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It had been a crap day in a crap week in a series of crap months, and Someone Upstairs clearly had it in for Danny Williams, devoted father, model ex-husband, and dedicated upholder of law and order on this tropical affliction of an island.
Okay, maybe model ex-husband was stretching it. But still, in no way did Danny deserve this. He slumped back against his lumpy couch cushions and stared grimly down at the this sitting on the floor near his feet. Wasn't it enough to be harried daily by pineapples in the flesh, here in this edible-food-forsaken dystopia, without being harassed by pineapples in the…well, the not-flesh?
So much for Kamekona and his for-shit shopping tips. The pawnshop he'd touted hadn't even had a single album by the Boss, much less the stash of vintage Springsteen vinyl he'd promised Danny. No, all it had offered was this miserable statue, or whatever it was — who the hell made two-foot-tall brass statues of fruit? — and that would've been merely annoying, if the fucking thing hadn't somehow tripped him.
The curved dent in the brass leaf spike closest to Danny's knee looked like it was smirking at him. It probably was. It was probably deriving a sick sense of satisfaction from costing Danny seventy bucks, when for all Danny knew it had already been dented before his stumble had knocked the statue against the pawnshop's wall. Try to tell the store manager that, though — well, Danny had tried. Loudly and at length; the guy had been as imperturbable and unbudging as his shop's concrete-block walls. Danny scowled at the smirking leaf.
Wait a minute, who was in charge here, anyway? He grabbed a couple of the leaves and pushed. The statue could smirk all it wanted to out of sight behind the arm of the sofa, which is where he should've dumped it in the first place when he lugged it into his apartment.
Instead of the pineapple sliding cooperatively across the floor, though, the spiky crown just twisted underneath Danny's hand, then fell onto the floor with an oddly painful-sounding thud.
Excellent. So now he had a dented and broken statue, and the already dubious resale value of this piece of —
"Watch it, asshole," the pineapple said.
Danny grabbed his gun off the end table and looked around— a little wild-eyed, he would be the first to admit — for the wise-ass breaking-and-entering ventriloquist. Due to the shoe-box-size shittiness of his apartment, he could check out practically every inch of possible ventriloquist hiding space without even leaving his seat on the sofa, not that that stopped him from getting up and making a thorough tour of the premises, gun in hand.
There wasn't anybody in the bathroom or the apartment's lone closet. He came back to the sofa and stood there for a moment, scratching his jaw and eyeing the statue with fresh irritation. The broken pineapple crown, or whatever you were supposed to call that bunch of spiky leaf things, was lying right next to his foot, and he gave it a retaliatory kick. Not too hard a kick, since he didn't want to break a toe, but really, searching his apartment for a ventriloquist? Hawaii was getting to him, that was all there was to it.
"I told you to watch it," the pineapple said. Again.
Then it muttered, "Fucker," which, okay, first — pineapple, talking, again. And second — not that this was as fundamentally profound an issue — a pissy pineapple?
No, just no. There was a logical explanation for this, as eminently logical as a wise-ass breaking-and-entering ventriloquist would've been had one been so kind as to actually exist. Danny glared at the pineapple.
It was a joke, it had to be. Absolutely. The pineapple was some kind of novelty item, the relic of some island entrepreneur's painfully misguided imagination: Amaze and startle your friends with a Talking Brass Pineapple.
Or to be more precise, a Talking Brass Pineapple With a Badass Attitude and a Potty Mouth.
"Just so you know," Danny said, albeit rhetorically, since he was addressing a brass pineapple, "if you hadn't just cost me sixty-nine dollars and change, your impolite brass keister would already be in the trash. But as it is, I'm going to attempt to overlook your general attitude long enough to try to sell you to some idiot on Craigslist, and the thing? The thing is, during this necessary period of enforced cohabitation, I would appreciate a certain level of —"
"Wait." The pineapple's hollow, somewhat muffled voice sounded like it was being forced out between gritted teeth. "Shit. Look, just be careful with the stopper, all right? And rub the goddamned bottle."
Okay, what? Danny had been expecting silence at this point, not an actual conversation. "Rub the… " he started, then paused. Oh, what the hell. "What goddamned bottle?"
"How the fuck should I know?" the pineapple replied. Then it sighed, like some kind of martyr or something. "Whatever you've been drop-kicking all over the place is the stopper to the bottle, okay? That should be a clue for you." The pineapple muttered something else that Danny didn't quite catch but sounded a lot like 'dumbass', which, hey.
"That's how you ask for a favor?" he asked incredulously. "I think not."
There was a somewhat sullen silence from the pineapple. "I'm sorry," it said finally; not entirely convincingly, but Danny could hear the effort it was making. "So please, or whatever — just rub the bottle. It's…important."
This was getting embarrassing. Danny hoped there were meds for this, because conversing with an inanimate object and analyzing its tone of voice wasn't exactly the pinnacle of mental health, and while Rachel and the good citizens of Hawaii could take their chances, Gracie was another story entirely.
"Of course it is," Danny said, although he wasn't sure who he was saying it to. "And hey, I get it. This is what comes of being forced to encounter Hawaiian-style 'pizza' one too many times, isn't it? A person can only endure so much, I get that, really, but why couldn't I just end up with an ulcer or something reasonable like that, instead of starting to hallucinate talking pineapples? This is so unfair."
"'Talking…' Excuse me, did you say pineapple ?" the pineapple asked. It sounded as if it was having some doubts about Danny's sanity. Danny couldn't bring himself to blame it for that.
On the other hand, if Danny had to put up with this hallucination, he wasn't about to do it alone. "I realize that self-awareness is probably not a major thing for your species — whatever that is, okay — I completely understand that self-awareness might not be something you're renowned for," he said, "but seriously, how can you not know about your pineappleness? Now who's the dumbass?"
Both of them were dumbasses, in point of fact: Danny wasn't sure how it had happened, but he was actually rubbing his palm across the brass belly of the pineapple as per the pineapple's instructions. Worse, he was rubbing the pineapple like he actually expected something to happen because he was rubbing it, which, yeah, dumbass.
Fortunately, nothing was happening. Nothing at all. Danny glanced down at the pineapple, then at the gun still in his hand, conveniently available should he choose to shoot himself for the inanity of following the orders of a piece of brass fruit. God, he was so fucked. Clearly Hawaii had finally finished mildewing him from the outside in and also poisoning his mind as well as his body with its terrible food. Now all he had left to look forward to was life in an Aloha-print straitjacket, which —
Wait, was that smoke coming out of the pineapple's…neck? A small dark curl of— Make that a large, dark, noxious cloud of —
Holy fuck.
Big guy. Big gun. Big gun aimed at Danny.
Big guy in green and brown face paint — who did this guy think he was, Rambo? — and camo gear. With a gun. And crazy eyes.
Who'd just appeared in Danny's apartment out of nowhere.
Except that he'd actually appeared out of a cloud of smoke that had appeared out of a two-foot-tall brass pineapple, and honestly, Hawaii was one of the lower circles of hell, there was no other explanation. This kind of shit never happened in Jersey.
"Drop your weapon," Camo Guy said. His voice sounded just like the pineapple's voice, except less muffled. And more pissed off.
Outstanding. How, exactly, was this Danny's life, again?
Camo Guy's crazy eyes got even crazier. "I said, drop your weapon."
Danny blinked. Oh, gun, yeah. No. "HPD, asshole. I suggest you drop yours," he retorted. He was pleased, and somewhat relieved, to note that his SP2009 had somehow gotten trained squarely on Camo Guy's chest without Danny having had to consciously think about it. At least his reflexes were still on board, even if his sanity had apparently taken a flying leap into the nearest active volcano crater.
"HPD?" the guy repeated, narrowing his eyes. "Where are we?"
Good question. "If I'm lucky, I am in a perfectly explainable REM state, taking a little pre-lunch nap on my sofa," Danny said. "And you? You would be hanging out in my subconscious to punish me for watching First Blood Part II last night. If I'm lucky, that is."
Camo Guy didn't look like he thought Danny was lucky.
He was probably right. Danny sighed. Awake and insane it was. "Geographically?" He gestured with his free hand at the palm trees visible through the windows. "Honolulu. That would be the H. The P and the D, by the way, stand for 'Police Department', which means you should be putting your gun down now."
Camo Guy's eyes flicked to the window and back. "Honolulu Police Department? That's impossible. Try again. Show me some ID while you're at it."
"I only wish Honolulu was impossible," Danny muttered. Louder, he said, "I'm going to get my ID out of my pocket now, nice and slow." He eased his free hand into his pocket.
Where, fuck, his ID wasn't.
His badge wasn't on his belt, either.
What the goddamned hell had happened to his —
Oh, yeah. Fucking spikes knocking the badge loose from his belt and onto the floor below the passenger seat. Danny's wallet had probably ended up there too, after he'd stuffed his receipt into it and laid it on the seat while he wrestled the goddamned pineapple into his car. Fucking spikes. Fucking pineapple.
"No ID? So I'm just supposed to take your word for it that you're a cop," Camo Guy said, briefly eyeing Danny's empty hand as Danny slid it back out of his pocket. "I don't think so."
Danny injected a decade's worth of authority from dealing with Newark's many and varied criminal elements into his tone. "If I were you, I'd think again. My ID and badge are in my car."
"That's convenient." Camo Guy's voice was dry. Dangerously dry, not to put too fine a point on it. Lesser men than Danny Williams might have found it intimidating.
"Convenient?" Danny scowled. "Not especially, no."
The stray curl of leftover smoke that was circling around Danny's head and beginning to make his eyes water wasn't especially convenient either. This wasn't exactly the moment to be temporarily impaired, vision-wise, not with a P226 aimed at his chest. He started to wave the smoke away from —
Jesus suffering FUCK. Danny grabbed his arm, the arm that a moment ago had been his gun arm, which was no longer his gun arm since he'd just dropped his gun, since Camo Asshole had just shot him. "Son of a bitch," he yelled, wrapping his hand around the fucking bullet hole in his biceps, "you trigger-happy son of a bitch. You just shot a cop. I don't know about where you come from, but trust me, around here shooting a cop ranks pretty high on the list of things not to —"
"I disarmed a threat. Anybody can claim to be a cop; you don't have ID. Anyway, it's barely a graze," Camo Guy said. Calmly. Bastard.
"I have ID. In. My. Car." Danny was still yelling. His neighbors were pretty much the dregs of humanity, but a gunshot, shouting, that ought to be enough to scare one of them into dialing 911, right? So a patrol car would come rolling up any minute now. Backup — just what he always enjoyed finding himself having a use for on his day off.
Camo Guy continued to look entirely unimpressed. Danny glanced at the blood welling up around his fingers. "A graze? You call this a graze? It's a bullet hole, a hole made in my arm by your gun, calling it a graze does not get around the fact that you shot me. You're going to wish you hadn't done that, I am going to personally make sure you —"
"I wish I hadn't done that."
Camo Asshole didn't look unimpressed any more. In fact, his face was screwed up in a strange, uncomfortable-looking expression that Danny couldn't read.
The S.O.B. wasn't lowering his SIG, though.
Danny glared at him. "Funny. You're a funny guy."
The expression on Camo Asshole's face screwed up even further, looking eerily like the one Danny's cranky great-uncle Melvin used to sport right before sending Danny out to pick him up a bottle of prune juice and a couple of boxes of Ex-Lax.
Fantastic. Being held at gunpoint — after getting shot — in his own living room by a pineapple-dwelling Rambo-wannabe with crazy eyes and regularity issues. Danny Williams' life: One Big Cosmic Joke.
Rambo clenched his green-paint-smeared jaw. "I'm sorry," he said through his teeth. "I'm sorry, all right? I'm sincerely sorry."
Danny snorted."You really think saying you're sorry — while you're still holding a gun on me, I might add — is going to keep you from getting your ass busted, you're out of your mind. I wish you hadn't shot me, too, for all the good that's going to… Okay, what's with the faces, huh? Did no one ever point out to you how completely unattractive —"
"I didn't shoot you."
Danny snorted again. This clown was clearly even more nuts than Danny currently was. Not that that was exactly reassuring.
"I didn't shoot you," Camo Weirdo repeated. "You didn't get shot, okay?"
Camo Weirdo was nothing if not persistent, Danny had to give him that. Danny rolled his eyes. "Yeah, see, the fact that I'm bleeding here and in pain says you actually did shoot me, you moronic… Wait, what?" He wasn't in pain; the throbbing burn of the bullet hole in his arm was totally gone, but not gone in a numb way, just…gone. Danny glanced down at his sleeve, which was — no, that was impossible. There wasn't a drop of blood to be seen anywhere. And there wasn't a rip in the fabric, either. It was like the whole thing hadn't happened.
He glared at the crazy son of a bitch infesting his living room. Living room cum bedroom. Cum kitchen. Whatever. Studio apartments, why had his life come to this. "How," he said accusingly, "and I need to know this, I'm not just asking to pass the time here, how is this fucking possible?"
Crazy Asshole sucked in a couple of deep breaths like he was short on oxygen and ignored Danny.
"Okay, yeah, no," Danny said. "You do not get to invade my home via some sort of hinky partnership with that stupid brass pineapple, shoot me, and then, then…unshoot me, and not explain it to me. In Technicolor and in triplicate, are we clear?"
The son of a bitch just stared at Danny, his eyes narrowed. He looked a little pale around the edges of his ridiculous face paint. After a minute he said, "What is it with you and pineapples, anyway? You have some kind of fetish?"
"Fetish? Fetish? Bite your tongue." Danny jerked his head towards the pineapple on the floor. "This pineapple, this pineapple in particular from whence you came, this pineapple which is, together with you, the official bane of my existence — does that look like anything anybody could have a fetish about?"
"'Whence'? Who says 'whence'?"
Danny snarled wordlessly, barely resisting the urge to tug at his hair. "Not the point."
"The point being…" Camo Guy's sharp gaze dropped to the pineapple then came back to Danny. "That? You're saying I was in that? I thought it was supposed to be some kind of bottle. Or maybe lamp. Which didn't make any sense in the first place — too fucking small, for one thing, and just…weird — but a pineapple?" He appeared to be confused.
Yeah, well, he wasn't the only one."Okay, what are you talking about — No, wait a minute." Danny hadn't grown up watching syndicated reruns of I Dream of Jeannie for nothing. "Holy shit." Lamp. Bottle. Rub the bottle. Smoke, poof: person. 'Wish you were sorry.' 'Wish you hadn't shot me.'
It couldn't be.
Could it? No. "I don't believe this. You. You're. With the bottle and the rubbing and the wishes. You're a fucking —"
"No, I'm not."
Petulance wasn't really all that good a fit on a guy trying to rock the Rambo look. Danny grinned; at least insanity was turning out to be entertaining. "Yeah, you are," he said. Of course, there was only one way to make sure. He cleared his throat. "I wish I had a large mozz and pepperoni pizza from Giametti's in Newark."
Psycho Possible-Genie's face contorted again, and Danny made a face of his own. "You really need to stop looking like you're a quart low on Metamucil, you know? That expression can't be good for your facial muscles," he said. And then he didn't say anything else at all, because only one pie on the planet smelled like Giametti's mozz and pepperoni, and that heavenly smell was coming from a large Giametti's cardboard pizza box, right here, right now, on Danny's kitchen table.
Holy fucking shit. He had a pie from Giametti's.
And apparently, God help him, a genie.
Also Froot Loops for brain cells, clearly, but he could live with that if it got him real Jersey pizza on call.
Danny shifted his gaze from the Giametti's box back to Camo Asshole — Pizza Delivery Guy — the genie — who glared at him in an oddly wavery way, looking almost gray now around the face paint, then vanished.
Vanished right in front of Danny's eyes, with the sort of pop a really big soap bubble makes when it bursts, and okay, just no. No way was Danny giving up this — whatever it really was, even if it was just some sort of wacked-out wish-fulfillment hallucination — without getting one hell of a lot more wish fulfillment out of it, because Hawaii owed this to him. Nobody should be forced to inhale as many coconut-scented sunscreen fumes as Danny was forced to inhale every day, everywhere he went, without some sort of compensation.
"Hey," he said loudly. "You. In the pineapple. Genie." He bent down and rapped on the brass with a knuckle. "Get back out here." Nothing happened. "Oh, right, I forgot." He gave the pineapple a brisk rub with his palm and stood back, waiting.
"Yo, Genie," he said again after a couple of moments. "I'm sort of thinking my wish is actually your command here, you know, and you have to get your ass back out here, so get it in gear. But lose the camo suit and the face paint, you look like a cross between the Swamp Thing and Stallone. Also? Lose the gun. There will be no more shooting of me. That ship has sailed. Finito."
The pineapple made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a groan. "Just give me a minute," it — okay, he, the genie — said. "I'm trying, all right? You have to give me a minute here."
Danny bent down further and tried to peer into the opening at the top of the pineapple. It was a couple of inches wide and he should've been able to see something, but all he got was an eyeful of thick black opacity, like darkly smoked glass, even after he'd tracked down his flashlight and aimed it down the pineapple's neck.
He poked his finger at the black whatever it was and yeouch, that was the same kind of shock he got if he wasn't careful when he plugged in his ancient coffeemaker, what the fuck?
"Hey," he said angrily, his whole arm tingling in that pleasant I Like To Play With Electrical Outlets way.
Genie Guy's "That's really not helping. Knock it off," sounded strangled and Danny backed down a little. Whatever was going on inside that…thing, it didn't seem like Asshole Genie was enjoying it all that much, and there was no point in gratuitously pissing off someone who could, at the very least, manifest honest-to-God New Jersey pizza at will.
Speaking of which… Danny headed for the Giametti's box and lifted the lid, staring down at the pie in reverence. He picked up a slice, folded it over, and bit in. And moaned. This, this right here, was almost enough to make up for —
"You two should get a room." The voice came at Danny without any warning from about six inches above and maybe six inches behind Danny's left shoulder, and Danny jumped and dropped the slice.
Onto his foot. Fuck.
He wheeled, pizza-draped foot and all, and glared. The genie — his genie, right? which, okay, Jesus —was looking down his long nose at Danny condescendingly, from way too close.
Danny poked the guy in the chest. "I did not ask for attitude, did I? Did you hear me asking for attitude?"
Genie Guy shrugged. "You said to not camo up." His eyes narrowed and he scowled. "And to 'lose the gun'."
"What, are you pouting? What kind of genie carries a gun, anyway?"
The genie looked affronted. "I'm not a genie."
"Oh, come on. The evidence is against you, my friend."
"That's not my fault. I'm not a genie, I'm a seal."
Danny snorted, which was starting to become a habit, thanks to Mr. I'm a Zoo Animal. "Once again, the evidence is against you. Seals have little flippers and things and bounce balls off their noses when people throw fish at them. While I admit I know absolutely nothing about your personal habits, I'm still not seeing any overt physical resemblance to a —"
"It's an acronym, asshole. Sea, air and land. SEAL. United States Navy Special Operations force."
"United States… SEAL — Special Operations — what? No, see, what you are is clearly touched in the head. As am I, I freely admit, but I find it highly unlikely that the Army has some sort of secret Genie Deployment Program going on. In my living room, moreover."
"Navy. I'm in the Navy." Yeah, that was definitely a pout. Supposedly SEAL Guy stepped back, all of a couple of yards, and crossed his arms over his chest.
Well, well. Would you look at that. The guy was no Barbara Eden, true, but Danny'd always kind of preferred tall and dark along with built. He had no actual objection to drop-fucking-dead gorgeous, either, whichever side of the street he was playing on. Hooyah, or whatever the hell it was that SEALs grunted at each other when they were feeling particularly preverbal. Hooyah, hooyah, hooyah.
He realized belatedly that he was — literally — licking his lips, and he made himself stop. "You have a name, Rambo? Or should I just call you Genie? Or maybe Flipper?" Or maybe Mr. October, with that Playmate-tight T-shirt, and Jesus, tatts flirting at Danny from the bottom edges of those tight T-shirt sleeves, and…cargo pants? Okay, that was just sad. Nice snug jeans would've been so much more fitting.
Genie Guy glared. "Lieutenant Commander Steven J. McGarrett."
"Lieutenant… excuse me, 'lieutenant commander'?" Danny repeated, maybe just a little sarcastically. "An officer and a genie? Lucky me. Not that I actually believe you. Navy SEAL, my ass."
The genie — McGarrett , what kind of name was that for a genie?— retrieved a wallet from one of his far too many pants pockets and snapped it open in front of Danny's face.
It looked official. Of course this guy could just genie himself up whatever ID he wanted. "Reserves. Huh," Danny said. "You find being a genie took up too much of your time to stay on active duty?"
"Reserves? What? I'm not…" McGarrett, if that was really his name, pulled his ID back and stared at it. "I didn't… This is wrong. I'm on active duty — I'm in the middle of a mission, goddammit. I was, anyway." He ran a hand over his face, and for a moment Danny felt sorry for him; he looked sort of the way Danny had felt when Rachel had condescended to inform him that their marriage wasn't doing nearly as well as Danny had thought it was doing; that, in fact, she was out of there. Or rather, that Danny was out of there.
The sympathy didn't last long. Not when somebody knocked on Danny's door, and almost before Danny could blink McGarrett 's hand slid out of sight behind his hip and came back into view aiming what looked like a seriously decked-out Heckler & Koch.
For fuck's sake. Danny stared at him incredulously. "What is wrong with you? I said no guns, remember?"
McGarrett didn't take his eyes from the door. "Actually, what you said was to lose the gun. This is a different gun." How somebody so visibly tense could also manage to look both smug and affronted at the same time was beyond Danny. McGarrett slanted his gaze at Danny for an instant. "And you know, while we're talking about this, you might want to word things a little more carefully. 'Lose'? I have no idea where my P226 is now. For all I know it ended up on the sidewalk outside and whoever's at your door has himself a new military-issue semi-automatic."
"Christ." Danny ran his hands through his hair as the knocking grew more insistent. "Of all the genies in the world, if there are any other genies in the world, I have to get the gun-happy, paranoid one?"
"I'm not a genie."
Danny ignored McGarrett's completely unsurprising retort and headed for the door, pausing with his hand on the doorknob to look back. "You, no shooting. I mean it."
The peephole yielded a view of a vast expanse of virulently flowered Aloha shirt, and Danny sighed and opened the door. "Kamekona," he said, at the same time McGarrett was also saying, "Kamekona?" matching Danny syllable for syllable, except for the disbelief in McGarrett's voice.
Kamekona looked at Danny, then looked over Danny's shoulder. His broad face fell. "Oh, shit. Howzit, Steve. Danny, you shouldn't have rub the bottle, dude."
"You two know each other," Danny said, perfectly calm, ignoring McGarrett's simultaneous, "You know him?" aimed at Kamekona. "And you," he jabbed an also perfectly calm finger at Kamekona's chest, "you know what's going on. Explain to me why, how, I have a pineapple that disgorges apparent people out of it, people who shoot me and then, just…haven't shot me, Army-type people, people who can just blink or whatever and poof, I've got a hot-out-of-the-oven pizza from New Jersey sitting on my table and I didn't even have to tip the delivery boy. Which, okay, awesome, since I'd feel obliged to shell out one hell of a tip what with Giametti's being in Newark, but explanations? I'm feeling the need."
"Navy," McGarrett said. He'd lowered his gun, at least. "I'm feeling the need myself, K. What are you doing here? What am I doing here? This is Honolulu, right? I'm…. I was deployed, goddammit. What the fuck is going on? I hit the rack and wake up in some kind of weird cell with graffiti all over the walls, strange crap about bottles and lamps and how to get out. About djinn, for God's sake, like some kind of Arabian Nights bullshit. Then things get even weirder and I get out, apparently thanks to this jerk, and suddenly I'm on reserve status and in Honolulu, granting fucking wishes? Start talking, brah."
Kamekona plastered an uneasy-looking smile on his face. "So you met Danny, huh? He da kine, Steve. Good cop. Akamai. Kinda funny, but not so bad for a haole."
"Yeah, he's a prince," McGarrett said. "Talk."
"Yeah, talk," Danny agreed. "Instead of the Boss, I end up with fucked in the head I Dream of Rambo, here? How do you know this genie guy, anyway?"
"Genie? No, no, not a genie." Kamekona shook his head, his chins wobbling in emphasis. "Steve isn't a genie. He's from Honolulu, yeah? Grew up here."
"Right," Steve said. He looked like he felt vindicated. "Not a genie. See?"
"Except for the part where he pops out of a brass bottle and grants wishes."
Kamekona flinched. "Yeah, except for that part. You can't do that anymore, though, 'kay? Since he isn't a genie."
Danny rubbed his forehead. "This isn't helping. Let me refresh your memory of how this works, Shamu: In the interest of information received that helps me out in an investigation, or with, say, some sort of situation — and this right here is a situation if I ever saw one — I'm reluctantly broad-minded enough to overlook some of your shadier —"
"Okay, okay," Kamekona broke in. "No need to get nasty, bruddah. I got a cousin who moved to the Middle East last month, and he found this, um, thing, where he could sort of — you know what a djinn is, yeah? Anyway, he was catching a djinn in a bottle, but it kind of didn't go right and he got Steve instead, and he sent the bottle to me, except he shipped it wrong and it ended up at Lono's. I was just there, and they said a short haole cop with a temper bought it, so here I am."
Nice. Danny glared at Kamekona. "Short haole cop with a —"
"Oh. Hey," Steve broke in, glancing at Danny, "sorry."
"Sorry about what? Not that you don't have plenty of things to be sorry about."
"I didn't believe you were really a cop. Sorry." Steve shrugged.
Danny shrugged too. "Your apology is noted. But you're still a genie."
"No, no," Kamekona said urgently. "Yeah, he can do shit, the bottle or something has some kind of mojo, but he's not wired for it, 'kay?" He looked at Steve. "Fucks with your energy, man. The 'w' word, I mean. I don't know what comes down, you do that wish thing too often 'fore we get this all fixed up. Could be bad."
"Wait, what? You're telling me I have a genie and a) he's not a genie, and b) I can't use him? No," Danny said. "Just no. Do not tease a Newark Williams with even a pseudo-genie, then take the genie away. You won't like what happens."
Kamekona's worried expression intensified. "I dunno, Danny. Maybe it's okay if you just ask Steve for something, casual-like, see? Just don't make any actual wishes, you mess him up. And relax, I can't take him away, not till my cuz and me figure out how to reverse this. That's the thing. He's kinda… Okay, Steve, don't get all pissed off at me, right? Danny's, uh, kinda… See, he rubbed the bottle and got you out first, so you're kinda, uh…"
"Kind. Of. What." Ouch. McGarrett was back to his pissy pineapple voice.
"You're kinda… Uh…"
"What, " McGarrett said again.
"Uh. His."
Right. Kind of Danny's.
Out-fucking-standing.
Danny was always surprised by how fast Kamekona could move all those megatons of his when he wanted to. Clearly he wanted to right now, since he'd backed out of Danny's apartment and slammed the door shut after himself while McGarrett was still frozen in place, staring after him with a glare that looked like it was on the verge of achieving disembowelment without the aid of anything actually material like a knife or a scalpel, or even a plastic spork from Taco Bell.
Kamekona's voice came in through Danny's window as a muffled shout. "'Kay den. We figure how to fix this up, I give you guys a call. Just be careful. Play nice. And hey, Steve, you don't need to worry about what you were doing, your Navy stuff, I think. The thing my cousin did, it sort of makes so there aren't any loose ends, you know? You don't got to worry any. Just chill."
"'Chill'," McGarrett said, transferring the I will eviscerate you thing he had going with his eyes into the tone of his voice with somewhat alarming ease. "Wow. That's helpful."
The great outdoors fell silent as, presumably, Kamekona ran for cover, and Danny scratched his jaw, eyeing his yes-no, maybe-so genie. "Huh," he said. So sue him if he was grinning. He figured he'd earned something out of this, whatever the Jesus fuck 'this' was. "What do you know. Turns out you're mine, McGarrett. "
"Absolutely not." It wasn't exactly cozy to have a double-whammy of disembowelment — eyes and voice — focused on him, but Danny wasn't about to back off. Not a snowball's chance in the middle of Honolulu. Hellalulu. Whatever.
He rubbed his hands together. "Okay, let's try a little experiment here. Pretending for the moment that I should take Shamu's warning to heart, I will avoid the 'w' word and merely ask you, nicely, to bring me another pizza from Giametti's. This one here has gotten sadly cold. Pepperoni and mozzarella, which it shouldn't be necessary to say, but I point out nevertheless." McGarrett just glared at him and Danny snapped his fingers. "Get a move on. Lunchtime, it's a tradition, ever hear of it?"
"No." McGarrett stuck his jaw out.
"No, you're unfamiliar with the concept of lunch, or no, you're refusing my — polite, I remind you —request?"
"I know what lunch is." Now McGarrett looked like he was about to pop a vein. "No, I'm not going to be your…whatever. For one thing, you're not ordering me around, not until you outrank me. And if that's your plan, you might want to get started on it now, since you're pushing the age for enlistment." He smirked. "For another thing, I wouldn't even know how to…to… Fuck. "
The air next to the Giametti's box started to shimmer and the aroma of bubbling-hot tomato sauce hit Danny's nostrils.
"You were saying?" he prompted, savoring both victory and the scowl on his ersatz genie's face. Oh, this had possibilities. Who needed wishes? Requests, commands, orders — the sky was suddenly Danny's personal limit, and hey, it was about time something turned out his way.
With a sound sort of like a burp, Danny's new pizza appeared on the table.
Danny's new pizza, which wasn't in a Giametti's box.
Danny's new pizza, which wasn't in a box at all, making it a little hard to miss the fact that it was covered with chunks of ham. And pineapple.
Danny glared at McGarrett. "Very funny. Do it over, and do it right this time."
McGarrett was staring at the pizza balefully. "I didn't 'do it' in the first place. I had no intention of 'doing it'. It just…happened."
"Well, make it happen right this time."
"Kamekona's cousin is going to need a djinn by the time I get done with him," McGarrett muttered. He transferred his baleful stare to Danny. "Get your own pizza; I am not your fucking —"
Pizza Number 3 popped aromatically into being, slap on top of Pizza Number 2.
"Apparently you are," Danny said, but without any real sense of triumph. The slices of pineapple on this newest travesty of the Neapolitan art were arranged in charming concentric circles interspersed with little pink domes of ham. Or maybe those were maraschino cherries; it was disturbingly hard to tell.
"I didn't…That wasn't…" McGarrett narrowed his eyes at the two fruit-plagued abominations. "Really, what the fuck?" He half lifted the gun he was still holding — or was that a different gun? Christ — like he was unsure whether he should eat the pizzas or merely shoot them.
Too Good To Be True: yeah, words for Danny Williams to live by.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Okay. My knee, what about that? Could you fix that, Steverino?" Danny waved the half-empty beer bottle in his hand towards his bad knee. More or less. He hoped. It'd been awhile since he'd drunk this much beer in one sitting.
Steve eyed him sourly. "I told you not to call me that, Dannerino."
Danny smirked. "No, see, that's nothing more than an embarrassing and futile attempt to mock a classic. Steverino is a classic. Dannerino, on the other hand, is just…" He paused, trying to corral the perfect word but settling for, "pathetic."
He belched. Which, ordinarily, no class, yeah. It wasn't like he was worried about impressing Steve, however. Steverino, the Genie. The Generino.
The Giant Pain in the Ass. The giant, useless, irresponsible, out of control, insane —
"You really want me to try with your knee?" Steve waved his own beer around a little haphazardly. "Seriously?"
"No," Danny said, rolling his eyes. "No, I do not. I was merely asking if you could fix it if you weren't, I don't know, such an idiot. Among other things — you realize I'll never be able to show my face at Haji's again, right?" Steve opened his mouth and Danny raised his eyebrows. "Do not even."
Steve ignored him, not for the first time today. "It was your idea to walk to the Minit-Mart and get a couple of six-packs, asshole. I could've just, you know, gotten us some. If you'd asked."
"Sure, you could've." Danny rolled his eyes again. "And instead of Longboards we would've ended up with a carton of tarantula venom or maybe a couple of liters of hydrochloric acid. You are not a genie. What you are is a danger to the ongoing existence of all life on this planet."
"I told you I wasn't a genie. Kamekona told you I wasn't a genie. But you had to keep asking for shit anyway, even after the fucking pizza." Steve's jaw was jutting out, and for a moment Danny almost felt sorry for him. It wasn't hard to see that Steve really, really didn't like to suck at anything. Even something he wasn't supposed to be able to do in the first place.
Not that that excused Steve's behavior on the beer run. Nothing on earth, with the possible exception of having been dropped repeatedly onto his head as a small child, could excuse Steve's behavior on the beer run.
Danny lifted his still-cool beer bottle and rolled it soothingly across his forehead. He'd lived through months that had seemed shorter than the nine hours since McGenie had poofed himself out of the stupid pineapple and into Danny's apartment. At least he'd wised up enough to phone the Lucky Dragon and get dinner delivered by actual people, people who weren't Steve, thus avoiding the chicken nuggets breaded with ground glass or the Pad Thai laced with an untraceable oriental poison that Steve's sicko inner genie would've mojoed up if Danny had been less careful. That eating in had also allowed Danny to keep Steve safely — more or less safely — inside his apartment was a bonus Honolulu and her coconut-sunscreen-smeared citizens should be grateful for.
The thing was, he still had the rest of the night to get through with Steve. And tomorrow, probably, and however long it took after that for Kamekona and his cousin to send Steve back where he belonged. Seriously, Honolulu and her citizens should be more than grateful, they should feel indebted to the point of starting to wear ties and dress like adults; to the point, even, of outlawing sand and surfboards — not to mention outlawing, preferably retroactively, the dangerous, dangerous fruit of the pineapple vine.
Or tree. Wherever it was the fuckers grew.
Yeah, and who was he kidding? None of that was going to happen, it was just business as usual: Danny Williams, good guy all around, taking one for the team.
He let himself slouch back against the lumpy cushions of his sofa. "I should've at least gotten a decent couch out of this," he said, frowning at McGarrett. "Would that have been too much to ask? A simple couch? A simple, uncomplicated, straightforward sofa-bed that I could sit on and sleep on peacefully, without getting attacked by a ravening horde of vicious lumps? Because these lumps are like sharks, Steven. Sharks. You might think a lump in a cushion is an inanimate object, who wouldn't, but you'd be wrong. These lumps circle you like fucking Great Whites. You're sitting here all innocent and relaxed, and the next thing you know one of them's got your ass in its jaws. Like what's his name." Danny waved his hand around, searching. "Robert Shaw, yeah? Anyway, not Roy Scheider, he was actually sane, something you ought to try sometime."
Steve screwed his stupidly rubber face into an offended expression — Danny had privately named this one his 'Hawaii is not a pimple on the butt-side of the planet, Danny' face — and opened his mouth.
Danny didn't give him a chance to start kvetching. "Be that as it may, the visionary genius of Steven Spielberg is not actually the point I'm making here. The point is the ravening horde of sharks in my couch, McGarrett, the couch that you can't replace for me. There is no justice in this world."
Steve glanced at the 12-round magazines and boxes of ammo stacked on Danny's end table, the magazines and ammo he'd moronically, if involuntarily, genied up — instead of a lump-free couch — shortly after the pizza fiasco, and Danny grimaced. He'd been so naïve. Back then he'd still been holding on to far too much optimism that the Ask And Ye Shall Receive concept wasn't irretrievably fucked sideways and upside down. That Steve just needed a little more practice.
He sighed, and Steve shrugged. "Well, at least now you've got plenty of ammo to shoot your horde of sharks with. That ought to count for something."
"Stop me if I've said this before, but shooting the couch? Not actually going to put me out of its misery, babe."
"You said that already." Steve set his empty beer bottle on the floor beside Danny's ancient La-Z-Boy and leaned back with a stretch that rucked his T-shirt up just enough to show off his obscenely perfect abs in a way that made Danny almost, almost, consider forgiving him for his inability to produce anything even remotely resembling a new couch.
Not that Danny was thinking about going there. Not with Steve. Forget hell and Honolulu — going there with Steve didn't rate a snowball's chance in a deep-fat fryer.
So what, if McGarrett was…hot.
Disturbingly hot.
Unnecessarily, unfortunately, unfairly hot.
And, unless Danny was badly mistaken, interested.
The thing was — okay, one of the things, because there was more than one thing, of course there was — that having sex with a guy who combined the ability to materialize hair-trigger explosive devices out of thin air with the inability to not materialize hair-trigger explosive devices out of thin air, in a highly unpredictable and unsafe manner, could end up being a little…iffy.
Danny sighed. It was chastening to think what might happen if you got too involved, lost concentration for a moment, and, say, asked a guy like that to blow you. Because afterward would be a little late to say, "I didn't say up, Steven. Read my lips: 'Blow me.' Not 'blow me up,' you Neanderthal."
Okay, a lot iffy. Fuck.
"We're going to need more beer," Steve the Neanderthal said, and Danny narrowed his eyes. Hell, no, they weren't. Sure, yeah, they might need more beer. But they weren't going out to get more beer. Neither of them.
"Absolutely not," Danny said. Quellingly, he hoped, although it felt more like horrifiedly.
"It was just one door," Steve said. Or, to be accurate, whined, and how the fuck Danny could find that hot was beyond him. "One door, and nobody got hurt. Look at it this way: the manager at the Minit-Mart doesn't have to worry about the missing key anymore."
"Just the missing door. Jesus." Danny ran his hands through his hair. "We were two blocks away from here. Two blocks. You could've waited to wash your hands until we got back."
"They were sticky —"
"Why do I suspect that you're perfectly comfortable covered in mud and gore for days at a stretch? But a little passionfruit juice from a leaky carton — get that on your hands and you turn into Mr. Fastidious? Two fucking blocks, McGarrett. The nice manager would've found the key to the restroom later, or, hey, here's a thought, called a locksmith. Now he has to call a lumberyard. Not to mention —"
"You know what, that's the best idea you've had all day: Stop mentioning it. Christ, Danny, you're the one who told me not to pick the lock, not to kick the door in. I listen to you, and what do I get but you bitching me out, over and over and over, like I —"
"You 'listened to' — excuse me? You 'listened to me'? That's what you're going with? Seriously? Because it makes so much sense that if I tell you not to kick a door in, what I'm really saying is pull a fucking grenade out from one of your fucking pockets and blow the door up instead?"
Steve shrugged, looking mulish.
And still, reprehensibly, hot. So unfair.
"We are not going out for more beer," Danny growled. "And just for the record, I hate you. More than I have words for."
"More than you have words for? You? That would be a first," Steve muttered, throwing Danny a dark — hot — look.
It really wasn't fair. At all.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"All gone," Danny said sadly to his now-empty beer bottle. "The last of the Mohicans." Which didn't even make sense, like Danny cared at this point. It just seemed kind of sad. He was in the wrong part of the world, after all, an ocean away from home, he wouldn't get to see Gracie until next weekend, and he had no more beer.
"Longboards," Steve said, like the pompous bastard he was, "not Mohicans." As if Danny cared.
Steve was drumming his fingers on the arm of his chair with a pointedness that Danny found less than charming at this moment. "No," he said to Steve, for what had to be about the tenth time in the past hour. "Just no. I am not going out to get more beer with you. I am not going out to get more beer myself while leaving you here alone with all of this." Danny waved his hand at the shadowy corners of his apartment, which were currently a lot lumpier than normal and giving off way too many metallic gleams at odd angles. "You are not going out on your own. And I am not asking you to genie up more beer. End of story."
"Maybe I've gotten better at it." Steve's jaw had to hurt with him clenching it so hard.
Danny could feel his eyebrows crawling up in search of his hairline. "Oh, really? You don't think this is a convincing enough demonstration?" He gestured at the lumpy shadows again. "I'm going to have enough of a problem getting rid of all this crap as it is. I am not asking you for anything else."
"Crap?" Steve said, with a disbelieving twist to his mouth — to his whole face, his whole stupid, rubber face — that made Danny want to smack him. "You think this stuff is crap? Maybe it's not exactly what you asked for, but it's all top of the line, Danny. You're not going to find a better —"
"— grenade launcher or crossbow anywhere, yeah, I got it. Jesus. The thing is, I don't want a grenade launcher. Or a crossbow. Or three, what was it, MP7a1s? Or two deeply scary-looking sniper rifles. Or a knife that looks like it could gut a rhinoceros and come back for more. Or any of the rest of this unnecessary crap. I am a man of simple needs, my friend. My department-issued weapon, a backup gun, maybe a penknife, in case I need to cut something. Something, not someone. Or some rhinoceros. Anything more in the line of weaponry would be overcompensation."
"Over-" McGarrett's mouth kept moving, but nothing else came out for a moment. He looked like a candidate for an emergency blood-pressure reading. "Just because I've had advanced weapons training and can appreciate the finer features of weapons you wouldn't even recognize doesn't mean I'm overcompensat—"
"Do you even hear yourself? 'Finer features'? That," Danny pointed at a vaguely round shape at the bottom of the pile in the far corner of the room, "that is a mace, Steven. It has no finer features."
"Shows what you know," Steve mumbled. Danny had the feeling he would be more than capable of enlightening Danny about the pros and cons of every weapon in Danny's new cache of mostly illegal and wholly terrifying weaponry, at excruciating length, and just no.
Diversion time. "Speaking of what I know," he said, eyeing Steve with an attempt at agreeableness. "I've been thinking. According to our whale-sized mutual acquaintance, you grew up here, right? You want to go visit your family tomorrow? Friends? I don't think we're actually joined at the hip or anything, so as long as no grenades are involved, we could work something out. You might as well take advantage of being in town. Your parents here? Brothers, sisters?" Although that was hard to imagine; Steve sort of seemed to be self-engendered.
"No," Steve said flatly.
"No family? No friends, no visiting? Which?" Not that Danny was nosy, exactly. You were a detective, you gathered facts, that was all. Second nature.
"Just no," Steve snapped.
Danny felt his eyebrows climb again. He hadn't heard that particular tone in Steve's voice before, not even when he was stuck inside the pineapple or pissed off at Kamekona. He kept his gaze steady on Steve and waited, silently. Interrogation 101: also second nature.
After almost a minute, Steve shook his head. "Sorry," he said, his voice a little rough around the edges. "Not that it's any of your business, but…" He sighed and scrubbed a hand over his face. "My dad's here, yeah. Visiting him doesn't usually work out so well, that's all."
Danny bit his lip. He wasn't sure what would come out if he let himself say something, but it would either be sarcastic — sarcasm was in the Williams DNA, what could you do? — or pushy, and judging by the expression on Steve's face, either one would be a dick move.
On the other hand, he didn't particularly want that expression to linger on Steve's face. "It happens," he said, going for casual. "I have an aunt in Glassboro who I used to voluntarily sign up for double-shifts because of. Any time she came for a visit, I lived at the precinct. Used to drive both Ma and Rachel insane. But they were just jealous because they couldn't escape Aunt Harriet that easily."
"Huh," Steve said, or something like that, a huff of sound that eased the knot inside Danny's belly a little. Or maybe it was the way the corner of Steve's mouth had tilted up, or the way he was looking at Danny again now, not looking past Danny at something that sucked. Something that, clearly, hurt.
Okay, no. Danny was not feeling anything here at all.
Sympathy, maybe. But that was all. "Grace used to beg to go on sleepovers with her friends whenever Aunt Harriet showed up," he said, breezy as fuck, because distraction was what he — what Steve — needed. "She'd even volunteer to spend hours shut up in her bedroom doing homework. I don't know how long you can stretch out second-grade homework, but Grace made an art form out of it when Aunt H. was around."
Steve's smile grew a little.
The knot in Danny's belly eased a little more. "So, Steve," he said, "enlighten me. What exactly are the finer points of a mace?"
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Danny stuck his head out of the bathroom door. "There's a new toothbrush I just bought in the medicine cabinet, you can use it. Get a mug or something out of the cabinet near the stove."
"What?" Steve's face was all screwed up. It was enough to make a person wonder about the Navy's IQ requirements, if a fully qualified SEAL couldn't follow a simple host-to-houseguest directive about oral hygiene opportunities.
Danny rolled his eyes and removed the toothbrush from his mouth, then repeated his words more clearly. It was obvious Steve had never been married, or he'd have better multitasking communication skills. Which was a waste, really. Not that Danny would encourage Steve to pass his genes along, and future generations should thank Danny for that consideration, but someone ought to have been having lots of regular sex with that body. Somehow Danny didn't think foxholes, or ocean floors, or any of the other fascinating places SEALs probably spent the majority of their time were likely to be hotbeds of swing-from-the-chandeliers fucking.
He swapped places with Steve, trading him the bathroom for the living room and unfolding his lumpy sofa into its equally lumpy impersonation of a bed. His closet yielded a spare set of sheets and a blanket, which he tossed onto the floor in the only free space big enough to accommodate six-foot-whatever of sleeping SEAL.
"I get the floor?"
Danny glanced up as Steve left the bathroom, then scrunched his eyes closed — fast — and sighed. Okay. He understood that Steve didn't have much choice. It was boxers or cargo pants or jaybird naked, so Steve sleeping in his boxers made sense.
But Danny was considerately wearing the PJ bottoms left over from one of Rachel's attempts at 'civilizing' his sleeping habits and an old, loose sweatshirt. There was very little skin involved.
Steve's dark blue boxers, on the other hand, were on the short side. And they were clearly thin and soft and…and drapey boxers.
And no fabric whatsoever, soft and drapey or not, was even attempting to obscure anything above hip level.
How, exactly, was this fair?
Danny opened his eyes reluctantly and swallowed. His throat felt thick. "I'm sure you've slept worse places."
Steve's lips quirked up in one of his infuriating Mona Lisa smiles and Danny knew what was coming next. "That's classified," Steve said, and yeah, there it was. The man was so predictable whenever he wasn't being asininely insane.
He blocked the pillow Danny tried to smack him with far too easily, his hand brushing against Danny's fingers where they were clutching the pillowcase — lingering against Danny's fingers. Oh, shit. "You're afraid to share your bed with me, Danny," he said, his face serious and his voice all low and throaty, and just fuck. "Admit it."
Truer words were never spoken. "There isn't a sane person alive who wouldn't be terrified to sleep with you," Danny answered. So there was a little bluster in there; between Steve's sex-me voice and his shirtless, sex-god body and the hot, prickling zap rocketing straight from Danny's fingers, from where Steve was still touching them, to his apparently suicidal dick, Danny needed all the distance bluster could give him.
"Does that include sleeping with me, or just sleeping with me?"
Danny groaned. "Please tell me you've never tried to use that line with anyone else before. Or at least tell me nobody's ever fallen for it. I need to retain some respect for the human species as a whole."
Steve's Mona Lisa smile was back. "Are you falling for it?"
"No," Danny retorted.
"Liar."
"Get over yourself, McGarrett. I wouldn't sleep with you if my life depended on it. Me, bed. You, floor." Danny illustrated the key points with gestures, jerking his hand away from Steve's lingering, fucking electric touch and stepping back as far he could in his shitty, mousetrap-sized living room. "End of discussion."
"Fine." Steve's voice had gone all clipped and cold. Terrific. Of course someone with the emotional maturity of a five-year-old would take Danny's sensible caution as a personal rejection.
Danny ran his hands through his hair. Steve's eyes were distant and unreadable: the drawbridges were up, hatches battened down, the metaphorical tac-vest on, like he was expecting a couple of rounds center mass.
"Look," Danny said, sighing, "leaving aside the potential for actual, weapons-related disaster here if I accidentally asked you for anything, I don't know what this is, all right? Sex, sex is great, I enjoy sex, I do, but I don't do the bar scene, I don't do faceless fucks, one-night stands, blowjobs with strangers in the corner stall of the restroom. Not my thing, you understand? I was married for ten years — that's what I do. Long-term. You, you're here for what? The next five minutes? A day, a week? As soon as Kamekona and his cousin straighten this mess out, you go back in your pineapple, back to your mission, or wherever. That's…not going to work for me."
The drawbridges went down, the hatches up, just like that. "Okay," Steve said, and his eyes were back with Danny again; his voice warm and gravelly and deep, and doing absolutely nothing to help the situation. "Okay, I get it. Um, we can just sleep, you know. 'Sleep' sleep. Nothing else."
"No, see, we can't. I can't. I fall asleep with you in the same bed and I'd wake up legally married to your thigh or something. It would be embarrassing."
"I don't think humping my thigh in your sleep counts as legal marriage." Steve sounded amused. "Anyway, I could just as easily wake up married to your thigh, yeah? Equal opportunity embarrassment." Danny shook his head, and Steve sighed. "Right, floor it is. You suck at being a gracious host, though, I have to tell you. As your guest, I should rate the bed."
"First of all," Danny said, stabbing a relieved finger in Steve's direction, "you are not my guest. Did I invite you? I did not. You told me to rub the pineapple. Ergo, you invited yourself. And now I have a fuckton of illegal and unexplainable weapons in my apartment that I'm going to have to deal with somehow, and Haji's likely to bar me from ever crossing the Minit-Mart's threshold again, and you, Steven, are in debt to me. Invited guest? Bullshit."
"Ergo. Really? 'Ergo'?"
"None of the rest of what I said even registered, did it?" Steve was busy mouthing 'ergo' silently to himself, and Danny rolled his eyes. "If I felt even the slightest shred of guilt about making you sleep on the floor, it's gone now, asshole."
Steve prodded the sheets and blanket on the floor with a bare foot. "Do I at least get a pillow?" he asked. Snarky, but that kind of shit never fazed Danny. The way Steve's abs had just rippled, on the other hand…
"Pillow, Danny? Or would that be too lenient of your Unwilling Hostness? I wouldn't want to put you out or anything."
Danny wrenched his thoughts, and his gaze, away from Steve's six-pack and generously gave Steve the pillow he was holding.
Well, tossed it at his head. Not that a polyester-filled pillow made much of a statement as far as projectile objects went.
But at least it was Danny's thinnest pillow. And there was a lumpy spot in one corner that had a knack for giving a person a kink in the neck if you weren't careful how you slept on the thing.
"Okay, what's with the smile? You look way too happy all of a sudden." Steve was eyeing Danny suspiciously and Danny felt his smile widen.
"Classified, babe," he said, and absolutely did not watch as a scowling Steve knelt down to arrange his bedding, causing the thin fabric of his boxers to stretch across his ass with an intimacy Danny was absolutely not jealous of.
Not in the fucking least.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"God hates me," Danny said, between gritted teeth. "If there is a God, which I doubt. First you, with the — and then the — all day, and now like that: you, like that, when we can't — and then this? Too? God hates me so much."
There was a grunt from the floor off to Danny's right. Danny propped himself up on an elbow and looked down at Steve. There was just enough light to see Steve's perfect, mean-spiritedly uncovered and totally naked chest. Also to see the pillow covering his face.
"Uh-huh. Sheila and Clancy are getting to you, too," Danny said, gratified. Steve deserved sleeplessness. "I'm sure you've been trained to withstand torture, but that was just ordinary torture, not my neighbors' attempt at porno-movie sound effects. I could rent those two out to the CIA. Waterboarding would become passe."
"Danny." Steve's voice was only slightly muffled by the pillow, which, you know, Danny's thinnest pillow; it made sense. "Shut up. Shut up, okay? You're driving me crazy."
"Me? Do you not have ears? They sound like dying cows, McGarrett. Cattle on their deathbed, mooing out their eternal, as in never-ending, passion. Clancy, there, has to be on Viagra or something, because it's just not normal to keep it up that long, even if you're a lot younger than Clancy is. I would be impressed if I wasn't so disgusted. And sleep-deprived." Danny glanced at Steve again. "You can't tell me you're enjoying listening to this anymore than I am."
The pillow gave a gusty, if muffled, sigh. "I was blocking it out, Danny. I'm trained to be able to sleep in difficult conditions. You talking, on the other hand? That's not a difficult condition, that's above and beyond any difficult condition even the most highly trained person should have to —"
"I just wish they would get it over with already, for fuck's sake," Danny muttered, insulted. Yeah, sure, he was a verbal kind of guy. What else would you expect him to be? The Newark Williams were all —
"Yes, Clancy, yes yes YES!" Sheila's shriek made Danny's eardrums ring. Before the echoes could die away Clancy was letting out a bellow that was loud enough to be heard by every cow currently residing in the western hemisphere, heartfelt enough to leave every bull suddenly feeling undersexed and inadequate.
Then there was silence.
Blessed, blessed silence.
Even Steve's pillow on the floor wasn't saying any—
Oh, shit. Shit.
"Steve!" Danny scrambled out of bed like the mattress had caught fire. "Sorry. Hey, I'm sorry. That was an accident. I didn't mean to —"
Steve was gone. The bedding was still there, and the pillow was still warm from his breath, from Steve bitching at Danny through it, telling him to shut up — like Danny had listened, fuck — but Steve was gone.
"I'm sorry," Danny said again to the empty room. "Steve. I'm sorry."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Danny made himself take a couple of deep breaths. That had never helped him much in the past, no matter how often the marriage counselor he and Rachel had gone to had talked it up for stress relief, and it wasn't helping him much now, either.
But there was no reason to panic here. They'd gone through this before, after all. The last time Danny'd made an actual wish, Steve had just popped back into the pineapple and recharged or something. It hadn't even taken very long. All Danny had to do was wait a few minutes, and Steve would be back, all recharged.
Ready to rip Danny's head off, yeah, but Danny was right there with him on that one.
The pineapple was on the floor against the back wall of the apartment and Danny sat down next to it, ignoring his bad knee. He rubbed its brass belly with the palm of his hand. "You okay in there? Steve?"
No answer.
Steve just needed a couple of minutes, that was all.
"Look, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to say what I said. Take your time, babe, all right? Come back out when you get…topped off, or whatever happens in there. Hey, I'll even swap with you; you take the bed and I'll take the floor."
No answer.
Danny let his fingers trace the brass scales of the pineapple. "I'm considering taking up a collection to have Clancy neutered, just so you know. Not just because of tonight — you realize I have to bribe Clancy and Sheila on Grace's weekends? Bribe them to not have sex while my innocent daughter is trying to sleep right next door to all their bovine bellowing and shrieking?"
The pineapple stayed stubbornly silent. Danny sighed. "Okay, so cows don't shriek. I assume they don't, maybe they do, I haven't eavesdropped on enough cows to be an expert. The streets of Newark aren't exactly teeming with farm animals."
He paused for a minute to give Steve a chance to insult New Jersey, trying to ignore the flicker of fear he felt when Steve didn't say a word. "Anyway, what I do is I pay for them to spend the night at the Aloha Sunrise just down the block. The only reason they go for it is the Sunrise has Jacuzzis." He leaned back against the wall and straightened his knee for a few moments. "I can't really afford it, but between the Triple-A discount and the senior citizen discount I can wangle for them, it's cheaper than any place I'd want to take Grace to spend the night. Yeah, I know what you're thinking, you're thinking my apartment isn't a place I should want my daughter to spend any time in. And you're right. The problem is, a cop's salary doesn't fly in your island paradise, my friend. Add in alimony, which Rachel does not fucking need, and child support, and you get this." He gestured at his surroundings with the hand that wasn't rubbing against the pineapple in small, soothing circles.
Not that he felt soothed. Maybe the pineapple did. He tried again. "Steven. I would really appreciate it if you would get your ass back out here."
This time he heard something. Maybe he heard something. A groan.
Maybe.
"Steve? Steve?"
The groan didn't get repeated and Danny slumped back against the wall. "Great. Take your time. So, you want to hear about my family back in Jersey? You'd like my ma. Everybody likes my ma. She, on the other hand, would probably not like you at all. You're freakishly tall, for one thing. And you had steamed vegetables and broiled chicken for dinner, who does that? Lemon chicken and eggrolls, McGarrett. Shrimp fried rice. That's why you order Chinese delivery, not steamed vegetables. How have you never learned this? You need to taste Ma's five-cheese lasagna, it would be a life-changing experience for you, trust me…"
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"— breaks free from the hive mind long enough to sabotage the cargo-bay airlock, which you wouldn't think would be enough to make a difference, yeah, but the aliens forgot to allow for —"
"Do you ever shut up?"
Steve's voice came from in front of Danny, not from the pineapple on the floor beside him and Danny's eyes flew up from contemplating his bare, lonely — and, frankly, worried — toes to drink in the sight of Steve standing near his abandoned bedding, and looking —
Fuck. Like he was about to pass out.
Danny got to his feet in a hell of a hurry, one his knee would be speaking to him about later, and lunged for Steve's arm.
Of course the idiot tried to brush off Danny's help, but it was like he was on some sort of slow-motion, wobbly time delay, and Danny found it frighteningly easy to tow him to the nearest piece of furniture and push him down onto it.
The moron immediately tried to stand up again, and Danny shoved him back down onto the La-Z-Boy with possibly a little more force than was strictly necessary. "Stay," Danny growled. "You. Stay there, or I will injure you."
"I'm fine, Danny," Steve said halfheartedly. Pinocchio with his nose shooting out long enough to use as a yardstick would've been more convincing.
"Gray is not your color, babe. Stay." Danny jabbed a finger into Steve's shoulder, then headed for the fridge. He didn't bother with a glass, just grabbed the orange juice carton and returned to Steve, slapping the carton into Steve's hands.
Which were shaking, just a little bit.
Blood sugar. It was low blood sugar, that was all. Not fucked up genie mojo, just a simple case of low blood sugar, and if Steve would just fucking drink the juice — "Drink," Danny demanded. Why couldn't he have gotten a cooperative fake genie, huh? Instead of Steve?
Steve rolled his eyes, but since that reminded Danny of how close Steve probably was to passing out, Danny didn't stop glaring at him until he gave in and chugged down a healthy amount of OJ. He set the carton down on the side table — a little less shaky in the hands now, maybe? — and wiped juice off his chin with the back of his hand. Then he just sat there, blinking slowly.
Danny sighed and went over to the sink, coming back with a damp paper towel that he handed to Steve. The last thing he needed was for Steve to go grenade-happy here because his hands had gotten sticky. "You were raised by orangutans, weren't you," he said, barely resisting the urge to wipe Steve's face and hands with the paper towel himself instead of watching Steve fumble through the process.
"Yeah, Danny. Orangutans. You got me." Steve leaned his head back against the chair's headrest and closed his eyes. Danny's gut twisted a little. Steve was still way too pale and shaky, and there was a crease in his forehead that made Danny wonder if he should break out the Advil.
"I'm sorry," he said, in case Steve hadn't heard him before. "I am very sorry that happened. I'll be more careful."
"It's okay." Steve didn't sound pissed off, just tired. He didn't open his eyes.
Fuck, his eyelashes were longer than Rachel's, even after she spent half an hour with her little wand-y brushes and sponges and bottles of various scary things. Rachel would hate Steve. His eyelashes, anyway.
The thought made Danny smile for the first time in what felt like hours. Rachel meeting Steve — Danny would pay to have court-side tickets for that meeting.
Too bad Steve wasn't going to be sticking around long enough for Danny to arrange it. Danny's smile vanished.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Cap'n Crunch. You actually eat Cap'n Crunch. Or… Christ, Cheetos? How are you still alive?"
Danny stumbled into the kitchen area, relieved to see that flaking out in the recliner for a couple of hours and finishing the night stretched out on Danny's bed had restored Steve to full, if irritating, throttle. He didn't entirely feel at full throttle himself. For one thing, he needed coffee, now. For another thing, it was a little hard to feel rested when you'd spent most of the night before watching someone sleep, half afraid they might disappear into thin air again.
He'd only gotten some sleep after he'd given in and crawled into bed beside Steve. Not too close beside Steve, he wasn't that dumb, okay? Steve was still a crazy, pitifully unsocialized and dangerous disappearing asshole who would be heading back to his camouflaged life, doing his Mission Impossible shit, any day now. But the pathetic fact of the matter was that Danny hadn't been able to relax until he circled a hand around Steve's wrist and kept it there, feeling Steve's pulse beating steadily against his fingers.
The weird thing was Steve hadn't even noticed, unless you call making some sort of humming noise and relaxing even more deeply into sleep noticing. That was just…freaky: a highly trained, demonstrably paranoid supermilitary-ninja type relaxing that deeply in a strange bed with somebody he'd known for less than twenty-four hours, somebody who'd nearly gotten him killed a few hours before.
Killed. Disappeared. Something.
Danny cleared his throat and glared at the freak. "Why are you rooting around in my cabinets?"
"Breakfast. I'm hungry." Steve stuck his long, snoopy nose into the next cabinet, then jerked his head back away from its shelves like he'd been slapped. "Wow."
"You do realize that is not acceptable houseguest behavior —'Wow' what?" Not that Danny really wanted to know. What he really wanted to know was where the defensive tone in his voice had come from.
"Twinkies? Seriously, does anyone over the age of ten even —"
Danny pushed past Steve and slammed the cabinet door shut, narrowly missing that irritating nose. "You? Shut up."
The fucker hadn't even had the common decency to start up Danny's coffeemaker. Or put clothes on. "Orangutans," Danny said to himself. "Barbaric, completely asocial orangutans." He glared at the coffeemaker, keeping his back turned to Steve.
Because of the unmade coffee, okay.
Not because the morning light was sliding over Steve's bare chest and making itself familiar with all that stupidly gorgeous skin and all those flawless muscles the way Danny's hands wanted to be making themselves familiar. That wasn't it at all.
It wasn't, okay? It just wasn't.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"How hard can it be for you to understand a two-letter word? No. N as in Not a chance in fucking hell and O as in… okay, O turns out to be a little disappointing here, a little wimpy, I get that 'Obviously not' isn't nearly strong enough for somebody who probably arm-wrestles crocodiles for laughs. But still, no."
Steve's eyes — no, make that his entire manipulative face — turned tragic. "But it's Sunday," he said. "Everybody goes to the beach on Sunday."
Danny snorted. "First of all, this is supposed to convince me? If I want crowds, I'll fly back to the East Coast and hit the subway during rush hour. And second? I don't like the beach. As I mentioned already. More than once."
"You can't be in Hawaii and not like the beach." Steve abandoned tragedy and went for an expression that Danny could only assume was meant to project reasonableness — as if Steve would recognize reasonableness if it head-butted him. "We don't have to go anywhere crowded, Danny. I know some good out-of-the-way places, really peaceful. You don't have to get in the water, you can take a book, sit in the shade, read, whatever. Or I'll just go myself."
Oh hell no, he wouldn't.
"Look, whatever Kamekona said, you're not my owner, Danny. I can go to the beach if I want to. Which I do. I haven't… it's been a while since I've been able to go for a swim in any ocean, much less here, okay? To just go for a swim, I mean, with nothing else… you know. Not as part of a mission, or training. Just a swim."
And that, that right there, that particular face right there — Danny buried his head in his hands. That face made him sure, absolutely certain to the core of his bones, that somewhere inside Steve McGarrett — motherfucking Navy SEAL, arrogant and high-handed walking disaster area, Genie of Doom and Destruction, shirtless cocktease — was somebody who didn't expect much for himself.
Of himself, yeah. But for himself — pretty much zip.
Not that Danny should care, right?
But it wouldn't actually hurt him to take the Ed McBain he'd bought for fifty cents at a library book sale to one of Steve's really peaceful beaches. There would be sand, yes. And possibly jellyfish. Or crabs. Falling coconuts. But still, spending a couple of hours at a beach probably wouldn't actually hurt him.
Danny sighed. "Towels we can use as beach towels are in the closet, sunscreen in the medicine cabinet, cooler under the sink. Wash your hands before we go, because we are not stopping anywhere, for any reason, up to and including emergency medical care or the Apocalypse. We are not destroying any public or private property today, Steven, I mean it."
Steve beamed. There wasn't any other word for it. He fucking beamed, like a kid on Christmas morning.
Danny sighed again.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Somehow hanging out on the beach wasn't turning out to be so bad, not that Danny planned on admitting that to Steve. If he ever saw Steve again, that was. Or saw more of him than a tiny dark dot moving slowly back and forth in the water, way too far the fuck out, out where nobody could help him if he got a cramp or got sucked in by a riptide, or if a giant squid tentacle came up out of nowhere and snagged onto his ankle.
Danny stopped trying to pretend he was reading his paperback. The dot that was Steve-the-lunatic was making towards shore, finally, and Danny felt himself relax.
Which was ridiculous.
Of course, Steve was ridiculous, so what could you do?
Steve stopped swimming and stood up, wading back through the surf. He looked — and how did Danny deserve this? How? — like he'd just gotten laid, the asshole. All breathing hard and blissed out, with drops of water rolling down his chest, basking in some sort of aquatic afterglow —
It was totally unfucking fair. Major Stick-Up-His-Ass on TV got to keep his Jeannie. Genie. "Damn it, babe," Danny said under his breath, watching Steve start to jog up the slope of sand towards him. "I want… Fuck. I wish you could just stay."
Steve froze, staring at Danny. Turned white.
Turned whiter.
Oh, Jesus. No.
Not again. Danny was on his feet, running towards Steve, panicking. "No. No. I didn't — that wasn't. Steve, that wasn't, I swear — you weren't supposed to hear that. That wasn't a wish, goddammit."
It wasn't. Even if it was, which it wasn't, Danny couldn't wish Steve into wanting to stick around. That would be wrong. So wrong.
"Danny. I can't…" Steve's voice sounded strange and Danny was too far away, not that he could do anything, Jesus, what had he done, and Steve —
Steve wasn't there anymore.
Just his footprints, wet on the drier sand this far up on the beach.
A moment later they were gone too.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
God damn Steve and his off-the-beaten-path beaches. It took Danny way too long to get back to his apartment, even with blue lights and siren going and the gas pedal floored almost non-stop, fuck the slow two-lane traffic and the hairpin curves and the imminent water-logged death waiting bluely just beyond all the guardrails.
He couldn't get the way post-wish Steve had looked last night out of his mind, the way Steve's hands had trembled, the way he hadn't had enough horsepower to stand on his own two stupid feet. Kamekona's words kept replaying in Danny's ears — fucks with Steve's energy, could be bad, could be bad — and it already had been bad, how could he have done this to Steve, how could he have done this —
He pulled into his parking slot at the apartment complex with a squeal of brakes and headed for his door at a run, his fingers fumbling for his keys. Maybe Steve wasn't entirely wrong about opening doors with grenades — it would be faster than this, anyway, when Danny's hands weren't steady enough to get the fucking key in the lock, but the key finally slid home, and that was good; Steve would be there, waiting for him, yeah? Standing — wobbly, sure, or maybe sitting on the floor in a wobbly heap, but Danny would take it — waiting beside that stupid pineapple, waiting for Danny —
He wasn't.
He wasn't there.
The pineapple wasn't there, either.
The pineapple wasn't there.
Danny tore through his apartment looking for the fucking pineapple everywhere, anywhere, impossible places, places it wouldn't fit, places —
Oh, Christ. Steve's stuff was gone too. All the lethal shit Steve had genied up, all the weapons, the fucking crossbow, the mace — everything was gone.
Okay. He didn't need to panic. Maybe this was just your basic B & E, the weapons would've been Christmas and Fourth of July all wrapped up together for any self-respecting felon. Maybe the asshole had thought the pineapple statue was worth something too, or else he just liked pineapples. Danny could track him down — no way a weapons stash like that wouldn't make waves on the black market. Find the weapons, find the felon, find the pineapple. No problem.
No problem at all.
Kamekona could help. Kamekona would be falling all over himself to help.
Or Danny would flatten all six hundred pounds of him.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Fo' real? You must've been smokin' the good stuff, brah. 'Bout time you loosen up some." Kamekona was looking at Danny like Danny was trying to pull his enormous leg, like Danny was the craziest fucking haole he'd ever seen. He was chuckling.
The only thing that was keeping Danny from perpetrating actual and permanent violence against the son of a bitch was that he wasn't lying. Kamekona was the world's worst liar; he had so many tells Danny could read him like one of Grace's old Max picture books. If Mr. Shave Ice King was lying now, Danny would eat Steve's leftover pineapple-bedecked pizza.
If he could. The leftover pizza had vanished from Danny's apartment along with everything else Steve-related, even the empty Giametti's box. Danny was trying very hard to chalk it up to his arms-acquiring felon being hungry.
Hungry, and needing some greasy, pizza-scented cardboard for…something.
So Kamekona wasn't lying, and he didn't have a cousin in the Middle East. "Closest I got is an uncle in Cannes, Danny. Sorry. Hey, my cousin Apikai almost moved to Dubai a couple months ago. Okole puka job fell through, though."
He didn't know anything about a brass pineapple. either."Two-foot-tall brass pineapple, you shittin' me? Crazy. Who's gonna buy that? Nobody local's that lolo and it's too big for tourists to cart back home."
He did know Steve, yeah. Which was terrific. "Hey, you met Steve? I didn't think he been 'round for a while. You musta met him from his dad being a cop before, huh? Funny about Steve coming here, though, he's always off doing all kinds of secret SEAL stuff. He don't come here much, not since his mom died and his dad pack him and his sister off to the mainland. Sad thing, fo' sure."
Genies? "Sure, Aladdin and his lamp, I heard of that. Everybody heard of that. Kid stuff. You want real, you talk with kahuna here. But genies? Marketing, Danny, gotta be marketing. Not real."
Danny wanted to flatten him with a fucking steamroller.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Brooding over what you'd had and lost was an American pastime, a divorced guy's hard-earned right, and a skill Danny had honed very nicely, thank you, since he and Rachel had split up. His brooding was familiar, methodical, grooved.
More than enough to satisfy anybody. Absolutely.
But here he was, branching out, brooding over something he'd never had in the first place, something that hadn't even fucking happened. It was making him crazy, just a little.
He could track down Steve if he wanted to.
He could try, anyway, through Steve's father, through the Navy.
But for what? Steve — if he still existed, if he hadn't been genied into fucking nothingness — had a life he was scarily well-suited for, blowing shit up all over the world and getting to play with all kinds of shiny, dangerous toys.
More than that — if Kamekona didn't remember what had happened, if Haji 's restroom door hadn't ever gotten blown up, if Lono's had never received a shipment containing a brass pineapple — maybe it hadn't happened.
For Steve, anyway.
Danny kind of hated Steve for that. Because it had certainly happened for Danny.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
McGarrett, John M.
COD: single shot to the forehead, execution-style.
Daughter: Mary Ann McGarrett, current residence Los Angeles, copy of California driver's license appended.
Son: Lieutenant Commander Steven J. McGarrett, USN, currently deployed out of Coronado. Copy of official military ID appended.
Transcript of phone conversation between Commander McGarrett and suspect Victor Hesse, as provided by McGarrett through official Navy channels, appended.
The first Danny knew about it wasn't from the local news, it was from catching the case at HQ, and he spent the next five minutes in the restroom, splashing cold water on his face and trying not to think about Steve saying "No" when Danny had asked him if he had any family here he wanted to see, trying not to think about Steve saying, "Visiting him doesn't usually work out so well." Trying not to think about the way Steve's face had looked when he'd said that.
Steve — the Navy probably let people go to funerals, right? Unless he was deployed somewhere they couldn't call him back from? Still, Danny could do this. Maybe he'd see Steve, maybe he wouldn't, but he could still do this. He just had to be careful, remember that Steve wouldn't remember him. Treat Steve like any surviving family member of a vic, not like Steve.
Danny splashed more water on his face and did not, did not, picture what it must've done to Steve, that phone call from Victor Hesse.
Hesse was going down. That son of a bitch was Danny's. It didn't matter that Steve would never know why Danny cared so much about bringing Hesse down. Catching murderers was Danny's job, after all.
And he could do this. For Steve, he could do this.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
There was a sound from the back of McGarrett's garage, a clunk. Movement in the shadows. Danny's pulse started its familiar rollercoaster ride , speeding up and slowing down all at once as adrenaline jacked itself up and his training kicked in.
"You! Hands up, don't move!" The SP2009 was a steady, reassuring weight in his hands. Not so reassuring was how fucking fast the intruder was, whirling to face Danny with a gun he'd pulled out of nowhere and aimed at Danny with way too much confidence.
"Who are you?" the intruder demanded.
"Detective Danny Williams. Who are you?" Danny yelled back. But it was reflex — that voice, he knew that voice. He knew that body, now that he'd moved forward and had a better angle of light to see the back of the garage.
He knew that face. He knew, God help him, those crazy eyes.
"Steve," he said stupidly.
He should've known Steve would be right where he shouldn't be, that was what Steve did. Except for the times when Steve wasn't where he should be, and Danny could've said a lot about that too. Would've. Couldn't. Fuck.
Danny cleared his throat, ready to cover his mistake. He didn't know Steve, right. They'd never met. Goddammit. "Excuse me," he said, trying to sound like nothing more than a polite, badge-carrying stranger. "I assume you're Steven Mc—"
"Look, whoever you said you were, this is… Wait. What's going on here?... What the fuck is going — Danny?"
"—Garrett, Detective McGarrett's… Wait a minute, you remember me?"
"No. Yeah? Sort of, yeah." Steve lowered his gun and scrubbed a hand over his face. The skin was stretched so tightly across his cheeks Danny half expected the bones to poke through at any moment. It made his own face ache. Steve wasn't supposed to look like that. His stupid rubber face wasn't supposed to look like he was so…fragile. So close to breaking.
That was wrong.
Okay, hold on — 'sort of'? "Did you just say 'sort of'?" Danny said, stabbing the air with short, furious gestures, because seriously. "That's not — you remember me, huh? Please don't tell me you remembered me before this. Because if you remembered me and didn't pick up a fucking phone long enough to track down my phone number and call me and tell me you were still alive, not disintegrated in some fucking black hole of failed genieness, I swear to God I'm going to —"
"Danny. Shut up."
The crazy eyes were still in force, but there was something in their depths that looked almost lost. Danny wanted to smack himself in the forehead. "Your dad. Fuck, Steve. I'm sorry."
"Yeah." Steve's jaw clamped down. "Hesse's going to pay for this."
The tone of his voice set off alarms in Danny's head. "Steve, we'll get him. I will get him for you, all right? You have to leave this to us. HPD, I mean. You know that."
"Actually, I don't have to leave him to you. You can help me, though."
Crazy, arrogant asshole. "Babe —"
"You know, I've spent the last couple of months pretty sure that what I could remember of that day with you was some kind of PTSD symptom, wondering if I needed to turn myself over to the shrinks and confess that I apparently had some deep-seated need to delude myself that I'd been a really crappy fucking genie for a day. But it wasn't PTSD, was it? It happened."
"Yeah. It did. Hard to believe, I know, but yeah. At least from where I'm standing."
"I was here, in Hawaii. With you."
"Yes."
"Kamekona — he knows, right?"
"He did. He just…the way it ended, he doesn't remember anything about it now. I wanted to kill him."
"It doesn't make any sense. But It was real. Somehow? The pineapple. Sharks in your couch."
"Of course you would remember a reference to sharks. Anything deadly — and you probably remember every single bloodcurdling item in the arsenal you genied up, don't you —"
"It was real — not sleeping with you. Sleeping with you."
Deadly, yeah. Steve's memory was as deadly as the rest of him. Unfortunately. Danny cleared his throat. "About that —"
"Right," Steve interrupted, suddenly brusque, all business. "Hesse — you'll be working with me, Danny. We've got full immunity and means. I can probably get you a nice jump in salary. We'll get the son of a bitch, count on it."
"What? We need to talk about —"
"It doesn't have to be anything else, Danny, it can just be work." Steve pulled his cell phone out and punched in a number, not looking at Danny. "That's up to you."
"Steven, would you for fuck's sake let me actually speak here —"
"Yeah, Governor Jamison, please," Steve said into the phone. "Tell her it's Steve McGarrett."
Danny rolled his eyes.
"Governor, I'll take the job." Steve looked over at Danny. "Let's just say I found something that changed my mind. I'll transfer to the reserves and I'll run your task force. I've already got the first member lined up."
Smug bastard.
Danny glared as Steve stowed the phone back in his pocket. "Task force?" Danny said. "You asshole. You are the role model for all assholes everywhere, you should know this. Have I said yes? I don't even know what the fuck you're talking about, why should I even consider —"
"I should probably tell you I don't plan on taking no for an answer. I think it'll work out great." Smug, arrogant, conceited bastard. Danny wanted to punch him.
Wanted to grab his smug, stupidly rubber face between both hands and pull it into range so Danny could kiss the living fuck out of his smug, stupid mouth.
"So you in, Danny?"
Hopeless, the man was hopeless, Danny could only despair of him. He sighed. "Yeah," he said, "yeah, I'm in." Of course he was in. Jesus. He was so far in it was ridiculous.
"And for your information," he said to Steve, who was still standing half the length of the garage away, like a moron, "I think it does." Steve opened his mouth, looking befuddled, and Danny took pity on him. "You said it doesn't have to be anything else. I'm saying it does. I know the timing sucks here, and we need to take it slow, but at some point, yes, I…"
Or maybe taking it slow was overrated. Steve certainly seemed to think so.
Unless Danny was misinterpreting the crazy-hot eyes, the hands — how many hands could one non-mutant, purportedly semi-normal person have, anyway? — his fucking tongue, what, did he do push-ups with his tongue as a hobby? pick handcuff locks? not that Danny was complaining —
Jesus. Yeah, Danny was in. As if Steve had even had to ask.