twentysomething

Title: Mama, I'm Tellin' You

Fandom: Hawaii Five-0

Pairing: Steve/Alwaysagirl!Danni (Wild Honey 'Verse)

Summary: "They get a call around midday, while Danni's tentatively sipping at ginger ale, that Max has something he wants them to see. "

Length: 4300 wordsish. (FUCK MY LIFE)

Warnings: I seriously don't even know where to start with the fucking warnings for this fic. BABIES. THERE. (Actually, baby singular, but you know. BABIES.)

Notes: I would like to preface this, as I do most things, with THIS IS leupagus'S FAULT. No, but really. I just- I don't even know. This 'verse is ridic. Just, look upon this o! ye mighty and despair and now I'm misquoting Ozymandias, this is actually a pretty fair indicator of what this will be like.



Grace had been a dream of a pregnancy- the glow with none of the back aches or throwing up- so when Danni spends a week solid puking in the head at HQ every morning like clockwork, pregnancy doesn't even cross her mind.

"If you get this from me, I will not be taking care of you," Danni mutters, slumping against the cold tile. "Seriously, I don't even know how you can stand to be in the same room as me. This is foul." Steve shrugs.

"I haven't gotten it yet," Steve offers, passing her a water bottle. "We practically live with each other. If I was going to get it, I think it would have happened already." Danni shoots him an admittedly weak stink eye.

"That might actually be making me angrier," she admits. Steve smiles at her, her (secretly) favorite one, the "Danni, you're ridiculous, but I like you anyway", the one he uses when she talks about the Jets and salt-water taffy. "You should be suffering with me."

"Sorry," Steve says, still smiling and Danni narrows her eyes at him but she can feel the corners of her mouth tugging up.

"Liar," she accuses him, but still lets him help her up when she decides she's done for this morning.

They get a call around midday, while Danni's tentatively sipping at ginger ale, that Max has something he wants them to see.

"Are you sure that you want to go to the morgue?" Steve asks her, and she waves off his concern.

"Please, I have never once thrown up because of a dead body." Danni says, fudging over the near-miss she'd had over a crack den in Hoboken. No one can count dry-heaves anyway. "Besides, Chin and Kono are out in court today. If I let you go talk to Max by yourself, you'll talk about fingerprinting all afternoon." Steve shrugs, but he keeps his hand in the small of Danni's back the whole way to the morgue.

"Oh, good, Commander, Detective, you're here," Max says, for once, getting straight from pleasantries to business. "I believe that-" He pauses. Danni steels herself for whatever tangent of "genius" is about to occur. "Well, congratulations."

"What?" Steve finally asks, after it becomes obvious that Max isn't going to continue.

"The baby. Congratulations," Max repeats. "In any case, I believe that we have another-" Danni and Steve stare at each other for a long moment, trapped in a vortex of confusion.

"What baby?" Danni demands. Max breaks off mid-sentence.

"You're pregnant," he says slowly. Danni glances down at her stomach, which, no, still looks the same.

"Not the last time I checked," she replies. Steve looks like someone hit him with a 2 x 4. "C'mon, be serious." Max- Max sniffs the air.

"Are you... certain, Detective?" he asks, his nose wrinkled up. "You smell pregnant." Danni raises both her eyebrows.

"I... smell pregnant," she echoes. Max nods.

"I've never been wrong yet." he adds, like it's part of his professional pride as the dead body guy to sniff out pregnant women. "If you would like, I can draw a blood sample to send to the hospital to test." Danni laughs, turning to look at Steve, who- who looks fucking-- speculative.

"You've got to be kidding me. You can't seriously- I'm not pregnant!" Danni cries. Steve throws up his hands in a classic don't-shoot immediately.

"The throwing up, Danno," he points out sensibly. Danni shakes her head.

"No, no, I never had morning sickness with Grace. This? Is a weird virus. You? You have a weird nose, can we please move on to the dead body?" Danni begs. Max looks put out and there's something wildly crazy in Steve's eyes, but Danni throws on her most stone cold of the stone cold bitchfaces and Max sulkily tells them that this is the fourth body that's come across the slab with a certain pattern of bruising and combination of chemicals in their tox screens.

Steve is distracted enough by the premise of a case, Max has corpses, the subject is dropped, completely dismissed by Danni.

Or at least that's what Danni thinks until they get back to their office, carrying a flash drive of photos and coroner's reports.

"Are you late?" Steve asks, the moment the doors close behind them in HQ. Danni stares at Steve for a moment before she even realizes what he's talking about.

"Okay, you are voluntarily asking a woman about her period, so you deserve any TMI this conversation results in," she warns him, but she's reluctantly thinking about it now. "Well... technically, yes, but I've always been irregular." Steve stares at her impassively.

"You can't seriously believe him about the whole "smelling" pregnant thing," Danni says flatly. Steve shrugs, but his eyes are pretty crazy again. "Steve, we use protection."

"Three weeks ago," Steve reminds her, and shit- cloud burst in the backyard, Steve had been wet, she had been wet, they had sex on the blanket, they'd said "fuck it".

"No way," Danni breathes out, but- Jesus fucking Christ.

They end up at a convenience store like a couple of guilty teenagers, buying three pregnancy tests, the cashier staring at the two of them, totally unimpressed with the production of a pair of crumpled twenties between them. It's like something out of a movie as they take a stereotypically nondescript paper bag back to HQ, Steve clearly torn between the desire to drive as fast as possible and sudden fear for his hypothetical unborn fetus causing him to drive under the speed limit.

"You're just fucking with me, right?" she finds herself demanding as Steve stops at a yellow. Steve stares at her with the blankest look she's ever seen him produce. "Okay, yeah, alright."

Two of the boxes have more than one stick in them, but she refuses to use all of them.

"More data," Steve argues, and Danni shuts the bathroom door in his face.

"Just let me fucking piss on a stick!" she shouts through the door. As it is, thank god she drank all that ginger ale, because there are still three goddamn sticks.

"Okay," Danni says, after washing her hands, opening the bathroom door to find Steve pacing like a crazy person. "And now you have to calm the hell down for the next two minutes, because one of these is a one minute type, but the other two take two minutes, and we are going to leave them over here," Danni puts them on her desk, pushing Steve back out of her office.

"Danni-" Steve starts, but Danni just crosses her arms.

"Uh, have you had a baby before? No, you have not. Shut your mouth." she cuts him off. Steve is already staring at his watch, like he can speed up time with the force of his mind.

Exactly two minutes later, Steve practically rips her door off the hinges.

"Danni, two stripes, two stripes is-" Steve says, looking between the tests again and again, like they're going to change.

"Son of a bitch," Danni mutters. "That little bastard can smell it."

Steve texts Kono and Chin about the files from Max and that they're taking the afternoon off.

Roughly three hours later, an OB/GYN who looks old enough to have delivered Moses tells them they've created the miracle of life.

Danni can't stop touching her stomach. She knows from experience that at this point, the baby is smaller than an inch, so it's ridiculous, but holy shit.

Steve has barely said anything since they've been certain certain, but there's a really fucking crazy look in his eyes that's making Danni extremely nervous. He even tries to open the car door for her, but he doesn't quite make it around before Danni does it herself, because she's, you know, pregnant, not crippled.

They make it into the house, and sit down on the couch, gingerly facing each other like extremely considerate gunslingers.

"Okay-" Danni tries, but Steve is faster on the draw.

"I love you," he says, and Danni lets out a breath she didn't really know she was holding.

"Good, because I'm going to make you marry me, and I swear to god, if you divorce me, I will- where are you going, you bastard?" Danni demands as Steve bolts into the office.

"Jesus, Danno, hold on," Steve says, familiar and normal thank god, and he's back in less than a full minute, holding- what the fuck.

"Did you knock me up on purpose?" she jokes, "Because seriously, have you been keeping that ring in the desk until I figured it out?" Steve rolls his eyes dramatically.

"This was my mother's," Steve says, and Danni's suddenly off-footed- not quite embarrassed, but unsure of herself. "Marry me." She looks at him for a long moment, looking at the pretty little ring his mother wore.

"I was kidding about the making you marry me thing," she says slowly, even though she sort of wasn't- her parents are Catholic, they don't care if you get knocked up, but you'd better get married. "You don't have to-" Steve just stares at her- Danno, you're ridiculous, but I like you anyway.

"I was going to ask. You can't make me do anything," Steve says and it's such a fucking lie, Steve McGarrett is her bitch but Danni kisses him because holy shit, they're going to have a baby.

They spend most of the afternoon arguing about whether they should tell anyone, but it's sort of a moot point, because Kono texts Danni, "ARE YOU SUPER PREGNANT? LIKE THREE TIMES PREGNANT BECAUSE OTHERWISE" immediately followed by "SOMEONE ELSE IS LEAVING THEIR PREGNANCY TESTS IN YOUR OFFICE"

So they "tell" Kono, who, of course, has already told Chin.

Mostly it all just means terrible caffeine withdrawal, which really isn't helped by Steve's neurotic hovering with extra cups of decaf tea. Also. at some point she's going to have to tell Grace and her parents, Jesus, and at some point she's going to marry Steve McGarrett, which- Jesus.

In the end, they distract Grace with the whole "getting married" thing, because a ring is harder to hide than an inch-big fetus. She'd suggested not wearing the ring, but Steve had made this face that he'd really unsuccessfully tried to hide and so she'd worn it. Grace is psychotically happy, which she also thinks Robert and Cynthia are privately irritated by, which is a bright shining spot she lives in while she's still throwing up every morning because Steve's baby hates her.

Her lease is also up in a month, and the look on Steve's face is nothing short of gleeful when Danni admits that she's practically already moved in with him, and no, she doesn't want any of her furniture.

"Everyone is getting something out of this but me," she mutters, even as she lets Steve make her lay down on the couch. The phone rings and from the pitch and extent of the yelling, Mary Ann got her email. Danni smiles as Steve looks increasingly guilty and emotionally constipated. "Okay, maybe it's the little things."

She calls her parents a day after she tells Grace- her mother cries, and cries again when Danni admits she's pregnant, although Danni's hazy on whether that one's happiness. Her father is silent for a long moment, before he finally goes, "... I'm sure you know best, Danni, but... a Squid? Really?" Danni laughs herself into hiccups when she tells Steve about it later, because oh God, how has she not thought about her father, the Army Ranger, meeting her boyfriend, the Navy SEAL? Danni sets the date for the wedding for a month from then, half for entirely superficial reasons, because she'll pass on obvious pregnancy in her wedding photos, and half because she's certain that the longer they wait, the more likely it is that one of them will freak out and go AWOL. (Okay, she means her.) And a little bit because airfare from Jersey to Hawaii requires at least a month's notice so it's not bloody murder, just a regular rip off.

The wedding is ridiculous.

Anyone who doesn't know she's pregnant figures it out when the toasts- oh, god, the toasts- are done with cider, but at least no one tells Grace, who is already in ecstasies of joy over her flower girl dress, and her new dad and Danni has to admit, when she sees the pictures a week later, everything looks strangely perfect. She prints out the picture of her, Steve, Grace (and by extension, Bump, who she and Steve have to name at some point, that's going to be a nightmare) and tapes it up on her monitor, along with the fuzzy sonagram that means their baby has a beating heart and isn't a reptile or anything.

Also, her dad doesn't murder Steve, so she puts the whole thing down as a win, even if she's sort of worried that Kono nailed one of her brothers.

They tell Grace when she starts the second trimester- it'd be hard to keep it from her anymore and the doctor is confident that her body isn't going to spontaneously boot the little sucker out. Grace has a hysterical crying jag for about ten minutes, which scares the fuck out of Steve (who has so much to look forward to) and Danni chalks up to too much happening too fast. (Danni has her own ridiculous crying jags, but she gets to blame them on hormones.) By the end of the afternoon, Grace is already wondering whether it'll be a little brother or little sister, totally sanguine again.

"Maybe you picked a terrible husband," Steve jokes, but there's a underlying gleam of panic in his eyes. "I don't know anything about kids." Danni snorts, thinking back to Steve's totally crap reassurances to that kid in the elevator, Steve trying the "it's okay, we're cops" line. She pokes him hard with her foot.

"You do great with Grace. Calm down. We're only allowed one freakout per week, and Grace took this one. You have to wait your turn." Danni tells him, and then tricks him into having sex with her.

Which is really just indicative of further Steve-insanity- Danni's finally stopped puking at the drop of a hat, but her boobs are getting ridiculous and Steve nearly assaults five men over the course of the week because they're "hitting" on her.

"I told you this wasn't your week for being crazy," Danni reprimands him. Steve just grits his teeth. He's already essentially benched her- Danni had to trick him into letting him interrogate a perp after about twenty minutes of lecturing about the danger of the situation. It's like her knee all over again.

("Oh, beautiful, where was McGarrett hiding you?" The drug dealer had leered at her for about ten seconds before Steve had come slamming his way into the room.)

"It's super endearing, but really, the missing teeth apology- you know, because you hit him in the mouth- was more than a little crazy, you have to admit," Danni points out, and Steve just sulks further into his taciturn caveman routine. "And if you keep this up, I am actually going to beat you. Just like your child is beating my kidneys, Jesus Christ, I think you used that move on those marathon bank robbers." Danni grabs Steve's hand and yeah, it's sort of worth it to watch his face light up when his bastard kid kicks against his palm, but it's also uncomfortable, so.

"McGarrettling, calm the hell down," she instructs her extra eight pounds worth of kid and fat, and- unlike its father- it actually listens to her and subsides for the moment.

When they find out it's a boy, she's not really surprised.

"He sort of reminds me of someone I know," Danni says, rolling her eyes, but she kisses Steve anyway, who repays her by completely benching her.

The next week Steve gets grazed twice and Danni threatens to bench him.

"My ankles hurt, because I have your son inside my body, and if you die, you do not want to know what I will do to you," Danni threatens Steve, which has some tangible merits, because now he calls for backup, even if he is building the world's ugliest rocking chair in the garage. Danni is finally showing, too, which is a debacle in the form of none of her clothes fitting. In the course of about two weeks, she goes from "ate too much at Thanksgiving" to "cartoonish throw pillow under my shirt". She spends a lot of time in HQ, wearing Steve's old high school t-shirts and leggings, eating frozen yogurt with Kono and trying not to freak out about the fact that she's over halfway into being pregnant.

Grace is still over the moon, with more and more outlandish baby name ideas, some of which- Tutankhamun, for choice- Danni is torn between marveling and despairing at.

"We're not naming the baby Tutankhamun," Danni protests. Grace makes a little 'tsk' of displeasure, leaning over to put her ear on Danni's stomach.

"How about Dumbledore?" Grace tries again, and takes it really well when Danni laughs for about a minute straight.

Steve is saved from having to bench Danni further into maternity leave by the doctor mandating bed rest. Danni isn't 100% convinced that Steve didn't pay Dr. Methuselah to do it, though. Steve also institutes more and more ludicrous baby sitters (which Danni tries to tell him is dumb, because they'll need these people when the baby is actually out of her body, and they need sleep like crack fiends), Kamekona and Mary Ann (who just spends days with Danni making fun of and cataloging Steve's different grades of aneurysm face) are her primary nannies. Grace is pretty freaked out by it, which mostly means she cries at Robert until he agrees that Grace can spend 3-4 afternoons with Danni, too. Danni mostly feels smug about this, although really, all they manage to do is nap, curled around each other like cats.

"I should have gotten you a little brother ages ago," Danni muses, absently playing with Grace's hair.

"For real," Grace agrees vehemently. Steve comes home early that day, and the three (four) of them eat Chinese and Danni insists she gets two fortune cookies and Steve rolls his eyes, but he splits the five cookies- two for Grace, two for Danni and one for him.

"You're a martyr," Danni chirps at him, and Steve just gives her this painfully fond look that Danni can't look at for too long.

Steve himself is equal parts perfect and utterly insane, which is reassuring in its constancy, even if his perfection and insanity are manifested in other ways than his previous scissor-kicking of Tong members and driving motorcycles up stairs. Danni likes to think that if they hadn't put Victor Hesse in jail, the man would have been distinctly taken off guard to see Steve smothering his pregnant wife with terrible, perfect compliments and fucking trying to build a treehouse.

"You're going to break your neck. This child will not be in trees for at least several years," Danni yells at him from the safety of the porch. Steve grins at her like some sort of deranged simian.

"All the more reason for me to build it while I'm young," Steve calls back. Danni rolls her eyes.

"You say that like you won't be climbing stupid fucking trees in seven years," Danni shouts back, and Steve just grins at her again, his head poking out of the foliage.

Two days later, the whole thing crashes out of the tree in the middle of the night, roughly five minutes after Danni finally manages to fall asleep.

"Thank god our son is still in the womb and you're a cop, not a carpenter," she says, staring at the the forlorn wreckage and her equally forlorn husband, pecking him quickly on the cheek.

Now that everyone knows that she's knocked up- because she's a tiny woman and McGarrett has monster spawn- and everyone knows it's a boy, it's not just Grace anymore.

"What about Hiwahiwakeiki," Chin suggests while on Danni-babysitting duty. Danni groans.

"It means 'beloved child'!" Chin tries, but Danni just throws popcorn at him until he stops. She gets linked to baby name websites constantly via her mother- Michael and Francis and Vincent- good Catholic Jersey boy names, but she grew up with boys named Michael and Francis and Vincent trying to get into her pants and she can't in good conscience name her kid that.

Kono's suggestions are all technically gender neutral bro names, like "Casey" and "Sawyer", and Grace has moved on from Harry Potter people names to animal names.

"Hedwig," she attempts, eating cookies in bed with Danni.

"We are not naming your little brother after a dead owl, and someday we're going to tell him about all the terrible things you wanted to name him," Danni tells her and Grace shrugs, extremely philosophically for a nine year old.

"He'll know I wanted him to have a cool name. We're going to be tight." Grace assures Danni and Danni rolls her eyes.

"We're not letting Kono babysit you unsupervised anymore," Danni sighs.

The only person whose opinion Danni actually sort of has to listen to is surprisingly quiet on the whole subject.

"You're not going to chime in?" Danni asks him- they're having a big "Danni waddles" barbecue in the backyard, and everyone's fighting over what to name their spawn- because she has her suspicions, she'd just like them confirmed. Steve shrugs.

"What do you think?" he asks instead, not really meeting her eyes. Danni sighs.

"You're an idiot. Of course we're naming him John." Danni says and yeah, called it. Steve breathes out this long sigh of a breath before he leans over and kisses Danni's cheek.

"Yeah. Of course." he parrots. Steve leans in close, resting their heads together. "Thank you, Danni."

Danni is terribly pregnant for a while, like, just, super insanely pregnant, and she swears to god, this child is going either be secretly twins or the size of a giant Christmas roast.

"Don't get me wrong, some day I may love you again, but right now, your kid is sitting on my bladder and I kind of hate you," Danni mumbles as she pees for the sixth time since going to bed. Steve, to his credit, just accepts his culpability and helps her back and forth to the bathroom every time.

"I've missed you being cranky at me. This is nostalgic," Steve just smiles at her and the really twisted part is, he probably sort of means that.

"You're a freak," Danni says, rubbing a hand over her monstrous belly and letting Steve serve as a giant, movable pillow.

Danni's so used to John moving at all hours of the day and night that she starts freaking out about two weeks before she's due, because he's been strangely quiet, and in McGarrett, that usually means either they're planning a full frontal assault or something is terribly wrong.

Dr. Methuselah assures her it's just because John has literally run out of room to move.

"So, what you're saying is, this kid is so big, that he can't actually make my body any bigger to move around in," Danni tries and Dr. Methuselah just laughs because he's delivered all the babies ever and everything has ceased to be alarming.

About a week after she's due, John is still making no effort whatsoever on getting himself out of there, and Steve is looking really fragile and crazy, so Danni does the mature thing and insists that Dr. Methuselah do a babyectomy.

"Seriously, he's going to have the vapours, you just need to go in there and get the baby." Danni insists, after she's sent Steve out of the room to "get her a glass of water." After a lengthy conference with the other baby doctors, they eventually come to the conclusion that yeah, she shouldn't/can't try to push that kid through her hooha, and they'll send in a strike team.

They have a quick argument about whether or not Steve should be in the room.

"Seriously, I know you think it can't get any grosser, you've seen it all, but do you really want this?" Danni demands, because no matter how prepared he thinks he is for this jelly, Danni just doesn't think he is. Steve just gives Danni that look, like he can handle anything- which, she'll see how he does with diapers- and kisses her quickly.

"Someone has to make sure they don't switch kids on us." Steve jokes, but Danni's pretty sure he secretly has a marker in his pocket or something, and their kid is going to be the one with a giant X on his foot.

Danni's a little fuzzy on the details, but about half a day later, she has 10 pounds of squirming baby in her arms.

"You're ginormous, and your father is already thinking about football, isn't he," Danni tells John, who just squints at her. Steve laughs and he has that itchy-fingered baby-hog look to him, so she lets Steve take John and pace around the room with him.

"You're beautiful," Steve reminds her and Danni just smiles tiredly at him.

"You don't have to flirt with me, I'm a sure thing. You knocked me up and I made you marry me, remember?" she teases him.

"Yeah, Danno," Steve says, perching carefully on the edge of the bed, just close enough that John can wrap a flailing hand around her finger. "That's what you think." Danni grins delightedly.

"You liked it, so you put a ring on it," she tells Steve solemnly and laughs when he rolls his eyes, but kisses her anyway.