Chapter Text
Danny knew there’d been many times in his life when he should’ve seen things coming. First and foremost, all the times Jake Salisman’s fist had connected with his jaw from Grades Four through Six, until Danny had had enough, and taken up boxing down at Sal’s Gym so he could kick the living shit out of the kid who was nearly a foot taller than him by the beginning of Seventh Grade.
It’d been worth the one-month suspension.
He should also have seen the spectacular disaster that was his relationship with Toni Lipinski in high school coming from a mile off. In the end, the fact that she’d slept with half the high school baseball team by the time they reached their Junior year in high school, pretty well sealed the deal on it becoming anything serious.
Well, more serious. Because Danny had been all-in on that one. Danny was always all-in. He was just that kind of a guy.
He should also have seen it coming two weeks before graduation when his four buddies Alan, Scotty, Scoop and Jax wanted to go to a party at a house that was well-known to stock plenty of pot for any occasion. The fact that he himself hadn’t smoked any…being Designated Driver and all…hadn’t kept him from spending a night in the clink courtesy of the Newark PD.
And his dad took about three years to totally forgive him for dragging his well-known name through the mud.
After Toni, Danny had kept pretty much to himself in the sex and love departments. At one point, realizing he was admiring the ass of his baseball team’s starting catcher, he sort of allowed the small epiphany that he might maybe be into guys, too, absorb into his psyche, but he never felt the need to act on it. He always figured that was just because he’d never met a guy he was willing to put himself out there like that for. And he didn’t have a goddamn clue how you had a non-platonic relationship with another guy, anyway. Hell, he had yet to master women, let alone men.
Then came the Police Academy and his years as a rookie taking shit from all the long-timers and – for the first time – getting respect from both people he knew and perfect strangers simply because he wore a uniform, a badge and a gun.
And carried a big damn stick.
Ah, yes, then there was Rachel. Danny in a squad car minding his own business and boom, Rachel happened in the form of their, “Oh, I’m so, so sorry, Officer” meeting in which Danny found himself stupidly smitten by big, brown eyes and a British accent that drove him crazy. It was like, every time Rachel opened her mouth, his cock sat up and took notice.
Which explained the ridiculous amount of sex he had over the next year-and-a-half.
So he’d proposed. And she’d accepted. They were married, he kicked ass on a case he’d stumbled onto from being the first man on-scene of a grisly murder and wham, there he was making Detective so young it was like being a rookie beat cop all over again. The detectives that were a little long in the tooth busted his balls like you wouldn’t believe, but Danny took it all in stride. Because no matter how much shit he got for being the ‘Baby-Faced Detective’ as he came to be known, his solve rate spoke for itself.
He was proud of the work he did. He was proud of his beautiful wife. He was really proud the day they bought their first house, a small brick two-story on Hamilton Street in Harrison. And he’d planned to give Rachel even more than that; so much more.
But then the honeymoon was over and reality set in. The reality that even though a homicide detective makes more dough than a beat cop, it didn’t amount to a whole helluva lot when you had a mortgage, two car payments, all the insurance that goes with both and Rachel’s student loans. Not to mention the everyday shit like utilities, groceries.
But in spite of it being lean times, they were happy. Even happier when Rachel found out she was pregnant. But during the three months of maternity leave after Grace was born, there’d been signs. Signs Danny had seen, but had chosen to ignore. Had chosen to hide from. Had chosen not to deal with.
They struggled through that, Danny more engrossed in his new daughter than in his wife, and he should’ve seen what that would do, too. Maybe would’ve paid closer attention to the fact that thanks to the amount of time she took care of Grace for them, Jeannie their babysitter managed to buy a car.
Because she babysat Grace a lot.
Danny’s schedule was never a set thing. It was about the cases, not the standard nine-to-five. And Rachel, well, she was supposed to have been working a regular workday at the financial firm she’d gotten on at with her accounting degree. And she did. Only thing was, after coming home and spending an hour or two with Grace, if Danny was working, Rachel was gone.
She’d had at least two affairs that he’d gotten her to admit to, and he suspected Stan had probably been a third.
But with Danny hardly being home, money being tight and him just being too exhausted all the time to pay the kind of attention to his wife that he should’ve, it fell apart like string of dominos, going too fast and too hard to be able to avoid the inevitable.
When Grace was seven, Rachel took her and left.
The divorce took ten months of nasty fighting to get to the end of. Grace was eight by the time it was finalized, and Rachel almost immediately married Stan.
Two months later, a hand-delivered passel of papers told Danny Rachel was taking his baby…the only thing he had left to show for a marriage and one-time love that were no more…away.
And really, he should’ve seen it all coming.
But he’d buried his head in the sand.
And so in all the hours, days and weeks after the divorce where Matt was alternately propping him up emotionally or holding him steady over the toilet after twelve-too-many drinks to drown his sorrows, Danny made himself a promise: he’d never bury his head in the sand about things in his personal life again, no matter how busy he got with a case.
Except, see, that promise had become impossible to keep. And it was all thanks to that goddamn six-foot-tall God’s gift to Planet Earth he’d been forced into a partnership with.
Danny was self-aware enough to know what that little heart palpitation had been in Steve McGarrett’s back yard that doubled as a beach, when he’d seen him with his shirt off. But since he’d never actually followed through on guy-related palpitations before, he shrugged it off.
And so with the next time.
And the next.
And the next.
Then one day found them alone in the locker room-slash-shower room at the palace, not three months into Five-0’s existence, and for the first time, Danny had finished up the paperwork for the case which ignominiously introduced his ex-wife to his partner early…so he figured a go at the gym to work off the only-just-now realization that Rachel had hit his car on purpose and get his head back on his shoulders was in order.
He hadn’t counted on the fact that Steve had spent the last hour in the gym doing whatever he did to keep his body looking like…that… oh, holy shit, the man’s coming out of the shower with nothing but a towel wrapped so loosely around his waist it’s going to fall any…and so it had. Well, almost.
Danny had just finished changing into shorts and a muscle shirt. He slammed his locker door shut and was putting the padlock on it when around the corner came Tall, Dark and Dripping Wet.
And fucking Hotter than his old man’s barbecue grill on the 4th of July.
“Hey,” was Steve’s greeting.
Danny’s throat had gone dry. Palpitations had become all-out arrhythmia to the point where he was almost gasping like he’d already run five miles on the treadmill. “Hey,” he managed to get out, then turned away quickly. He’d intended to escape to the gym but no, of course Mr. Perfect wouldn’t let him.
“Rachel’s nice,” Steve said.
“Yeah, until you’ve been through marriage, the birth of a child and divorce with her,” Danny quipped, keeping his back turned.
“Something the matter?”
Danny whirled on him. “Oh, no, of course not, other than the fact that I was never intending for my work life and my personal life to mix like it suddenly did today!” And then, oh, crap, what had he just said?
Because Steve was making a face. He always made a face. Or maybe two at once sometimes, somehow. Danny could never be sure how a guy became and stayed a Navy SEAL with such an expressive face, anyway.
“It wasn’t so bad, was it? Everybody got along. Rachel’s actually pretty smart.”
Which, you know, Danny took the wrong way on purpose to try and deflect. “You mean, you thought she was an idiot for ever having married me?”
And another face Danny hadn’t ever seen before, dammit, and Steve said, “No. I thought she was an idiot for leaving you.”
As Steve turned to go back to wherever his own locker was, his towel did indeed slip precariously low, and there was the top of his ass crack which he didn’t even bother to try and re-cover as he moved slowly away.
“Oh,” was all Danny said, and then spent the next two hours killing himself in the gym trying to figure out what the fuck had just been said.
You’re overthinking it , Danny finally convinced himself as, dripping with sweat and hitting the locker room’s shower at nine-thirty at night, he stood there lathering up his body.
Only thing was, his cock didn’t seem to care if he was overthinking anything at all. In order to ensure he could actually get his pants back on once he’d dried off, Danny had to take care of the throbbing erection that thinking about Steve in nothing but a towel had brought about, right there in a place where he could easily be caught doing so.
After that, Danny vowed to be more on-guard around McGarrett. To be careful what he said. To not think about Steve dripping wet and a towel falling off his hips. To not think about what might’ve happened if, instead of fleeing to the gym, he’d stalked up to Steve, ripped that towel off him and taken him right there in the locker room.
Somehow, though, Danny’s subconscious wasn’t taking that vow of his very seriously. Oh, Christ. He should’ve fucking seen this coming from a mile away. But he couldn’t act on it, he told himself, for a whole grocery list of reasons.
And so back into the sand went his head.