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1.
“You’re an idiot,” Danny tells him, once he’s laid out his plan. That part, as well as the slightly tense disapproval that comes with Danny trying to hide his concern, is exactly what Steve expects. What he does not expect is the immediate sequel, in which Danny demands, “Take your shirt off.”
It’s gratifying to Steve that he doesn’t seem to be the only one surprised by that. Chin and Kono, on either side of them at the tech table, are also some mix of be- and amused, though they take their usual stance of keeping politely quiet, like an audience at a tennis match. “Excuse me?” Steve is left to ask.
Danny waves his hands around. Things immediately snap back into the range of the fully predictable. “If you think I’m letting you go in there without a wire, you really might be certifiably insane. I need to be able to hear it when people start shooting at you.”
“I think you’ll probably notice gunfire even from outside the building,” Steve argues, but he knows Danny more than well enough to recognize that that’s not much of a reassurance, and he can also admit it wouldn’t be an altogether terrible idea if his team is aware of what’s going on while he sends himself undercover on this drug deal.
He will, however, strenuously deny any knowledge of Chin and Kono’s side-eye looks while he lets Danny, handsy as always, tape the wire to his bare chest.
*
2.
There’s a group of four college girls gathered around a trunk two parked cars over, like they’re waiting for the rest of their friends. Steve only notices them noticing him because Danny does, but that’s more than enough reason to slow down in unloading the surfboard from the Silverado and give the girls a grin. It sends them tittering, and the boldest of them waves, but Steve measures his success in Danny’s eye roll.
It’s a pretty good one, too. “You’re an idiot,” Danny adds, and this time Steve’s grin isn’t an act. “Why don’t you take your shirt off? Really give them a show.”
Steve strips off his shirt. He doesn’t look over to see how the girls respond, because it’s not very interesting.
“What are you doing?” Danny asks, so Steve throws his shirt in the truck bed and pulls Danny’s surfboard halfway out, as a hint.
“Who goes surfing in a t-shirt, Danny?”
Danny scoffs and blusters and accepts the board. “Modest people,” he claims, like he hasn’t been walking around in boardshorts and a sinfully unbuttoned plaid this entire time.
*
3.
Contrary to people’s expectations – or Danny’s, anyway – Steve is a decent cook. Eggs, toast, fried rice, he can do it all. He definitely knows how to cut tomatoes, which is why he is, from the depths of his soul, deeply offended when one blows up in his face.
Annoyingly literally. He doesn’t even get a moment to process, because somehow Danny saw the exploding tomato while he had his entire head in a cupboard to get the pan he wants from the back. “You really are an idiot,” Danny says, with emphasis. Having successfully retrieved his desired pan, he swings the cupboard door shut with an elbow. He’s just showing off at that point. “How did you even do that?”
“I didn’t,” Steve says. It was the tomato’s fault, not his. He’d even go so far as to put the blame on Danny’s knife, if Danny didn’t take enough pride in his kitchenware that an accusation like that would risk Steve getting a little too intimately acquainted with just how definitely not dull Danny’s knives are.
Danny puts the empty pan on a cold stove, seemingly solely so he has two hands free to make gimme gestures at Steve. “Why are you just standing there? Take your shirt off. I’ll wash it.”
“You’ll wash it?” That’s an almost suspiciously helpful offer.
Danny’s hands look like they’re itching to get Steve undressed. Steve needs to make the conscious choice to stay where he is, and he doesn’t examine too closely whether the other option would have been to fall back or move in. “I don’t trust you near my washing machine,” Danny says, and that Steve can believe. “Look what you did to my tomato, and you didn’t even need a grenade.”
“Let me get my spare from the Camaro first.”
Danny’s eyes narrow. “Spare grenade?”
Steve wishes. “Spare shirt.”
The fact that Steve still hasn’t moved means Danny has no difficulty tugging on his t-shirt sleeve. It’s not a helpful gesture, but it is a pointed one. “Why? It’s not like you’ve ever been shy about showing off your abs.”
Steve gives in before anything worse can happen. “But Daniel,” he asks, face inside his shirt as he pulls it over his head, “what will the neighbors think?”
Danny accepts the shirt with another hand on Steve’s now naked bicep. “If they see half-naked men who look like underwear models in my front yard? That I live a much more interesting life than I actually do.”
Danny heads off for his washing machine, and Steve doesn’t encounter any neighbors when he hops outside to the car. It’s almost a shame.
*
4.
It’s a silly set of circumstances: the court case where he’s been summoned to testify runs long, so Steve heads straight to Danny’s instead of stopping home to change. There he takes off his suit jacket, which leaves him in a long-sleeved white button-up, which would have been fine if Danny and Charlie hadn’t been waiting for him for dinner, which means that instead of setting the table, Steve ends up sitting at the kitchen table, listening to Danny putter around with pots and pans and knives – Steve is officially banned from touching tomatoes these days, after Danny found some dried red remains on the underside of one of his cabinets a week after the incident – while he helps Charlie color in a printed drawing of forest animals having a picknick.
Which again, would have been fine.
If he hadn’t somehow moved his arm, and bumped into an uncapped marker on the table, and given himself a pink stain right above the cuff of his shirt. It’s in the worst spot possible, very very bright, and larger than it has any right to be.
And of course Danny shows up with three plates just as Charlie is helpfully putting the cap back on the offending marker, and already doing a pretty good impression of a much more earnestly worried version of his dad in reminding Steve that you should always put the cap back on, because that’s better, because Danno said so. Funnily enough, “because Danno said so” is not far off from being part of how Danny himself would have delivered this message.
The Danno in question, meanwhile, puts his stack of plates down and is caught up to the situation at a glance. He doesn’t appear particularly impressed. “Charlie, can you tell me? What’s Uncle Steve?”
Charlie puts the pink marker in the box with the rest of his collection and frowns a little. “Awesome?” he guesses, like he knows that’s the answer, but he’s not entirely sure why he’s being asked.
“Sure,” Danny says. He puts some measure of doubt into it, but to Steve’s great delight Danny has a general policy of not telling his kids not to say nice things about people – it’s something Rachel and her mother benefit from most often. “Sometimes. But any other things?”
Charlie’s face clears. “An idiot.”
“Ding ding ding, you clever boy.”
Steve watches Danny ruffle Charlie’s hair and tries to feel offended, which is not an easy task with a heart that refuses to be anything but sweet and gooey and hot, like melted caramel. Still- “Hey now. What are you teaching your kids?”
“Important life lessons.” Danny’s hand goes right from Charlie’s head to tapping his own. “Pretty, brave, kind people don’t necessarily have a lot going on up there.”
It does very little to turn Steve’s heart back into a solid. “That was three compliments and one insult. You’re losing your touch, buddy.”
“You’re an idiot,” Danny tells him, almost like an afterthought, or a required grammatical marker before he can express, “And now take your shirt off, so I can reunite it with my washing machine.”
Steve doesn’t bother with token protests this time, instead putting that energy into undoing buttons. “Never thought it would be this easy to get you to do my laundry on a weekly basis.”
“I’ll send you my bill at the end of the month,” Danny promises, and it makes Charlie giggle, so Steve pulls a face at him to commiserate when Danny turns to leave, which makes Charlie giggle more.
At least he has one true friend left in this world.
*
5.
“Nah,” Steve says, about something – later, he can never fully remember what.
So Danny, in the Adirondack chair next to Steve’s and gesturing with the beer he still hasn’t finished, shoots back, “You’re an idiot.”
And Steve, well. He’s sitting in his own backyard one beer in, which is not much of an excuse when he suddenly finds both his hands at the top button of his shirt. He’s easily sober enough to be startled by it, anyway.
Before he can pretend nothing happened, Danny’s eyes have already clocked the gesture. “What are you doing?” The beer bottle does a very sarcastic little dance in Steve’s direction, somehow managing to question his entire upper body. “Are you gonna take your shirt off?”
With very few options left, and none of them entirely void of a hint of embarrassment, the best way out might be to go all in: Steve finishes undoing the buttons, shrugs out of his shirt, and then shrugs again. “It’s hot out here.”
It’s hard to tell sometimes whether Danny is looking or he’s looking. “We’re in Hawaii,” he argues, and he’s definitely not looking anywhere else, so maybe there’s not much difference. “It’s hot out here every day.”
“Yeah, well. Today is one of those days.”
“One of which days?” Danny asks, so Steve balls up his shirt, throws it right in Danny’s face, and thinks, fuck it, and-
*
+1.
“Danny,” he says. “You’re an idiot. Take your shirt off.”
Danny plucks Steve’s shirt from his head, revealing an unimpressed face which is of course already talking. “Oh, very smooth, Smooth Dog. Don’t you know any better lines than that?”
Steve squares his entirely naked shoulders. “It worked on me.”
“That’s because-” Danny swallows the rest of that sentence abruptly, like a fly got stuck in his throat. He makes a fitting noise, too – dismayed, a little alarmed, and somewhat sad that this happened to him. “Shit. I’m going to need new insults, or you’ll end up naked every ten minutes.”
“No,” Steve counters, deciding to forgo a discussion about the whole Pavlovian aspect of this thing. He’s pretty sure he could only lose that one, no matter how he tries to twist it. Better to shift focus. “You’re going to need new insults. I’m still wearing pants.”
It’s suddenly not hard to tell anymore whether Danny is looking.
He is, and he takes his time with it, trailing along Steve’s throat down, over his biceps, his pecs, his abs, his pants – there’s a moment of particular contemplation, here – and then back up, past Steve’s by now louder than normal heart. Danny keeps direct eye contact for a long moment, at the end of which he suddenly lobs the shirt he’s still holding over his shoulder, careless of where it lands.
And then he points the beer bottle Steve’s direction again and says, very precisely, “Neanderthal. Nitwit. Jerk.”
Steve figures that just might be enough to cover the boxers, too.