Advent Calendar 2025

by redgoldblue

Summary:

Y'all know advent calendars? You know fanfic? Well what if, like a bad joke, an evil scientist came along and crossed them with each other, and then kept doing that every year for 12 years. That's right, you'd get this here Advent Calendar 2025!

24 ficlets at a rate of (roughly) one per day, spanning multiple fandoms (see tags) and multiple genres (i'll be honest, mostly fluff) and festivity levels.

Chapter 1: For Crew and Comrade

Notes:

hiiiiii everyone. i'm a day late starting, but i'm here. As you will know if you follow me on Tumblr, my most current hyperfixation is actually Heated Rivalry (sports? i hear you say. i know, i don't know what rachel reid did to me either), but given that my style of fanfic is mostly 'filling holes', I don't often get urges to write for canon ships, so that may or may not eventuate in fic. Otherwise, White Collar's gonna be the newcomer this year, and Rizzoli & Isles might be making a comeback.

This chapter was originally intended to have a Spirk final scene, but, well, I'm a day late and already over 1000 words. The spirk mayhaps will be chapter 24. I swear every year the Star Trek chapters become more self-indulgent, and I can't believe in 12 years I've never done mistletoe for them before.

Fandom: Star Trek (TOS)
Ship/s: Chapel/Rand (idk. have some star trek yuri. i just think they both deserve better than canon love interests of
Jim and Spock, blatantly uninterested), everyone&everyone

Spock held the twig aloft and peered thoughtfully at it. Grey-green leaves tapered to sharp points, intersected by small berries doing their best to reflect every mote of light they could pull from the greenhouse lamps. “Is this not poisonous?”

“Hm?” Sulu said, looking up from the dirt he was patting into place. “Oh, yes, at least to humans. And I think Vulcans, so maybe don’t try it out. Last time I had an Andorian in here, they said, ‘ooh, sh’rtatani!’ and ate a whole handful of the berries. Guess it’s an exotic delicacy on Andoria.”

“And yet it is utilised in human tradition.”

Sulu shrugged. “A human tradition, yeah. And I like any tradition that involves plants and affection. But I figured you should be warned about this one before it starts.”

“Well,” Spock said, and handed back the sprig of mistletoe. “Thank you for the consideration, Mr. Sulu.”

“No problem.”

The greenhouse doors slid open while Spock was still approximately 1.35 centimeters from the sensor.

The explanation came in the form of Uhura standing on the other side, casually dressed in a bright red-and-orange patterned wrap dress. Smiling at Spock, she called, “Hey, Sulu, I’m here to help with decorations!”, then raised her eyebrows and her gaze, briefly, to where a sprig identical to that Spock had been holding hung from the doorway above them.

Spock blinked, raised an eyebrow back, and crooked his head. There was no point to being on a ship of many cultures if one made no attempt to engage with them.

Grinning, she stepped in, leaning up to brush a kiss across his cheek. The faint sense of hard-won contentment which underpinned every touch of Uhura’s brushed his consciousness with it.

“Happy shore leave,” she said, then leant back and moved past him into the greenhouse.

Spock stepped far enough into the corridor for the doors to slide closed behind him before he corrected, “There is a week before shore leave.”

~

Janice was the one who nodded towards the door of Rec Room 5 during a lull in the conversation and asked, “Who hung mistletoe?”

“Hikaru,” Chekov answered immediately, before Jim could volunteer any guesses.

“With Nyota,” Sulu added, his tone more one of accuracy than protest.

“Anyone in particular you were hoping to catch with it?” Jim asked, knowing full well the answer. Sulu’s favourite Russian wouldn’t be caught dead standing under mistletoe, and he hadn’t known Uhura to have a single serious romantic interest since he’d met her – which meant either that just wasn’t something she did, or she was so discreet about it that she’d never use anything as public as rec room mistletoe.

“Not for ourselves,” Sulu retorted, straight-faced. “We thought you and Lieutenant Scott might find yourselves under it.”

Jim laughed, throwing his head back. “If Scotty turns up, I’ll be sure to catch him.”

Janice had stayed silent since asking, with a thoughtful, slightly plotting look in her eye, staring somewhere over Jim’s shoulder. Raising his eyebrows at her, he asked, “Did you have someone in mind, Janice?”

“Excuse me,” she replied, somewhat absently, and stood up. Her chair made a grating scrape against the floor as it pushed back; she winced, her face clearing, and looked down to lift it back into place. Huffing a laugh, she said, “Sorry. Um… yes.”

As she walked away, Jim tilted his head at Sulu and Chekov – a mannerism accidentally adopted from Spock. Sulu shrugged back at him, and Chekov made a quiet hum of bafflement.

Jim spun around in his chair, arms hanging over the back, to watch her walk to the table behind them. Holding Bones, Chapel, and Doctor Tourmaline, visiting from the Shah.

Jim had his suspicions from that group, which were shortly confirmed. “Chris,” Janice said, resting a hand on her shoulder. “Do you want to come on a walk with me?”

Chapel blinked up at her, then smiled and nodded. “Sure.”

The vast majority of the rec room was paying zero attention to the two of them – even Bones and Shah returned immediately to whatever avid medical discussion they’d been having for the last half hour. Jim had overheard something about comparative rates of endocrinological metabolism between Vulcans and Romulans early on and promptly tuned them out. Jim’s table, though, twisted as one to follow Chapel and Rand’s course through the rec room. They were talking as they walked, heads bent together and smiling, until they got to the door. Janice slowed her step first, but Chapel was the one to glance upwards, then look back at Janice, eyes widening.

Janice lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug, suddenly bashful – at least, until Chapel smiled and lifted a hand to her arm. Then she was the first to lean in, and Chapel the second.

Jim managed to stop himself from clapping, for the sake of both their and his own dignity. Still, he turned back to Chekov and Sulu with a huge grin – what could he say, he loved love – and gave Chapel and Rand just long enough to leave before he said, “I gotta go,” and pushed himself up. If he was going to immediately spill to Spock, well, the bridge crew all knew their first officer harboured secret fishwife tendencies.

“Bye, Cap’n,” Chekov said, and Sulu waved.

Bones reached out as Jim weaved past their table, absently patting his arm in simultaneous greeting and goodbye.

“Good to see you too, friend.”

“I don’t think Romulans even have a thyroid anymore.”

Jim chuckled and kept moving.

Going out the door, he almost ran bodily into someone else, automatically putting a hand out to hit a firm red-clothed chest.

“Ach, sorry, Jim.”

Jim looked into the face of his chief engineer, and started laughing.

Scotty frowned at him. “Do I have dilithium on my face or something?”

“No, just-” Jim shook his head, then pointed up.

On the other side of the room, either Chekov or Sulu clearly noticed; a whole-hearted wolf whistle split the air of quiet conversations.

“Something I should know?”

Jim lifted both hands into the air, palms up. “How do you feel about crew morale?”

Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott was not a slow man. He grinned, and raised a hand to Jim’s shoulder. “I feel it’s our duty as department leaders to boost it,” he answered seriously.

“Oh, me-” Jim began. The “-too,” came after a significant pause as he found himself suddenly somewhat upside down.

Scotty, as it turned out, was a pretty good kisser. He was a very good dipper.

Once he was upright again – and the clapping Jim had forsaken earlier had died down – Scotty let go of him, laughed, and bowed from the waist.

Shaking his head, Jim said, “Bye, Scotty. I’ll let you know if there’s any other morale-boosting activities going,” and promptly left the rec room, chuckling under his breath.

So much for preserving his dignity.

Chapter 2: Tracking

Summary:

I am not as obsessed with the symbolism of the anklet as I know some in the fandom are, but that doesn't mean I'm normal about it. i'm also not normal about peter in submissive-coded positions

This is an alt of the Front Man tag scene. Context if required: at the start of the episode Neal gets loaned out in his CI capacity to Agent Kimberley Rice, who ends up using him, without his knowledge or consent, as a ransom payment to a guy who wants to kill him due to prior history - removing his anklet before sending him in to the drop. Instead of immediately killing him, the guy uses him as a 'front man' to pull a job, complete with a lot of blackmail, tasing, and general beating him up, which does give Peter (and Mozzie) enough time to find him. Neal disappears at the end while still off-anklet so he can show Alex he can get out of it, then comes back to the office to get it replaced. (Real tag scene I have no huge issue with, but involves Peter giving him the speech he decides against herein, and then leaving Neal alone in the office).

Fandom: White Collar
Ship/s: hints of Peter/Neal

“Forget something?”

Neal shrugs, grinning charmingly. It’s the kind of expression that works on Peter just as much as it doesn’t, all at the same time. “Got all the way home before I realised it was gone.”

Peter glances up at him then, a single quick shot from under his eyebrows before his gaze reverts to the papers in front of him. “How’s Alex?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Neal sits, because everything hurts after today, but sitting hurts marginally less than standing. “But I’d imagine she’s fine.”

Peter inhales, frowns, seems as if he’s about to say more – there’s the faint aura of an impending It’s Time To Pick A Side, Caffrey speech – then exhales on a long sigh and puts down his pen. “Here,” he is all he says, and slides the anklet across the desk.

Neal picks it up with one index finger, letting it hang insouciantly. “Ah, the freedom of the cage.” Better to sound dismissively bitter than admit he doesn’t want to bend anywhere he doesn’t absolutely have to for fear of encountering a new injury. If he can get Peter to scoff and leave him alone to undertake that ordeal in private, so much the better.

Peter purses his lips at him, grouchy like he’s just bitten a lemon, then stands, and for a moment Neal thinks he’s succeeded. It’s not that unusual – whether he’s genuinely conned Peter or Peter’s just going along with it, he’s not a cruel man. If he has no reason to suspect Neal’s pulling something nefarious, he’ll follow his lead every so often. Hell, sometimes even if he does suspect it.

Still, he’s surprised about it right now. Less for Peter’s drive to turn Neal into a law-abiding citizen, more for his protective instincts. He’s half-expecting to look out his window at 3am tonight and find he has a personal Agent Burke security detail.

Then, instead of leaving the office, Peter leans back against the desk directly in front of Neal. He rubs a hand over his eyes, exhaustion painting shadows across his face. “I have to watch it go on.”

Neal almost asks whether that’s legal or personal. He thinks better of it at the last second. If it is personal, he doesn’t want to know how much is because he got taken with it off, and how much is because Rice was the one to take it off. How much is because someone else was the one to remove it.

There’s something a little messed up in the fact that he really wants that to be part of it.

Rather than approach any of that, he jokes his way to the truth. “I don’t think the office wants to hear the noises I’m going to make if I bend that much right now.”

He’d been expecting – he didn’t know what he’d been expecting. It hadn’t been the flash of pain that wipes over Peter’s face, there and gone like a wave over sandbeds. He should have been. He’d seen the wince when he’d jabbed back at Rice about the tasings. Had been aiming for it a little, maybe, somewhere beneath the part of him that knew Peter had no real choice about letting him go with her.

He hadn’t been aiming for it now. One or the other of them walking out of this office before he’s re-ankleted is still the best possible outcome here.

Instead, Peter stands again, and leans forward to take the anklet from where it had dropped to Neal’s lap. The brush of hand against thigh makes Neal freeze, distracts him through Peter’s hand on the chair arm and the bend of his knee, all the way until he’s on the floor.

Peter kneels, and that’s enough already to steal Neal’s breath from him – the world’s fastest heist. He’s never done that before – has put it back on, once or twice, when Neal was hurt or unwilling and no-one else was around, but he’d always got Neal to hoist his leg onto something, no matter how sore he was. He’d always avoided a position this vulnerably intimate, even more so when he hooks under the hem of Neal’s trouser leg and draws it up, backs of his fingers feather-light against Neal’s calf.

Neal has been more naked than this in front of Peter himself, let alone anyone else, but he’s starting to get what the Victorians were on about with ankles.

“Peter,” Neal says, not entirely able to help himself, and Peter looks up.

He’s on one knee, holding Neal’s calf in one hand and the anklet in the other. There’s some terribly warped echo of marriage in this, and Neal hates that his brain can’t stop drawing connections long enough to not see it.

“Neal,” Peter replies, when Neal fails to follow up his name with anything else.

Neal shakes his head, mute, and Peter looks down again. His fingers run across a patch of skin below Neal’s knee, still covered by cloth, and Neal hisses involuntarily. Peter blinks, sharp, and pushes his pants leg the rest of the way up to see the red, bruised abrasion. Neal hasn’t tracked every wound on himself yet, but he knows this one is ugly, from hitting the floor of the van and the corner of the doorframe and god knows what else.

Peter closes his eyes before he asks, “Has anyone looked at these?”

“You,” Neal answers truthfully, then, “I’ll be fine. I’ll wash them out when I get back home. My tetanus shots are up to date.”

Peter’s gaze wanders up to meet Neal’s, pausing at and dragging away from his knee. All he says is, “Next time Hughes tries to give you away…”

Neal’s smile is a little too sad to be charming. “I’m a very popular present.”

There’s an audible click as the anklet locks shut. Peter doesn’t stop touching him, and he doesn’t know which of those predicates his sense of relief.

Peter doesn’t stand up, either, for a long moment, gaze locked on Neal’s. There’s something he wants to say, or do, and Neal knows, instinctually, as if Peter was any other mark, how he’d get it out of him.

If he was braver, maybe he would.

There’s an edge of hoarseness in Peter’s voice when he says, “Promise me you’ll raid June’s medicine cabinet.”

“I swear,” Neal says, and reaches a hand out to him. “I’ll even tell her I’m doing it.”

Peter’s grip is as strong around his palm as it was gentle on his leg. He hauls himself up to stand over Neal, and lets Neal use the same hold to stand from the chair.

It leaves them far too close. Neal lets go of Peter’s hand first, and Peter backs off by two steps, as far as he can until he hits the desk. “Have a good night,” he says, then turns around, reaching over to pick through his forms.

“You too,” Neal tells his back. “Tell Elizabeth I said goodnight.”

Peter hums in acknowledgement.

Neal turns and leaves. His body is still sore, but the mismatched weight pulling down his left ankle makes walking a little easier.

Chapter 3: The... 'Calm' Before The Storm

Summary:

steve and danny are never far away from me (there is a h50 dvd literally inches away from my elbow right now, so, doubly true).

Anyway, I haven't really written a lot of just. established relationship active flirting for them, all things considered. That's basically all this is.

Fandom: Hawaii Five-0
Ship/s: Steve/Danny

Clear water laps up to the sand, painting a centuries-long path back and forth, gentle and unassailable. Steve’s skin has already equilibrated to the sharp edge of cold which had greeted his first steps past the shoreline, and it feels natural now, a push and pull that sends the sand stirring under his feet. Turquoise turns to white around his ankles, foaming as it spreads out, as the microcosms of land stir and slurry into the water. As the tide pulls back to the ocean, Steve inhales, and as tiny wave peaks flow back in, he exhales. Recede – inhale – release – exhale. Recede – inhale – release – exhale. Recede – inhale – release – exh-

“Steve!”

Steve exclaims, slips, and lands ass-first in the surf. “Fuck.”

The noise of Danny clattering his way through the house is preceded by a speedy pad-pad-pad rhythm that denotes a still-fast-for-his-age Labrador having a sudden realisation that one of his favourite people is now on the ground, where he is.

Given that Eddie was already in the garden, Steve doesn’t manage to get more than one leg bent up before he’s being knocked back down. Flatter, in fact, because Eddie lands both paws on his chest in excitement.

“Hi, Eddie, I love you too,” Steve says, then rolls his head out of the way of the oncoming tongue. “Get off.”

Foiled in his licking attempts, Eddie instead chooses to lie down with his front half on Steve’s chest and his back half on the sand. Steve scratches a hand over Eddie’s ruff and sighs.

Steve hears the snort of laughter before he sees Danny. “This is your fault,” he calls, then watches as the blonde head of the most annoying person he’s ever loved with his entire being appears above him, replacing the sun.

Danny grins down at him, undeniably way too amused at Steve’s predicament. “This is what you get for not helping me shop. It’s karma, babe.”

Steve glares up at him. “God forbid I want a moment of quiet before the entire Williams family descends en masse.”

“Your family too,” Danny points out.

“Oh yes. Two people. One of whom is a child, so really one and a half people.”

“I meant the Williams are your family as well. But I don’t think Joanie would take kindly to being called half a person.”

“Well, no,” Steve says immediately. “That wasn’t what I meant.”

“You gotta work on your phrasing, then. Ma was asking what to get you for Christmas, I’ll tell her you need a dictionary.”

“Thesaurus.”

“Oh, we’re negotiating up, are we?”

Steve rolls his eyes. “Fucking help me up, man.”

Danny starts talking to Steve’s dog instead. “It’s sad, Eddie. Civilian life has affected your father so much he can’t even displace a single canine. He used to be a Navy SEAL, did you know that?”

“And if you get the dog off me, I’ll prove it to you.”

Danny smirks at him. “Promises, promises.”

Eddie pants up at Danny, oblivious to all banter, flirtatious or otherwise. Given the house he lives in, it’s possible he assumes that’s just how humans talk.

Finally, Danny clicks his tongue and pats at his leg, taking a step back. “C’mon, Eddie.”

Eddie stares curiously at him for a moment, then decides it’s worth pursuing the small chance this will be worth his time and stands up.

All he gets is head pats from Danny, but he seems content enough with that. Steve, clambering to his feet, can’t fault him.

“Are you going to help me unpack the groceries, or does the old man need some more alone time?”

“We’re the same age, Daniel.”

Danny rests the hand that’s not patting Eddie comfortingly against Steve’s chest. “Only physically.”

Wrapping a hand around Danny’s wrist, Steve pulls him in enough to drop a kiss on his forehead. “I hate you. And no, I need a shower now.”

Danny looks accusingly down at Eddie. “Eddie, this is all your fault.”

“Still yours. I wouldn’t have fallen in the first place if your voice didn’t carry like a drill sergeant’s.”

“Turn around,” Danny requests, then pushes at Steve’s shoulder like he can make it happen through sheer force.

Steve stays put. Ex-Navy SEAL is still good for something. “Why?”

“I want to see my handiwork.”

“You want to check out my ass.”

“The two things can coexist.”

“You’re gonna have to help me shower for that.”

Danny throws his head back and laughs, and Steve can’t help grinning fondly at him even as he realises his own mistake. “And he claims he’s not a senior citizen. Oh, what would the Navy think of you now? Reduced to asking for help to clean himself.”

“I think they’d still have more of an issue with who I’m asking for it.” Grabbing Danny’s hand, Steve runs his thumb over the gold band on his ring finger.

“You’re not going to get me to stop mocking you that way,” Danny warns. “There was nothing in our vows about that.”

“If I’d put anything in our vows about you insulting me, it would have had to go with the love and cherish and other keep-doing-it-for-all-time things.” Eddie gets bored of them and wanders into the house, and Steve looks towards the kitchen. “Do you have cold things in there?” There is sand now sticking somewhat uncomfortably up the entire length of his calves and into the crook behind his knees, but he will help Danny put stuff away before showering if it needs doing.

“I have hot things out here.” Danny’s hand smooths under Steve’s t-shirt, coasting over his hipbone.

Steve snorts, sufficiently distracted from both the sand and the groceries. “Your lines are really, really awful, you know that?”

“You’re one to talk, smooth dog.”

Steve performs a strategic assessment of his enemy/husband, makes a split-second decision, and takes a calculated risk. It comes in the form of abruptly pulling Danny closer, kissing him, and using the back of his foot to rub wet sand up and down his trouser legs.

Danny yelps into his mouth and jumps back. “You’re disgusting, I hate you!”

“Last one to the shower has to listen to Stella’s hysterectomy story!” Steve calls, taking off running.

“There’s ice-cream in the bags!” Danny protests behind him. Given that he also collides with Steve’s back somewhere just inside the lanai doors, he’s obviously not that committed to the ice-cream.

It’ll refreeze.

Chapter 4: When The Moon Hits Your Eye Like-

Summary:

The prompt for this has been in my notes, from me to myself, for two years as, I quote, 'Post-SR Hutch housewifing with Pete 🙏🏽😰'. so I'm happy to finally be bringing that to fruition.
(This also lowkey ties in to the universe of.. a fic i haven't posted yet. and its prequel, that i've barely started writing. so i don't know why i'm telling y'all about it.)

Fandom: Starsky & Hutch
Ship/s: Starsky/Hutch

“That’s probably enough kneading.”

Pete lifted their hands reluctantly from the dough, leaving a slightly asymmetric but nevertheless smooth and cohesive ball sitting atop the dusting of flour that currently covered not only the kitchen bench but also most of the kitchen in general. “Really?” they asked, clearly disappointed.

It had taken somewhat of a military campaign to convince Pete to learn to cook, against strenuous objections that ‘everyone was trying to make her do girl things’. Hutch’s ‘you can be anything you want to be, as long as it’s someone who can feed themselves more than boxed mac and cheese’ hadn’t done much to help, and neither had Starsky pointing out that Mrs. Ramos was the only woman involved in the campaign. Kiko reminding Pete that he made dinner for them once a week had helped a little, but Hutch still wasn’t sure what had actually put them over the top. All he knew was that Pete had turned up at his and Starsky’s place this afternoon, about a week after they’d all given it up for a lost cause, and accosted him coming out of the greenhouse with, “Okay, what are we going to cook?”

What they were going to cook under those conditions was whatever Hutch had already been planning to make for dinner that night, which happened to be pizza from scratch. And whatever the deciding factor had been, Pete had taken to kneading dough like a house – or at least a kitchen – on fire.

“Really,” Hutch told them, vis-à-vis kneading.

Pete poked the ball of dough with her index finger, leaving a single round indent. “And this is going to become pizza?”

“Well, not by itself. There’s tomatoes in the fridge if you wanna get them.”

“I don’t want vegetables on my pizza.”

Despite their protestations, they already had their head in the fridge when Hutch said, “I bet you want tomato sauce on it, though.” He managed to forestall the ‘and actually they’re a fruit’ that he would’ve followed that up with if he’d been talking to Starsky.

Pete knocked her head against the top of the fridge straightening up, and clasped her free hand to it. “Ow! You’re going to make tomato sauce? Why do you hate fun, Hutch?”

Then again, sometimes it felt like he was talking to Starsky. “The entire point of this is that we’re cooking. Anyway, it’s pretty easy. You get to blend things.”

Pete groaned dramatically and dropped the bag of tomatoes in front of him. “Do you like being a housewife?”

Given the phrasing and the context, Hutch’s initial instinct was to laugh, admonish them, and move on. There was a real question somewhere under there, though, and a serious undertone, and Pete rarely asked anything they were actually curious about without wrapping it in a joke. “I enjoy doing this, yes,” he answered carefully. “Can you fill up that pot with water and boil it?”

“Are we cooking the tomatoes?”

“We’re blanching them. I’ll get the ice water.”

Pete turned to him from the sink, cradling the pot of water in both arms, and frowned at him. “What’s blanching?” They paused, then, turning to the stove, added, “But you enjoyed being a detective, too.”

“I did. But,” Pete knew at least the outline of the story; knew about Starsky’s long and shaky two-steps-forward one-step-back recovery post-shooting, knew the basics of Hutch’s ‘time off from work’ that became ‘extended leave’ that became ‘there’ll always be a place for you in this precinct’. What she didn’t know, maybe, was so much of the tail end of that. “I didn’t want to go back to it without Starsky, and he couldn’t. And you know, I found when he was getting better that I did like doing this.” ‘Housewife’, aside from gender, wasn’t quite fair anyway – he still taught first aid at the Academy and spent a decent amount of time volunteering with the child protective services team he’d gotten embroiled with during Starsky’s hospital stay. But after a lifetime of sidelining everything domestic, there was a pleasure in having the time to take his time, cooking and cleaning and tending to his plants, and a comfort for both of them in knowing he’d be there when Starsky got home on his non-Academy days, when they hadn’t been together all day.

“Mm,” Pete said. “Blanching?”

On a huff of laughter, Hutch turned to get a bowl for the ice water. “After we boil them, we dunk them in the cold. It makes them easier to peel.”

A clattering noise came from the front door, then, “Honey, I’m home!”

Hutch rolled his eyes at Pete. “He thinks he’s hilarious.”

She grinned at him. The plop of tomatoes dropping into water underlaid Hutch’s returning, “How was the evidence basement, darling?”

“Not a shred of evidence to be found, dearest,” Starsky said, voice slowly getting louder until he appeared in the entrance to the kitchen. Hutch took the moment he always did to appreciate it; Starsky standing upright, in jeans so tight they were about three rating levels above decent and a denim shirt that could almost be called buttoned, curls wild and grin cocky. “Minnie’s scored an undercover assignment, though. I helped her pick out a leather jacket. Hey, Pete.”

“How dangerous did she look in it?”

“That girl” –Starsky kissed Hutch on the cheek, then ruffled Pete’s hair, which was borne with grudging grace–“could take down entire gangs in a miniskirt and stilettos, if she wanted to. But she rocked the leather.”

There was no denying that.

“I dropped by Huggy’s on the way home.”

Pete turned to face the blender, but not quick enough to hide the pinkness flashing across their cheeks.

Starsky continued anyway, to Pete, “Suzie asked about you.”

“Stop it,” Pete mumble-hissed, and Hutch raised questioning eyebrows at Starsky.

“Suzie works for Huggy, in the kitchen,” Starsky explained. “Pete had a daaaa-aaate.”

“God!” Pete exclaimed, still half under their breath. “Shut up, Starsky.”

Grinning, Starsky raised his hands in surrender, then mimicked zipping up his mouth.

“Hey,” Hutch complained. “You never stop talking when I tell you to.”

“I trust Pete’s ability to inflict violence on me more than yours.”

Hutch looked down at himself. “Ability?”

“Mm.” Starsky shrugged. “Willingness.”

A thought suddenly struck Hutch, and he leant around Starsky, wrapping a hand around his arm to keep him in place, and asked, “Pete, is this why you agreed to learn how to cook?”

Pete turned around way too fast, face grimly set to neutral. “What do you do with the tomatoes next?”

Laughing, Hutch said, “Starsky, get the blender out, will you?”

“I demand compensation.”

Tugging Starsky in by the collar, Hutch kissed him firmly on the mouth, then spun him around and pushed him in the direction of the pantry. “Blender.”

“Ew,” was Pete’s considered input.

“Get the ice, Pete.”

“You won’t be saying that if you see Suzie much longer!” Starsky called back from the pantry.

Pete groaned and fell to their knees in front of the freezer.

 

Chapter 5: Rattle My Cage

Summary:

So there's a preliminary note in my prompts list about Jane and Maura (Rizzoli & Isles) being the only contemporary ship I can genuinely see doing the 'i'll have sex with you to Help You Out. as a Friend.' thing, and I somewhat stand by that because it's a very different vibe, but also. last night I watched a House episode and. well.

you know how at the end of s7e12 You Must Remember This House gives Wilson an ultimatum of 10 days to get a date, with zero goal-setting of what happens if he fails? Well. uh. what if he did.

Fandom: House MD
Ship/s: House/Wilson
Rating: E

House’s mouth is an inch away from Wilson’s when he murmurs, “You can still say no, and I’ll keep harassing you to get laid.”

“You’ll keep harassing me about something anyway.” Wilson’s not proud of the breathlessness evident in his own voice.

“True.” House isn’t touching him, at all, one hand on the kitchen bench and one by his side, body palpably close in a way that absurdly makes Wilson remember the bar House had taken him to the very first night they met, after bailing him out. The grating sound of the barstool House had dragged closer in, and the same dangerous instinct that had landed Wilson in jail in the first place urging him to respond in kind. The higher, sober part of his brain that had made him repress that and never think about it again.

Well. Think about it as little as possible.

“I don’t hear a no.”

“Mm,” Wilson agrees, and he’s not even entirely sure that was an agreement, but a second later House is kissing him and-

Maybe it was. House kisses firm and insistent, still under the same kind of façade he spends 60% of his time with Wilson under – 99% of his time with anyone else – and Wilson really shouldn’t be responding to it like this – if he should be responding to House like this at all, it should at least be the real House – but maybe if you spend so much time under a façade it becomes part of who you are anyway, and whether he can justify it or not he still opens on a faint moan and wraps a hand into the front of House’s t-shirt.

It's some consolation that House doesn’t sound all that in control of his own breathing when he says, mostly into Wilson’s mouth, “Bedroom.”

Right. Yes. There’s not much beyond making out and handjobs House could manage without being horizontal. Although there’s also not much more Wilson can mentally handle at all. Or that he’d be willing to do in a kitchen.

House backs off a little, although one of his hands has moved to Wilson’s side, dragging the cloth of his shirt in friction against his skin, so there’s no reason for the sense of loss Wilson immediately has to fight. He sounds a little bored and a little amused on, “You’re overthinking things. If this was twenty years ago, I’d just carry you in there.”

The idea alone is enough to make Wilson’s cock swell, pressing against the fabric of his slacks. And against House’s thigh, as he continues, “Of course, if it was twenty years ago it wouldn’t be necessary.” Then he stops, tilts his head. He presses forward in concert with the grin that spreads over his face. “Noted.”

“You’re an asshole,” Wilson grumbles.

House just laughs, breath warm against Wilson’s neck.

“If we’re doing this, you can’t be the only one noting things.”

“Bedroom, Jimmy,” House breathes into his ear.

 

Wilson is tempted to sprint to the bedroom and leave House to catch up, if only to skip the always-awkward walk down the hallway with its too-great time to think, but he’s also aware that House will probably need someone to lean on. If Wilson was a fraction less steady on his feet at baseline, he’d need someone to lean on. So it’s executed in a haze of touching and kissing that ends up with Wilson shirtless somewhere halfway down – “Your button-downs are stupid,” from House, an insult that doesn’t hold quite the same zing when the button-down in question is being pushed off his shoulders, and Wilson’s responding, “They’d look better on your bedroom floor?” and House’s snort of laughter buried in Wilson’s hair – and there’s not a lot of time to think anyway.

If House notices his old room when they pass, still exactly as he left it, he doesn’t comment.

They’re barely in the door before House pushes him onto the bed. Wilson goes with it, because what else is he going to do, insist on staying standing? House still seems to take it as some kind of victory, mouth quirking up and eyes widening in a clear challenge.

Wilson scrambles further up the bed and stares straight back at him.

Shucking his t-shirt is a quick, utilitarian movement, and it ends up discarded on Wilson’s bedroom floor, leaving them on equal footing nakedness-wise.

House doesn’t let that stand long, crawling onto the bed next to Wilson, one long leg slung over Wilson’s. He kisses him again, a quick, hot, brush of lips, then moves up to kiss his forehead, temple, the underside of his jaw. Wilson holds onto his shoulder, steadying himself as much as anything, and lets the other hand trail over hard chest and sparse hair. The lines of House’s sternum and the mouth exploring down the soft skin of his throat almost distract him from House’s hand working at his zipper.

Not entirely, and he makes some kind of vaguely protesting noise and lifts his head from the pillow.

House laughs, stifling it against Wilson’s skin. “The point of this was to get you laid, remember? I can try to do it with your pants still on, but it’ll make it harder.” Then because, as previously mentioned, he’s an asshole, he cups Wilson’s cock through his pants and adds, “Or, you know, not as hard.”

“Not a lot of faith in your capabilities, huh?” Wilson snarks back, but he also pushes House’s hand away and unzips his own damn pants.

House proceeds to entirely ignore that he’s done it, other than to spread one large hand over his hipbones, half beneath his waistband, pads of his fingers bruisingly tight. Otherwise, he returns to kissing his painfully slow way down Wilson’s neck, then starts along his clavicle. Midway, he stops to suck hard at a spot high enough to just barely be covered by Wilson’s work shirt tomorrow, and Wilson gasps and bucks, hooking his leg over House’s good one and pushing down. It’s not the most effective friction he’s ever achieved, but it’s something, enough to feel House’s hardness against his hip in jeans that must be damn near constrictive at this point.

He reaches for it, squeezes, and House groans against his chest, punched out and cut off. “Not the point.”

“I don’t do this without…” he hesitates, for a moment, over the phrasing of this, but in the end, “that being the point.”

“You should try it sometime. I highly recommend it.”

“Says the man trying to get his dick ignored.” Wilson gets as far as popping the button on House’s jeans before House’s hand covers his, and very firmly removes it to his own stomach. When House looks up at him, finally, pupils blown and cheeks flushed, heel of his hand massaging into Wilson’s hip, all he says is, “Believe me. It’s not ignored.”

Wilson has never felt he’s a particularly large man, but his chest might be two acres of land with the pace House is crossing it at. He’s pinned, but not enough; free to move, but not enough; House is touching him, but not enough. He’s never had anyone pay this much attention to the path of his fifth rib, and it feels distinctly like something other than just ‘getting laid’, but the thing is, House is still close and still hard and still a warm weight, inhale and exhale and lips and tongue and teeth and musk and occasional moans when Wilson shifts his hips, vibrating against his skin, and- he’s definitely not just getting laid, but at this point he’d also like that to be happening.

House scrapes teeth across Wilson’s nipple, making Wilson’s grip on his shoulder tighten, then looks to be starting back up towards Wilson’s sternum. Wilson groans, and rolls his hips, and-

Fuck it. House is the one who’s always telling him to be less selfless. “Get to the point,” Wilson demands, and gets a hand in House’s hair to reinforce it.

“Good boy,” House mutters against his stomach, and moves down with Wilson’s push.

He still stops at Wilson’s briefs, cocking his head and blinking like Wilson’s erection might be one of the great diagnostic mysteries of our time. Wilson’s not applying pressure, not more than to keep him there, so it’s still a surprise when he decides to solve it by leaning down and licking, a narrow stripe of sudden heat from base to where the tip is straining the waistband.  Wilson’s hand tightens in his hair, directionless except, “More. Now,” and he responds by hooking two fingers into the waistband to pull down the briefs, side of his hand brushing firm against the side of Wilson’s dick, then wrapping his mouth around just the tip, tongue milking pre-cum from the slit.

“Tease,” Wilson admonishes, blood nowhere near enough to his brain to form full sentences, everything wrapped up in the heavy heat gathering in his groin. “No surprise.”

House grins, absolutely filthy with Wilson’s dick filling his lips, and hums in agreement. On a sharp exhale, Wilson pushes down, finally, and House moves smoothly with it, sinking halfway down. His hand moves down to Wilson’s thigh, squeezing, rough fingers stroking in time with his tongue.

“Not long,” Wilson warns. There’d been too much time without, too much build-up, too much- too much House, a thing he still can’t face head-on even with his dick in the man’s mouth.

In acknowledgement, House strokes a single finger from the base of Wilson’s cock up to meet his mouth, and Wilson manages to repress the responding buck down to an arch, into House’s mouth and fingers and heat.

House glances up at him, eyes curious as ever, and repeats the gesture – Wilson’s breath stutters – then wraps his hand whole around the shaft, draws off, looks straight at Wilson, and gives one long, slow stroke.

Wilson’s orgasm hits him with the same baffling intensity of this whole damn scene, sudden and messy and with House’s name falling from his lips like a prayer – holy but commonplace.

“You-” is all he says as he comes down, and House laughs, low and rough, and unzips his jeans like an underground show the cops could bust any minute. He draws his own dick out, still too far down the bed for Wilson to do anything but watch as he strokes, rough and hard, once, twice, then comes, eyes falling closed and body jerking, over Wilson’s still half-on slacks.

The first thought Wilson has is that he’s never going to be able to wear these to work again, and the second thought is that he didn’t even get to touch House.

He holds a hand down for House to pull himself up by; there’s a second-long moment where they lie face-to-face on the same pillow, until House turns to his back and Wilson looks to the ceiling.

“Do I still have to go get a date?” Wilson asks.

He can feel Hutch’s laughter through the mattress and at his side. “Not if you keep getting laid.”

He doesn’t try to clarify that, not now. Maybe not ever, but he does shift over just enough that their shoulders bump together, and maybe neither of them have to note it. Not yet.

 

Chapter 6: U+2764 Across

Summary:

there was no elizabeth in the last white collar chapter. this was a grievous oversight that needed to be remedied immediately.

Fandom: White Collar
Ship/s: Peter/Elizabeth/Neal

Neal drops a kiss on Peter’s temple as he walks into the kitchen, and Peter absently pats at his neck. Then he steps in behind Elizabeth, who’s standing over the toaster like it might stop working without being watched, and carefully sweeps her hair to one side before laying an equally careful kiss against the curve of her neck.

She reaches back and grabs hold of his hand, squeezing once before letting go.

“You know,” Neal says, leaning against the island opposite Peter. “This is exactly what I imagined mornings in the Burke household would be like.”

“Quiet?” Peter asks, not looking up from his newspaper.

“Boring,” Neal rebuts, with a soft smile and a twinkle in his eye that Peter can track even in his peripheral vision. “Give me the crossword.”

“No. We may not have a rooftop view of the city, but we do have coffee.” Peter gestures towards the espresso machine that he refuses to admit was bought for Neal, even if it did make its appearance in their kitchen suspiciously soon after Neal started staying over.

Instead of making use of it, Neal pouts at him. “Why not?”

“Because you’ll do the whole thing in your head and then hang over my shoulder trying to give me clues.” It would not be the first time.

Neal doesn’t bother trying to refute him, just turns around and asks, “El, are you alright?”

She’s still staring at the toaster, so it’s a fair question. Immediately after Neal finishes speaking, the toast pops up with an obnoxiously loud ding!. She jumps, then looks over her shoulder at Neal. “How are you so chirpy? You had four glasses of wine and came twice last night.”

“The follies of youth,” Peter says drily.

“Not as many times as you!” is Neal’s explanation.

“Double the partners, double the fun?”

Peter snorts, and judges, “She’s fine.”

El grins at him, unapologetically corny. “I’m living proof a woman can have it all.”

“You have toast as well,” Peter reminds her.

“Oh, yeah.” Turning around, she says, “Neal, can you-”

He’s handed her the butter before she can finish the sentence, then the jar of honey. He barely moves to do it, and Peter didn’t see him pick up either of them, despite the fact that they were both on the island between the two of them. Admittedly Peter hasn’t been paying all that much attention. Still, use of Neal’s skills outside of either crime or crime-solving continues to range from extremely useful to slightly terrifying. Sometimes simultaneously.

Neal turns back to Peter slowly, like he can read his thoughts, and one side of his mouth quirks up.

Slightly terrifying. Peter looks back at his newspaper. He was reading something about baseball, he’s pretty sure.

El takes a bite of her buttered and honeyed toast, then pauses. “Do either of you want toast?”

Peter lifts up his still half-full cup of coffee in response. El is well aware that, when given the time, he prefers to finish the first coffee of the day before eating anything. “Neal can make his own breakfast if he has so much energy,” he adds.

“Oh, now I’m getting punished for being a generous lover?” Neal retorts, one hand waving languidly through the air, but he takes the butter knife from El’s hand with the other and turns to the bread bin. “El, steal the crossword for me, will you? Please. Love you.”

El’s obviously still out of it. She doesn’t even blink at that, just walks around and takes the seat next to Peter’s. Peter, meanwhile, is frozen so rigidly in place that she actually manages to extract the games page from between his hands before he even reacts.

He looks at her, already arranging his face into some kind of desperate communication, and meets raised eyebrows and a cool blink.

So maybe she did notice. Maybe Peter’s overreacting. It’s not unprecedented, especially when it comes to Neal.

It’s a little difficult not to. He overreacted the first time Elizabeth said it, too. Which she no doubt remembers, given that he’d literally fallen out of bed, and left the house, and generally acted like someone who hadn’t already been thinking it to himself for months.

Neal pushes the toast down and turns back around. Peter hopes he at least froze into a reasonably casual posture. El pushes the games page over the island and says, “Love you too.”

There’s a brief stutter as Neal reaches for it, a flexing and retraction of shoulder muscles under the indecently attractive tank he insists on wearing to bed, then it gets smoothly incorporated into the movement as if it never happened.

So maybe he hadn’t meant them to notice. Or maybe he just hadn’t meant to say it. He runs a smoothing hand over the newspaper sheet and reads out, “20-across, ‘the best policy, idiomatically’, six letters.”

“Honesty,” Peter replies automatically. “And why the hell are you starting at 20 across?”

Neal looks at him from under his lashes, steady and maintained eye contact, and Peter shakes his head minutely. “I don’t care what message you’re trying to make, it’s no excuse for not starting at 1 across like a normal person.”

Neal doesn’t even bother looking back at the crossword before he says, “32-down, ‘Freudian-derived term used to describe a neat freak’, four letters.”

El snorts with laughter, spraying the marble with toast crumbs. “Anal,” she supplies.

“First prize goes to the beautiful lady in the first row wearing Daffy Duck pyjamas.”

“Hey,” she protests, looking down at her matching t-shirt and shorts. “Bugs Bunny is on these too.”

Neal peers at her, then nods. “My apologies to the Bunny. I was too focused on the woman inside them.”

“I suppose we’ll forgive you.”

Why their flirting starts at least half the time with ganging up on Peter… he got himself into this situation, he supposes. “If you’re not going to actually do the crossword, give it back to me.”

Neal lays his hand flat on the page, spinning it around, and slides it back to Peter with a smile playing at the edges of his lips. “13-across.”

Peter squints suspiciously at him, then looks down. 20-across is actually ‘honesty’, 32-down is seven letters long and has nothing to do with Freud, and 13-across is… eight letters, ‘words that might be found on a Valentine’s card, for example’.

“Yeah, yeah,” Peter mutters, trying to pretend he isn’t smiling inanely at a piece of paper. “13-across to you too.”

El peers over his shoulder to see, a warm, comfortable weight against his side. Neal swallows, opens his mouth like he might be about to say something else-

Ding! goes the toaster, and they all jump.

Laughing, Neal turns back to his toast. El starts sweeping crumbs off the island into her hand, and Peter goes back to his sports pages like it’s any other morning.

Chapter 7: blackbird slipping in a sky of blue

Summary:

I started writing this as post-canon and then got two lines in and my brain went 'hm. no. early seasons'. I do continue to be obsessed with the fanfic gap over when Steve actually left the reserves, it's true.

Title from Springsteen's All I'm Thinkin' About, somewhat of an inspiration.

Fandom: Hawaii Five-0
Ship/s: Steve/Danny

The screen switches from black to Danny’s face in an instant, like an anvil dropped. Or an anvil lifted, from Steve’s chest, as he takes maybe his first full breath since the last time they video-called five days ago.

“Which road in the middle of nowhere have you been dropped on now?” he asks, too close to the screen, then puts the phone down on something and backs off a little, so Steve can see down to his shoulders.

Steve huffs a laugh. “They’re keeping us in the US this AT. How middle of nowhere can we get?”

Danny just raises his eyebrows. “Never underestimate the army’s ingenuity, right?”

“Which might be more relevant if I wasn’t in the Navy.”

“Same difference.”

“You realise I’m surrounded by sailors here. An admiral could hear you.”

“At which point they’re going to reach across the Pacific Ocean and kill me where I stand,” Danny says, deadpan and straight-faced.

Steve scoots back on his bunk until he hits the tent canvas, pulls his knees up and balances Danny against them with one hand. He’s got eyes on the only entrance, and he’s currently alone in it – every other reservist called to training is in the mess having lunch. Steve’s paying his price in MREs for this time with Danny. “Well, no,” he tells him. “But they might try to make me sign a contract swearing to cut all contact with you.”

“And would you do it?” Danny challenges.

Whatever’s between them is still soft and collapsible, barely breathed into existence when the AT email landed in Steve’s inbox. Whatever it is drives Steve to answer honestly. “I’d leave the reserves. What good is one weekend of four lost to training drills doing me, anyway?”

Danny looks away from the screen like he can’t quite bear to meet Steve’s eyes. “You never told me where you are.”

That’s its own admission of something from Danny, Steve knows; the avoidance, but also the need for a location, for Steve to let him as far as he can into this thing he’s doing three thousand miles away. “We’re on the outskirts of Phoenix.”

Danny snorts. “Bit different to Florida.”

Where they’d been at the start of the week. It was different, in a lot of ways. It was the same in that he was spending his time alternating between exhausted and bored out of his mind. It was the same in that in every corner he turned to, he found something that reminded him of Danny, and of home.

“Tell me about it. I’ve never been to Arizona.”

Steve struggles to come up with something. Anything that isn’t ‘we passed a girl picking blackberries on the way in and I thought about the time Grace stained her tongue purple with them’ or ‘one of the captains owns a Camaro, but it’s bright orange and I wanted to drag her about it just for your sake’ or ‘the sky this morning was the colour of your eyes.’ “You’d hate the heat. And the sand. It’s kind of familiar like that.”

Danny laughs. “At least it rains in Hawaii.”

“Actually, it rained this morning.” It had been sudden, a startlingly dark rush of water, drenching them all and then gone. Someone had joked that it had turned up just to get the squids wet, and Steve had barely processed it in time to laugh, because his breath had still been stolen by the relief of the water. “The rain is like a miracle out here.”

Something of the reverence must steal into his voice, because all Danny murmurs is, “Oh.” He shifts, and more of the wall and couch behind him comes into view.

Steve squints at the small phone screen. “Are you at my place?”

“Oh.” Danny glances around himself, like he might have teleported to wherever he was over the course of their conversation. “Didn’t want your houseplants to die.”

“I don’t have houseplants.”

“Your logic is impeccable.” Danny doesn’t offer further argument, just shrugs one shoulder.

“You missed me.” It’s an easy accusation to levy, doesn’t touch on any of the warmth threatening to punch its way out of Steve’s sternum, the butterflies teetering on tightropes in his gut, as he waits for the denial.

It doesn’t come. It’s not technically agreement, but what Danny does say is, “I don’t like this, Steve.”

Steve knows, but, “Don’t like what?”

“You not being here.” Danny takes one short, sharp breath, chest rising and falling on screen, tension writ in hard lines through his jaw and forehead, then, “Or knowing the Navy could call you up any time. But mostly the first thing.”

Steve breathes, longer, slower. A tension all his own sets into his shoulders at the thought of- the thought of solving this, he supposes. It’s still true. “I don’t like not being there either.” He has earphones in, because he might be alone right now, but he can’t, god knows, control what Danny says, and someone could come in at any moment. Danny’s got him on probably loud speaker-phone, alone but unguarded, in the middle of Steve’s house.

Danny tilts his head to the side, expression dead-set serious. “What are training drills doing for you anyway?”

“Keeping me in the Navy.” It sounds flippant – Danny takes it as flippant, from the way he rolls his eyes – but it means something real to Steve. Something more real than he can properly describe, over a video link with no time to prepare. “I- look, Danny. We’ll talk about it, okay? When I get back.”

Groaning, Danny drops his head back to thud against the top of Steve’s couch. “A week, right?”

“Eight days,” Steve corrects.

“Let me be optimistic.”

Steve huffs a laugh. “Who am I to argue with a miracle?”

“First in line, if I know anything about you,” Danny says, but a fond smile has spread across his face, still staring up at the ceiling.

Steve touches two fingers to the screen, like he’ll feel anything other than cool glass beneath them. “Danny.”

Danny lifts his head and looks at Steve. “I know.”

Steve shakes his head. “I-”

“Yo, McGarrett!” One of his tentmates shoulders in, tossing something wrapped into a napkin onto his bunk. “You planning on eating today?”

“Gotta go,” Steve rushes out. Danny nods, the screen goes black, and the anvil drops again.

“Hey, if you were on with your girlfriend, tell me to fuck off.”

Steve forces a friendly grin. “No. Any food left?”

“If you pull out that SEAL speedrun, you might get the dregs of Unidentified Animal Stew.”

“You’re kidding,” Steve says, heaving himself off the bunk. “That’s my favourite military meal.”

And, he thinks as he jogs out to the sound of his brother’s laughter, he’d trade it all for Danny’s lasagna. Or even just one good malasada.

Notes:

if there are any inaccuracies about naval reserves annual training in here. i don't care. i've done far too much US military research for this man already

Chapter 8: January 2019

Summary:

ok so i was wrong. i'm writing hockey fic. do you think the canadian government will fund me as well.

this is set after Heated Rivalry the book - between Heated Rivalry and The Long Game - so it does almost certainly contain spoilers for the unaired portions of the show. Not heavy ones, but if you really wanna avoid any knowledge about what Ilya and Shane decide to do after they admit they're in love, this may not be the chapter for you.

Relevant excerpt(s) from The Long Game pp. 25 & 32 that made me go 'wait I do really want to see that scene. i could just write that scene.':
The other major difference between them was that Ryan Price did know Shane and Ilya's secret. He'd walked in on them kissing last year at the end of the first day of camp. Shane still barely knew the guy because he was too embarrassed to even look Ryan in the eye.
-
"Oh god," said a voice from the doorway. "Not again."
"We weren't!" Shane said quickly. "We were just talking."
Ryan glanced between them, which wasn't hard to do because they were practically stuck together. "Okay."

Fandom: Heated Rivalry
Ship/s: Shane/Ilya

“Do you think it went okay?”

Ilya steps in behind Shane with infuriating slowness, especially for a guy who's known on the ice for, among other things, his speed. Every movement is being conducted with a solemn grace, and Shane knows it’s deliberate, calculated to combat his own simmering anxiety, but it doesn’t actually make it any less irritating.

Shane’s foot taps against the floor, a fast rhythm forming the only noise in the room as Ilya shuts the perfectly silent door behind them. Having done that, he finally turns around. Unfortunately, his face is schooled into the unreadable stoicism that Shane still, over a decade into this thing, can’t decipher. He advances on Shane as slowly as he’s been doing everything else.

Shane backs up until he hits the edge of the table, then puts a hand out to stop Ilya. “We’re still at camp. Our fellow players are out there. Not to mention a bunch of kids.”

“Out there,” Ilya repeats, and wraps a hand around Shane’s wrist, removing it from his own chest. He doesn’t drape himself over Shane like he’d clearly been planning to, though, instead turning to lean against the table next to him. “And most of them are queer. Except Hayden. He’s too boring.”

“Do you think it’s too obvious? That we kind of collected the whole gay NHL pack.”

“And trans. And bisexual. And I do not know about Hazy, but I am suspicious.” Ilya snorts. “We should have a special trading card collection. Rainbow.”

Shane tries to ignore the extra heaping of anxiety on top of his churning gut in favour of the way the thought also kind of makes him want to laugh out loud. “Did you know my dad gave me your trading card one Christmas? Before they knew… anything. He thought it was hilarious.”

Ilya ducks his head, looking Shane in the eye as he grins. A curl falls over his forehead, and Shane wants to reach up and tug at it. “I have seen it. In your bedside drawer.” Unfortunately, he’s telling the truth about that, so Shane can’t even bite back. “I did not know that was where it came from. Yuna was not involved?”

“Are you kidding? She still hated you then. I think she almost made him sleep on the couch about it.”

Ilya’s hand lands on his shoulder, then slips down, squeezing his bicep, before it travels around. He’s ended up half-side-hugging Shane before Shane can really protest. “Before I was her favourite son.”

She said that once. Ilya’s absolutely never going to let him forget it. “She hasn’t known you as long as I have,” he grumbles.

“True. Soon I will be her favourite person in the whole world.”

And there’s a certain number of ‘I love you’s exchanged that stop him from really even responding to that effectively. “How do you think it went?” he repeats instead.

The arm around his shoulders tightens, pulling him further into Ilya’s side. “It was fine, Hollander. The kids loved me. The adults love you.”

Shane groans. “I’m not good with kids.” Why he’d decided – he’d been the one to suggest – doing a children’s hockey training camp with Ilya when he already knew that… Well, he knew why. It was a great way to raise money for their foundation, and at the same time support kids in their communities who wanted to play hockey and might not have access to the totally traditional routes. They already had a couple of free-access spots in each camp, Montreal and Ottawa, and hopefully as it grew they’d get more. All of the coaches, current or former NHL, were volunteering their time. And, selfishly, it was time he got to spend with Ilya. Time he got to spend watching Ilya with the kids, which always made his heart do flips and twirls in his chest like a figure skater showing off.

“Is alright,” Ilya tells him, not bothering to deny it – of course. “I am twice as good to make up for you. Like when we play together, no?”

“No, you asshole.”

“Hey,” Ilya says, and rubs Shane’s arm until he looks up at him. “It was first day of first time doing this, okay? I know you are thinking about Maxie slipping and how we couldn’t at first find the shin guards and probably many other things I have already forgotten, but no-one was hurt and everyone had a good time and we have six more days to get things right. Hm?”

“That’s six more days for things to go wrong,” Shane points out. Ilya’s presence next to him has already done a lot to help his brain slow down – definitely more than his words – but it doesn’t mean it’s stopped. Or that he has to let Ilya know that.

“And then another week in Ottawa.”

“Exactly.”

“Shane,” he says sternly.

“Ilya.”

Ilya blinks, twice, then runs a hand through his curls, and Shane knows they’re thinking the same thing – that sounded a lot like Ilya’s bedroom voice, and they’re a long drive from Shane’s place. Where Shane’s parents are staying with them for the week, anyway.

They’re pressed together now – Shane’s not quite sure when that happened, but he can feel Ilya along his side and around his back, and when he drops his head to press a kiss to the bulk of Ilya’s shoulder, he has to admit that anyone walking in on this was would know about as much as if they saw him on his knees sucking Ilya’s dick.

Which is enough to scare the arousal out of him a little, but also enough to stop him from resisting when Ilya turns to fully face him and brings his free hand up to cradle Shane’s jaw. They stay like that for a moment, Shane’s gaze tracking the line of Ilya’s cheekbones and the fall of his hair and the world-tilting, heart-pounding adoration in his eyes. “First day of camp, yes?” Ilya says softly, entreatingly. “We did it.”

Shane loses his breath for a moment. He hasn’t even allowed himself to realise that. “We did it.”

The press of Ilya’s mouth is firm enough to push Shane back into the table edge, but everything else is painfully gentle, fingers running along the curve of his throat and palm smoothing over his back, the tilt of Ilya’s head and the slight twitches of his muscles when Shane slides a hand under the hem of his t-shirt. Shane sighs into the kiss, tension finally leaching from his body under the physical proof of Ilya’s support.

“Um. Fuck.”

Shane fully jumps, falling back almost onto the table, and even Ilya jerks and lets go of him. It takes Ilya stepping back before Shane can even see the doorway. With its now open door.

Luckily – maybe – better than the alternative – it’s Ryan Price. Who, for starters, Shane knows is gay. And also is so massive that he’s entirely filling the doorway, and there’s no way anyone could have seen past him.

“Come in, Price,” Ilya says.

“Uh, no, it’s fine.” He might be blushing – it’s kinda hard to see under his beard, and Shane winces. One of the only other things he actually knows about Ryan is that one of the reasons he retired from the league was because of his clinical anxiety. This is probably not the ideal situation for that.

“You don’t have to,” Shane says. His voice almost sounds normal, and not like he’s freaking out right along with Ryan. “Just–”

Ilya glances sideways at him and takes over. “You saw what you think you saw. We will tell you more if you would like, but please do not tell anyone else.”

“I’m good,” Ryan says hastily. “I won’t. Um. Leah wanted to ask you something about setup for tomorrow, Shane.”

“Okay.” Shane pushes away Ilya’s hand, wandering over to his arm, and stands up. “I’ll come now.”

“I’ll– leave.”

He does, much faster than you’d think someone with that much bulk could move. Ilya grabs Shane’s arm on the way out the door and says, low, “World did not end.”

The world didn’t end. Through sheer luck, maybe. But that makes five people who know about them.

If one more thing happens today, Shane’s going to lie down and pass out and possibly have a heart attack. Maybe Ilya will do CPR on him, and that will be their first public kiss. It would fit.

Chapter 9: 10:00 PM

Summary:

I truly do not know how rabbot happened to me. I watched the entirety of The Pitt twice - once by myself and then shortly after with my mother - and for the entire course of both watches I was very firmly like 'ehhh I really can't see it as a shipping show, I guess probably because it's too real as someone who's been on the staff side of hospitals for years already and plans to spend the rest of their career in EDs. If I did, I guess I can get behind any of three Robby ships (/Langdon, /Jack, /Heather), but yeah. not a shipping show for me.' and then, like a month after finishing the second watch, I was on the bus home and out of absolutely fucking nowhere my brain was like rabbot hyperfixation time. NOW. and I wrote fully >600 words of the following in my 'prompts' note. for 'prompts'. and i guess they never really left me.

This picks up directly after the show ends.

Fandom: The Pitt
Ship/s: Jack/Robby
Rating: somewhere between a high M and a low E

Jack watches Robby leave, unwilling to reattach his prosthetic just yet and still with half a can of beer to go. Robby puts in his earphones and, as he reaches the end of the park, pulls up his hood, and Jack sees a flash of an imagined teenage Michael that makes a smile lift the corner of his mouth.

“You going to let him sleep alone tonight?” Princess asks. If anyone ever mentioned the concept of minding your own business to her, she’d been pretending not to understand English.

He answers her anyway, partially because he can see Robby’s new kid in his peripheral vision, fresh off the first shift from hell, slowly connecting dots, and he wants to see her expression when she gets there. “He knows better.” It’s true, and he sounds smugly confident saying it. Doesn’t mean he’s not dreading the possibility of getting home, finding he’s wrong, and having to turn around and go all the way to Robby’s place.

She mutters something in Tagalog. Jack doesn’t pick up all of it, but he does catch ‘dako ng nota’ and the snort of laughter from Donnie, who apparently understands it.

He’s pretty sure Princess and Perlah have never realised he spent a few month’s worth of stationing in the Philippines. Or the kind of stuff he did there in his free time.

He considers ignoring it, but he can’t entirely help the smirk that comes out.

Princess shoots him a suspicious look. Next to him, Javadi chokes on her beer.

When Mateo jumps up to pat her on the back – that’s not going to help with her blindingly obvious crush – she starts to ask something, then clearly rapidly realises she isn’t being nearly as quiet as she thought and shuts up. 

Mateo raises his eyebrows at Jack over her head. Jack shrugs. Robby might care, but he also might not; Jack spent long enough under DADT that he can no longer muster a single fuck to give.

“Yeah,” Mateo answers the kid’s mostly unspoken question.

“And with that,” Jack says, tips the last of the can down his throat, and leans down to screw on his leg, “I’m gone. Feel free to gossip about me once I’m out of hearing range. Just tell me what you said after.”

 

Jack pushes open his own front door, searching for Robby before he’s even fully through. The apartment is dark, and there’s no movement when the door thuds shut behind him. Jack exhales in time with the sinking feeling in his gut, and throws on the light switch on autopilot. He needs to at least get a glass of water before he-

There’s a dark head peeking over the top of his couch, perfectly still. It doesn’t make the sinking feeling go away, but at least it means Jack’ll get to sit down and not get back up for a while.

When he rounds the couch, Robby is sitting there, holding whiskey in a glass that is definitely not one of Jack’s proper fancy whiskey tumblers, which is its own bad sign. It’s not like it would have been any easier to get his crappy water glasses out of the cupboard. He’s also staring into the middle distance like he’s trying to outdo a thousand-yard stare.

“That your first?” Jack asks.

Robby breaks, blinks, and peers down at the glass in his hands. “Second.”

Jack takes it gently off him, putting it down on the coffee table. Robby lets him, fingers loosening against the glass then dropping to his lap, gaze tracking Jack.

That’s what convinces Jack. He sits with his back against the couch arm and pulls Robby in, first a hand against his arm then, as he moves, to shoulder and back and chest, until Robby’s settled against Jack’s chest with Jack’s fingers playing at his hoodie’s zip.

“You good?” he checks, out loud, once, because that’s good form, even though Robby’s much better at lying with words than with actions.

“Not remotely,” Robby answers. “Please keep going.”

Probably the best he’s gonna get. He keeps going. Robby’s breathing evens out, slow and deliberate, chest rising and falling under Jack’s forearms, and when he gets to the bottom and Robby’s hoodie falls open, he shifts with it.

It presses the edge of Jack’s prosthetic into the real skin above it, and he hisses on an inhale.

Robby lifts himself up immediately, bending his legs and moving to the side.

“It’s fine,” Jack says before he can be apologised to, then, because he can’t do it himself from this position and he doesn’t relish the idea of leaving Robby without touch long enough to fix that, and because maybe Robby needs something to do with his hands, he asks, “Can you take it off for me?”

Robby pauses, inhales, and Jack can’t see his face like this but his chin dips momentarily, baring the nape of his neck. And, yeah, Jack hadn’t even thought of that, but maybe the expression of trust helps a little as well.

He could do it perfectly well like this, if maybe with a little more spinal curvature than comfortable at their age. Instead, he slips down and turns around, sitting back on his heels between Jack’s legs.

It’s the first good view of him Jack’s got since the park. He looks haggard and exhausted, pale under the beard, and he obviously realises Jack’s looking at him, because he shakes his head, shrugs off his open hoodie, and keeps moving, lying on his front with his head resting sideways against Jack’s sternum.

He’s operating blind like this, but apparently that’s preferable to Jack being able to read his expressions. It’s classic Robby, and Jack almost tells him to sit back up and deal with it, but- maybe he needs to be allowed a little hiding tonight. Just enough to make the openness bearable.

One of Robby’s hands rests flat, broad along Jack’s thigh, and the other traces its way down to, Jack assumes, the loosening screw. It’s always strange, and there’s a reason he doesn’t let most people touch the fake leg. He can still feel something there – knows well enough that he might always – but if he can’t see what’s meeting with it, his brain can’t manufacture the feelings properly. He can still feel Robby touching it, in a strange, buzzing, formulated medley of contact.

He can also, genuinely – in the sense of ‘genuine’ that his nerves are responding to real physical stimulus – feel as it loosens its grip on the stump, and Robby pulls it carefully off. He leans it against the side of the couch, with a lot more care than he’d discarded his hoodie – to be fair, the leg cost a lot more, at least for the VA – then smooths both hands over the scar.

Jack rests a hand on Robby’s head, scratching just a little into his hair. Robby gets the message and moves on, sliding up to where the cup digs in, pushing palm and fingers against muscle that protests for a split second before it equilibrates and loosens. He uses long strokes, down and around, pressure shifting in response to whatever he can feel of the reaction, and Jack sighs and lets his head fall back against the arm of the couch. “Why are you better at this than me?”

“Benefits of not learning in the army,” Robby jabs.

Jack’s been touched by Dr. Robby, ED Attending, check-ups and patch-ups, and this isn’t it. He lets it slide, though, because he’s zoning out; falling into a half-trance state under the rhythmic massage of Robby’s hands and the weight of him against his lower body and the slow gusts of his breath against Jack’s stomach, where his t-shirt has rucked up under Robby’s movement.

Robby shifts again, his body pressing down a little firmer, and makes a small punched-out sound that brings Jack back to reality just enough to realise it’s a very familiar noise.

Jack exhales on a slight laugh. “Man, how hard are you?”

“Harder than you,” Robby mutters, because part of what Jack loves about doing this is that it flicks some switch in Robby’s brain that lets him be kind of a bitch without overthinking it.

“Guess you better do something about that, then.” Jack’s always kind of a bitch.

Robby laughs, and doesn’t move; that’s fine. Jack was aiming more for laughter than anything else, even if there is still enough remnant adrenaline in his veins that he could’ve gone either way.

Except, of course, that he can now feel Robby’s dick against his inner thigh, and it clearly wants something more than laughter. “Are you gonna do something about that?” he asks.

“It’s fine.”

Jack rolls his leg in, and Robby’s breath sucks in sharp. “Uh-huh. You want me to do something about it?”

“No.”

Resting his head sideways against the couch cushion, Jack looks down the length of his own chest at Robby. At as much of his face as he can see, which isn’t much, but enough to catch dark pupils and a slight flush. “Then you better.”

“It’s fine.” Bitch, brat, one or the other.

“Sit up.”

Robby shoots him an annoyed look, up from under his lashes without moving his head, but then he follows orders. Resumes the position he first took, now between Jack’s calf and the couch back.

Jack sits up a bit more himself, propped against the couch arm, then gestures him in with two fingers and waits until he shuffles up between Jack’s thighs. “Do something about it.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Watch,” Jack answers, then huffs a laugh at the look on Robby’s face. “Hey, you told me not to help.”

Because, again, bitch, Robby finds the loophole in Jack’s demands and pushes his hand under the waistband of his – actually, Jack’s, he must’ve changed into them here – sweatpants without lowering them even slightly. Luckily, that was never what Jack had been planning to look at. He’s here for the rising warmth flushing Robby’s throat and heightening the redness of his cheeks; his eyes brushing Jack’s face before they land somewhere over his shoulder, then quickly close; the shifting of muscle under his white t-shirt sleeve as his right hand moves. For the almost painful-sounding edge to his breathing, and the way, when Jack moves his left leg in to press against Robby’s folded right one, he can feel fine tremors running through him.

Eyes still closed, he grits out, “Jack,” from between clenched teeth.

Jack moves, bracing himself against the couch and leaning in until he’s almost mirroring Robby. “Look at me,” he says, close enough to barely breathe it and still be heard.

Robby shakes his head, then does, opening his eyes. He inhales, hard, at finding Jack so close, then his eyes flutter again.

Jack saves him from disobeying by kissing him, soft but definite, one hand resting on his hip. Robby’s breath shudders, then comes in one long exhale into Jack’s mouth, and his arm stills.

Jack keeps kissing him a moment longer, then backs off and returns, with some effort, to his previous position. The difficulty of being lopsided isn’t helped by the fact that he is now definitely hard himself.

Which Robby points out by conspicuously eyeing the outline tenting his scrubs – he can’t believe he’s still in his fucking scrub pants – and repeating back to him, “You want me to do something about that?”

Jack smiles at him, a languid curve of his lips. “It’s fine.”

Robby glares at him, and Jack laughs. “Asshole.”

“You love it.”

Robby doesn’t bother denying it, just wrinkles his nose and says, “I need a shower.”

“Chill out for a minute, and I’ll join you,” Jack promises, and holds a hand out.

Robby stares at it for a moment, then takes it, and follows the tug to lie back on Jack’s chest. Jack lifts his own head enough to kiss the top of his hair. “Better?”

He doesn’t answer immediately, taking the space of a few breaths to consider it. “No. But not as bad.”

Jack kindly doesn’t tell him they mean the same thing. Instead, he runs a hand down Robby’s back, doesn’t complain about the fact that he’s going to have beard burn where Robby was lying on his stomach earlier, and keeps breathing in sync with him.

Notes:

at some point there's gonna be rizzles smut in here, but i like that at the moment the sex is exclusively the property of almost entirely 50+yo men. *banging pots* old man yaoi we got old man yaoi over here

Chapter 10: Champagne Problems

Summary:

i. have a whole paragraph in a wip where neal's thinking about how he fell in love with peter and el as a couple. apparently it wasn't enough for me.
Also one potential version of the time Neal sent champagne to a surveillance van, as per Cruz.

Fandom: White Collar
Ship/s: definite Peter/El, twisty understated pining-type Neal/Peter/El

The first time Neal sees Peter, he does a rapid assessment, a con-man’s scan – as much as Mozzie will haul him over the coals for walking up like this, there’s a point to it beyond the draw of the forbidden – and comes up with a list of traits.

1) Pinstripe jacket, badly cut. Takes his job seriously, but doesn’t think it relies overly on how he looks. (Sucker. Everything relies on how you look, in the end.)

2) Obnoxiously gold tie, presumably genuinely chosen, as opposed to Neal’s cover’s obnoxiously red tie. He wants to make himself memorable – probably also a work thing – but the tie was possibly bought for him by a relative. One who doesn’t like him all that much, or might be colour blind. Or just blind.

3) Haircut that could possibly be styled well, but decidedly hasn’t been. He doesn’t come from a family that cared about fashion – probably blue-collar – or it would be automatic to at least make it look slightly better than this, but he does have someone in his life that convinced him to go get this haircut.

4) Upright posture, shoulders back, head high. There’s genuine confidence in there, but there’s also a self-aware projection of Sensible Authority Figure that feels like someone still building their own identity a little.

5) Gold wedding band. Shiny enough to be newly married, and the way his thumb skates over it, absentmindedly as he reassures Neal of the viability of his bonds, would have told him it was new anyway. Still an unfamiliar weight on his hand. The lines at the corners of his eyes relax as he does it, and that tells Neal he loves his wife.

 

The first time Neal sees Peter smile, it’s at Elizabeth.

They’re all in New York. Obviously Peter doesn’t know that, although Neal’s pretty sure he has suspicions. He definitely doesn’t know that Neal’s given into his worst instincts and is currently standing across the street from the Fed Building, hidden in the shade of trees behind newspaper and sunglasses and a veritable collection of Mozzie’s worst ideas. He’s been here all day, sure to keep himself in positions and angles Peter can’t see him, because that would be game over, but he’s aware that he can’t keep track of every other FBI agent who might possibly recognise him.

It doesn’t make him move. Especially when Peter walks out the front door of the Fed Building again and this time pauses on the steps, looking around.

There is a heart-stopping moment where Neal thinks he’s looking for him. Adrenaline rips through him, ready to drop him on the balls of his feet running, sending his gaze scanning for the nearest crowd to lose himself in.

Then Peter’s eyes brush straight past Neal, down the street to his left, and he smiles.

Neal almost drops his newspaper and his façade and possibly his heart.

Elizabeth walks right in front of him, and Neal immediately knows he’s safe until she leaves, because Peter clearly can’t see anything other than her. Neal doesn’t see anything other than Peter, really, until she reaches him and turns to sit on the steps next to him, and he sees her smile.

He sits down next to her, looser than Neal’s ever seen him. She leans in to kiss him, and he rests a hand over hers, matching gold bands shining in the afternoon sun. Then she pulls two brown paper bags from her coat pocket, leans back against the concrete, and hands one to Peter.

Neal watches them all through their lunch, something heavy burning beneath his ribs. At the openness, at the sheer normality, at the way they never stop smiling at each other.

When Elizabeth leaves, he watches Peter watch her go. As she turns fully and strides down the street, coat swirling around her – Neal spares a thought to wonder how the hell Peter managed to marry someone with that much effortless style – Peter inhales, nods, and visibly pulls Federal Agent back around himself like a cloak.

Neal keeps watching until Peter disappears behind the glass doors of the Fed Building, then stands and walks in the opposite direction to Elizabeth. He’s glad for the sunglasses now, for whatever they might hide of his expression to passers-by.

 

It’s not difficult to find out more about Elizabeth, or their marriage. He doesn’t dig deep, feeling inexplicably intrusive the entire time, but Elizabeth Burke’s budding events business is very much public knowledge, as is Elizabeth Mitchell’s fine arts degree and succession of minor museum jobs. There’s a gala-based con he, Mozzie, and Kate had been throwing around for weeks that he pulls the plug on, giving them a bullshit reason. They both know it’s bullshit, and he bears the brunt of their irritation for almost as long as they’d been discussing it. He never tells either of them that Elizabeth had landed the organising gig for it, one of her biggest yet, and he didn’t want to do anything to jeopardise it for her.

Peter and Elizabeth’s wedding was in the newspapers. A wedding notice, something which strikes Neal as delightfully old-fashioned and also somewhere deep in his heart, in his poorly-hidden romantic tendencies and love of Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn and Rock Hudson and Doris Day and anyone else who fell in love in black-and-white and vintage pastels where the only complications were humorously wrapped up in a nice neat bow within 120 minutes.

 

It's stupid, and cocky, and either of his partners would be entirely justified in yelling at him if they ever find out about it. But he’s sitting on the roof of a building conveniently across from the MoMA, watching a poorly disguised FBI surveillance van watching the same doors he is, and Peter is in there on a night he absolutely should be at home.

He meets the delivery guy out the back of the office building he’s using.

“Do you have a pen?” he asks, and is handed a biro with a slight frown.

Neal hands it back along with a fifty-dollar bill he really can’t afford, but clears the frown immediately. “Go back the way you came, and there’s a white plumber’s van. Knock on the back, and give this to whoever answers.”

The guy opens his mouth, looks back at the fifty dollars, and shrugs. “Sure, man.”

 

Diana, Jones, and Peter all stare at each other when the knock comes. Jones is holding the headphones to one ear, and Peter has an unidentified sinking feeling about who or what might be on the other side, so he lets Diana answer it.

“What is this?” she asks. Interrogates, honestly.

He hears, “Some guy paid me way too much to bring this to you. I didn’t ask questions.”

“What is it?” Peter asks.

“It’s… champagne, boss.”

Peter sighs. “Bring it in. Let him go.”

Diana is pretending not to grin as she closes the doors and turns around. She’s doing a bad job of it.

“Stop being charmed by our target,” Peter grumbles, like he isn’t fighting back a grin himself.

“I think it’s for you,” is all she says, and hands the bottle over.

Peter doesn’t know a lot about champagne, but he’s pretty sure this is genuinely good quality. As he turns it around in his hands, he spots blue ink on the back of the label.

He recognises Caffrey’s handwriting by now, as if he didn’t know. ‘Happy anniversary, Peter’ is scrawled over the calories, country of origin, and warning not to drink if pregnant. ‘go back to Elizabeth’. Then, in smaller letters underneath, ‘I promise not to rob it tonight’.

Peter exhales on something that might be a laugh. The really awful thing is, he believes the promise.

“Do we get champagne?” Jones asks.

“Nope,” Peter replies. “This is a present for me and my wife.”

“Better go home and drink it, then,” Diana tells him.

“Yeah,” he agrees, and stands up, holding the champagne. “I’ll see you both at work tomorrow. I expect a full report.” Not that they’re going to see anything from Caffrey. Not now.

 

Chapter 11: sometimes you make the tea

Summary:

hit the tag limit yesterday. am adding a new fandom today anyway. ao3, meet me out back of maccas.

Fandom: MASH
Ship/s: present BJ/Peg/Hawkeye (Peg/Hawkeye on-page), past Hawkeye/Tommy

Hawkeye wakes, blinks at the dark ceiling, and executes a controlled fall out the side of the bed.

There’s a reason he always sleeps on the edge. This is it. Erin’s old enough not to be waking BJ and Peg up anymore, there’s no reason he should. He’s got thirty years on her.

He pads out to the kitchen by touch and muscle memory alone, ducking around the sharp edge of a corner table and putting a hand out to steady the three-foot tall papier-mâchè monstrosity Erin’s insistent is soon going to turn into Bugs Bunny. At least, that’s what the ear-shaped bumps on its head and her repeated declarations of, “Bugs!” when asked suggest.

He rounds the corner towards the kitchen, distracted, and throws a hand up in front of his eyes. “Aah!”

“What,” Peg asks flatly from the other side of the kitchen bench.

“You’re trying to blind me. You realise I’ll stop bringing in money if I can’t operate anymore.”

Peg doesn’t dignify that with a response. Hawkeye raises his hand and peeks cautiously into the dim light.

She looks very unamused by him. She’s also leaning with one hand braced on the bench and the other wrapped around the handle of the kettle, so Hawkeye can hazard a guess as to why.

“Why are you up?” he asks anyway.

“Cramps,” Peg says, gesturing to her middle with the – hopefully cold – kettle. “It’s my time of the month.”

“You do realise we’re doctors. You can call a rather blood-soaked spade a menstrual period.”

“Don’t try to be witty at half past midnight, Hawkeye. I know it’s asking a lot of you.”

She means it would be hard for him not to be witty, Hawkeye chooses to believe. In the spirit of benevolence.

“Let me,” he offers, grasping the kettle below her grip. “Sit down.”

She lets go, switching places with him and sinking onto a stool.

They’re silent through Hawkeye filling the kettle, setting it to boil, and fetching two mugs down from the cupboard. Eventually, as he’s spooning out sugar, she asks, “Why are you up?”

He stares down at the golden grains, shakes his head, and dumps another teaspoon in both mugs. She knows the answer is nightmares, which means she’s asking about the content of them.

She would also accept ‘I don’t want to talk about it’, or any more comfortable diversion, probably. While the kettle boils, he turns around and looks at her.

She’s a little pale, lips tight and hair a light-blonde mess around her head, but she’s watching him with soft eyes.

He makes a snap decision. “Did I ever tell you about Tommy?”

She shakes her head minutely. “I don’t think so.”

“He was the first time I cried in Korea. I’d been there an eternity and no time at all. Before BJ’s time.”

“Was it with Trapper, or were you…?”

‘Were you alone’, Hawkeye knows, is what she doesn’t say. Even though it was never really true – Henry and Hawkeye came to the 4077^th at the same time, and Radar turned up, quavering competence and duct-taped wire frames, almost immediately. Still, he knows what she means.

“Trapper was there.” He doesn’t mention that it barely helped, at the time; that he’d been too aware of how Trapper’s streak of cynically-edged depression was likely to emerge in response to his own grief, had chosen to viciously repress any expression of sadness rather than spread it around.

He was getting better about that. Still wasn’t good at it, but hey, he was talking now.

Peg doesn’t ask what happened. Instead, she asks, “Who was Tommy?”

Hawkeye breathes in, then breathes out. Tries to come up with a way to describe everything Tommy was. Is. “Incredible. My best friend in fifth grade, my first kiss in seventh, the boldest man I ever knew, and the million-and-oneth soul I failed to save over there.”

Tilting her head, she asks, “Which part were you dreaming about?”

“Hearing the bullet.” She frowns at him; he smiles, a wry twist of lips, and shakes his head. He doesn’t need to get into that part. “Almost the first thing he did when he got into camp was kiss Henry. On the mouth.”

She snorts with sudden laughter. “How did Henry react?”

“He seemed flattered.” Hawkeye laughs himself, remembering it. “Tommy wasn’t–” The kettle whistles, and he quickly turns, lifting it before it can wake BJ or Erin. As he pours water, he explains, “I thought he was beautiful, because we’d grown into our bodies together, but he was no James Dean. But he was charming as all get out, and… fearless.”

“Like you,” Peg says softly.

“You can’t see me in Hollywood?” Hawkeye asks, smoldering over his shoulder at her.

She rolls her eyes. “Finish making the tea, or I’ll send you to Hollywood.”

He obediently heads for the fridge to get the milk. “Not like me. The charming, maybe, but I was never fearless. Just too scared at baseline not to function through it.”

She looks, when he glances over his shoulder, like she wants to argue, but she doesn’t. It’s true, and he thinks Tommy’s death might have been the start of Korea being truly terrifying.

He puts the milk away, picks up the mugs, and slides one across to Peg. They could go to the more comfortable lounge now, but neither of them make a move to leave the hush of the kitchen. “There’s losing someone on the table, and there’s losing someone in life, and he was both.”

“At least you got to see him first.”

That’s– he’s never thought about it like that. Tommy being there, in camp, with Hawkeye so soon before and then at the moment of – it made it rawer, more harshly felt. But he compares it, now, to Peg’s months of thinking her husband could die at any moment thousands of miles away, unheard and unknown until the letter came – to the very real possibility of having found out about Tommy’s death only through military grapevines or his own letter from Dad.

He leans his elbows on the cold kitchen counter, cups a hand over the warm steam of his tea, and looks at Peg’s quiet certainty. “You’re right. I’m glad I saw him. The camp was brighter, for a minute.” He huffs a laugh. “I’m glad I got to hear him say he loved me in front of a commanding officer, even if it was only Henry, and admit to being a communist in the middle of an army camp. We could all learn a little courage from Tommy Gillis.”

She looks back at him for a moment, then tilts her head and holds out an arm. He rounds the bench and hugs her side-on, burying his face in the fuzzy halo of her hair and letting himself grieve anew, just for a moment, for a best friend with more life than anyone he’s ever known.

Then he sniffs, straightens up, and asks, “Do you need aspirin?”

“I already took it, honey. Just sit with me.”

“I can do that,” he agrees, and slides into the seat next to her. “Sitting is one of my best-developed skills.” Pulling the mug over the counter, he adds, “Drinking’s up there too.”

“Excellent,” Peg says drily. “You can challenge our 4-year-old to a talent competition.”

“Oh, she’d win, hands-down. Have you seen her papier-mâché skills?”

“Yes, Bugs is really coming along, isn’t he?”

Tommy would have loved the concept of a papier-mâché Bugs Bunny as tall as its creator, for sheer whimsy. Hawkeye wraps an arm around Peg’s shoulders, and grins at the thought of introducing it to him.

Chapter 12: please stop it right away ('cause i remember just what you'd say)

Summary:

I think I've said before, it simply isn't an advent calendar without Steve's abandonment issues sticking their head in.

Coda to 7x07, Ke Makuahine A Me Ke Keikikane, aka the one where Cath turns up to tell Steve Doris is being held at a black bag CIA site because she tried to break out Yao Fat, and Cath learns that Steve was going to propose to her, and both Cath and Doris admit to Steve's face that they knew they were going back to the CIA when they told him they'd stay in Hawaii.

Title from Don't Play That Song, I was listening to the Bruce Springsteen cover while writing.

Fandom: Hawaii Five-0
Ship/s: canon-typical Steve&-/Danny

Steve’s still sitting on the floor, papers in his lap, when his front door opens. The tread is familiar enough that he doesn’t need to look up, but he does anyway, at Danny dragging a suitcase inside with a beleaguered frown. Doris’s handwriting had been starting to blur in front of his eyes.

“Hi, Danny.”

Danny abandons the suitcase next to the couch and walks straight to him, dropping into a crouch. “Hey, Steve,” he replies, deceptively casual. “Heard you had an adventure without me.”

Steve doesn’t bother asking who briefed him on it; probably more than one team member, and Cath might’ve as well. Doris is about the only person he could potentially eliminate from consideration, and even she has strange and roundabout ways of expressing love that could manifest as telling his best friend to check up on him behind his back.

Except that Danny would tell him if it had been Doris. And would be in a significantly worse mood. “Everyone’s okay,” he tells Danny.

“‘Everyone’ include you?”

Steve drops the letter he’s holding, finally, and spreads his arms. “Nothing’s broken.”

Danny crinkles his eyebrows in something half-raised half-frown. It’s adorable, and normally it would make Steve want nothing more than to smooth out or kiss away the creases in his forehead. Right now, he shrugs and says, “You can examine me if you want.” He’d find a few bruises, maybe a bump on the back of his head, most of them from Doris herself before she’d realised who he was. Steve’s betting he’s not actually gonna go there, not tonight.

“Okay,” Danny says, and points to the letter Steve dropped. “What were you looking at?”

“I said examine, not cross-examine.”

“I asked you a question. You want me to cross-examine you, you ain’t heard nothing yet.”

“It’s a letter Doris wrote to Yao Fat. Never sent, obviously,” Steve answers, aware that it isn’t even close to the question Danny was actually asking.

He still doesn’t ask it bluntly. “What else is in the treasure trove?”

“Diaries. Photos. A couple files I’m pretty sure she wasn’t supposed to have.”

“It’s been here the whole time?”

Steve takes a breath, shakes his head. “It has to have been.” It’s just one factor in the whole everything of this, but man, it sure is one.

“How long have you been down here?”

Steve looks around, at the neat piles of paper surrounding the lockbox, and the dark wood under his stretched-out legs. He’d shifted so he could lean against the back of the desk at some point, but other than that, “Don’t know,” he says, and makes the decision to give in and answer the actual question. “It wasn’t great. I… I yelled at her. For the first time.”

“Good,” is Danny’s response, of course. He drops to sit cross-legged in front of Steve. “And you didn’t, by the way. Chin heard it over the comms. You expressed an emotion. Doesn’t equate to yelling. I should know.”

That answered the question of at least one person who’d called him. “It was just, um, a lot. Doris, and Cath, and–” He stops himself just in time from saying, ‘and you weren’t there.’ He didn’t want Danny to be there. He was extremely glad Danny had been practical enough to know he couldn’t get back to Honolulu in time to join Chin and Kono and Grover on whatever transport they’d hitched to Morocco.

The next thing Danny says is still, “I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”

“You were with your parents. Don’t be stupid.” He couldn’t have locked down even as much as he’d managed to if Danny had been there.

“Me? Me be stupid?”

Steve raises his eyebrows, suppressing a smirk.

Danny rolls his eyes. “Thank you for telling me anyway.”

“You don’t need to.” It’s an agreement, unspoken for a long time now, but still. They don’t disappear without telling the other beforehand. Not since Korea. Doesn’t mean Steve hadn’t sat on the edge of his own bed for a long time, staring at his phone while Lynn and Cath talked downstairs, hoping Danny wasn’t going to pick up the call as much as he hoped he was.

“Will you let me be earnest for a moment?”

Steve lifts his hands in surrender.

“I’m sorry you had to do this. I’m sorry it happened while I was away. Thank you for letting me know you were leaving, even if you didn’t tell me why or where, you asshole, and thank you for letting everyone else help you.”

“Do most of your earnest declarations involve calling people assholes?” Steve wonders.

“They do when they’re about you.”

Steve can’t argue with that. “Thank you for telling the team. It helped.”

“Uh-huh. Do you want to actually talk about it?”

Danny’s watching him, head tilted to the side, like he’s trying to calibrate to every line of Steve’s face. Like he’s willing to wait as long as it takes for Steve to respond. That’s what drives the sob into Steve’s throat that he hastily swallows back. “They both knew. That they were going to leave.” He could have dealt with learning that for sure from either Catherine or Doris, maybe. He’s ridden through the revelations of both on adrenaline alone, and that left him hours ago. “I’m glad Cath’s happy. I want her to be happy. Ma too, I…. I guess. But they knew.” They both lied to his face, and then they left him. There’s a two-ton weight on his chest, and it’s making it really painful to breathe.

Danny touches him, finally, leaning forward and bracing both hands against Steve’s calves. He looks hurt himself, pain deep-set into the lines around his eyes and tension of his jaw. “I’m sorry, Steve,” he says, then shakes his head. He nudges Steve’s legs aside, pushes up onto his knees, and awkwardly crawl-hobbles the few inches closer. He hugs Steve, one arm hooking around his neck and the other a firm support across his back, palm spread broad along his ribs, and the two tons gets replaced with a hundred fifty pounds. Breath rushes out of him, suddenly easier, and with it, face turned to Danny’s shoulder, comes the tears that wouldn’t grace either goodbye.

Danny sighs, shoulders rising and falling, and tightens his grip. “I’m here,” he murmurs.

They’re meaningless words of comfort. The thing that cuts Steve to the core is, he believes them.

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 13 of Advent Calendars