And Steve, well, it’s a solidly established fact that he’s a pigheaded asshole and would still let Grace clamber all over him and maybe bounce on his head if she really wanted to. Long story short, Danny thinks he needs to work out how to handle this part of their new equation. Grace will understand, he’s got a lot of confidence in his kid, but he doesn’t know if she’ll like listening to Steve blowing chunks all night if he has another episode like the first treatment caused.

It gives him a headache just thinking about it, but none of it can be skirted around or stepped over, so he’ll work something out. Danny’s a resourceful guy and he knows that.

He gets to Grace’s school, parks and meets her and Rachel at the backstage entrance of the auditorium. Danny tells Rachel hello and then asks where Step-Stan is.

“Business trip,” Rachel says and Danny rolls his eyes.

“I saw that,” Rachel says and then lets it drop; there’s no real heat to her words anyway.

Grace looks remarkably cute and awkward in her starfish costume and she’s beaming at him between her little foam starfish legs… tentacles… Danny’s not sure about the anatomy of starfish; though he is pretty sure none of them are violently purple like Grace is. Then again, maybe so because he’s not a marine biologist and wouldn’t really know, would he?

Fuck, it is nice to be distracted by her smiling face.

“Where’s Steve?” she asks him and Danny kneels down in front of her, listens to his knee make a gross pop-crunch sound and then settles.

“Steve’s really busy tonight, Monkey,” Danny tells her. “But he asked me to take pictures and we can call him after your big debut.”

“Okay,” Grace says and cocks her head. “Debut,” she repeats. “I like that word.”

“It’s a good word,” Danny agrees as he stands up again.

Grace’s teacher calls her back to get ready to go on stage and she gives him a starfish costume-squishy hug and then squeezes Rachel, too, before she flounce-waddles off to join her classmates.

When he looks back, he finds Rachel watching him with one eyebrow raised. “What?” Danny asks.

“Don’t do that,” Rachel says and tilts her head a little bit. “Something’s not right.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Danny says, waving a hand and his tone is pitch-perfect, but his answer is too swift and Rachel was married to him for a long time. She knows things, like a former spouse spidey-sense or some such.

“Mhmm,” Rachel says and makes a little tick sound with her tongue against the back of her teeth. “You can come in for some coffee when we’re done here and tell me all about it. If you’d like.”

Danny opens his mouth to say something, maybe even pick a fight because hell, it’s not that hard to do even now. However, like Chin, Kono and Grace, Rachel needs to know about this and he does trust the woman quite a lot still, so he’s left flailing for some kind of comeback.

“Right,” Rachel says with a decisive nod even as Danny continues to flounder. “Come along, Daniel, I believe we need to take our seats in the auditorium for now.” She starts to walk off and stops to look at him over her shoulder, a little smile pulling at her mouth. “If you think of some way to respond to me anytime soon, feel free to whisper it in my ear, I’d love to hear it.”

“Shit,” Danny says, cursing the fact that she can still fuck with him like this, but he’s smiling a little, too. He follows along behind her, listening to her heels click-clicking on the concrete as they go for the main entrance to the auditorium.

After Grace’s play, somewhere between the parentally obligated standing ovation she and her classmates receive and the three of them going out to the parking lot to leave, Grace asks if she can spend the night with her friend, Tracy. Grace informs them that Tracy’s mom already said it was okay, so pleeeeaaase. All Danny can do is wonder when the hell they had time to make these plans.

Rachel purses her lips and exchanges a look with Danny then says, “It’s alright with me as long as your father says it is.”

“Please, Danno?” Grace asks and turns pleading brown eyes up at him.

“Hmm…,” Danny says, fighting a smile as she squirms a little and continues to give him puppy dog eyes, hands clasped under her chin like she’s praying. “Well, okay,” he finally relents.

She hugs his legs, exclaiming, “Thank you, thank you!” before she makes to sprint off.

Rachel stops her with a hand on her arm. “Oh, no, young lady. They can follow us back home so you can at least get some pajamas and your toothbrush.”

Grace pouts and then nods. “Okay.”

“I should think so, yes,” Rachel says and bites her bottom lip, fighting her own smile as she releases Grace to the custody of Tracy and her parents “I mean it!” Rachel calls after her and Danny watches her meet up with a little blonde girl with a braid as thick as his fist hanging down her back.

“She was the octopus wasn’t she?” he asks Rachel.

“Squid,” Rachel corrects him. “Let’s go, shall we? I’ll make the coffee while Grace packs her things and then we can have grown up conversation.”

“I look forward to it,” Danny says blandly and Rachel gives him that head-tilted, narrow-eyed look again; assessing.

“Liar,” she informs him and walks away, not waiting for Danny to get in his car and follow her, just automatically assuming he will. He’s tempted to just leave, God help him, but he is. He’s left Steve alone for hours and crap he forgot to let Grace call him, too. He did take some pictures though and Rachel has even more and video, so he guesses that will have to do.

He stands in the parking lot as all the other parents begin to leave, shifting from foot to foot, wondering at his strange urge to just bolt and go back to Steve even though he’s half afraid of what he may find. Which wouldn’t be anything, he tells himself, insistent that he will not go home to find Steve’s corpse because he’s not that sick. He’s sick though, yes he is and Danny is once again struck by the feeling of choking on a salty wad of dread because… because… he can’t. But how many times can he think that without it becoming redundant? Danny figures he can do it as many times as he fucking well pleases because this has nothing to do with redundancy and everything to do with hanging onto hope.

They should put that on a greeting card.

Danny startles a laugh out of himself with that then shakes his head and goes to his car. As he looks over the roof while unlocking the door he notices that Rachel is still there, waiting on him and he realizes that at this rate, Grace and her friend will most likely make it back to the house before them. He raises a hand and then opens his door, sliding into the seat with a huff of breath. He cranks up and then takes his phone out, pulls up Steve’s number and hits SEND. Only when the phone begins to ring does Danny put the car in reverse and back out of the parking slot.

And only when Steve answers does Danny actually relax and say, “Hey.” His voice doesn’t betray even the slightest tremor of worry and he’s getting really good at this shit. Like, he’s excelling at it and Danny never thought he would ever be this good—and so quickly—at hiding his feelings about things.

Grace is gone and has been for about fifteen minutes, but Danny can still smell her cherry Chap Stick where she gave him a quick smack on the cheek with a, “Later, Danno, I love you, bye!”

Now he’s sitting on Rachel’s pristine white couch with a cup of Irish coffee that he’s drinking too fast and well aware of the fact it’s a bit more Irish than it is coffee. Rachel is sitting across from him, dunking her teabag in a fine porcelain cup with little purple and yellow flowers on it. That set belonged to her great grandmother, Danny recalls as he sips his coffee again and keeps his eye on the bag of tea going up and down. It’s almost hypnotic watching it move and he keeps his eyes on it, not on Rachel’s keen gaze.

The spacious room is claustrophobic and hot to Danny as he sits there, feeling like he’s dirtying up the pretty white couch that Stan’s money bought. He thinks that when he stands up there may be a perfect outline of his ass on the soft fabric and he’s half tempted to scrub against the cushion to make sure. While they may be divorced and nothing but friends now, so far past anything else that it doesn’t even bear considering, that does not mean Danny can’t still be petty and annoyed with Stan for missing his baby’s play tonight. As well as unwittingly leaving him at the mercy of Rachel’s shrewdly observant nature.

“Are you going to tell me or am I going to have to pour more whisky down your throat in an effort to loosen your tongue?” Rachel asks, breaking the silence.

Danny chokes on his sip of coffee and takes the mug away from his lips, wiping the spilled droplets of whisky-spiked coffee away with the back of his hand. “So you’re trying to get me drunk, that it?” he asks and winks at her.

Rachel is unimpressed with his diversionary tactics. “Don’t try to change the topic,” she says, all brusque, Englishwoman-on-a-mission. Polite, but definitely to the point. “I know you, remember and your attempts at deflection don’t fool me, Daniel.”

Danny sighs and finally leans back on the sofa. He takes another sip of coffee and meets Rachel’s frank gaze over the rim. When he lowers the cup, he makes some feeble gestures with his free hand and it looks like he’s winding an invisible crank as he fumbles for the right way to say this. The direct approach has always worked best for him, so with his arm still waving, more agitated now, he says, “Steve has leukemia.”

Rachel clears her throat and her eyes widen a bit, but she doesn’t say anything for a moment as she tries to process that. “Come again?” she says, like she can’t believe she’s heard him right.

“Steve… he’s sick, Rachel,” Danny says and feels himself sag into the couch, holding onto his ceramic coffee mug so hard he’s a little worried it may break in his hand.

“When did this happen?” Rachel asks, eyebrows drawing together in a concerned frown. “My God, I am so sorry to hear that. How is he doing?”

“He’s been kinda… off for about a month now and he went to the doctor because of this nasty bruise he had and it all… just went from there,” Danny says and rubs at his forehead. “He’s doing okay, I guess. He went for his first chemo treatment Friday and he—Okay, I’m lying. He threw up all over me after he came back from the treatment and I spent half the night just trying to keep a sip of water in him. He seems like he’s taking it well, but between you and me—he’s full of shit and I know it.”

“Well,” Rachel says after his outburst and takes a moment to remove her teabag and set it aside on her saucer. “Neither are you. Taking it well, I mean. But you’re trying aren’t you? That’s what the brave face is all about?”

“Brave face? What are you…? I am not seven years old with a skinned knee,” Danny says, latching onto the first thing he can.

“No, you’re a grown man who just found out his partner is very ill,” Rachel says simply, summing it up nice and neat as she sets her tea aside and crosses the room. “I’ll get you some more coffee.”

She takes his mug and leaves him alone for a minute to re-gather himself and Danny calls, “Thank you,” after her so softly he almost thinks she won’t hear.

But she answers with, “You’re welcome. After all, that’s what friends are for.”

And that, that makes him smile.

When Danny leaves Rachel’s he feels a little better and he’s not sure if it was being able to talk about this with someone or the four cups of mostly-Irish-Irish-coffee. He thinks it was probably a mix, actually and knows that as a responsible officer of the law, he should not be driving after consuming so much whisky, but he also knows his limit and he’s far from drunk. He may be a small guy, but Danny Williams is no lightweight.

He drives back to Steve’s with the Camaro’s windows down, breathing in the scent of the island and the traces of Rachel’s expensive perfume whipping in the wind. Danny likes the scent, always has, but just like always there is something in it that leaves his nose itching with the faint urge to sneeze. She’s been wearing it for years, he’d spent a wad on a bottle of it for her birthday one year way back in The Days of Jersey and so he knows it won’t actually make him sneeze.

She’d hugged him before he left and said, “Call me if you need to talk.” She had punctuated it with a gentle shake and a stern look. “I mean it.”

Then she had let him go and stood in doorway to make sure he made it out to the car okay.

By the time he pulls into Steve’s driveway, most of his slight whisky-buzz has faded, but he’s still wired on Rachel’s coffee—she knows how to make it good and strong. He parks the car and looks up at the house, lights blazing all over and spies the garage light on. That’s the one he aims his attention to as he gets out of the car and goes that way.

He finds Steve sitting on the trunk of his dad’s old car and while he’s breathing a little heavier than normal and looks a little too pale for Danny’s tastes; he thinks it is okay overall. There are tools scattered around and Steve’s obviously been up and about more since he left, which makes Danny think he really must be feeling more up to par.

“Hey,” Danny says and goes to lean against the trunk beside Steve.

“Hey,” Steve says back and Danny watches him lick the little beads of sweat from his upper lip.

“How much did you get accomplished on this heap?”

“Not much,” Steve admits.

“Well, look at this way: At least you can’t break it more,” Danny says and Steve makes a scoffing sound in the back of his throat. “Face it, Superman, you’re not much of a mechanic and never have been.”

Steve cuts his eyes to the side and glares at Danny.

“If you’d just take it to a shop like a sane human being capable of admitting their shortcomings, they could fix it for you,” Danny says.

“I can do it,” Steve insists.

“You’ve been “doing it” for ages now and have managed to get it more than half a mile a grand total of twice,” Danny says.

“Shut up,” Steve says and clears his throat.

“Sure, just remember: Danno knows best and what Danno knows best right now is that you’re a lousy mechanic.”

“Asshole.”

“Yeah, but I’m honest,” Danny says and smiles at Steve. Steve glares at him again and pushes against his side with his leg.

“I can fix the car,” Steve says.

“Alright, alright, you can fix the car,” Danny says and throws his hands up.

“You know, if I had someone to help me it may go faster,” Steve says and he’s doing his hedging thing, trying to talk someone into doing what he wants them to do without saying it. Danny is hip to this game; he’s had years of experience.

“Are you asking me to assist you in this endeavor?”

“You could say that,” Steve says, tilting his head, feigning consideration.

“I think I may be able to do that,” Danny says and pushes away from the car. He yanks at the cuff of Steve’s shorts to get him to come on. “Have you eaten anything else today?”

Steve doesn’t say anything at first and then he sighs. “No. I didn’t feel like it.”

“Worried about a repeat of lunch?” Danny asks.

“No, I mean… You know what I mean.”

And yeah, Danny knows what he means. He means he doesn’t have any appetite and somehow that seems worse to him than the nausea does. “So how about we eat something now?”

“Sure,” Steve says and casts a sidelong glance at Danny.

Danny just gives him a big smile as he backs toward the kitchen. “Did I ever tell you how much I love it when you’re cooperative, Steven?”

“You may’ve mentioned it,” Steve says and now he’s finally smiling as well. He’s got some color back in his cheeks and his breathing is regular. Danny takes note of all that before he turns around to go on into the kitchen and find something for them to eat.

They end up sharing a bowl of original Cheerios; nice and plain, nothing in that straw-flavored bowl of yumminess to make Steve sick to his stomach again. He dutifully eats his half of the bowl, but by the time he’s nearly done, Danny can tell he’s forcing himself to eat them. It makes him frown, but he just ducks his head and starts a spoon war with Steve until they slosh milk all over their wrists. They are, after all, responsible adults.

It makes them laugh and it’s just one more thing that feels normal to them both now that things are starting to go pear-shaped. It’s a slow progression, but Danny can already feel the enormity of it bearing down on him and knows that Steve can feel it, too.

They finish their cereal and Danny takes the bowl into the kitchen and dumps it in the sink. Then he goes back and sits down beside Steve, both of them leaning slightly into one another in a way that’s so familiar and comfortable Danny feels something twist unpleasantly inside his chest as his annoying, mean little thoughts want to trample back through his brain.

Instead of letting those thoughts have their way; Danny puts his hand on Steve’s knee and says, “I told Rachel.”

“Danny,” Steve says, tone sharp as he turns his head to look at him. His eyes are narrowed and he’s annoyed, Danny knows he is, but damnit, this is one secret that cannot be kept.

“She needed to know,” Danny says. “I needed to tell her about it so she’s prepared and can help me with Grace.”

“What about Grace? It’s not contagious,” Steve says and shit, yeah, that came out wrong.

Licking his lips and wishing there was a different way to tell Steve what he already knows, Danny says, “You’re going to lose your hair, babe, you’re probably going to lose some weight, too. The chemo makes you sick and Grace spends time here. We can’t hide that from her, no matter what we do and if she doesn’t know then all it’s going to do is scare her.”

Steve’s quiet for a long time, so long that Danny figures when he next speaks, it will be at top volume. He’s got his hands fisted beside his hips and he’s staring straight ahead; the muscle in his jaw jumping. Danny watches him and thinks he’s maybe not so mad that he told Rachel, but because it had needed telling at all.

“When are you going to talk to her?” Steve asks after a while and Danny squeezes his knee.

“We’re going to talk to her next week sometime,” he says and Steve lets out a harsh breath. “Me, you and Rachel are going to sit her down and explain what’s going on. She’s a smart girl, you know that and if she understands then she’ll be fine. She was fine after we explained to her about… about how we’re more than friends and she’ll be fine about this.”

“This is a little different and you know it,” Steve says.

“Maybe so, but she’s still a smart girl and she’ll get this, too,” Danny assures him.

“Yeah,” Steve says and leans back against the cushion. “She is a smart girl.”

“She takes after her dad, after all,” Danny says and Steve smirks.

“I think she gets it from her mom, actually,” he says and Danny squawks in outrage.

“Hey, Rachel’s no slouch in the brains department, but Grace obviously got her genius from me,” Danny says.

“She at least got her mouth from you,” Steve concedes and covers Danny’s hand with his own.

Danny allows that, he’s feeling generous after all and leans back next to Steve. They fall quiet for a while and then Steve shifts a little and says, “We need to tell Chin and Kono, too. They’re not going to buy food poisoning as an excuse every time I throw up and especially not when… when…”

He gestures at his head and Danny gets what he means. “I know,” he says.

Steve presses his lips into a thin line and finally just says, “This fucking sucks.”

“Well said,” Danny agrees.

They lapse into silence again, the air heavy with their thoughts and worries, all left unspoken. To anyone looking in at them, they would look like two overgrown and sad children sitting on the sofa together. That is until Danny turns into Steve and kisses him. And kisses him. And kisses him some more as he laces their fingers together, careful not to squeeze too tight and cause more bruises.

They rise from the couch, stumble-fumbling, still kissing as they disappear into the dark upstairs and into the room at the end of the hall. Because sometimes, sometimes sex can be about forgetting for a little while, too, just as much as it can be about holding on at the same time.

“It will not be simple, it will become your will”

— Adrienne Rich
“Final Notations”

Steve is sitting down on the beach with Danny watching the sun set over the ocean. They’ve got their chairs sitting right in the surf, Danny’s trousers rolled up to his knees so he doesn’t get salt all over them. The surge of the water makes their chairs move gently and when there is a particularly strong wave; Steve can see Danny grabbing the arm of his chair with one hand, holding on, as he continues to use the other to aid his speech. The sight amuses Steve and he turns his head a bit more to watch better.

Danny is telling him about his day, all animated, bright energy as he flail-talks with his hands, waving them and slash-jabbing to make his points. With a smile, Steve slouches down in his chair more and closes his eyes, feeling the last of the sun’s warmth beating gentle as moth wings against his face.

Danny’s speech falters for a minute and Steve cracks an eye open to look at him and says, “I’m listening.”

“If you’re ready to go inside, we can,” Danny says and Steve shakes his head.

“I’m okay, Danny,” he says and he is, he’s just a little tired, but that’s a pretty constant thing these days.

“Alright, but if you—”

“I’ll tell you if I want to go back in,” Steve tells him and closes his eyes again. He reaches across the gap in their seats and shoves at Danny gently to motivate him. “Now, come on, finish the story, I want to hear this.”

“Yeah, okay,” Danny says. “Where was I?”

“You were interviewing the witness and…” Steve prompts.

“Right,” Danny says and then snickers. “So, I’m interviewing this witness and she’s in the middle of telling me that around four thirty this morning, she heard some people talking really loudly. Well, I’m trying to listen to her, but I keep noticing that it looks like one of her boobs is moving and I’m wondering, What the hell is going on here?. I was thinking I was going nuts, so I tell myself to ignore it and be professional. Because staring at this one woman’s jumping bean breast is not professional—”

“Jumping bean breast?” Steve asks and opens his eyes again to look at Danny.

“That is what I said, isn’t it? The thing was active,” Danny says.

Steve holds a hand up for Danny to pause while he takes a moment to digest that mental image. Active, Steve mouths to himself as he tries to picture someone’s breast doing a jig independent of its owner. He doesn’t have much luck with that.

“May I continue?” Danny asks and Steve makes a “by all means, please do” gesture with his hand.

“Thank you, kind Knight of the Lawn Chair,” Danny says and then carries on while Steve snickers softly. “So, her boob is moving, I swear it is and by that point, I’m staring, I mean, I can’t help it. This woman has the most hyperactive boob I have ever seen and then… then it squeaks.”

“Her… Wait. Her boob squeaked?” Steve says and finally gives it up, opening his eyes as he turns his head to stare openly at Danny. “You are so making this up right now.”

“I am not! Hand to Christ, I am telling you the absolute truth,” Danny says.

“You are telling me absolute bullshit and I should’ve known that the second you mentioned a… hyperactive breast,” Steve says and digs his toes into the sand, feeling his left big toe slide over a shell buried there. He works at pulling it up with his toes while he waits for Danny to tell him the truth. But no, because Danno don’t work like that, Steve thinks and has to bite his lip to keep his laugh in.

“So, any-damned-way,” Danny says and shakes a finger at Steve. “Doubt all you want, this woman’s tit was lively and noisy. I couldn’t take it anymore either because I was bugging out just a little bit. It was even worse because this woman didn’t even seem bothered. I asked her, Ma’am, what do you have in your shirt? and she stops, looking at me like I’m the freakazoid in that situation and she says, You mean Custard? To that… I had nothing to add.”

“Custard,” Steve repeats flatly. “She had food in her bra… food that made noise?”

“Thank you, yes, that is what I was thinking, too,” Danny says. “But no, she reaches in her bra, right there in front of me and everybody and pulls out this tiny little monkey. In board shorts. She had a monkey in her bra and it was hanging onto her thumb making some of the most god-awful racket I have ever heard and Grace was colicky as an infant, so I have a basis for comparison here. I have proof, too.”

Danny starts digging out his phone while Steve laughs until he’s wheezing unpleasantly and starts coughing. He waves Danny off while he fights to catch his breath and gets out, “I’ve got it.”

Danny gets back in his chair reluctantly and starts jabbing buttons on his phone while Steve works on evening his breath back out. He’s got pills for this sort of thing now and an inhaler, but they’re not a one hundred percent guarantee when he gets really winded from laughing too hard or something. Still, that shit was funny and he’d needed the laugh, so he doesn’t really mind.

“Damn you, Phone, work,” Danny curses and shakes the thing like that’s going to do him any good.

“Give it to me,” Steve says.

Danny pulls away instead, hunching over the phone to try and shield it from any potential snatching that may occur on Steve’s part. “No, I’ve got this,” he says. “I’d just figured out the old one and now this thing.”

“How’d you get your proof then if you can’t operate it?”

Danny cuts his eyes to the side and mutters something.

“What?”

“I said, Konodiditforme,” Danny mumbles in a rush.

Steve snorts out more laughter at that. His chest is starting to hurt a little though and it’s getting dark out for real now, but he wants to see before they go in. So he leans over and snatches the phone from Danny despite all his efforts at avoiding just such a thing. “I’m teaching you how to use this when we go in,” Steve tells him as he scrolls through the menus. “Is it a picture or video?”

“Video,” Danny says.

“Okay, I’ve got it,” Steve says and goes to the video files, of which there is only one and it’s aptly named Monkey-in-a-Bra. That makes him grin as he hits play and watches as a tiny monkey in board shorts screeches at the camera. “Pygmy marmoset,” Steve says when he sees it.

“And how do you know that, Darwin?” Danny asks.

“I watch a lot of the National Geographic Channel lately. I’ve also been to South America,” Steve says just as the alarm on his watch goes off.

“Time for your evening cocktail,” Danny says and Steve frowns and hits play on the short video clip again. “C’mon.”

“Fine,” Steve says and when he stands up, he wobbles a little, nearly dropping Danny’s newly replaced phone because a junkie broke his other one a couple of weeks ago. Chin wound up with a broken tooth, too, he recalls and sighs as he passes Danny the phone back.

“Hey,” Danny says and wraps an arm around Steve’s waist. “What’s up?”

“Not a damned thing,” Steve says and leans into Danny. “Let’s go get me dosed, huh?”

“Right away, sir,” Danny says with a fantastic British accent and that almost makes Steve forget about all the other stuff he’s missing lately.

“Lead on, Jeeves,” Steve says and off they go, two shadows moving on a windy night.

The tide coming in drags their forgotten chairs out to sea that night while they sleep and in the morning Steve shakes his head when he realizes they’re gone for good. He doesn’t think he likes the metaphor his brain tries to supply him with because metaphors are for poets and dreamers. Steve is a staunch realist, so he takes his pills like a good boy and doesn’t think about the goddamned chairs anymore.

Instead he goes back inside, washes Danny’s coffee mug and cereal bowl since he doesn’t quite seem to understand the concept of doing those things himself no matter how many times Steve says something about it. When he’s done with that, he goes and brushes his teeth, gets dressed and then looks down at the top of the dresser where there is a slowly growing assortment of bandanas for him to choose from.

He rarely bothers to pick one and today is no different. Steve closes his eyes—a little game he’s taken to playing with himself about this particular task (chore and nothing so small and insignificant should feel like such a big deal)—and grabs one. He opens his eyes and sees the Harley Davidson one Chin gifted him with and nods. He likes this one best, the washed-softness of it attesting to that and he sits on the side of the bed to tie it on.

Steve just sits there for a moment when he’s done, running his fingertips lightly over the black cloth of the bandana and finds it strange that he wants his hair back this badly. He’d kept it buzzed down to bristles for years and contrary to what some people would say, he is not a vain man, but it doesn’t change him wanting his hair back any less. Having hair would mean he wasn’t sick anymore, that’s how Steve sees it. Hair has come to equal good health to him. It’s been a couple of months now and he’s still not all that used to it though he does try.

He’d gotten up one morning to go pee and had come back to find Danny sitting up in bed, touching the fine, dark hairs clinging to Steve’s pillowcase with a look on his face like the bottom had just dropped out. He’d seen Steve and the look had blinked away, but Steve hasn’t forgotten it anymore than he’s ceased to notice Danny’s uncustomary silence that seems to grow deeper every passing day when he isn’t telling Steve about monkeys in bras and such.

He gets up from the side of the bed, smoothes his hand over the bandana one last time and remembers sitting outside on the front porch steps while Danny shaved his head for him. His hair had flown away on the slight breeze and tickled in the light sweat at the back of Steve’s neck. When it was done, Danny had kissed his dully gleaming scalp, pressing his lips to the denuded skin and loose hairs, but hadn’t complained about them sticking to his lips. Steve had just hung his head a little more, focusing on the lingering sensation of Danny’s lips until it had faded. Danny had sat with him after that kiss and there they’d been, perched on the top porch step in the little whirlwind of Steve’s shorn hair.

Clearing his throat, Steve grabs Danny’s Knicks cap to slap down over the bandana. It’s really sunny out and the last thing he needs is a sunburned scalp and the bandana alone is no guarantee against it.

He leaves the house, weaving around Danny’s boxes still stacked in the hall and pats the top of each box in the short, uneven row, smiling a little at the one that says, Grace’s Stuff: DON’T TOUCH! in her blocky child’s handwriting. Danny’s finally moved in, but he hasn’t had the time to unpack his meager belongings. Steve thinks if he feels like it later, maybe he’ll do it for him; it’s the least he can do. Right now though, he’s going to 5-0 headquarters to see if he can wheedle any of them into giving him some paperwork to occupy him until it’s time for his 1:30 doctor’s appointment. It’s paperwork; he doesn’t think he’ll have to wheedle very much at all, actually.

Steve grabs up his truck keys and his pillbox that says Medicated and Motivated, which was a gift from Kono along with an entirely too pink bandana that he has not and never will wear. All in all, it feels like a good day and he can’t bitch too much about that because those are in kind of short supply these days.

They sit outside in the grass that same night after they’ve finally unpacked Danny’s stuff and put Grace’s box of things in the room she’ll be staying in once she’s sleeping over again. Steve likes spending time outside, maybe even more now than he did before. He can’t do the same things, but it’s still fresh air and the sky spread out above him and that’s almost good enough.

They don’t say much, just end up lying on their backs in the itchy grass staring at the stars. Somewhere in there one of them reaches for the other and they wind up holding hands. Steve feels like a teenager on a first date or something, but it’s different, too and he just tangles his fingers with Danny’s and says, “If you really look, you can just make out the Antares star over there.”

“Where?” Danny asks.

Steve points with his free hand and says, “There. The big, kind of reddish one in the Scorpius constellation.”

“I just see a bunch of stars,” Danny says and Steve shakes his head.

“Obviously, but if you look there’s a pattern,” Steve says.

“Yeah? Well, there’s a pattern over there, too and it looks like the Cat in the Hat’s hat,” Danny says and points as well.

Steve rolls his eyes and looks, cocks his head to the side and says, “Nah, Danno, that’s Abe Lincoln’s stovepipe.”

“My lily white East coast ass it is,” Danny says. “Cat in the Hat’s hat for sure and over there is Thing One and just to the left is Thing Two.”

How they manage to let the conversation devolve into picking Dr. Seuss characters out of the stars, Steve can’t say, but they find the Fox in Sox, several of the hats belonging to Bartholomew Cubbins and that damned goofy looking goldfish before they go in for the night.

Steve takes his nighttime round of pills and Danny pops one of the Sominex he’s started taking occasionally because otherwise he lays awake all night and Steve knows it. He knows it because even with the mind-fuzzing effects his painkillers have on him, sometimes he still doesn’t sleep. Instead he lies awake in the dark and dwells despite himself because at night it’s the worst; at night it’s when he could swear he feels the cancer eating away at him one delicious cell at a time like he’s a fine piece of pie.

He’s rolled over on more than one night to find Danny watching him from the black holes the darkness has made out of his eyes. Sometimes they talk and sometimes they don’t; sometimes Danny will reach out and lay a warm palm against Steve’s cheek and even more rarely, Steve will curl into him and bury his face against Danny’s chest. It’s there, like that, that he usually finds the sleep he’s chased most of the night.

Because at night it’s the worst to Steve and part of that is because it’s then that he feels so goddamned frail. Thoughts can be like poison in the middle of the night and he’s known that since his mother died. They’re no different now than they were then except this time, somehow, the situation seems even worse. But Steve holds onto Danny and Danny holds on right back just as tightly and that way it’s a little easier to breathe through.

A couple of hours after they go to bed, Steve's still awake because he got caught up in doing his dwelling thing and he glances over at Danny, who’s sprawled out on his back and snoring softly. He doesn’t need a light on to know that even now Danny looks exhausted. He’s glad he can sleep because he’s doing far too little of it lately and Steve is aware that it’s because he never stops worrying. It’s gotten to the point that Steve is pretty sure Danny is almost afraid to sleep these days.

He runs his hand lightly over Danny’s hair and he’s so knocked out from the Sominex that he doesn’t even stir at the touch. With a soft sigh, thankful that Danny’s resting even if he isn’t, Steve slides out of bed and moves around in the dark, putting on shorts that have gotten far too big for him. He picks up his boots and carries them downstairs to put them on in the living room.

When he’s done with all that, Steve goes outside and down to the beach where he walks along the sand, looking out at the water and feeling the wind on his face. The night air is balmy, yet it still makes him shiver some because he’s thin and sickly, but Steve pays it no mind. On the nights he can’t sleep, sometimes the best thing for him to do is get up and walk even though he can’t go far; he tires out too easily for all of that.

Turning, Steve looks out across the water and for the briefest second thinks about walking out into the surf and keeping on until the water is over his head and then taking a deep breath. It would be quick, not slow and painful like this is, but Steve’s never been a quitter and he’s not going to start. He may not even die and that keeps him tethered here on Earth as well, the knowledge that he could survive this and live to be an old man. He could see Grace grow up and watch Danny grow old and he’d be right there with them for it all. There’s no way in hell he’d miss out on that chance simply because he’s sick and hurts all the time now. It won’t last forever, either way it goes. Things like that are some of the reasons Steve’s never really understood suicide; throwing away all of the possibilities simply because of a little something-or-other that probably wouldn’t last for long if it could be waited out.

He closes his eyes against the breeze and lets himself feel it like soft fingers on his skin as he discards the thought of walking into the ocean as a nonviable option. No one ever said this shit would be easy and Steve knows that. It’s the hardest thing he’s ever had to do, but he’s still here and he’s still fighting. Sometimes he’s weak as a kitten and he despises feeling like that, but he’s plugging along.

Steve can’t work much anymore, but he’s still doing that when he can. He also can’t work out like he used to, he can forget running completely and swimming out more than a couple hundred yards is hard. Fighting against the current takes it out of him and that galls Steve to no end. He’d been top in his class at Annapolis when it came to swimming, now he can barely keep his head above water and has to use those same currents that drag him down to help push him back to shore.

He’s nothing if not determined to keep doing what he’s always done as much as he possibly can. Even on the days he’s so shaky and weak feeling he falls down while trying to do so—something he hasn’t and will not ever tell Danny—he still keeps going. God, Danny would be pissed if he knew about all of that, but he worries and frets too much as it is and it’s taking a toll on him. Steve sees it in the lines of his face and the circles under his eyes; he hears it in every word Danny doesn’t say nowadays. But he’s always got a smile and a touch for Steve, he hasn’t given up on him yet and Steve’s certain that he never will.

Steve really hopes that he doesn’t end up letting Danny down and there’s another reason to keep fighting: Do it so he can make all of Danny’s confidence in him mean something in the end; so all of his sadness and sleepless nights will not have been for naught.

It occurs to Steve as he’s standing there on the nighttime beach, the sand looking blue-white in the starlight, that he’s never told Danny that he loves him. It kind of startles him to realize that, too, because he thinks he’s been in love with Danny since about the first month he knew him. He fell fast and he fell hard, but it still took them over a year to get to where they are now. Steve was too emotionally retarded to manage it and Danny was kind of clueless. They’d danced around it, drawn close and then pushed apart again only to pull back… push apart. It had become cyclical and Steve had thought it was never going to be anything more than that. Especially after Danny had started seeing Rachel again; when that had happened, Steve had given up because there was no way he stood a snowball’s chance there.

Except Danny had shown up on his doorstep early one Saturday morning, far earlier than Danny was usually awake if he didn’t have to be. Steve had thought something had to be wrong and had automatically gone into crisis management mode. But Danny had stopped him, had actually clapped his hand over Steve’s mouth while he was rattling off questions and told him to shut the hell up for a second.

Steve had shut the hell up; Danny had dropped his hand from his mouth and then he’d gestured between the two of them. “This,” he’d said. “Tell me if you want this and don’t act like you don’t know what I mean. Yes or no, like we’re in grade school—I like you, do you like me?”

He’d floundered for a moment at how abrupt it all was, but that was Danny—he was always abrupt and to the point about his feelings once he decided to do something about them. “What about Rachel?” Steve had asked stupidly, but it was the first thing that had come to his racing mind.

“That’s done, it’s been done for a long time and we were deluding ourselves. I’m not who she wants anymore and she’s definitely not who I want anymore,” Danny had said. “Now answer me or should I write it on a piece of paper? Ask you to circle yes or no?”

“No,” Steve had said and for a second, Danny’s face had fallen then Steve realized how that’d sounded. “No, I mean you don’t have to write it down. I mean… Damnit… I mean, yes, Danny. Yes.”

“Now I’m confused,” Danny had said beetling his brows together.

So Steve had kissed him and that had settled it.

He laughs into the wind at the memory and then shivers again, wrapping his arms around himself. Steve licks his lips and tastes the salt spray clinging to them then turns around to go back inside because he thinks he can sleep now.

Once he’s back in bed, Steve scoots close to Danny who is still laid out on his back, one arm flung over his face. He watches him for a moment and then lies down with his head propped on Danny’s chest. Danny’s arm settles around his shoulders even though he doesn’t so much as snort in his sleep and Steve thinks, Yes. The answer is still yes.

Danny wakes up the next morning with one hand curved protectively around the back of Steve’s bald head and his other arm wrapped around his waist, his fingers slotting neatly into the sunken spaces between Steve’s ribs. Steve has drooled on his chest in his sleep, matting the hair there and Danny huffs out a tired breath. He doesn’t care about that one bit, these days he could wake up to Steve snoring like a freight train in his ear and he wouldn’t mind.

He lays there for a few minutes listening to Steve breathing in and out beside him just to be sure. Danny thinks his breath sounds a little strained, maybe a little rattle-y on the exhale, but he can’t be certain because playing Worst Case Scenario has become his least favorite hobby. He can’t help it; his mind just bends to the morbid and completely unwanted thoughts like that until they dog his heels with every step he takes. He flexes his fingers lightly against Steve’s bony side and sighs, reassured by his solidity.

After a few minutes though he gently untangles himself from Steve’s long limbs to get out of bed and then stands there looking at Steve for another minute or so. Steve is out like a light and has pulled Danny’s pillow close to wrap his arms around it and the sight makes Danny smile though it is wan as the light leaking around the closed blinds. He covers Steve up, making sure he’s got the blankets pulled up to Steve’s chin since he gets so cold now if Danny’s not there to lend his body heat.

He’s on his way out of the room when Steve stirs on the bed and then he hears, “Where’re you going?”

“Gotta shower and get ready for work, babe,” Danny tells him, turning around to meet Steve’s sleepy grey eyes. He’s pushed himself up in bed a little and is blinking slowly at Danny, trying to wake himself up.

“Oh, I thought it was Saturday,” Steve says and blinks again.

“Nope, close though, it’s Friday,” Danny tells him. “Soon we’ll have the weekend to frolic and do as we please.”

Steve smiles at that and lays back down. “Yeah, maybe we can go mountain climbing,” he says.

This is a game they play and not one nearly as fucked up as a lot of people would think. It amuses them, the grim humor suits them to a T. It also gives them something to look forward to as well since Steve has extracted Danny’s promise to be more adventurous when he gets better.

“Or white water rafting,” Danny says. “Maybe we can fly out to Colorado and hit up some rapids there, I hear they’ve got great ones.”

“Mmm… or skydiving,” Steve says, already drifting back off.

“Now you’re pushing it,” Danny tells him and walks out of the bedroom to the sound of Steve’s drowsy laughter.

Danny gets his shower then goes downstairs to fix his breakfast. When it’s done, he brings it back upstairs and stands in the bedroom doorway while he eats. He thinks of himself as being something of a stalker, he’s really not, he knows it, but he still can’t shake the strange feeling of watching someone sleep. He can’t help it though; he stays with Steve as much as he can so he can watch over him. It isn’t stalking, it’s guarding, but Danny doesn’t think it’d make a whole lot of sense to most people if he were ever so inclined to try and explain it. Steve sleeps through it all, still holding tight to Danny’s pillow, only the top of his head poking out from under the covers. Danny just keeps his eyes on the slight rise and fall of the blankets until he cannot stand there anymore because he has to go or be late.

It’s the same old routine every morning he has to leave, he makes it to the end of the driveway and then he sits there with his hands wrapped around the steering wheel as he breathes. Steve would be appalled and concerned to see Danny like this; to know just how deep his anxiety runs these days. Which is why he will never tell Steve any of this stuff, he won’t breathe one word of it. He won’t tell him how Chin has started helping him pay the bills because he forgets. He won’t tell Steve about how he’d gone back to his apartment for a couple of little things he’d left behind and found an eviction notice taped to the door because he hadn’t actually paid his rent in about three months. His landlord had only let him slide that long because she was trying to be understanding. Danny had gotten her notes to come see her during her office hours; they’d told him that she was sure they could work something out, but he’d never gone. He hadn’t cared about any of that and his mind had been made up about moving in with Steve well before that had ever happened.

He’d still had to beg and barter with her son who was filling in for her that day to let him in to get Grace’s stuffed dog and a Polaroid of him and Matt from the last time he’d ever seen him before it had all gone tits up there. When that hadn’t worked Danny had flashed his badge and resorted to bullying, which had worked and had made him feel lower than whale shit because he didn’t do things like that.

With a shuddering breath and one last glance in the rearview mirror, Danny flips on his blinker and turns out of the drive to head for Iolani Palace and 5-0 headquarters. He makes it to work and smiles and greets everyone like today is the best day and later he thanks Chin when he takes him aside to let him know he paid Danny’s Visa bill online the night before. Then it’s back to business as usual, investigating a drug running ring that they think is responsible for six pharmacy break-ins over the past week.

Danny doesn’t really relax though until around 10:30 AM when Steve calls him. When he answers, Steve says, “I’m awake.”

Danny feels like cheering, but he doesn’t. He just says, “And congratulations on that, Rip van Winkle. How was your beauty rest?”

“Beautifying,” Steve says. “I think I may’ve grown a couple of eyebrow hairs back it was so invigorating.”

“Brilliant,” Danny says and laughs even though his heart hurts. “Before long we’ll have to pluck them.”

“You know it,” Steve says. “I’ll be in later to do… whatever you can find me to do.”

“Maybe you ought to just—”

“No.”

“I know, I’ll see you when you get here and you can help Chin run prints,” Danny says.

“Sounds like a party, see you then,” Steve says.

“Yep, later,” Danny says and hangs up with a sigh as he thinks that Steve may not—no, does not—know everything, but he knows something or else he would never have started calling Danny everyday to tell him he’s woken up, which is like saying, I’m still alive.

Danny is grateful, but he also thinks he’s not trying hard enough because if Steve’s caught on enough to worry about him then he needs to do better. Much better.

He pushes away from his desk and goes back into the bullpen, clapping his hands once and saying, “We got anything on those plates yet?”

Steve gets there two and a half hours later looking a little sweaty and too pale for Danny’s liking, but he smiles at him the second he sees him and Danny smiles right back. Kono slaps him on the shoulder and Chin calls out, “Hey, brah, glad you could make it” and Steve laughs.

Danny hangs back a little bit for a minute, taking it in and committing the scene to memory; saving it up in case he needs it one day. Then he straightens his tie and bustles forward, waving his hands and telling Steve that if he cannot learn to be punctual then he’ll have to be let go.

Steve slings an arm around his shoulder and squeezes gently. “Island time, Danno, island time.”

Danny glares and grumbles a curse and Steve smiles again. His eyes are the color of the Atlantic on a fall day in the sunshine, Danny thinks when the light from the windows hits them. He saves that, too and then gets to work on getting Steve to run prints with Chin.

Business as usual, yes indeed, he thinks.

After work comes supper. Danny has figured out that Steve’s appetite seems to be better early in the evenings for some reason, so as soon as they get home, he goes to cooking; the sooner he does so then the better Steve will eat is his logic. It’s not foolproof, not by far, but it’s something Danny can work with; something that Danny can do and he’s really big on finding anything that will keep him busy these days.

Steve helps him, chopping herbs plucked from the little pots sitting in windowsills all over the house now, washing vegetables, deboning chicken breasts and setting the table. They’ve fallen into a routine that looks incredibly domestic on the outside. It’s actually a cleverly disguised way of keeping each other close and their minds occupied with other things.

Danny throws some onions into a skillet to start sweating and looks over to see how Steve’s coming with the herbs he was chopping and raises an eyebrow. “That is way too much rosemary. Seriously, what are we going to do with that much rosemary for this little bit of chicken?”

Steve looks down at the neatly chopped pile of fragrant herbs and shrugs then looks back at Danny. “Use it for garnish?”

“Maybe it was a whole flock of chickens we were roasting and not just two breasts I’d say that was a brilliant idea, babe, but we’re not,” Danny says. “Does the plant still have any leaves?”

“We can’t just throw it away,” Steve says with another glance at the rosemary. “And needles.”

“What?”

“Rosemary doesn’t have leaves, it has needles,” Steve says. “It’s an evergreen.”

“Uh-huh,” Danny says because there’s not really anything else to say. “Who am I to argue with the master windowsill gardener?”

“That’s what I was wondering,” Steve says with a smirk.

Steve reads books on home herb gardening like some people read bodice ripper romances. Since he’s off salt now because the chemo has fried his taste buds, making even the slightest bit of salt too salty, they’ve resorted to other methods of flavoring their food. And in typical Steve fashion, he’s taken on this new edible hobby of his with a zeal that’s bordering on obsessive, hence the overflowing windowsills and little racks with tied bundles of drying herbs hanging in the kitchen. Sure, Danny could still eat salt, but if Steve can’t then he won’t; easy as that. One thing is for sure though—the house smells absolutely wonderful lately, Danny thinks as he stirs the onions sizzling in the pan. That and they’ve both learned a lot more about cooking than “throw it in a pan or on the grill and hope there’s not a fire”.

“Okay, so what if we put the excess rosemary in a bottle of oil,” Danny suggests. “People do that all the time.”

“Usually whole sprigs though,” Steve says and then shrugs. “That’s probably mostly for looks anyway. Get what you need and I’ll rake the rest in there. Then I’ll start on the carrots.”

“It’s a plan,” Danny agrees and Steve nods and dinner preparations resume as usual.

Once dinner is cooked they eat and eating is a slow affair. Danny watches Steve slowly chewing his food and tries not to wince when he feels the corner of his mouth twitch in sympathy. Not only has the chemo fried Steve’s taste buds, it has left ulcers in his mouth that hurt like hell and as soon as one heals it seems like there is another one to take its place. That’s reason number two for all of the herbs—Steve can’t have anything too spicy anymore, so there goes black pepper, cayenne and anything with much of a bite or burn to it. On top of his already poor appetite, Steve’s sore mouth makes him even more reluctant to eat.

Danny watches him slowly chewing a forkful of brown rice with lentils and makes sure he paces himself right along with Steve. It’s the same thing as with the salt; if Steve can’t eat like he wants to, at the speed he would prefer then Danny won’t do it either. It takes them ages to eat supper lately, but they get through it although Danny has noticed Steve doesn’t put as much food on his plate as he does. He wonders if Steve thinks by spreading it out and making wider piles he’s actually fooling him. It worries Danny, but short of force feeding Steve, he’s not sure what to do. Telling him he should try to eat more only gets an, I know and Steve always looks so pinched and sad when he says it that Danny’s pretty much stopped bringing it up. He makes sure Steve drinks at least two protein shakes a day, he seems to manage liquids better and is more welcoming to that idea.

Despite his best efforts, Danny still finishes supper first and feels guilty for it and not just a little bit. It’s a gut-churning, sick-making kind of guilt; the kind of guilt that tells him he’s healthy and Steve’s not. Danny used to not be that way; he and Steve sat at an oyster bar one night and scarfed them from the half shells until they were both vaguely green from it and all because Steve said he could eat a dozen faster than Danny could. Four and a half dozen later, Danny was the clear winner and he really didn’t know how he’d beat Hoover McGarrett, but he had. Then there they’d both sat for the rest of the evening with bellies that felt like they were full of snot. It had been a terrible idea, but Danny had been quite chipper about it—he’d eaten more and done so faster than Steve had.

Now he feels like a bastard for finishing supper before him. Funny how things change, Danny thinks with a frown that he hides behind a fake yawn.

They eat their dessert of all-fruit popsicles—Danny has raspberry, Steve has cherry—in the garage, sitting on the trunk of Steve’s old car. It’s become another part of the ritual, at least twice a week they go out to the garage and try their damnedest to get the car running again. So far they’ve gotten it cranked twice and have driven it once. Steve insists it’s progress and Danny still insists that Steve is a terrible mechanic. Which leads to Steve telling Danny that it’s not him who’s crap at mechanic work, it’s Danny who’s shit at assistant mechanic work. The argument always ends when Danny asks how he affected Steve’s previous lack of success when he was only present the one time before. Steve usually tells him to just shut up then and Danny smiles sweetly at him. A couple of weeks ago, Steve bopped him on the end of the nose for that, but he hasn’t stopped.

Right now they’re just enjoying their desserts like they also usually do; what Danny has come to think of as The Calm before the Clusterfuck because they should just face facts: neither of them is any good at fixing cars. That knowledge has not stopped Steve from trying though nor Danny from attempting to help.

He’s about done with his popsicle and seriously considering being a glutton and going back for a blackberry one when Steve clears his throat and says, “Danny?”

“Yeah?” Danny says and cuts his eyes to the side to look at Steve. Something about his tone doesn’t feel right and he doesn’t like it.

Steve sighs and then turns to face Danny completely, twisting around on the trunk and Danny does the same. “I was late today because I had somewhere else to go,” Steve starts, speaking slowly like he’s trying to pick his words carefully.

“Did you have a doctor’s appointment or something you didn’t tell me about?” Danny asks and no, hell no, he doesn’t like this and he likes it even less when Steve looks away from him.

“No,” Steve says and Danny starts to speak again, but he holds up his hand. “I went to see my lawyer.”

“Lawyer? What did you need to go see— Oh. Oh,” Danny says when it clicks and his gut clenches when Steve nods. “You didn’t have to do that. Why would you do that?”

Danny can feel himself wanting to panic a little because this is hitting too hard. Steve’s gone and drawn up a will and he cannot— He can’t because that is like— No. Just. No.

“I want to be prepared, Danny,” Steve says. “Just… just in case… I want everything to be taken care of. I wanted you to have a place to stay if I… you know… and—”

“What did you do?” Danny asks and he feels cold now and like he’s choking. Steve made a will, he made preparations and he can’t think. He can’t because he knows what all of that means. People who expect to live don’t run out and do this shit, but Steve did and that means that Steve thinks he’s going to… to… Danny cannot even think the word, those three little letters seem huge and indecipherable to him right now.

“I left you the house,” Steve answers him. “If I’m gone, I don’t want you living in some crappy apartment and I don’t want Grace there either. I want you two to have a home here in Hawaii; this one.”

Danny thinks he may scream. He really might and he’s handling this badly, he knows he is and he cannot stop himself. It’s like having every single fear he’s had since the beginning of this wrapped up and handed to him like a gift, except when he listens really closely, that gift is ticking like a clock with the time running out on it.

“What about Mary? This is her home as much as it is yours, she’s gonna be pissed,” Danny forces himself to say.

Steve just shakes his head. “I called her and we talked it over, she’s okay with it; she wants you to have the place, too. Says you’ve been here more than she has been in years and that it’s as much yours as it is hers.”

“But I don’t want it!” Danny finally cries and slides off the trunk because he has to move, he can’t be still another minute. “I don’t. I don’t want it and you don’t need to give it to me or make a will saying that it’s mine. If you’re not here then I don’t want to be here in this house either. It’ll kill me and you can’t, Steven, you can’t.”

“Can’t what?” Steve asks with a frown. He looks worried, big eyes taking on a hound dog cast. “I already did and if you don’t want it then sell it and buy yourself someplace decent with the money.”

“No!” Danny yells at him. It’s so loud Steve leans back a little bit and Danny swipes his hand over his face—the hand holding his forgotten popsicle—and smears raspberry red juice all over his face and through his hair. He’s so upset he doesn’t even really notice, just says, “Fuck,” and tosses the remains aside.

“Calm down, Danny, it’s okay,” Steve says and starts to get off the car.

“No, no it is not okay,” Danny says. He feels like he’s a tower made of Jell-o right now, wobbling to and fro, tilting and threatening to topple and he can’t do that either. He can’t let Steve know how upset by all this he is, but he still says, “You cannot die, do you hear me? You can’t go and leave me alone like that, Steve, it’s not fair and you went and made that fucking will and it’s like you’re already dead. Have you picked out a fucking headstone yet?”

He’s breathing too hard and shaking all over, it feels like he is sweating every ounce of worry, fear, anxiety and sadness that has followed him like a pale shadow since the day he heard, On a scale of leukemia. What’s not fair is him blowing up at Steve like this, Steve has his own worries and concerns, fears and they don’t talk about it. Now Danny understands why they don’t: They would spectacularly lose their shit if they did; like Danny is doing right this second.

“Listen to me,” Steve says and goes to Danny, putting his hands on his shoulders and Danny shudders. It starts in his belly, rippling out and through him. Instead of getting mad back and yelling at Danny; telling him he’s the one being unfair here, Steve sounds almost pleading.

“I don’t want to listen to you,” Danny says and instantly feels utterly childish, but the words are out of his mouth before he can stop them.

“I’m going to talk anyway, so you may as well,” Steve says as he slides his hands across Danny’s shoulders and up his neck, stroking his pulse points with his thumbs. Danny goes still and clenches his jaw; he doesn’t want to hear this, but he will, he will force himself if he has to. “The treatments aren’t working as fast as the doctor had hoped and I don’t know what that means, not exactly, but I do know that it doesn’t look good right now and I can’t hide from that. I want to make every preparation I can in case this doesn’t get better, in case I don’t make it because I won’t leave you or the other people I care about with a mess to clean up when I’m gone.”

All Danny can do is shudder again, he hates what he’s hearing, he doesn’t want to deal with it and he’s never run away from anything in his life, but this… this he wants to run away from. Except if he did that then he’d be running away from Steve and they’ve lived through some hard times together; always watching the others back, so he can’t. But he can’t be here right now either because he is thisclose to breaking down in the garage that smells of dust and grease and faintly of fruit popsicles.

He takes one of Steve’s hands away from the side of his neck and brings it to his mouth, kissing the calloused palm and just holding it for a moment. “I need a minute, give me a minute here,” he says already backing away, apologies in his eyes, but this is too much and he has to be strong and if he breaks totally then he’ll ruin the illusion he’s carefully built for Steve’s sake. “I can’t be here right now, I need… because you can’t and I have to… So I’ll be back in a little while.”

“Danny, don’t go,” Steve calls after him and his voice sounds strained raised that loudly and he thinks he hears Steve coughing afterward, but he can’t be sure because he’s already outside and headed for the Camaro.

He gets in the car, cranks it and backs around in a cloud of dust as he pulls away. He can feel a burning-pricking behind his eyelids and blinks rapidly to try and make it stop. The treatments aren’t working fast enough… The treatments aren’t working fast enough… It becomes a loop in his head by the time he’s at the end of the driveway and by the time he’s half a mile away, it’s spinning around his mind so fast it’s almost like white noise.

By the time he’s a mile away Danny has to pull over onto the shoulder and sits there hanging onto the wheel as he finally falls apart.

Danny is once again sitting on the big, white sofa in Stan’s big, white house come two that morning. He’s wrung out and had perked up for Grace when he’d shown up, but when she went to bed an hour and a half later, he’d wilted again. He feels like there is nothing holding him up anymore, at least not right now. He wants to go home, he does, but he’s so goddamned embarrassed and ashamed over how he behaved that he’s honestly certain that now that he’s had time to think, Steve is probably good and pissed at him. Danny doubts that Steve is anywhere near capable of being as mad at him as he is himself. He hates leaving Steve alone though, but he feels like such a cad after that that he’s kind of forcing himself to stay put as a form of self-punishment. Which is not sane, nowhere near it and probably would not make sense to anyone but to Danny.

Across from him in her usual chair, Rachel is watching him worriedly and sipping at a cup of tea. “Danny, maybe you should call him, talk it out,” she says gently.

“Talk what out, exactly?” Danny asks with none of his usual bite. “Should I call him up and say, “Hey, Steve, I’m sorry I’m such a rat-fuck asshole for blowing up at you because you’re sick”?”

“That would perhaps be a start, yes,” Rachel says calmly.

Danny just makes an ahhh sound and runs his fingers through his hair that’s still sticky from the popsicle juice.

“I am so scared, Rachel. I have never been this scared in my life,” he says, just blurting it out. “I am so, so scared and everyday I wake up thinking that this is it, this is the last good day I will ever have with him. It’s getting harder and harder for me to leave in the mornings for work or do anything and I don’t want him to know that.”

Rachel sucks at her teeth in thought and nods. “I know you don’t and that’s your choice, but he’s trying to be strong, too, don’t you realize that?”

“I know he is, I know he’s scared, too and that only makes what I did about a thousand times worse,” Danny says and tugs lightly at his hair then lets go to wave his hand around. “A million times worse.”

“You two need to talk about this because if nothing else, this is killing you both,” Rachel says.

Danny opens his mouth to respond, but before he can, his phone rings. He snatches it up and looks at the caller ID and sees Steve’s name. He hits “accept” and says, “Hey.”

The line is quiet for a minute and then Steve says, “I can’t sleep.” He pauses again and Danny’s sitting with his free hand gripping his knee as he waits. He doesn’t have to wait long before Steve sighs and says, “Come home, Danny.”

“I’ll be there in a few,” he tells him and he’s already up off the sofa and hanging up. He crosses to Rachel and kisses her cheek then says, “He can’t sleep.”

“Then I suppose you should go put him to bed then,” Rachel says with a little smirk as she pats Danny’s cheek.

“Filthy, woman, you are filthy,” Danny says as he walks away and she laughs.

He drives back to the house about like Steve usually would and makes it in record time because all of this today has been wasting time and right now minutes-seconds-hours are precious. He’s squandered them with his own melodrama, he thinks and he can never have them back again, so Danny forces himself to not think about all the other shit that happened earlier. He just goes home.

Up the stairs he goes and to the bedroom where Steve is under the now-common pile of blankets. “Babe, I’m sorry,” he says as he goes to sit on the side of the bed next to Steve. “I am so, so sorry.”

Steve smiles faintly and shakes his head. “It’s okay, you were upset, I get it,” he says.

“I still acted like a jerk,” Danny says and then hesitates before saying, “I’m afraid though, so fucking afraid of losing you that that alone scares me even more.”

“I know,” Steve says softly and leans forward to rest his forehead on Danny’s shoulder. “I don’t want to leave you behind either, not if I can help it.”

“Then don’t,” Danny says fiercely as he wraps his arms around Steve. “Just don’t.”

Steve’s quiet for a long time and then he picks his head up to look at Danny with one of the saddest smiles he has ever seen. “I don’t know if it’s that simple, Danno,” he says even softer than before.

Danny shakes his head and takes Steve’s face, his beloved face, in his hands and kisses him. Steve starts to protest because the sores bother him—he doesn’t want Danny feeling the sores there, but Danny makes a sound of negation in his throat and does it anyway because he has to. And Steve kisses him back with a barely audible sigh, arms going around him and holding on tightly. It’s a slow, gentle kiss—they have to be careful—and it’s the best kiss ever, Danny thinks before he pulls away.

He keeps his hands on Steve’s face and after a moment, Steve raises his hands to Danny’s face and they sit there, looking. Danny commits every detail about Steve to memory because they’re going into the homestretch here; it’s make or break time and they both know it although they won’t say it.

Danny squirms around and kicks off his shoes, loses his tie and work shirt then wedges himself onto that side of the bed next to Steve because he doesn’t want to get up and move to his own. Steve doesn’t complain and they wrap around each other there, holding on like it’s the only thing they know how to do.

As he drifts off with the feel of Steve’s even, sleeping breath washing over his skin, Danny thinks about how Steve said that it may not be that simple. All he can think is that it’s got to be.

Steve has beautiful bones, Danny thinks as he watches him moving around in the kitchen the next afternoon, the yellow glow from the overhead light giving his skin a false wash of color. He’s greyish beneath his tan, bones sharp as rocks jutting from the ocean floor. Sharp and angled, high cheek bones, narrow skull and long, pretty fingers and it’s all outlined for Danny to see so fucking clearly now.

Months now he’s watched those bones reveal themselves one by one, growing more defined every time Steve’s stomach refuses to keep food down. The doctors are saying now that if he doesn’t maintain what weight he’s managed to hold onto that they’ll have to postpone his treatment and that is a thought Danny cannot bear. It’s already not working fast enough and if they have to wait for Steve to get more weight on his wasting frame then he’ll just get sicker and he can’t… he won’t…

He should’ve never been able to see Steve’s pretty bones so up close, in such intimate detail and with such perfect nuance it leaves slats of shadows in the spaces between his ribs. He has kissed those bones and murmured prayers into them that Steve couldn’t hear because he didn’t even move his lips.

Danny runs his fingers down the side of his beer bottle and watches the knobs of Steve’s spine shift and slide beneath the thin veneer of skin holding them in place as he turns to look in the refrigerator. He swallows, hears the dry click in his throat and then picks the beer up to drink; drains it one long, starving gulp.

He wants to touch those bones and press them back down, hide them under the muscle that’s trying hard to maintain itself in the face of this, but failing. Danny wants to build Steve back up to where he was, well and a healthy weight; too heavy for Danny to lift. Danny can almost pick him up now he’s gotten so thin and as tall as Steve is it only looks worse; worse than it really is. How many times has he dared to complain about Steve’s long fucking legs wrapping around him and waking him up in the middle of the night because Steve is clingy? Now he regrets every single time he told Steve to stop mistaking him for a teddy bear. He maybe even hates himself a little bit for it, even though he never made Steve move when he did that and waited until morning to voice his complaints.

Now Steve still does it and his ankles have grown so bony that he’s left bruises because he hangs on tighter now than he ever did before. Danny’s pretty sure Steve’s not aware of that though and he’s stopped complaining anyway. He’s glad for the feel of those bony ankles, knobby knees, the harsh plane of his shins digging into his flesh now when Steve tangles their limbs together bruisingly hard, making soft, dreaming sounds against the back of Danny’s neck.

It’s even worse on the nights the chemo has made Steve so sick that Danny has to half pick him up off the floor after he’s vomited. That he can, really can almost lift him up alarms Danny. His heart has slowly started to crack as it readies itself for the eventual breaking he fears will come and it does so a little more each time helping Steve to stand comes closer to just picking him up. He’s afraid that the day may come that he just gathers Steve up in a bundle of beautiful bones, but he’ll hold on and keep them near to him as they move from the bathroom to the bed again. He will.

It won’t happen though, it won’t Danny tells himself fiercely and believes it with all of his soul even if his brain is trying to tell him otherwise. Because when Steve turns back around and smiles at him like he’s doing now, holding up the can of Ensure he’s snagged from the fridge, he can believe in anything as his eyes glance down from his smile to the jutting wings of Steve’s collar bone and back up again.

“I understand the strawberry is particularly nasty,” Danny says and doesn’t listen to the way his voice cracks a little.

“It is and particularly gritty, too,” Steve says as he opens the can and walks back to the table where Danny’s sitting.

Danny watches him move, eyes following the slide and flow of those beautiful bones holding his sick body up and Danny silently prays once again that they are strong enough to keep on doing so.

“Don’t leave now.
We have almost
survived
our lives.”

— Linda Pastan
“March”

The hospital is cold, Danny can’t stop noticing that as he fusses with the blankets that cover Steve. His hands are unsteady and caffeine-jittery-nervous, flitting lightly over the soft, blue waffle weave of the blankets as he smoothes and tugs and tucks them around him better. He doesn’t want to get too into it, tuck too firmly or smooth too harshly because Steve’s sleeping right now. His skin looks bluish-grey in the dim light coming from the bathroom and the nasal cannula almost seems to glow. Danny could easily imagine it being filled with neon gas instead of oxygen that’s feeding Steve because he’s so stopped up rattly-clogged from the respiratory infection that has finally landed him here despite how much he’s fought being hospitalized.

Danny had thought he heard him coughing the day he left in such upset when he found out Steve had made a will, but he hadn’t been sure. The days that had followed had proven him right, but Steve had just brushed him off, saying, It’s nothing, Danny, everyone coughs. Danny had known better, but Steve had been so determined; so stubborn that he’d hushed up about it even though he kept an even closer eye on Steve and had stopped taking his nighttime sleeping pills so he could lay awake and listen to the sound of Steve breathing.

Then one morning before dawn Danny had woken up to harsh, racking coughs interspersed with gasping breaths and muttered curses. He couldn’t remember falling asleep, but he must have and when he came to, Steve was sitting on the side of the bed fighting to breathe. The bastard had tried to tell him he was okay even then; Danny recalls with a rueful shake of his head as he crosses his arms on the side of Steve’s narrow hospital bed.

He’d been having none of it by that point and had manhandled Steve out of the house and to the emergency room where the attending on duty had taken one look at Steve and a quick listen to his breath sounds and had him admitted on the spot. They’d wheeled him away from Danny with an oxygen mask over his face and Danny had stood there in his pajama pants and dress shoes watching him go. It hadn’t been sneaky about getting Steve, no sir, once it had established itself the infection had ransacked Steve’s chemo-compromised immune system and taken a firm hold.

He’s recovering now, but Steve’s doctor seems grim and Danny doesn’t like that; he doesn’t like hearing about the options they have left. However, he can be—and is—grateful that there are at least options still and no one’s mentioned hospice care, which has become the stuff of Danny’s worst nightmares.

“You’re going to get better, you are,” Danny tells Steve’s sleeping self and checks the IV bag pumping antibiotics into Steve’s veins.

He finally rests his head on the mattress and sits there, hunched over and miming sleep as he watches Steve through slitted eyes. He does close them after awhile and only wakes up again when he feels Steve’s cold fingers stroking through his hair.

“Danny?”

“Yeah?” he asks, instantly awake.

“Why are you still here?” Steve asks him, voice raw and hoarse sounding from sleep and sickness.

“Because there’s nowhere else for me to be,” Danny tells him simply. He’s made up his mind; he’s not leaving this hospital until Steve does—one way or another.

“You have work in the morning, you can’t leave Chin and Kono there running things on their own,” Steve says.

“I also have an alarm on my phone and the doctors’ showers at my disposal,” Danny says. “It’s fine, you rest.”

“Don’t tell me to rest when you’re doing this to yourself,” Steve says with a sigh and Danny listens closely to the sound of the exhale. The rattle is definitely lessening. “You’re driving yourself crazy with this and you’re driving me crazy watching it.”

“I can’t leave you here alone,” Danny says softly after a long, long time spent thinking and feeling Steve’s skinny fingers combing through his hair. He’s messing it up, but Danny doesn’t care; Steve could yank a wad out right now and he’d be happy because it would mean Steve was getting some strength back.

“Danny, don’t do this to yourself,” Steve says and then has to stop to cough. He spits up phlegm in a cup sitting on the nightstand and settles back down again. “Don’t.”

“I’ll stop doing this to myself when you stop being so fucking stoic,” Danny tells him and sits up to look at Steve better. He’s got circles under his eyes that look like he’s been beaten.

“I am not being stoic, I’m just trying to be practical. One of us has to be,” Steve tells him with another sigh. He’s got his eyes closed and his long lashes disappear into those inky-bruise smudges.

“Yeah and you’ve always been so good at being levelheaded and cool, right?” Danny asks and he’s tired, but there’s a bite to the words, too.

“Fuck you,” Steve says, eyes snapping back open to look at Danny and there’s fire in them. Danny straightens up more in his seat at that look; he’s glad to see it there instead of Steve’s calm, Zen acceptance of the state of things. “Just… fuck you,” Steve says again through his teeth.

“Yeah? Fuck me? Fuck you,” Danny says back and he’s goading him, he is, but if Steve doesn’t think Danny has missed the toll this has taken on him and the sad anger in his eyes every time he takes one of his multitude of pills then he is mistaken. He doesn’t know how it’s turned into this right now, but he’s almost glad of it.

Steve nods and coughs lightly, but it’s not a bad one and the fire is still in his eyes. “Yeah, fuck you. I’m the one dying here and I’m watching you kill yourself everyday, so fuck you hard.”

“So this is all about me? All of it?” Danny asks. “What about you, Steven? Huh? You’re still trying to micro-manage and control everything and look after everyone and you never think about yourself. To hell with that, I don’t want you worrying about me or Chin or Kono or Grace or anyone else and you’re making this some kind of self-sacrificing, altruistic bullshit… thing.”

“What the hell else am I supposed to do, curl up in a ball and cry?” Steve snarls at him and with his raw voice it really does sound like a growl.

“Yes! If that’s what it takes to make you worry about you then fuck yes,” Danny says.

“I can’t do that,” Steve says and balls his hands into fists in his blankets. “I am so scared and so… so angry that if I let it go I will explode. Do you get that at all? I want to scream about it I am so mad. I want to hit everyone I see because how dare they get to go on living their lives and being healthy when I have to live like this? I hurt all the time, I have nightmares about my own funeral… I think about having to leave everything and everyone I love behind and I just want to go on a goddamned shooting spree.”

He runs out of steam with a rattling exhalation of breath and lays there, staring at the far wall with angry tears turning his eyes to grey glass. Danny watches him for awhile and nods to himself once as he leans forward again to take Steve’s hand in his and lay it against his jaw.

Steve resists him for a second, but then lets him do it and walls his eyes to look at Danny. The first tear runs down his ashen cheek and Danny licks his lips. “Then hit me,” he says. “Hit me if it will make you feel even a little better, babe. Do it. I want you to.”

“Danny, no,” Steve says and there goes another tear and Danny can hear them clogging up his throat, making his rusty sounding voice thick.

“Go on, do it, sock me a good one,” Danny says and lets Steve’s hand go to stand up and lean over close for Steve to reach.

“Danny…” Steve says and more tears run down his cheeks.

“Do it!” Danny yells at him.

His yelling seems to snap something loose in Steve and he punches Danny square on the jaw. Sick or not and weak from that sickness, Steve still knows how to hit and Danny’s head snaps back as pain flares in his jaw. He works it with a wince and straightens back up to look at Steve.

“You know, I think I do feel a little better,” Steve says almost wonderingly and then he hunches his shoulders and sobs like his heart is breaking.

Danny climbs onto the bed and holds him and Steve holds on right back so hard his clenching, bony hands leave ugly bruises all over Danny’s back. “Shh, I’ve got you,” Danny says and Steve just cries harder. Without even realizing it, Danny’s crying now, too, teardrops falling onto Steve’s skin.

Steve cries himself to sleep against Danny’s shoulder and Danny sits there, half curved over and around him like a broken question mark until he falls asleep, too.

A week later finds Danny sitting on the edge of Steve’s hospital bed reading over a case file with it angled so Steve can read along with him. The infection has cleared itself out of Steve’s lungs and his breathing is back to the way it was before—not quite normal, but not a labored wheeze either.

Glancing up, Danny frowns and shakes his head and says, “I cannot believe you let Grace do this to you,” and runs his fingers over the dolphin frolicking over the dome of Steve’s bald head.

Steve looks over at him and grins. “She needed something to do,” he says and reaches up to pat one of the big, yellow flowers blooming along his temple. “I kind of like it.”

“So help me if you get your scalp tattooed I am leaving you,” Danny says, knowing it’s a lie.

“I just might,” Steve says. “You think Grace would draw up a design for me?”

“No, I am putting my foot down here,” Danny says and licks his thumb to rub away a piece of wave that migrated onto the top of Steve’s ear.

Steve swats him away and says, “Can you even reach the floor this high up?”

“Go to hell,” Danny says very calmly and turns back to the file he was reading, but when Steve starts laughing he bites his lip to keep from smiling in return.

“Come on, that was funny,” Steve says.

“To you it was funny, to me it was an insensitive jibe about my height,” Danny says, sounding almost prim about it and making Steve laugh even more.

“The woes of the vertically challenged,” Steve says and tuts mockingly. “Poor, poor Danno.”

“Read the damned file before I hit you with it,” Danny threatens and looks back at Steve again who’s smiling at him.

He leans his head against Danny’s shoulder and says, “Sure, turn the page though, I read this one already.”

“Sure thing, babe,” Danny says and turns the page even though he hasn’t finished reading that one yet.

After awhile and still pretending to read over the next file, Danny asks, “You ready for tomorrow?”

“Yeah,” Steve says, still pretending to read as well. “I have to be.”

“I guess so, but it’s a big thing you know,” Danny says.

“I know,” Steve says. Then he says what neither of them has been willing to say before, “It’s my last chance though, I have to take it.”

Danny huffs out a breath and nods. There’s nothing he can say to that at all. Tomorrow Steve begins the conditioning phase of the bone marrow transplant he’ll be receiving once it is done. All that it’s going to entail has Danny on pins and needles, he’s been doing his research and if they’re not careful; if they don’t take the very best precautions, this phase could kill Steve before he ever gets the transplant. Even after the respiratory infection though, Steve’s doctor had deemed him healthy enough to withstand it because Steve had been in such excellent physical shape before he got sick. His leukemia may be stubborn, but it hasn’t degraded Steve’s physical condition the way it would a patient who had been less healthy than he was beforehand.

Knowing all of that doesn’t make Danny feel any better about what’s going to come. Tomorrow they’re going to put a tube—a catheter the doctor called it—into a vein near Steve’s heart so they can pump him full of even more chemotherapy. They’re going to be giving him intensive radiation treatments on top of it. All of Steve’s health that has kept him going this long is going to be wrecked in the process and intentionally no less. They aren’t just going to compromise Steve’s immune system, they are going to totally destroy it.

The thought makes a chill run down Danny’s spine because once they start that tomorrow they will be walking a very, very thin line between killing Steve and saving him. Steve knows it, too, but he won’t talk about that part and Danny hasn’t said anything either; but they’re both thinking it. Danny’s got letters addressed to himself, Mary, Chin, Kono, Grace and Kamekona all in the Camaro’s glove box that Steve gave him yesterday.

“Just in case,” he’d said when Danny asked what the letters were all about. That was all he’d needed to say and Danny had held them so hard they’d bent under the grip of his fingers on the smooth white envelopes; each with a name written on the front in Steve’s cramped, economical print. All of the envelopes had been surprisingly thick except for the one addressed to Danny, it was so thin Danny could hardly believe there was anything in it at all.

“Turn the page, Danny,” Steve says and elbows him gently to drag him out of his thoughts. “The others will be here soon and I want to finish this before they arrive.”

“Yes, sir, Commander Bossy Breeches,” Danny says and then stops. “Turn the page yourself, your hands aren’t broken. What am I, your maid?”

“Commander Bossy Breeches, really?” Steve asks and gives Danny a flat look as he turns the page. “Of course you’re my maid. I should get you one of those frilly white apron things; dress you up right.”

“You do that,” Danny says and smiles at Steve.

Steve smiles back and leans up to kiss the fading bruise on Danny’s jaw. “I’m going to be okay,” he says, suddenly serious.

“Yes, yes you are,” Danny says and leans over to kiss Steve square on the mouth.

His lips taste like the blue raspberry Lip Smackers Grace gave him because his lips had started to dry and crack when the respiratory infection got him good. Steve wears it now because Danny thinks he secretly likes the taste since his lips aren’t all that bad anymore. He thinks that’s pretty damned funny, but it still kills him to think about the why of it. It hasn’t stopped him from buying Steve two extra tubes to use once they start blasting him with chemo and radiation though.

Danny deepens the kiss and thinks about how tonight is the last night for a long time he will be able to do this. After tonight his visitation will be extremely limited and when they do let him in, he’s going to be wearing gloves and a mask so he doesn’t give Steve some little something that could kill him. Tonight is the last night he will be able to even touch Steve and feel his skin under his fingers and Danny’s going to make the best of it so he can remember every nuance, every little bit of Steve because it’s going to have to keep him going for weeks once the process starts.

He breaks the kiss and rests his forehead against Steve’s, sharing his air and licking the Lip Smackers from his own lips as Steve cards his fingers through Danny’s hair. Leaning against him like that, Danny thinks that weeks of waiting to touch Steve again after tonight is a billion times better than ever having to find out what’s inside that skinny little envelope with his name on it.

The next morning dawns cloudy and grey outside the hospital windows. Danny thinks it all looks so cold out there even though he knows Hawaii is anything but. He misses the cold, thinks it should be cold; actually cold, not the manufactured chill of the hospital blowing around him with its disinfectant scented currents of air.

He’s still with Steve, but this is really it for now, he’s going in for his first radiation treatment and after that their long separation will truly begin. Danny’s already wearing a mask and gloves at the doctor and nurse’s insistence. Everyone looks like they’re dressed for a part in a movie about outbreak and contagion and Steve is playing the role of Patient Zero. Steve’s already gotten into an argument with his doctor when he protested about being wheeled down to the radiation therapy room; telling him he could walk just fine. The doctor was having none of it and so here he sits, sulking on a gurney while they finish the minor preparations to move him.

He catches Danny’s eye when they’re finally done and says, “It’s going to be okay.”

“Stop worrying about me,” Danny says. “Worry about you. How many times do I have to say that?”

“More than you already have,” Steve says and tries to smile, but it’s tight at the corners and doesn’t meet his eyes.

“Maybe I’ll work out a way to chant it then,” Danny says and takes a slow, careful breath to calm his nerves. It doesn’t work, but he gave it a shot at least.

“We’re ready to go,” the nurse says and she and the doctor start wheeling Steve away.

Danny’s got a tight feeling in his chest; it’s like they’re taking Steve away forever and he will never be able to see him again. He knows that isn’t the case, but as he goes with them out of the room and looks down the corridor it seems to go on forever and after this point, Danny will no longer be able to follow.

Steve’s going to be put in a new room with specially filtered air and seals on the doors to keep everything unwanted out after this. Danny will mostly have to stand on the other side to talk to him, to see him, to be anywhere near him. He thinks he can live with that and he knows he has to live with that. Everything they are doing now will be worth it in the end is what he keeps telling himself and it’s the God’s honest truth. It’s still strange how he half misses Steve already though.

“I’ll see you soon,” he says and his voice sounds normal and perfect when he speaks. It still amazes him how good at this he’s gotten.

“Yes you will,” Steve says and Danny squeezes his hand once, unable to really feel him through the latex covering it.

“Yep,” is all Danny can manage and then they’re pushing Steve down that endless corridor of pale blue and cream tile and away from him.

He sighs and goes back into Steve’s room to get all the things he won’t be able to have in his new room. Danny tries to look on the bright side and be glad they let Steve have his Lip Smackers, which will likely be taken out of the packages and sterilized some way, but it’s not doing the trick. He picks up Steve’s boots and looks out the window again, thinking once more about how it definitely looks cold outside; about how it should be cold outside. With a quick shake of his head to focus himself, he goes back to gathering Steve’s things and then leaves to go to work like it’s an ordinary day.

It dawns on Danny that today is a Friday and he laughs without ever smiling and then hits the side of his steering wheel. Steve’s said more than once he’s starting to hate Fridays because so many of his appointments have fallen on them. Danny thinks that after this round of everything Steve may well end up being Friday-phobic. When the sun at last breaks from behind the early morning clouds and pierces his eyes with its jovial yellow-orange rays it feels like a terrible lie to Danny as he drives to work all alone, more alone than he has been since this all started.

The weekend after Steve begins his conditioning phase, Danny has Grace. Rachel offered to keep her, but he wouldn’t have it. Honestly, right now he doesn’t just want to spend time with his daughter, he needs her to be there. Danny doesn’t know how to say that though, so he doesn’t say anything.

Sunday morning he gets up and makes them a big breakfast of French toast and home fries with sausage links and juice for them both, coffee just for Danny. Grace’s favorite meal is breakfast and Danny enjoys making it for her like this sometimes; it’s a special treat though and not something he wants to feed his child all the time. Though personally Danny thinks he could survive on French toast and coffee alone for years, but for Grace it isn’t healthy; do as I say, not as I do and all of that.

They eat quietly, Grace plowing through her French toast like there’s no tomorrow and Danny watching her more than he is eating himself. Halfway through a slice that’s been liberally sprinkled with powdered sugar, Grace cuts her dark eyes up to look at Danny. She makes a face, nose twitching a little and mouth screwing up some and he knows she wants to say something, but doesn’t know if she should.

“What is it, Monkey?” Danny asks her.

Grace huffs out a breath and licks powdered sugar from her upper lip. “Danno… Is Uncle Steve going to get better?” she finally asks and then frowns down at her food, picking up a sausage link to poke at her home fries with.

“Of course he is,” Danny says with a reassuring smile.

“It’s just… he’s really sick,” Grace says and looks up at him again. She looks worried-sad as she continues to poke at her food with the piece of sausage. “I want him to get better.”

“And he will, he’s getting better right now,” Danny says. “That’s why he’s still in the hospital, you know, so the doctors can make him better faster.”

“Really?” Grace asks and looks at him with hope in her eyes. “Do you really mean it?”

“Yep, I sure do,” Danny says. “Would I lie to my girl?”

“Hmm… maybe,” Grace says and she’s got a sly look in her eyes, mischievous; something that’s all her mother and Danny cracks one of the few real smiles he’s managed in days. She’s teasing him, he thinks, his own kid is trying to cheer him up and he’s never loved her for it more even if he wishes like hell his daughter didn’t have to try.

“Pfft,” Danny says back. “I’d never.”

“Would so, you told me last year that Great Uncle Otto didn’t smell like moth balls anymore so I’d hug him,” Grace says and wrinkles her nose. “That was a lie, Danno.”

Danny just blinks at her and sees she’s fighting a smile herself and then he throws his head back and laughs. “Okay, I’m guilty there, I admit it.”

“Good,” Grace says brightly, sounding very satisfied with herself. Then she throws a piece of home fry at Danny and it gets lost in his hair.

“Hey!” Danny cries and Grace slumps down in her chair, giggling as she picks up her toast to start eating again.

When she’s helping him clear the table after breakfast, Grace asks him to tell her about when him and Steve first met. Steve is usually the one who tells this story for some reason, even though Danny thinks he’s a crappy storyteller, but he tells her anyway, smiling faintly when he gets to the part about punching Steve at the scene that time. Grace is laughing, too and says that him and Uncle Steve are a lot like her friend Molly and a boy in their class named Vinay. After that she asks him how they actually got to be boyfriends and Danny flushes at the question, at how straightforward his little girl can be and blames himself and Rachel for that one.

He tells her a carefully abridged version of the truth while she finishes her juice and he runs hot water on the dishes in the sink. When he’s done, Grace sighs and says it’s romantic.

Danny’s face turns even redder and he asks her where she gets this crap. Grace shrugs and says, “I dunno,” but she’s smiling at him and giggles again when she notices he’s blushing. “You look like a tomato,” she says around her giggles and Danny goes over and tickles her until she’s squealing.

“How about we go down to the beach and you can play in the water—the shallow water?” Danny asks when he’s done tickling her and she’s caught her breath. Grace nods eagerly before hopping up to go change into her swimsuit, leaving him alone for a few minutes.

When she’s gone, Danny sits down in her chair and lets out a heavy breath, hoping he didn’t lie to her about Steve getting better. Then he gets up to tend to Steve’s herb garden in the windowsills while he waits on her. He swears to himself that today will be a good day, he will have fun and most importantly, Grace will have fun. He can worry about other stuff later.

Danny goes to the hospital after he takes Grace back to Rachel. He practically lives in the hallway right outside of Steve’s room these days. He could go in and see him, but after a talk with his doctor, a man with lively brown eyes and the best bedside manner Danny thinks he’s ever seen, he’d opted not to go in to see Steve at all. Not because he doesn’t want to, but because it’s safer for Steve this way. Even wearing a protective mask, a gown and gloves, with the work Danny does that sometimes requires him to stomp through garbage looking for evidence, any little particle of anything could get shaken loose from his clothes. It could come loose from the soles of his shoes or slip from under the paper cap on his head. Danny had given himself a fit sitting and thinking about some nasty little microbe sneaking its way into Steve’s protected little bubble and getting inside of him. He’s afraid that if he goes in there, he’s going to accidentally kill Steve no matter how careful he is.

So he doesn’t go in. That’s how he handles that. Neither do Chin, Kono or anyone else. Steve thinks they’re all overreacting, but one look at how he’s so pale now Danny can see the topography of blue veins in his face and how his hands shake with exhaustion and sickness only stiffens Danny’s resolve.

Instead he sits out in the hallway in an uncomfortable chair with a legal pad and magic marker and flashes notes at Steve. He’s not going to disrupt hallway traffic on this floor of glass cube-rooms that Danny would’ve never thought existed outside of shows like House. But they do, they’re as real as anything and there’s a row of six on either side of the broad hallway. Only one other is occupied though, a seventeen year old boy resides in the last one on Steve’s row. Danny’s met his parents and older brother and younger sister; they’ve talked and are on friendly terms when they meet. At night though, Danny has the hallway to himself and he and Steve flash notes at one another scrawled in thick black lines.

It’s what passes as conversation between them lately. Tonight Danny tells him about his weekend with Grace and French toast for breakfast and how she said they were romantic. Steve smiles from his side of the glass and writes back, asking Danny if he actually washed the dishes. Danny didn’t know it was possible to write in italics, but Steve somehow does it. Under that, Steve asks Danny how bad he blushed.

Danny scribbles back a lie saying of course he did the dishes and informs Steve in extra-tall letters that he didn’t blush at all; that he does not, in fact, ever blush.

Steve’s response is quick: LIAR.

Danny forgoes writing a reply and simply flips Steve off.

Steve gives him a brief, flickering smile and then rolls over to face the other side, the only other solid wall in the room. While Danny waits, he pretends that Steve isn’t puking in the pan on that side of him. He can pretend all he wants, but he knows that it’s probably only going to get worse and if he thought it was bad before then he was sadly mistaken.

When Steve rolls over again, he’s clammy looking and Danny wants more than anything to be able to go in there and wipe the sweat off his face with a cool cloth instead of sitting out in the hallway and watching Steve do it with a corner of his blanket. Instead he mouths, You okay? to Steve who gives him a thumbs up with a hand that’s shaking even worse than before.

He picks up his marker again and writes a note asking Danny how the investigation into the pharmacy break-ins is coming. They’ve already got one of the guys, but they’re still trying to track down two others and Danny is on his fourth page of explaining all of that—he’s got to learn a little more concision if they’re going to keep this up, he thinks absently—when he glances up to see Steve’s fallen asleep.

His ashen cheek is resting on the bright yellow legal pad and Danny can see a long, black mark from his marker skipping across his hand and the IV line plugged into the top of it. He’s curled up slightly and he looks so terribly fragile laying there that Danny sighs heavily and watches him like he’s going to disappear any minute; just wither up and fade away.

After awhile he leans back in his chair and watches the green lines on Steve’s heart monitor bouncing serenely across the black screen. It’s wonderful to watch that steady rhythm thumping away with little dips and spikes. It’s also hypnotic and lulls Danny to sleep right there in his hard plastic chair, legal pad and marker clattering to the floor with small, echoing sounds in the monastic silence of the ward.

Danny wakes up with a start when he feels a gentle shake on his shoulder. For a millisecond he thinks it’s Steve waking him up for work, but when he opens his eyes he sees one of the night nurses, Neona, standing in front of him. She’s a transplant just like Danny, but from Greece instead of New Jersey and in his half-asleep state her black hair seems so shiny he’d swear he could see reflections in it.

“Wassit?” Danny mumbles and then rubs at his eyes.

“You should come lay down in the lounge if you are going to insist on sleeping here, Danny,” Neona tells him, her accent making her words sound like strange, pretty music to him. He’s on a first name basis with most of the staff and he knows the night watch, as he calls them, particularly well.

“Yeah, yeah,” he says and stands up, wincing at the pain that shoots up his back. He blinks a few times and then looks at Neona. “Steve—” he starts and Neona shakes her head.

“He buzzed me to come get you out of this chair,” Neona tells him with a patient smile and steps aside so he can see into Steve’s glass box.

He’s propped up a little in bed and bleary-eyed, but he’s holding up his legal pad: Go lay down.

Danny frowns at him and rubs his face again, but he nods and walks up to the glass wall to tap it once, Goodnight, Steven, before he shuffles off down the corridor to the lounge with its cushy blue couch to do as he’s told. Neona brings up the rear and lays his legal pad and marker on the small end table.

“Sleep well,” she tells him and Danny grunts at her.

“Give him something for the pukies,” Danny says and waves a hand. “He threw up earlier. Again.”

“I was planning on it,” she tells him and then the lights in the lounge go out. “You rest now, you must do that; it is very important,” she says and then he hears the door click shut.

Danny does fall back asleep and he dreams of writing all over the hospital with fat black markers. Somewhere, just out of his sight, Steve is laughing and telling him he’s going to get in trouble if he doesn’t stop. Danny smiles in his sleep and snuffles into the throw pillow he’s sleeping on and when he wakes up the next day to the sound of his phone’s alarm going off, he tries to hold onto the feeling.

Steve’s bed is empty when he walks by to head home for a shower and he forgets again because he knows they’re off slamming Steve with more radiation, breaking him down one cell at a time.

The days stretch like time is being pushed through a sieve and by the following Wednesday Danny begins to notice a change in Steve. Not just sickness, he’s almost depressingly used to that by now, but in his mental state. Steve, when he’s awake, which isn’t often lately, has become withdrawn and distant. When he looks at Danny through the glass walls in the evening there is something bleak and trapped-animal frightened in his eyes. He’s getting really short tempered, too, when he does speak, yelling at the nurses and his cheerful, friendly doctor. He called him a sadistic sonofabitch just yesterday and threw him out of the room. Or tried to. Danny had stood on his side of the glass watching it all like a man observing animal behavior and shook his head. His constant companion, Worry (yes, he’s personified it, what of it?) has taken on a new facet in the face of all this. Steve’s going nuts cooped up in his glass box on top of everything else.

The doctor warned them that this would likely happen; he said that it often does because the lack of physical contact and so much isolation begins to wear on patients after awhile. He had strongly advised Steve to speak to a psychiatrist or a counselor during this time to keep himself on track mentally, but Steve had turned him down. He thought he could handle it, but if he’s like this after less than a week, Danny dreads what he’s going to be like when several days turns into several weeks after he receives his bone marrow transplant.

I’m trained for this, Danny, I don’t need a damned shrink, Steve had told him, scowling at him over his bowl of plain oatmeal one morning after they’d started discussing and preparing for the conditioning phase.

Danny’s looking at him right now though and thinking that no SEAL has ever been trained for this though. They’re not trained for weeks of sickness and pain just so they have a hope of surviving. They’re taught to withstand enemy torture and long hours of solitude in prison camps; buried in little bunkers built beneath the sand and such. Not this because while it may be a lot like a combat situation in some regards, the battlefield is completely different and the enemy is Steve’s own body. His coping strategies do not apply to this; for one thing, Steve works out when he’s stressed and these days rolling over seems to leave him slightly winded, so he doesn’t even have that to fall back on.

He leans his head against the glass and wishes Steve would open his eyes and look at him, but he doubts he will. Steve hasn’t spoken to him in a couple of days although Danny doesn’t think he’s mad at him, Steve is tired though—all the time—and stressed out and yes, he’s depressed. So he’s doing what Steve always does: He’s pulling away and closing himself off and sick or not, Danny could happily throttle him for that. Of all the times for Steve to pull this crap, he’d have to go and do it now when he needs to fall back on this little coping mechanism of his about as much as he needs a hole in the head.

Danny taps his fingers against the glass and after a few minutes of that, Steve opens his eyes to cut them to the side and give him an irritated look. Danny grins at him; he knew he wasn’t sleeping. He slaps his legal pad against the glass for Steve to read, It’s only two more days.

Steve presses his lips into a tight line and gets his legal pad, scribbles something and flashes it at Danny, annoyance evident in every shaky movement. Of THIS part.

I am trying to cheer you up here. Work with me.

No. With that, Steve puts his legal pad down again and turns over to face the solid wall.

Danny smacks the glass and says, “Damnit, Steve, don’t you do this!”

It echoes down the long corridor and the only sign Steve hears any of it is the slight twitch of his bony shoulder.

“I’m right here, babe, you hear me? Right here!” Danny yells and he’s not yelling because he’s angry, but because the damned plexiglass walls are so fucking thick he has to if he wants to be heard at all.

“Shit,” he says to himself. If he could just touch Steve… hold his hand or lay down next to him for a little while maybe he could reassure him that he’s not alone. Standing on the other side of a glass wall isn’t the same thing. Fuck, Danny knows it’s not the same thing.

It’s just a few feet, but it feels miles away because Steve is somewhere Danny cannot be and vice versa. Out here in this long, quiet hallway, Danny is nothing more than an observer in this and there’s nothing he can do to change it. Watching Steve like this is like looking at bug kept under glass or a goldfish in a bowl.

Feeling like a shit for the comparisons he just made, Danny sits down on the cold floor outside the glass. His chair is down the hall in the lounge, he had to move it so the janitor could mop that morning and he’s not bothered to get it back yet. He looks at Steve’s back for a few minutes, but then he has an idea and gets up, heading down the hall to the nurse’s station.

Neona is on duty tonight and that makes Danny glad, she’s his favorite of all the night watch. “Hey, Neona, I have a favor to ask you,” he says after telling her hello and saying she looks lovely, which got an eye roll for his troubles.

“Yes and what favor would that be?” she asks.

“Well, it’s like this,” Danny says and takes out his cell phone. “I can’t use this in here, right?”

“You know you cannot, not on this floor, no,” Neona says.

“Right, so I was wondering if I might use this phone here at the desk,” Danny asks her. “I know it’s for official hospital business and all, but this is important. A patient’s cheerfulness depends on it.”

“Ah, so he is still very frowny is he?” Neona asks.

“And irritable and pissed off and sick and depressed, yeah,” Danny says. “I’m asking you as a friend and fellow human being to please let me call him.”

Neona smiles at Danny and says, “You do not have to sell your cause so hard, Danny, you could have just asked.”

“Now you tell me,” Danny says and Neona shrugs.

“You are very good with your words and twisting them around, it is quite impressive,” she says as she motions him behind the desk and moves to another chair with the book she was reading. “Call him, tell him to keep his courage up, it will be a-okay.”

“Will do,” Danny says, already dialing the extension to Steve’s room.

It rings and rings and rings until Danny’s thinking Steve isn’t going to answer at all, but then he does and instead of a greeting, Danny gets, “I know it’s you. What do you want?”

Steve sounds awful, his voice a whispery rasp, grating in his throat and it sounds so dry. Hearing his voice, Danny can hear how sick he is and it’s just one more block in the picture of Steve that Danny has been building.

“I want to tell you a story, sunshine,” Danny says. “So don’t hang up, this is a good one.”

“I’m too old for the Billy Goats Gruff,” Steve says, but he hushes and Danny can tell he’s listening.

“Good to know because this is a way more grown up story and I gotta say, I think it’s way more interesting, too,” Danny says.

“Well, what is it?” Steve asks and Danny can’t be sure, but he sounds a little more relaxed now, not so tired-angry-sad.

“When me and Matt were teenagers, Matt got himself a joint from one of his friends, some stoner kid named Colin… something or other… for his birthday. Well, Matty convinced me, yes, me as in yours truly, to spark it with him out back of the house one night after everyone else went to bed. See, I don’t know what I was thinking because I never been big on doing drugs or nothing, but it was my kid brother’s birthday and he wanted to smoke that joint with me, you know?” Danny says, steamrolling right along, hands waving around the more he talks and the more into the story he gets. “So I smoked it with him and it was the craziest shit. I mean, we didn’t go all Cheech and Chong or nothin’, but we laid out there in the backyard listening to Pink Floyd on this little battery operated radio I had and all we could do was laugh. The one part I remember most clearly—aside from eating three grilled cheese and onion sandwiches later that night—was Matt making this joke out of the line in “Another Brick in the Wall Part Two”. You know the one where it’s like this headmaster guy—I think it’s a guy anyways—and he’s saying, if you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding Matty and me was cracking up already, but then Matt starts saying, if you don’t beat your meat, you can’t have any pussy and we about pissed ourselves then. Was the funniest shit I’d ever heard and I think damn near everybody does it with that part of the song, but to me that night it was like it was brand new and there we were, laughing like hyenas and shushing each other in between because we didn’t want our parents waking up and finding us stoned in the backyard. But yeah, that’s my story.”

Danny stops talking and takes a moment to catch his breath. Beside him, Neona has abandoned her book and is sitting with a hand over her mouth and head down to muffle her laughter while she shakes her finger at him with the other hand. Steve’s quiet on his end of the line and Danny wonders if he fell asleep or hung up on him while he was babbling on and on, but then he hears a snicker that grows into a laugh that rolls into Danny’s ear at last.

Danny leans back in the chair with a smile splitting his face as he listens to Steve laughing and laughing. “That doesn’t even make sense,” Steve says and he’s trying to be serious, but he’s still laughing his ass off, so the effect is lost.

“I know, but we thought it was fucking brilliant at the time,” Danny tells him and Steve laughs even more.

“You… stoned… I’d pay to see that,” Steve says.

“Oh yeah, how much?” Danny asks him, smile growing wider because even with his croaky voice, Steve really sounds more like Steve finally.

Steve says, “I dunno, a dime, maybe a quarter…”

It’s Danny’s turn to laugh then and after awhile they lapse into a conversation, keeping it light and not once mentioning Steve being sick and cut off from the rest of the world in his glass bubble. Before they hang up though, Steve says, “Hey, Danny? Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it, babe,” Danny tells him. “Goodnight, Steven.”

“Goodnight, Danno,” Steve says and then there’s a click as he hangs up and the open line hums in Danny’s ear.

“Mission accomplished?” Neona asks after Danny sets the phone back in the cradle with a sigh.

“For now,” he says and taps the receiver, wanting to call Steve back and just listen to the sound of him breathing. Except he’d feel like a total creeper if he did that, so he resists the urge.

“If you want to talk to him again, anytime I am on duty then you come to me and I will let you,” Neona says. “He does not need to be feeling so alone right now.”

“I know and thank you,” Danny says as he gets up and squeezes her shoulder. “Really, Neona, thank you so much.”

“You are so welcome,” she tells him with a bright smile. “More people that come onto this floor should have someone like you around.”

“Now you’re gonna embarrass me,” Danny says, but he’s smiling a little bit, too, as he starts to walk away. “I’m gonna get my chair and if I fall asleep, wake me up.”

“Of course,” she says and gives him a little wave as he goes to get his chair and take up his usual post outside Steve’s wall.

Without meaning to, Danny has become another part of the night watch here on the ward. For Steve though, he’s okay with that.

The day of Steve’s transplant finally comes around and the whole group of them gather outside Steve’s glass wall to watch. Danny asked him over the phone the night before if he really wanted them there for that and Steve’s immediate answer had been yes. So here they stand, Danny, Chin and Kono watching with their faces right up against the glass as bone marrow is pumped into Steve with a nurse standing by and monitoring his vitals.

None of them were a match, not even Mary had been though the doctor had assured them that it wasn’t nearly as uncommon as popular media would have people believe about a sibling being a match. So Steve is lying in his bed with bone marrow donated by some stranger found in a registry. They are all depending on some nameless, faceless person to save Steve’s life. Danny really hopes Anon doesn’t let them down because a world without Steve is not a world worth living in, he doesn’t think.

“He’s going to beat this,” Kono says, jaw set and firm as she looks on.

“Yes, he is,” Chin chimes in.

Danny stays silent, standing there between them, watching Steve who is watching him back. He smiles at him and Steve smiles back, lifting his hand in a little wave at his group of supporters. Chin and Kono each sling an arm around Danny and that’s how they pass the rest of the transplant, leaning on one another as they watch Steve being administered the last chance he has left.

After the transplant Steve thinks he feels worse than he did before and he didn’t think that was possible. It’s a constant feeling of sickness, like he’s got the worst case of the flu that has ever been; perhaps some new and particularly virulent strain of it. Even with the medication he’s being given, he still feels like complete shit to the point that even when he’s asleep, he doesn’t rest comfortably. Bone aches and joint pains have been his constant, unwanted companions since the symptoms first started showing up, but it’s worse now and some days all he can do is lie in bed and honestly try not to scream because of the throbbing ache in every part of his body.

Some nights he just lays there staring up at the ceiling until he could swear it’s getting lower and lower every time he blinks and then opens his eyes again. He gradually starts to believe that the ceiling is going to crush him in his sleep, so he starts fighting sleep, keeping Danny awake as long as his conscience will allow it and after that, Steve tries to watch television. Despite that, he typically falls asleep not long after Danny’s shuffled off down the hallway to sleep on the couch in the lounge.

There are honestly days when he’s laying there, sweating and still cold, hurting and worrying about the walls crushing him if he doesn’t keep a close eye on them, that Steve wonders if all of this is really worth it. He doesn’t feel any better, he’s going stark raving mad and he’s so unbelievably lonely here in his hated room that he doesn’t think he can bear it one moment longer. He’s tired of being poked and prodded at, he’s got bruises on the insides of his arms that would put a junkie to shame thanks to having his blood drawn every goddamned day to check him for a whole host of problems the transplant itself could cause.

Then he’ll turn his head and see Danny’s chair sitting there, waiting for him to come in that evening and fill it. His legal pad is in the seat of the ugly thing with his magic marker on top of it and Steve tells himself to stop it then. He can do this, it’s worth every single twinge of pain if he can make it out of here and go home where he can touch Danny again and listen to his voice without it coming muffled through plexiglass or crackling down a phone line. Steve tells himself that if Danny can wait then so can he.

Sometimes it’s hard though, so, so hard and never before has Steve been so thankful for painkillers. Doubts nag the back of his mind though, the knowledge that this is not a one hundred percent guarantee that he will survive at all. There’s a chance that everything he’s put himself and the people he cares about through will be for nothing. Steve’s sick in a bad way and at best the whole damned thing only gives him a fifty-fifty shot at survival. What he tells himself though is that fifty-fifty is better than flat zero because without the bone marrow transplant, he’d have been dead in another month, two tops. He never has told Danny that and he never will.

One day Steve wakes up and he feels good, genuinely good for the first time in so long he can’t really remember. Aside from feeling a little weak, he would almost swear that it’s like he was never even sick at all. He lays back in bed and laughs at the sensation of feeling alive again instead of mostly dead already. He reminds himself that the doctor said that it happens and that tomorrow he may wake up feeling worse than he did in the first place, but he won’t waste this either, he thinks. He can’t waste it, it’s too great to spend lying about in bed when he actually has the energy to stand up and walk around a little while.

That evening Steve pulls a chair up to the wall directly across from Danny’s and sits there, waiting. When he comes in a little after six, he nearly falls down when he sees Steve sitting there.

“Should you be up?” Danny says and Steve has to strain his ears to hear him even though he knows he’s yelling.

Steve writes back to him because his throat can’t take that kind of volume. I feel good.

Danny’s eyes go wide and he sits in his chair, scraping it across the floor until their knees are touching through the glass. He picks up his pad and hastily scratches something out then slaps it against the glass. Are you cured then?

Steve smiles at him and writes, Getting there. I think.

You are, is Danny’s near-immediate reply.

Maybe, Steve writes back. You know what the doctor said.

Doctors don’t know anything. It’s slammed against the glass with Danny jabbing a finger at it.

Steve laughs and hopes Danny’s right as he sets his legal pad aside and thinks for a moment then presses both hands to the glass. Danny mirrors him and they spend the next hour and half doing some weird mime routine that mimics touching.

They both fall asleep in their chairs that night, foreheads leaning against the glass, inches away from real contact. Steve wakes up sometime early that morning with a feeling like fire ants are eating at his vertebrae and he frowns, kisses the glass then gets up and makes his aching way back to bed.

Yesterday was a start though, he thinks as he lies down with a gasp. It was a start and from here on out it can only get better. Much like Danny said all those weeks ago, it has to.

“Back off.
If there is light
it will find
you.”

— Charles Bukowski
“The Harder You Try”

The herbs in the windowsills are wilted, the marjoram is altogether dead and Danny thinks the curly leafed parsley is on its way out, too. The house still smells good, but there’s a creeping odor of rotting vegetation underneath it all now. He keeps meaning to throw them out, but he doesn’t have the time or energy to do it lately.

He moves around the bedroom getting dressed and taking his time with it. He goes to the dresser to grab his socks off the top and his fingers brush across the top of one of Steve’s bandanas. It’s a blue paisley one Grace picked out for him because it was navy blue, she’d said. Danny holds it for a little while, stroking the softness of the fabric and then he refolds it and lays it back down where it came from so he can put on his socks.

Once he’s dressed he looks over at his nightstand to the letter propped up against the lamp, his name written across the front of the envelope in a familiar hand and taps his fingers on his thighs. He’s been tempted to open it for ages now, but he can’t bring himself to do it even though a part of him wants to know what’s on the single sheet of hospital stationery folded up inside it. Maybe one day he will read it, but not today. No, today he has something more important to do and a promise he needs to keep, so he smoothes a hand over his hair and walks out of the bedroom with a sigh.

Steve looks up when Danny comes down the stairs and grins at him as Danny gestures at himself. “Do I pass inspection?”

“Yep,” Steve says and gets up to take a closer look at Danny standing there. “I think you look good in cargoes.”

“You think everyone looks good in cargoes,” Danny says dismissively. “I don’t see why I can’t just wear jeans to go on this little adventure you’ve got planned.”

“Cargoes have more pockets,” Steve says like that explains everything. Danny scowls at him and pokes a finger into his chest that’s still a little on the bony side, but is filling back out nicely now that he can eat again.

“You’re just saying that because you want me to dress like you for some freakish reason I dare not examine too closely,” Danny says then reaches up to pat Steve’s cheek fondly, worry dancing in his eyes. “Are you sure you’re up for this? It’s only been two months since the doc gave you the green light to go out and do crap again. Leave it to you to pick camping.”

“It’ll be fun and besides, I haven’t been outside for any length of time for way longer than two months,” Steve protests and then adds, “I feel okay, Danny, stop worrying. You’re getting grey hair from so much worrying.”

“Least I have hair,” Danny says and reaches up to run his hand over the top of Steve’s fuzzy head.

“I have some and I’ve got all of my eyebrows back,” Steve says and waggles them at Danny with a smile.

“Real sexy, Grover,” Danny says and laughs before waving a hand towards the door. “Well, we gonna go or what?”

“We’re gonna go,” Steve says. “As soon as you grab your pack.”

“Shit, right, pack,” Danny mutters. “Cut me a break, I’m new to this whole “outdoor adventure” craziness.”

“You’ll love white water rafting though, I swear,” Steve says, trying not to laugh at the look on Danny’s face.

“No, I will not, but I will do it because I said I would,” he says as he shoulders his pack. “There. Pack is on. Let’s go now; the sooner we get there, the sooner we get to come home again.”

They’re sitting around their campfire that night, roasting marshmallows with a not altogether pleasant sense of nostalgia when Danny looks over at Steve and says, “What does it say?”

“What does what say?” Steve asks, giving him a perplexed look and then looking down at his t-shirt like it has somehow been written on when he wasn’t paying attention.

Danny clears his throat and says, “The letter you wrote me in the hospital. What does it say?”

“Why don’t you just read it?” Steve asks him.

“Because I don’t have to; you’re sitting right here,” Danny says. “You’re alive.”

The look he’s giving Steve says he can’t quite believe that’s true and Steve understands that perfectly. It’s a look of hopeful wonder on his face as he watches Steve through the dancing flames and Steve smiles at him because yeah, he definitely gets it. He’s here, right now and alive and with Danny and there were so many times he never thought that would happen.

He gets up and goes to sit right beside Danny, both of them crammed onto the fallen limb Danny’s using for a seat. Danny bites into his marshmallow as he turns to look right at Steve and Steve leans close to him just because he can.

“The answer is still yes. That’s what it says,” Steve says and leans a little bit closer, close enough he can smell the burnt marshmallow clinging to Danny’s lips. He licks his own lips, tastes blue raspberry Lip Smackers and says the one thing he never has, “I love you. It says that, too.”

There’s no fanfare or heart throbbing force behind it, but he means it all the same and Danny just smiles at him, his whole face lighting up. He grabs Steve’s face in his hands and kisses him hard enough he knocks them both off the limb and into the dirt. They lay there for a minute laughing about it, but then Danny says, “I love you, too.”

Then he kisses Steve again and their mouths taste like blue raspberries and burnt marshmallows, lips sticky and slick at once. This is it, they made it through and that means everything, Steve thinks as he deepens the kiss and they hold onto each other there in the firelight, happy and triumphant in that knowledge for now.