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Danny is never particularly worried that anybody will find out. Being partnered with a Navy SEAL takes a lot of the heat off. Everything about Steve McGarrett screams dangerous and classified, from his height to his tattoos to that steely look he gets when he’s staring down the barrel of a gun.
Whilst nobody would dare mistake Danny for being harmless or anything less than an exceptionally skilled cop, it’s easy to don a crisp tie, stand next to Steve, and paint a picture of comparative civilization.
Danny loves nothing more than to argue with his partner, with the world in general. He loves gesticulating wildly and spurting out grievances like it’s a biological imperative. But there’s more to it than that. Being hot-headed and noisy serves a purpose; he’s been called many things over the years, but nobody has ever accused him of being squirrelly and secretive.
People feel that they have the measure of Danno Williams. Which is exactly how he wants it.
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When Danny pushes his way into the bullpen, a bag of malasadas clutched to his side with his elbow, the last person he expects to see is his old training officer. Years out of practice, he almost forms an expression of familiarity and surprise, before schooling his countenance into one of detached and professional curiosity.
“Can I help you?” he asks, depositing the fried sweets onto the tech table, ignoring Kono’s hiss of displeasure.
He brushes his hand on his shirt, dispelling the grains of sugar that have worked their way out of the bag and onto his fingers. Task complete, he reaches forward to introduce himself. “Detective Danny Williams.”
The gentleman grips his hand firmly. “Owen Donovan. I am here as a representative for Rachel Edwards, pertaining to the forthcoming alteration of custodial arrangements. May we speak in private?”
Danny wishes he’d picked something else for his cover. Custody arrangements and messy divorces might seem like something that would be private, something that traditional colleagues would politely skirt the edges of, or respectfully ignore altogether. But Danny works with curious people, and just one of them happens to be his best friend, who is heavily involved in the well-being of Grace. That, and he’s nosey.
So, yes, Danny knows there will be questions.
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Danny wonders if the voice recording playing from Jack Bristow’s fountain pen is really necessary. He’s been out of the game for so long that it feels faintly ridiculous, but he listens intently to one conversation, whilst creating another entirely. He watches Jack’s mouth form words like custody and Grace and visitation - he knows without looking that Steve is doing the same - and listens to the electronic revelation that an old enemy has escaped confinement and discovered his location.
Their meeting ends. Jack is baffled by his inability to pick up shop and move. Jack’s daughter is an adult, and fully capable of taking care of herself. Grace is young and defenceless. Either way, he’s not about to leave Kono and Chin. Not about to leave Steve.
After Jack departs, Danny blows out of his office, all curse words and wild eyes, bitching about the horrors of ex-wives and the injustice of it all. His team eats it up. When Steve isn’t looking, just for a second, Danny glances at him and ponders the secrets that they keep.
The knowledge that Steve has lived a life of deception, helps to lessen the guilt – helps to stem the niggling longing for truth and simplicity. Steve, too, has done things under the cover of darkness. Things that he would never reveal to anybody. Not because of a lack of trust, but because that was the way the game was played.
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Danny gets the phone call in the middle of the night. Steve has been recalled for a SEAL mission. He can’t disclose any information, and Danny understands - but there's a moment before the goodbye, where Steve half whispers his name, and Danny doesn't fail to miss the painful elongation of the a; doesn't fail to miss the way the sound of his name on Steve's breath is riddled with the regret of things left unsaid. He fights the urge to take up arms and declare that's he's coming along for the ride. But that’s not what he does anymore.
So he does a bit of digging, a bit of poking around. Contacts in the world of international espionage are moving targets - both metaphorically and literally. Languages that were once constantly on his tongue now feel rusty in his mouth, adjectives and past participles long ago cobwebbed over in the back of his brain. He spends longer than he cares to admit staring at his phone, trying to recall which verbs to conjugate with être and not avoir - it doesn't do to sound like an idiot.
When his computer screen finally yields the information he’s seeking - his proficiency with technology a little greater than he's ever admitted - his body turns into a jumble of contradictions. His brain freezes, but his joints thrum with undirected energy.
The file contains both the departure and destination locations, and relevant scheduling. A quick glance at the clock tells him that Steve is still on the island, but his partner had severed all communication, as per protocol, three hours prior.
Even if he could contact the SEAL team, what would he say? His thoughts are loud and aggressive, and he wonders when he started to think in a Jersey accent that was once fake. He laughs softly to himself, recognizing that he’s slowly but truly becoming the person he presents to his team.
With that realization, he runs to his car.
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Up ahead, he can see rows of blinking lights - the tell-tale sings of an airstrip. With a flickered glance to the dash, he calculates how many minutes until Steve’s departure. He still doesn’t know what the plan is.
How is he supposed to explain to Steve that the building the SEAL team intends to infiltrate is liberally sprinkled with counter-measures? Let alone explain how he came upon this information, or, indeed, how he knows the finer points of Steve’s mission in the first place? He can hardly announce that he was the only survivor of a spectacularly disastrous black-op several years prior. He can hardly go into detail about the undeniable connection between their destination, and the recent escape of a man who wants him dead.
He breaks into the military airstrip with relative ease. For a second, he smirks, relieved to know that he’s still got it.
Sneaking between various hangars and bits and pieces of aviation equipment, he moves further into the base. The whirr of engines prompts him to move faster, but he knows he’s not going to make it. As he breaches the airstrip, the plane begins to pick up speed.
He’s too late.
--------
Ah yes, Danny thinks. This is the life. There’s nothing quite like the pleasure of perching atop an aluminium roof in the scorching sun for hours on end, with two extremely smelly Air Force Combat Rescue Officers on his right for company – old contacts that had not fallen by the wayside. On his left, his decidedly less smelly former partner, Sydney Bristow, is fiddling with her binoculars.
The full kit and caboodle uniform doesn’t help. He’d never really worn bulky military gear, even when he was an active agent. Most of his work had involved black-tie infiltration and swift but silent altercations – blows to the throat in corridors, rather than full-frontal assaults on terrorist compounds. He’d had to swallow a chuckle earlier, as he’d buckled on not one, but two, thigh holsters.
He’s not sure if it’s the heat seeping from the metal and into his skin, or the thought of Steve’s delighted expression when faced with gun paraphernalia that makes him feel giddy. For a second, he’s not perched on the edge of a skylight, watching Steve and his team be beaten, wrists and ankles shackled to the wall. Rather, he’s back home - irony of ironies, he’s originally from Hawaii - flopped in a chair by the beach, one of Steve’s dinner plates on his lap, waiting impatiently for the steaks to be taken off the grill.
He can almost hear the clink of sweaty Longboards being knocked together… and then he realizes that it’s actually the sound of Sydney adjusting her gun. “They’re gone,” she whispers. “It’s now or never.”
Biting down the recently developed instinct to launch into a diatribe about the injustice of the world, Danny merely nods and fingers his reflective combat glasses, securing them between his helmet and the half balaclava that covers his chin and mouth.
Working together, they lever open the skylight. The sound of glass sliding against glass gives way to the whisp of ropes uncoiling, and then the unnerving rasp of leather boots and gloves sliding down, down, into the belly of the aluminium beast.
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Even beaten, the SEALs are more than capable of ascending to the roof. Danny gives Steve a wide berth, leaves the talking to Jim and Palmer, lets Sydney tackle the locks around Steve’s limbs. Nevertheless, he can feel eyes burning a hole into the back of his head – he tries not to acknowledge it. Even wrapped in military garb, his height and shoulders speak volumes, but a part of him thinks that even in the ink of total darkness, Steve would know it was him.
Eventually, the hiss of being stared at eases, and Danny glances briefly towards his partner, who is now watching his men glide up the ropes. He knows that Steve will insist on being the last to leave, but he also knows that he cannot leave before Steve.
The moment arrives when they are the last two on the ground, and with a deep breath Danny looks up into Steve's eyes. Technically, he has the advantage - where he has glasses and a mask, Steve has nothing but a bloodied brow. And yet somehow, he feels like he's the one who has lost his footing.
"Together?" he asks, daring to speak.
For a fraction of a second, Steve looks angry, but then he merely nods, turning to face the rope, and yet still somehow managing to inspect Danny's every move.
Danny climbs up easily. He has never pretended to be unfit, nor unskilled - Five-0 demanded physical ability. But where once he had hidden the easy grace of a trained operative, he now grips the rope with skill. For a brief moment, he thinks that Steve is going to race him, and a tiny part of him thrills at the chance to play on Steve's level for the first time.
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The ride back to the dive they've rented as a base is tense at best, downright murderous at worst. Between the pot-holes and the angry glares, Danny is almost relieved when someone starts shooting at their convoy. It doesn't take long to dispatch of them, and as he leans backwards out of the open passenger window, shotgun in hand, he thinks he almost recognizes one of the faces peering out at him through a broken windscreen, right before the accompanying body is flung from the vehicle and to the ground.
“Hey, hey,” he mutters, pressing a booted toe to Steve’s thigh. Earlier, Steve had immediately made for the driver’s side, holding his hand out expectantly, and Danny had merely laughed and flung the keys at his head. It had been a fleeting moment of levity, ruined utterly when Danny had tossed his glasses into the dash, and settled the mask around his neck - the four hour drive since had been quiet.
“Pull over, would you?” Awkwardly, he withdraws his boot and slips back into the seat. When the car slows to a stop, he opens the door and follows his gun out into the world, finger on the trigger.
He can sense Steve behind him, and can see Jim and one of Steve’s men approaching from both sides. As one, they converge on the body.
“Patrick,” Danny says, not at all surprised.
“Agent Williams,” the body replies, his words half breath, half blood. His chest expands, back arching off the ground as if trying to take in enough air to supply more conversation. “Or should I say Detective?”
Glassy eyes flick to Steve, who has come to stand behind Danny’s back. “And your faithful pooch.”
It is all Danny can do not to drop his gun and fall all over himself. Dying of laughter in the middle of the jungle is not particularly becoming. “Clearly, you do not know Steve very well.”
Danny doesn’t fail to notice the way that Patrick’s blown pupils flick down, and he knows without turning that he’s taking in the cuts and bruises on Steve’s arms, the bloodied and raw skin around his wrists.
“Got to know him-” his words are cut off by a gruesome cough. Eventually, he regains his breath. “Got to know him pretty well, actually.” His pained expression morphs into a smirk, though it looks like the energy costs him. “Knew he’d be the perfect lure. Why kill you in O’ahu, surrounded by civilization, when we could kill you here?”
Danny raises an eyebrow. “And how is that working out for you?”
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A particularly painful vibration against his cheek wakes Danny from the brief doze he'd allowed himself. The plane lists a little to the left before settling, and through the haze of lingering tiredness he surmises that they're coming in to land. A delicious stretch sharpens his focus, and he takes in his surroundings - an almost empty cabin. Jim and Palmer had flown elsewhere, and Sydney had remained in Colombia - doing what, exactly, Danny did not want to know. Steve's team had peeled off in the dead of night without so much as a how do you do. Danny supposes that he should be grateful Steve had remained. Even if they weren't really communicating beyond troglodyte-style grunts, Steve had still made his choice.
Shifting in his seat - barely more than a fold out metal bench lining the wall of the plane - he braces his elbows on his knees, clasps his hands together, and looks up to take in Steve. He's half sitting on the opposite bench, half propped up by a mountain of khaki supply bags strapped down with military netting. He looks exhausted and miserable, and Danny doesn't know whether to be frustrated or apologetic.
"Look," he begins, and then falters. "Look. Maybe we're not so different, you and I."
He can practically feel the anger radiating off Steve in waves. "Clearly," is the only verbal response he gets. Steve says more with the tilt of his chin to the guns strapped to Danny's thighs, the derisive flick of his wrist at the knife buckled to the inner ankle of Danny's left boot.
Danny grits his teeth, unclasping his fingers to press the heels of his hands to his eyes. "Are you angry because you don't like the truth, or because I didn't tell you? Because, babe, pot, kettle, black."
Steve leans forward, half-mirroring Danny with his elbows on his knees. "It's not the same. You knew."
At this, Danny throws his hands up. "Knew what? Every time anybody mentions anything even vaguely aquatic you get all defensive. Grace brought up a nature documentary the other week, and I swear I saw the hairs on the back of your neck stick up."
"Ha-fucking ha. You knew what I was. You had an unfair advantage."
Danny can feel his eyebrows rising into his hair-line. "An...an unfair advantage." Suddenly and inexplicably, all of the fight leaves him. "Isn't it enough that I came for you?"
Steve seems to deflate, visibly sinks back into the uncomfortable wall. He's down, but not out. "I have clearance. You could have told me."
Danny does his best to ignore this. He absolutely does not want to discuss clearance levels - he remembers too well when Steve had snatched Operation Strawberry Fields from his grasp. Remembers all too well the deeply internalized fear that somewhere out there in the world, was a room with his folder and photo.
"Look. It's all very well that you have clearance. But so do I, and guess what. I never looked you up. Never snooped. Never poked around your past, beyond the odd ribbing every now and then. Because you're my friend. I trust you. And yes, okay, yes, I knew that you're a SEAL and no, no, you didn't know I was CIA, but so the fuck what?"
At this, Steve springs forward in his seat again, but Danny cuts him off with a particularly violent jerk of his hands. "You're never going to talk about your deployments and I'm never going to talk about my operations. Because it's not about us, okay, it's about the people we worked with, and the people we're protecting by forgetting it ever happened. You really want to rehash all that? Huh? You show me yours and I'll show you mine? Is that really how you want this?"
He's leaning forward so far that his boots are almost pressed against Steve's. He doesn't know why he does it. He can only conclude that he's lost complete control of his faculties. Nevertheless, he scuffs his shoe forward and nudges Steve's ankle, weirdly affectionate. "I'm still me. And you're still you."
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Except...not really, Danny thinks, as he catches a brief glimpse of the floor beneath Steve's couch, before he's bodily slammed to the ground, wounded spine to the floorboards and wide eyes to the ceiling.
"I'm going to kill you," he announces cheerily to the shadowy shape that is looming over him. "You, Steven, have the emotional maturity of a blueberry scone. I am going to kill you, and I am going to enjoy it."
His indignation thrums even faster in his veins when Steve snorts derisively at him. "Not likely. We're three for three."
A hand emerges from the pre-dawn darkness to wave in front of his face, but Danny smacks it away and rises without help. "Because I refuse to stoop to your level." With that, he stalks off to the kitchen, assembles a bowl of cereal in the dark. What his knowledge of Steve's kitchen says about him, he dares not contemplate. Not when his spine is in pieces, at any rate.
Just as he is about to delve his spoon into the milk, his bowl is plucked from reach and promptly tucked into by a hungry SEAL. "I'm starting to doubt this whole CIA thing," Steve says around a mouthful of wheaties. Danny resists the urge to make a comment about boorish military lugheads, and settles instead for physically pushing Steve's mouth shut with his fingers.
Steve rolls his eyes, makes a great production of chewing, visibly swallows with a hurrumph and then continues. "You were having me on, right? You're really a member of the Culinary Institute of America, or something."
Danny presses a hand to his heart in affected shock. "You caught me, fair and square, officer, I am guilty of pastries. Many, many pastries. Also, get that spoon out of my face."
"Why won't you fight back?" Steve looks as if he doesn't know whether to focus on his question, or the fact that Danny has pried the spoon from his fingers and is now proceeding to finish the bowl of wheaties. "I know you prefer guns to hand to hand combat, but you seriously cannot be this useless."
It's not that Danny doesn't know better than to rise to the bait. He does. It's just that he's physically incapable of not doing so. "Bring it."
-------
"Are you serious?" Steve yelps, a tangle of limbs on the sand.
Danny watches Chin and Kono round on them in alarm and confusion, their hands resting at the ready on their respective holsters and their gazes sweeping first over Steve and then over the many beach-goers swirling around them.
Nobody seems to have noticed the stealthy swipe of Danny's foot against the backs of Steve's knees.
"You, uh, you seem to have fallen over there, Steven. Did the itty bitty rock trip the big bad SEAL?" It's almost impossible to talk, his smirk is so wide. Yeah, Danny thinks. Still got it.
-------
"Alright," Steve says with an air of negotiation. "I concede that you have... a certain level of skill." He tries to adjust his shoulder, but Danny's grip is firm. "Would you let me up?
Danny does as instructed, and then dashes away five paces to press his back to Steve's front door, hands innocently behind his back. "Forgive my suspicion, but the last time this little scenario played out, I decked you."
Steve advances on him, stopping only when he can loom with effective vigour.
Just as Danny thinks that a raised eyebrow will be his only response, Steve knocks him for six. "Do you ever think that we should be fucking instead of fighting?"
Danny's right hand, which had been trying to covertly pick the lock to the house with a bobby pin from within his sleeve - now that he's acquiesced to Steve's game, he's playing full throttle, thank you very much - slips to dangle beside his hip.
His shock lasts only a second. He'd once had a rather frank, albeit slightly concussed, discussion with a gentleman in the Aegean region of Turkey, regarding his desire to buy a camel to travel on, (see, flee weapons dealers), not to have sex with. He supposes that once you combine 50% CIA operative, 50% Navy SEAL and 100% Hawaiian task force, you have a 200% chance of insane conversations.
"Yes, actually, I do. Although I must say, I don't know why we can't do both."
-------
The months roll on. Steve manages to drag Danny to the firing range at Pearl, only to be incensed when Danny's a better shot with the M25. Steve has a far faster tactical reload, though, so it all balances out in the end.
Eventually they get the measure of each other. Dawn stealth attacks are slowly replaced by middle of the night blow jobs, and the only jumping on each other that they do these days involves the shower and soapy morning sex.
None of this, however, stops Danny from muttering, "you fucking fucker," at Steve, who is twenty feet away and snugged tight to the wall of a warehouse, peering surreptitiously around the corner. He has a hand raised, and is forming a variety of obnoxious gestures in the direction of his team.
Chin, ever cool as a cucumber, merely raises an eyebrow. Kono goes the whole hog and rolls her eyes. Danny resists the urge to pack up and go home, but it's a near thing.
"He's signalling that there's a plane preparing for take off. And that there's a sniper on the far roof, covering the field. Also, he thinks the best point of entry would be the window." Danny draws a little box with his pointer finger, and glances up at the window, easily two meters from the ground. "Fucking fucker."
He tries to brush off the astonished faces that greet him. "You said it yourself, Chin, been hanging with McGarrett too long."
"Brah," Kono pipes in, "you really need to work on your pillow talk."
-----
His hands curled around his morning cup of coffee, Danny eyes Steve with both a calm and yet still slightly murderous intent. "I beg your pardon?"
Arms crossed, Steve leans against the sink with a sigh. "You're doing it again, Danny. That thing where you pretend you didn't hear me, to give yourself more time to think, even though you heard me perfectly clearly the first time."
Danny supposes that this might be the truth, but decides not to give a fuck and narrows his eyes. "Run it by me again, anyway."
"There's a little certain something that I've been asked to do, in a little certain cave, in a little certain country ending with a little certain stan, and I was thinking that perhaps you might like to tag along."
"Okay, Steven," Danny begins with a raised finger. "First of all, do not try to be sarcastic, it is not a good colour on you, okay? Capiche? Second of all, I do not tag along. My Urdu is far better than yours, you sound like a constipated yak."
Steve nods, a rare capitulation. "True. So?"
He looks oddly vulnerable, and it throws Danny for a loop. He doesn't quite know how he's got to this point, how he's arrived at Steve asking him for help with something that is decidedly classified. He can still too easily remember the dreadful expression of betrayal that had been beamed his way from across a decommissioned military aircraft.
They're never going to discuss their past. Never going to discuss old colleagues. Never going to discuss the lives they've taken and the mistakes they've made. He suspects it's their own unique way of protecting each other.
"Well," Danny says around a small smile. "What are we waiting for?"