twentysomething

Title: Wouldn't It Be Nice

Fandom: Hawaii Five-0

Pairing: Steve/Danny

Summary: "If it was just him, he wouldn't ask, but- Grace needs to watch it for school and Danny isn't going to let Rachel say he's stunting Gracie's education.

And it's not like he doesn't have a sneaking suspicion as to who has over 800 channels of nothing on.

So he calls Steve."

Length: 2300 wordsish.

Warnings: FAMILY FIC FAMILY FIC

Notes: DID YOU MISS ME INTERNET, I MISSED YOU. In addition to a WIP later, enjoy this FINISHED FIC. So, I myself was watching a marathon of Life and wondering what the fuck was going on with my existence and wondering how traumatized on a scale from mild concern to Mufasa's death I would be watching this as a kid. And then I wrote this.



Gracie shrieks at about two in the afternoon while they're out buying ice cream.

"What, what, what?" Danny demands. "Are you hurt, are you bleeding, did you fall down?" Grace rolls her eyes and shakes her head frantically.

"No, Daddy, I just remembered that we're supposed to watch this show for school, it's on tv right now!" Grace explains and Danny heaves a sigh.

"Jeez, sweetheart, I nearly jumped out of my skin, don't yell like that unless there's something wrong." Danny says, rubbing a hand absently over his heart where adrenaline is still making him feel like someone's punched him.

"No, Daddy, this is really important," Grave whines. "It's called Life, Oprah does it, it's on the Discovery Channel." Danny winces. His basic cable package, consisting of whatever his rabbit-ears- supplemented by some tin-foil and duct tape- can get him, doesn't get Discovery. Danny doesn't really watch anything other than the news, if he manages to stay awake.

If it was just him, he wouldn't ask, but- Grace needs to watch it for school and Danny isn't going to let Rachel say he's stunting Gracie's education.

And it's not like he doesn't have a sneaking suspicion as to who has over 800 channels of nothing on.

So he calls Steve.

"Danno, it's called a day off because we don't talk to each other," Steve says, sounding smugly amused with himself.

Danny rolls his eyes.

"You get the Discovery Channel, right?" Danny asks, ordering Grace's chocolate chip cookie dough and his fudge ripple. Danny can hear Steve's shrug.

"Yeah, all day marathon of Oprah telling me about the planet. Why?" Steve answers suspiciously. Danny sighs.

"Grace has to watch it for school." Danny explains and Steve snorts.

"You're getting me mint chocolate chip, two scoops, in a cup. Come on over." Steve bargains, and thank god Grace has Steve as whipped as him.

"I would thank you, but I'm buying this service in 31 flavors, so." Danny jokes, but maybe he'll leave his tie at home on Monday. He's still hoping that, by rewarding Steve's good behavior- facilitating Grace's education, waiting for backup, abiding by the rules of the Geneva Convention- he can be trained, yet.

"And two scoops of mint chocolate chip, cup," Danny sighs. Grace beams up at Danny adoringly.

Danny is so whipped.

When they get there- because Steve is a spoiler- there's buttery, delicious-smelling popcorn that Steve solemnly performs a prisoner exchange with Grace for his ice cream.

The one thing Steve had apparently purchased with his probably obscene amounts of back hazard pay from Uncle Sam was a ludicrously large high-def tv. Abstractly, Danny knows that it's the sort of terrible excess demanded of a guy of Steve's age and lack of social life, and he can appreciate that economies are turned on these sort of purchases, but Grace plops herself down on the floor three millimeters away from the screen and he specifically objects to his kid rotting her eyeballs out.

"Grace, at least five feet back, you'll go blind." Danny gripes in an uncanny impression of his mother. Steve stares at him, a pale green smudge escaping the corner of his mouth. It's an endlessly flattering sort of look.

"Seriously? I always sat "too close" to the tv and I turned out fine," Steve protests and Danny can see nearly an entire un-chewed scoop in his mouth.

"Six feet," Danny revises. Steve rolls his eyes while slurping and smacking his ice cream around in his mouth and seriously, how has Danny never realized how gross Steve McGarrett is?

"I'm fine," Grace protests after moving back maybe two inches, completely transfixed already as the faux-tribal, pseudo-Enya intro music starts. Danny rolls his eyes and gives up. Step-Stan can deal with the optometrist appointment.

The first episode is apparently about marine animals in the deep sea or something, there'll probably be whales and shit.

Five minutes later he's staring slack-jawed in horror at the tv.

"They're letting, no making you watch this for school?" Danny manages in a strangled whisper as sixty quadrillion starfishes and some tube things and some other bottom-dwelling bastards eat a fucking dead baby seal. This is sick shit.

"Daddy, this is the circle of life," Grace reprimands him, still staring avidly as the time-lapse cameras create a sea floor stop-motion hell.

"I never should have let you watch The Lion King, it made you callous and scientific about death," Danny mutters, still watching half-through his fingers. Grace just clucks at him and goes back to kicking her feet idly under the coffee table as a fuckload of jellyfish eat each other.

"Who runs the Discovery Channel?" Danny muses idly, his hand migrating to cover his mouth as this giantass mean jellyfish- that really does look like a fried egg- devours twenty baby-sized jellyfish whole. Danny is no fan of jellyfish, but this is seriously twisted. He turns to the other side of the couch for even pretend moral support but Steve-

The son of a bitch is laughing at him.

Steve is almost-silent, shoulder-shaking, lip-biting laughing at him.

"Oh, Danno," Steve manages to croak out after a long moment of vicious glaring. "You are one hundred and ten percent the most princessy princess of them all." Steve starts cataloging places he could dump the body.

"They are not going to find enough of you to bury," Danny promises. Steve just grins because Steve has an incredibly thinly veiled death wish.

"If it gets too scary for you, you can just hide your face in my shirt," Steve says, all mock solicitude and Danny gives him a stinkeye mastered by generations of pissed Jewish women undiluted by his mother marrying a goy named Williams.

"I don't know who that worked on in eighth grade, but you didn't even buy me junior mints," Danny says, reflexively, before he scowls. "Also, why the f- uudge am I the girl here?" Grace is still glued to corals and anemones, but the f-bomb is always off-limits. Steve just smirks at him.

"I can go get my letterman jacket if you're cold," Steve adds and Danny wishes the horde of creepy, awful crabs would eat Steve's face and holy shit- that manta ray just fucking sucked up that goddamn crab.

"I hate you so much," Danny says absently, totally on autopilot as the camera pans over this morbid graveyard of outgrown crab shells.

It doesn't get any better.

And Oprah is strangely invested in cuttlefish sex.

They burn their way through the seas, insects- virulently disgusting- and primates, which is just super fucking terrible and plants- that naturally also manage to be horrifying. But probably not as horrifying as the knowledge that he's in a room with two robots, who apparently feel no fear or sympathy.

Well, Steve feels too much something and Danny nearly has to shoot him in the face when Steve attempts the yawn-arm-stretch-over-the-shoulder. Danny wonders if there is a support group for girls Steve McGarrett clumsily hit on high school.

He reviews that last thought and between that and the fungus growing ants and the story Steve is telling about pitcher plants eating rats, Danny goes to the kitchen and gets himself a beer. Steve fucking pouts at him when he comes back with only one bottle.

"You've spent the last three hours sexually harassing me. Go get your own beer." Danny protests. Steve retaliates by sticking his fucking freezing feet under Danny's thigh and he can feel how cold they are through his jeans.

"You're such a brat," Danny hisses. Steve just gives him the blankest of the blank looks- which usually precedes Steve hitting someone with a toilet tank lid- before wiggling his toes.

Grace makes a disappointed noise as the credits roll and an episode of Dirty Jobs comes on.

"Daddy, can we get dinner now?" she asks, standing up and stretching. Danny raises his eyebrows.

"You're still hungry? You had ice cream and popcorn and- no, you're right, real food, I'm a terrible father, you're going to get scurvy." Danny accepts this as he stands up, automatically reaching for Grace's hand. Steve watches them from the couch.

"Well, aren't you coming?" is out of Danny's mouth before he's really thought about it, even as Steve blinks but stands with a loose shrug.

"Sure. Where are we going?" Steve asks, bemusedly taking Grace's hand when she waves the hand not in Danny's at him.

"I want fish," Grace decides, which yeah, limits them to pretty much every restaurant on the island, still. Steve shrugs and Danny is leery of eating anything they just watched Oprah describe in-depth.

"I know a pretty good place, you trust me, Gracie?" Steve asks, swinging their arms together. Grace smiles up at Steve, sweet and uncomplicated and Danny's heart does this funny thing he doesn't really want to examine too closely.

"Yep," Grace says. "Daddy trusts you, too." Steve flicks this considering look over Grace's head at him and Danny can feel his cheeks heat, despite the fact that he hasn't blushed since his mother found skin mags under his bed in 1989.

"Certainly to not give us food poisoning, at least." Danny allows, even though he does trust Steve, an embarrassing amount, especially because most days Steve can't seem to remember how to inform suspects of their legal rights. Steve smiles anyway, this stupid smirk that makes Danny suspicious and strangely warm.

They end up in this place that looks pretty much like a hole in the wall, which- like in most places- is code for being really delicious. The waitress makes a big deal over Steve as she seats them, saying something about getting her grandmother. Danny is wondering if he can try earmuffs again so he can make a really inappropriate joke when possibly the world's oldest, wrinkliest lady appears out of the backroom.

Danny's sort of glad he didn't make a MILF joke, in retrospect.

She gives Steve a fierce hug before solemnly shaking Grace's hand- and Grace appears fascinated by the whole strange thing- before she focuses in like a heat seeking missile on Danny.

"So you're the new one," she simply says, and after a long moment, she just cackles, patting Steve on the face. "Much better." She disappears back the way she came and Danny is so fucking confused.

"What did that even just mean?" Danny demands. Steve passes Grace a menu.

"The flounder is really good," Steve tells Grace and Danny feels like nothing really makes sense.

"Flounder is Ariel's best friend, you can't eat him," Danny protests weakly even as Grace nods excitedly. Steve just raises his eyebrows at Danny.

"Danny, are you going to look at your menu?" Steve asks, like butter wouldn't fucking melt in his mouth, and seriously, Danny feels like he's being taken advantage of, somehow.

"Whole world," Danny mutters. "World world is against me." Steve is busy showing Grace some sort of secret handshake that's actually probably a death strike for most mammalian species. Danny figures he'll just order the special because otherwise he'll have to keep, you know, his eyes open.

When the special arrives, it's covered in pineapple and Steve laughs at him. Grace just sort of watches them with some weird look of abstract amusement on her face and Danny manages not to go, "What? What?" like he's wanted to, all afternoon.

"Danno, I'm glad you made friends with Steve," Grace finally says, when she's moved on from eating her food to playing with it. Danny almost chokes on a chunk of pineapple. Steve slaps his back complacently. "He's the best."

"The best," Danny wheezes, and Steve just grins brightly and yeah, when Steve's not torturing terrorists, he's not a bad guy. Danny pays the bill when Steve is in the bathroom and he has the feeling that by Monday morning, the entire HPD is going to know they went on some terrible fucking alternative-family-unit date.

They drop Grace off into the clutches of Rachel and Step-Stan and it's not until they're getting out of the car in Steve's driveway, so Danny can pick up his car that Danny realizes, actually, as far as his dates go, that wasn't bad.

In fact, looking back on it, Danny has probably taken Steve "I-forgot-my-wallet" McGarrett on upwards of ten dates.

Fuck.

Someone should probably put out.

"So when you do things like complain about my clothing and try to get me to swim in the ocean, that's you hitting on me, right?" Danny blurts out, because this is all tragically making so much more sense. Steve stares at Danny, who cannot stop talking.

"Like, the thing, with the tie, that's a sex thing?" Danny goes on, completely out of control and he really doesn't blame Steve for shutting him up with his mouth.

Which is also a lot better than Danny had expected, because Steve kisses like he's serious about it, hot and kind of mean when he bites at Danny's mouth and holy crap.

"I was really starting to worry there was some sort of Jersey courtship ritual I was missing," Steve explains, even as he pulls Danny back in for another bruising kiss. "Like, bring you a freshly slaughtered pizza. Except I did that, and we just watched football." Danny shrugs.

"Do you wanna keep bitching, or do you want to go inside and fool around-" Danny doesn't get to finish his sentence because Steve starts dragging him into the house.

Danny knows Steve's attractive, because he has eyes and Danny's pretty sure red-blooded, heterosexual males have fantasies about Steve- let alone casually bisexual men who occasionally indulge in a masseuse- so he spends the time he should be freaking out in tucking his fingers into the loose waist of Steve's jeans, instead.

"So, fool around?" Danny asks breathlessly, grinning, because this is stupid and reckless and fun.

Steve just pushes him into the bedroom.