Steve/Danny Fic: Where do we go from here?

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Title: Where do we go from here?
Companion Series to "It Started with a Question"
Pairing: Steve/Danny
Genre: Angst, slash 
Rating: PG-13 (for 'danger' and 'concepts' of Danny's internal struggles) 
Summary: Danny is overwhelmed and confused by these new things between Steve and himself
Disclaimer: Don't own them, don't mean any harm, don't gain any ducats, just playing around.
Word count: ~2500
A/N: There’s a lot of canon in this that is clearly not mine, I’m only borrowing from the show. I have taken actual quotes from the show as part of the dialog either because its slashy on its own, I wanted to make it slashy, or it just seemed right to add it. 

Thanks to purple_spock for making this into something vaguely sensical (it should be a word dammit...).


At first, it had been a little awkward sitting on the couch together, barely speaking, both of them still too nervous to know what to say. Steve threw in CHiPs, a gift from Mary. They were both on the couch, sitting close together, not quite touching and Danny was sitting forward bouncing his knee as he often did when he was unsure or impatient. Steve put an arm around Danny’s shoulder, and pulled him along to recline on the couch, tucking Danny against his side.

Danny stopped bouncing his knee and curled up on the couch and Steve smiled as he again pictured a big cat showing affection, even though Danny had far more puppy-like qualities than feline. Then Danny started ranting about Steve’s tactics during this case or that, but Steve wasn’t really listening, he was just watching Danny’s hands and laughing. When he started imagining Danny’s hands busy with him instead of the air and he just couldn’t take it anymore, he’d kiss Danny and Danny would melt against him.

They spent the weekend laughing, making out and goofing; it was glorious. Even though Danny hadn’t spent the night either night which Steve felt was part of an unspoken agreement for now. Regardless, Steve enjoyed the weekend feeling like the teenagers whose parents were out of town for a few days, the teenager he’d never been after his mom died. He’d turned himself into a machine, broken all kinds of records in high school and later the Navy because he worked himself into exhaustion, which over time had become harder and harder. No second in his waking day was to go unfilled lest the death of his mother and the consequent crumbling of his family break him.

Danny made him feel like anything was possible. The weekend was like a dream; it was perfect. But perfection never lasted forever, he knew that better than anyone did. The two of them had to return to reality. In other words, work called.

Steve did not want to pull rank. He would argue, plead, bargain, push, and fight before pulling rank on Danny. It was too soon in their too fragile relationship which they had still not yet discussed. Sure they had spent the weekend making out, but they hadn’t talked about what attraction would mean. Steve liked to think he was good at reading people, but he had too much invested in Danny to feel confident about where Danny was. Clearly, they were attracted to each other, but that did not a relationship make. The amount at risk for both of them would be enough to scare anyone anyway. He didn’t consider Danny a coward, but even he felt “rationally concerned” about the possible repercussions of their relationship.

Steve would have to push all that aside for now because they had a case, and this SEAL deserved a chance, deserved the full effort of Steve’s team, or at the very least, the SEAL’s wife did. He was going to have to go on the ship by himself and leave the rest of his team to investigate the wife’s murder, even if it did look like the SEAL had done it.

Danny was not, not at all cool with Steve going onto the floating museum alone, but he knew two things about the situation:
1. There was no arguing with “mission Steve”.
2. There was no one better for this job than “mission Steve”.

For Danny, the previous weekend had been an awkward perfection, a new adventure, satisfying in ways he’d never imagined and sparking a completely new kind of want that left him breathless and tangled up in knots. He was terrified. He wanted to spend the night with Steve, wanted to share something with him that he’d never shared with anyone, wake up in protected by Steve’s arms, a vision that had him yearning, but he couldn’t do that without knowing what this weekend meant to Steve. Hell, Danny would like to know what this weekend had meant to him, he’d been surprised and confused, but also excited and happy. He hated not knowing where he stood, but he still hadn’t figured out where he wanted to stand. However, that was not the problem currently requiring his attention.

“Okay, let’s say I am you and you are the bad guy here. Kay? I would know that all the ways onto to this ship are visible somehow. So how would you outsmart yourself and get yourself onto that ship without yourself seeing yourself?

“Okay, was that an actual attempt at a question or were you just kinda throwing words at each other and hoping they made sense?”

“How you going to get on that ship without Graham seeing you? That’s all.”

“Graham is expecting people to come from land not from the water.” Danny stared at Steve, who had paused for a second, “I’m just gonna go for a swim.”

“You’re gonna go for a swim.” Danny laughed, mostly because he didn’t understand how it was that Steve continued to surprise him. There was a small part of him hoping Steve wasn’t serious, but the rest of him knew better. “You’re serious, and now you’re shirtless. That’s great.”

All right, the shirtless part really was great, or at least it would have been under different circumstances. If Steve had been preparing for an evening swim, Danny would have enjoyed the display. His partner was beautiful and impressive, damn him, and he was going to himself killed with his crazy stunts. He wanted to yell at Steve for the stupid feat, ask him not to leave alone, but Kono and Chin had arrived. Even if they hadn’t, what right did he have to ask that of Steve?

Steve was going, and there was no stopping him, which annoyed and worried Danny to no end. Calling him “Aquaman” seemed the best thing he could do to show his displeasure with Steve’s plan. It was time to throw himself into the investigation and do whatever he could to get Steve the hell off that boat.

He and Chin went to the crime scene. He knew that he was trying to make the evidence fit the theory that the husband killed his wife, instead of letting the evidence speak for itself, but looking at the more complicated possibilities for the crime would drag out how much time Steve was on the boat and he was having a hard time with that. Even without the befuddling attraction to the crazy man Danny wished he still hated, Steve was his partner and become his friend and there was no way Steve should be on that boat with Graham, never mind alone. He really needed to get control of his mind because losing focus right now would only make the dangers of Steve’s position worse.

Time to try again. He found the diary, which looked like it might have been helpful (mostly because of how it was hidden since he didn’t know what it said) had they been able to read it. He doubted he could get enough of it translated quickly enough to help them in the few hours that they had, but he would have to do whatever he could.

Steve said he would initiate contact and Danny had been desperate waiting for him to call. If Steve got himself killed doing this, Danny was going to raise him from the dead and kill him again. If Steve got out of this alive, Danny was going to kill him. The three of them began discussing what they had so far, which led to Chin checking on Graham’s meds. By the time Steve called, he was still feeling uneasy but he did try to make light of the situation.

“You, uh, you miss me don’t you?” He meant it to sound like a joke, but he wasn’t entirely sure he’d pulled it off.

“Yeah, I wish you were here, but you don’t swim do you?”

“I don’t, I don’t swim? I swim very well actually, I just choose not to,” and he could swim just fine, but Steve was clearly distracted which both reassured Danny that everything was fine for the moment and made him wish that Steve did miss him.

Danny had sent the journal to Catherine who promised to have a translation quickly, which was technically a good thing but it peeved him anyway, because he knew that Catherine and Steve had a history. He knew this emotion all too well because it was what he’d felt about Stan not all that long ago.

Steve seemed so sure that Graham was innocent, which was making Danny feel worse, because if Steve was trusting Graham not to kill him just because he hadn’t already, then Danny couldn’t be sure that Steve was thinking clearly. That’s when he heard what sounded like a gunshot and Steve saying he had to go before hanging up. It took every bit of will Danny had to not to call Steve back over and over, but he knew that it would only be a distraction if Steve was in a fight.

Danny was beginning to think that if he was feeling what he thought he might be feeling about Steve, it was going to be either the worst or the second best thing (nothing was better than Grace) that ever happened to him. Danny was glad that it wasn’t long before Steve sent him a picture message with a fingerprint from what looked like a murder weapon and Danny was fairly certain that, whatever that sound was, it was not Graham shooting Steve, at least not yet.

Only a little later, Danny got the news that Graham’s daughter was kidnapped in front of Kono, which did suggest that there was something more to this murder, but Danny still wasn’t sure, and Steve was getting more stubborn about Graham not being a murderer. Danny didn’t like it, if Steve was wrong he would end up dead, and even if he was right and wanted to be the “I told you so Steve” later, Danny was still going to get on him about his recklessness. Normally, Danny could have argued to himself that a large portion of his worry about Steve’s antics could be attributed to the fact that Steve was risking both of their necks, but this time, concerned for the hostages as he was, he knew the person he really worried about was Steve. Fuck. If this day didn’t kill him, Danny was going to kill Steve.

The diary did turn out to be important and when the pieces came together, it turned out Steve was right, Graham hadn’t killed his wife. By the end of the mess, (after thinking about three billion times that Steve was going to end up dead) Danny considered nominating the day for longest of the year, but decided that it would tie with every day he worked with Steve. Besides, why tempt the powers that be to demonstrate that “things could always be worse”?

Paperwork could wait for the next day, and Chin and Kono had some family thing, at least that’s what they said, but he felt like Chin was giving him an odd look. Briefly, he wondered if Chin had over heard him ask if Steve missed him, but he wouldn’t make a big deal of it. If Chin brought it up, he could play it off as a joke between partners. He hoped. So, it was him and Steve alone, still surrounded by S.W.A.T. and the EMS, but with no one was paying them any attention as they headed to the car.

“Aquaman, I see you found your shirt!”

“Happy to see me?” Steve asked, grinning, that smug grin. Danny didn’t answer right away.

“That was a really amazing thing you did for him back there,” Danny told Steve, vaguely begrudgingly because he really hated making Steve’s ego any bigger than it already was. Everyone else inflated Steve’s ego, he felt it was his job to make it smaller, and here he was giving Steve a compliment on top of spending an entire weekend unable to keep his hand off him. Shit, he thought as they got in the car.

“I had to try to resolve it without anyone ending up getting killed.”

“You could have been killed! And, I’m not talking about you going for “a swim” and then nearly getting yourself killed all day by a paranoid and even more mentally unstable version of you!” Then he sighed, “I’m talking about getting them to let him say good-bye to his daughter. I could see how much that meant to him. I know how much it would mean to me.”

“I know what it means to lose a parent. I couldn’t let that little girl lose both in one day.” Perhaps it shouldn’t have, but the answer surprised Danny. He had grown accustomed to the way Steve was always pulling crazy stunts, putting everyone in danger in the process and then somehow getting everyone through okay. Maybe it was this reckless confidence in his “so crazy it just might work” plans that made him seem so closed off from emotion. This weekend had seemed to be an aberration, albeit a good one, more so than it seemed an example of who Steve was underneath all that SEAL training.

In the beginning Danny didn’t want to believe there was anything beneath that training, and did his best to ignore any glimpses he might have caught. But time, desire, and the last few days in particular were making him see Steve differently. He was beginning to understand that there was a lot underneath. He had been dealing just fine with his attraction to Steve when he thought it didn’t mean anything, when he thought he would never feel anything deeper than a tenuous friendship and a strange attraction to his infuriating (yet surprisingly tender) partner.

Fighting his attraction hadn’t worked, and now he was terrified he was falling for Steve in the worst way, and he still wasn’t sure what the hell Steve meant by all this. Steve might have started it but Danny couldn’t be sure of how far Steve wanted to take this, and he still didn’t know how far he wanted to take it. He was overwhelmed, feeling like he was caught in the current fighting to save himself and his little brother all over again, not knowing if he was going to make it. Danny might be a damned fine swimmer, but if this weekend meant more than passing attraction, if he’d allow himself to see that all Steve’s crazy stunts were to save people, not just for a rush, then Danny was going to drown. Steve would be the only person who could save him and what if Danny was the one person Steve wouldn’t be able to save?

He felt he should run, but they were opposing magnets and he didn’t know how to tear himself away from that kind of force, or even how to want to.

(Master List!)