Archive of Our Own ^beta

It was enough to give a guy flashbacks to grad school—the overcrowded office, the smell of slightly burnt coffee, the aura of impending doom. Not that any of Danny's grad school cohort—as weird and as wacky a bunch as they'd been—had ever glared at him the way McGarrett did, but Danny was going to preemptively declare him some kind of special case. The whole nostril flaring shtick he had working for him couldn't be common, at the very least.

"Listen," Danny said, dumping his box of stationery on top of the desk that the department had procured for him. Battered and scarred, it looked as if they'd dug it out of a landfill or something; Danny wasn't eager to go looking inside the drawers, because knowing his luck, Jimmy Hoffa'd be inside it. "Am I happy that my first day here, I get told that there's no office for me? No, no, I am not. But the nice lady who makes sure I get paid once a month made it very clear to me that until they get the asbestos out of the fourth floor, faculty in this building are just going to have to double up."

McGarrett folded his arms, doing impressive things to the fabric of his shirt. "I'm used to working by myself," he said shortly.

"Yeah," Danny said, rummaging through the box for the picture Gracie'd drew him—a Good Luck, Danno! card that'd been drawn with all the multi-coloured enthusiasm of someone who wasn't entirely sure what a tenure-track job was, but was really glad her dad was happy about getting one nonetheless. She'd tried to draw Danny wearing his academicals, though the shapeless black robes she'd coloured in made him look less like a history professor and more like Batman. Not that Danny was objecting to the overall effect, you understand. "Of course you are, you're a medievalist, and as a species we tend to hibernate in tweed-lined nests in archives and communicate in Latinate grunts, but let me tell you that I'm planning on developing emphysema from archival dust, not from asbestos, so you, Dr McGarrett, can just put up with me for the next twelve-to-fourteen weeks, university subcontractors willing—which, as we all know, is wildly unlikely, nothing ever gets done on time."

McGarrett grunted at him.

"I'm glad we could come to this understanding," Danny said.

"Just don't touch my stuff," McGarrett said, retreating as much as was possible to his side of the office, which wasn't much. If Danny stood in the middle of the room, he could probably touch both walls with the tips of his fingers. "There's a method."

Danny looked around at the stacks of books and papers which seemed to cover every available surface that wasn't Danny's desk and the small pathway that led in from the door. He'd bet that there probably was some esoteric order to what McGarrett had going on here, but to the uninitiated eye it just looked as if Villehardouin and Joinville had engaged in some unholy mating ritual with the Monumenta Germaniae Historica and exploded all over the floor in a resultant orgy of primary sources. "Yeah," he said, "I'll just sit over here."

McGarrett ignored him, ostentatiously grading papers with savage flicks of a red pen. Danny looked down at Grace's good luck card and repressed a sigh. He really hoped his little girl had some sort of a knack to her wishes—otherwise, the six years between now and the time he got tenure and could actually tell assholes what he thought of them were going to be long. So very, very long.

It wasn't as if Danny didn't try to get another office somewhere else on campus—didn't matter much to him where, if it was the physics building or the business building or even the poky admin block on the far side of campus, not once he had space for a coffee maker and his laptop, not if it freed him the constant awareness of having McGarrett looking down his nose at him—but all the Jersey charm he could muster didn't help much. The whole campus had been whittled out of asbestos back in the nineteenth century—nothing added to the Olde Worlde charm like lung disease, in Danny's opinion—so usable office space was at a premium. Danny was just going to have to deal with it.

"But you're sharing with young Professor McGarrett, aren't you?" Mrs Ruiz said. She was one of those annoyingly peppy people who never stopped smiling, not even on Tuesday mornings when it was raining and cold and Danny's socks still hadn't dried out after their unfortunate encounter with a puddle in the parking lot. Maybe, Danny thought in one of his less charitable moments, that was because she knew that as chief admin in charge of scheduling, budgeting and room allocation, she wielded a stupid amount of power and wasn't afraid to use it in petty, sadistic ways.. "Oh, he's such a nice boy, I've known him since he was small, did you know that? The two of you'll get on so well, he was always so polite."

"Uh huh," Danny said. Yesterday afternoon, he'd heard the words Steve had mumbled under his breath when he'd seen the book review Dr Viktor Hesse (Queen's University, Belfast) had written in Speculum about McGarrett's late father's posthumously published book. None of them in any of the languages Danny knew had been complimentary. Steve McGarrett might have been the kind of guy to hold a door open for a woman carrying bags of groceries, or who knew which kind of knife you used for fish, but polite wasn't the word Danny would have used for him.

"What did I do?" Danny said, staring down at the paper he was grading. Only the knowledge that he'd spent a lot of time on his hair that morning prevented him from tugging at it. He settled for taking a slug from his swiftly cooling cup of coffee instead. Another semester teaching one of these survey courses and it'd probably be more economical for him just to buy a coffee farm somewhere. "Did I do something in a past life to deserve this, they had weeks to work on this and I'm still getting crap about how Hannibal and Spartacus fought a pitched battle on top of elephants."

"That's... really wrong," McGarrett said absently from across the room. He was frowning, though Danny didn't know if that was because he was personally offended at Danny's student's lack of effort (Danny scrawled F — come see me across the bottom of the page) or if he was still having trouble transcribing the manuscript he was working on. Under his worn green shirt, his shoulders were hunched, and he'd somehow acquired a pen mark on one cheek.

"It is so wrong," Danny agreed fervently, tossing the paper onto the 'done' pile. "It is all the wrong, it contains so much wrong I don't have the words to describe it and I can read eight languages."

"Slacker," McGarrett said, though he looked a little impressed despite himself, and shifted uncomfortably in his chair for a moment before continuing, "Make an awesome movie, though."

"Are you kidding me," Danny said, "I'm totally pitching this one to Hollywood, it's even better than the Zombie Paul of Tarsus one."

Moving across the country for his daughter's sake was far from the worse thing Danny'd ever done. He had a decent position in an otherwise shitty job market, with his own research assistant and a teaching load that didn't quite require him to sell a kidney or something to Starbucks in order to stay functional during the day. He'd found a nice apartment in a quiet neighbourhood, twenty minutes' drive from Gracie; he'd even been able to afford a two bedroom, so she had somewhere to sleep that was just hers on the weekends she stayed with him. And sure, he'd left behind his family, his friends, the career he'd carved out for himself back on the East Coast; sure, he'd made it so he'd probably never again taste decent pizza in his life; but it was all worthwhile, knowing he'd made sure his little girl had some bit of stability, had her dad around. The town itself was a little quiet for someone who'd grown up in New Jersey's suburban bustle, New York's skyline looming just over the water, but there was always something to do in a college town and enough coffee shops to keep even Danny's latte habit satisfied.

The department was even mostly sane. Sure, you had your kooks, your oddballs, your people who probably shouldn't be involved in the moulding of young minds, and the department chair—Sanders—was of the knoweth all, seeth all variety. (Danny was convinced she could smell fear; it was impressive.) Still, they'd been largely welcoming—Professors Hanamoa and Kamekona, both working on trade in the Pacific Ocean world; Chin Ho Kelly, who'd written a good chunk of the books worth reading on nineteenth century US policing; Lori Weston, could blow your mind six ways to Sunday with the stuff she knew about the history of medicine, Danny never wanted to see another seventeenth century etching of the uterus, thanks so much; Kono Kalakaua, the department's postdoc and resident bright young thing, so smart she apparently understood Judith Butler, a feat Danny'd never managed. They invited him out to lunch, asked him over for Saturday evening drinks at their houses, explained the ins and outs of departmental politics to him.

Steve McGarrett, on the other hand... Danny had made a career out of studying people—their actions, their inactions; what made them tick, what made them click, why they moved in mysterious ways—but Steven J. McGarrett was like that one case study that seemed to buck all macro-historical trends. He was odd, abrasive, spent longer hours hunched over his desk than even Danny thought wise, his glasses slipping down his nose as he peered at scans of whatever manuscript he was currently working on. He didn't suffer fools gladly, gave the side eye to theoretical jargon and had an innate preference for quantitative studies; had a weirdly obsessive relationship with his copy of Capelli, an encyclopedic knowledge of all known military engagements throughout the Crusades, and drank bright green vegetable smoothies for breakfast.

He had startlingly long eyelashes and a keen mind, could be startled into laughter at moments Danny could never quite predict; after that first day, he'd never complained about having Danny colonise half his office, not even when the renovation works were delayed time and again because of funding shortages. Danny found himself losing long moments to staring at the curve of Steve's back while he worked, fantasising about tracing the warm line of Steve's spine through the cotton, and maybe, just maybe, Danny was ever so slightly fucked.

Gracie, god bless her heart, was taking after her mother. Despite all that Danny could tempt her with talk of awesome medieval ladies—Hildegard of Bingen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Qasmuna bint Isma’il al-Yahudi—Grace looked like she was going to turn out a classicist. Which, some of Danny's best friends were classicists, he'd been married to one for nine years, almost, but geez. She was currently on a Greek myth kick, devouring all the books in her mom's library and drawing pictures for her Danno.

Some of them were not, admittedly, the usual kind of work that would adorn a guy's office, but that was not what Danny was going to focus on when he talked to Gracie on the phone. "It's great, monkey! Is that—that's Athena being birthed through Zeus' forehead, huh? That is excellent, sweetie, it's very dynamic."

The morning Danny hung Grace's magnum opus up over his desk, it made Steve stop dead in the doorway with his messenger bag slung over his shoulder and an oversized travel mug of coffee clutched in one hand. He blinked. "Is that the last stand of the Spartans at Thermopylae?"

Danny preened. "It's great, isn't it? She's talented, my Grace. You think I should put it on the office door? I think I should put it on the office door—that whole corridor needs brightening up."

Normally, Steve was the Grand High Poobah of "nothing goes on the office door except the name plate and a list of office hours"—sticking anything else up there was like asking for a replay of the Investiture Conflict—but this time Steve looked at the drawing, then at Danny, then back at the drawing. "Sure," he said, "whatever," and Danny would have bought his act of nonchalant indifference if he hadn't noticed the tiny smile flickering at the corners of Steve's mouth.

(Of course, this began the Great Door War of 2011, because when Steve had said "sure", what he'd apparently meant was "on your part of the door", but what Danny heard was "go wild", and forget the Investiture Conflict—it got Avignonese Schism up in this piece for a bit.)

Within three weeks of taking up his position at the university, Danny had been asked to be the faculty liaison for both the undergrad medieval history society and for the LGBT alliance. He was fine with the former—was perfectly willing to help them organise read-throughs of The Canterbury Tales and El Cid, played along when they very earnestly argued for an academic justification for watching The Princess Bride at one of their Medieval Movie Mondays—and sort of bemusedly pleased with the latter.

("Why'd you decide to ask me?" he asked the alliance's president while signing the small mound of paperwork that was needed to make him an official liaison. "It's not like I've been here that long—I don't have that much leverage yet."

"We thought you'd be cool," Riley said. Half her hair was pink, the other half turquoise, and Danny was pretty sure he'd never seen her without a latte in her hand; she seemed to exist in a perpetual state of blurred, technicolour motion. "The last faculty liaison was from the philosophy department, and she was a great ally and all but she liked to talk about periods a lot. Except she called them her 'moon times.' So, you know... no. And hey, it's nice to have an actual LGBT staff member repping us"

"Huh," Danny said. He figured there was no way that was even semi-professional for him ask how they'd realised he was queer, especially if it involved the word "gaydar"—or even, what would it be with him? "bi-dar"? "made out with a couple of guys in college, had been known to get off on Rachel murmuring really filthy, homoerotic bits of Catullus to him in that accent of hers while she fucked him with a dildo'-dar"? He just signed the paperwork. Anything for an easier life.)

Steve agreed to Danny's request that they put an LGBTQ Safe Zone sticker on their office door—turned out he'd taken the Safe Zone training a while back anyway, so it was all good. The man'd never make the best counsellor—the ostentatious show of not listening; providing privacy; emotions make my spine do the whole ramrod-straight thing the day Riley came to the office in tears because her parents had found out about her girlfriend proved that much—but he tried even though he obviously felt uncomfortable. He provided tea and Kleenex, stuck a sign up on the door which said that office hours for Professors William and McGarrett were cancelled for the rest of the day—and that, Danny thought, that was worth something.

"No, but," Danny said one day to Kono as they were both working on their photocopier tan, getting copies made of their midterm exams, "really, what's his deal? I can't figure it out. He's all, you know..." He waggled a hand vaguely. "But at the same time, he's..." He pulled a Steve Face, the one that made it look like he had a rotting oyster under his tongue.

Kono wrinkled her nose, started stacking her papers into neat piles. "You mean the Daddy Issues?"

"Those, I can figure out myself," Danny said. "There's photos of the guy all over the department, they named part of the library after him—"

"It's really more like a bookcase," Kono said.

"—they had a retrospective panel on his work at Kalamazoo this year, it does not require three degrees to figure out Steve has Daddy Issues."

"Then what?"

"Why is he... just... I cannot figure it out, and it is frustrating to me," Danny said, wielding a stapler with a little more vicious force than was strictly necessary. "He's like a mystery in a riddle in an enigma sort of thing, only less Soviet Union and more... more, I don't know where this metaphor is going. Somewhere medieval. Castle besieging, something, that's what he's like."

"Oh honey," Kono said, in a tone of voice with which Danny was intimately familiar—it was the kind of tone Rachel sometimes used towards him, after the detente, the one that meant he'd done something dumb and she was trying to be kind. "Okay, here's where I'm going to tell you what I tell my first years—are you sure you're asking the right question of your evidence?"

Danny squinted at her, folded his arms. "What the hell does that mean, 'am I asking the right question'? You are a confusing woman, Dr Kalakaua, because I don't—"

Kono put her hand on his shoulder. "Danny? I'm going to leave now and listen to my students fumble their way through a discussion of American imperialism. You are going to stand here and think about questions, okay?"

"A confusing woman," Danny yelled after her, but then she was gone and Danny was left with a stack of paper, a deep sense of befuddlement, and a stapler that, for some reason, seemed to have stopped working.

"Look, for the fifteenth time: when I lecture, I like to look like a professional, Steven. I wear a tie, I wear my academicals—"

Steve pulled this face, like Danny just told him he liked to punch kittens in his spare time. "Who wears a gown to lecture anymore? That's just, it's—"

"Tradition, that's what it is! We're medievalists, academic dress was invented in the Middle Ages, ergo medieval historians should be proud to wear this. This is a point I've explained a lot already, I'm not sure why you refuse to grasp it."

Steve slumped back in his desk chair, narrowed his eyes. "I should have known you'd be like this. Why else would someone give their job talk in a three piece suit?"

"Your glass house," Danny said, "feel free to throw stones if you want to, but I should warn you I think it's ill-advised. Not only do I see how you dress everyday, but I heard about that paper you gave at Congress wearing cargo pants and a t-shirt that said 'What would Talhoffer do?'" Trust Steve to be a fanboy of a fifteenth century German fencing master.

"I can have Sanders make you teach Western Civ I again," Steve said, like he thought that was a viable threat.

"Please," Danny scoffed, "the students love me. You're just jealous because I have more chili peppers than you on Rate My Professors."

"That site is not a forum for empirical studies," Steve said, jaw clenched. "Statistically, it—"

Danny held up a hand, cutting him off. "And that response, my friend, is why you don't have more chili peppers."

Steve was smirking when Danny passed him in the hallway, looking far too smug for someone with a stack of papers to be graded tucked under one arm. Danny knew the particular quality of that smirk—that was the smirk of a medievalist who'd just introduced some impressionable first years to Abelard and Heloise.

"You know, I'm starting to think that we should bring cameras to seminars when we talk about the Historia Calamitatum," Danny said, stepping to one side to allow students to hurry past on their way to their next class. He mimed taking a picture. "Capture their faces when they realise what happened."

"Almost had a kid throw up today," Steve said proudly. "He went really green when I said maybe it was the berries and the twig."

"That is both impressive and worrying," Danny said. "Well done, you should feel proud."

There were departmental meetings once a month. Danny was still settling in, feeling his way in to the politics of the department, so he mostly took a back seat—watched how people interacted, or didn't; paid attention to how grad students were handled, in preparation for maybe having a couple of his own in a few years time; observed how budgets were juggled to open up a Research Assistantship here, a line for travel funding there. There was nothing about how they were conducted that was unusual, the only thing different from Danny's old department to be found in the particularities of personality and custom,

The once-a-semester College of the Humanities meetings were something else entirely. In order to accommodate the professors and lecturers from everything from Asian Languages to Theatre Studies, these meetings were held in one of the big lecture halls. Danny slid into a seat about five minutes before the meeting was due to start, clutching a venti mocha and feeling nineteen again, experiencing the vague panicked sensation that he'd forgotten to read something and there was going to be a pop quiz.

There was a guy standing down the front of the room, fiddling with a Powerpoint presentation and wearing a suit that looked a lot more expensive than anything an associate professor could afford. Danny leaned in to Chin and Kamekona, whispered, "Who's that?"

Chin arched an eyebrow at him, in that way he had of making you unsure if he despaired of what you'd just said, or of you in general. Kamekona huffed out a laugh. "That's the Dean of Humanities, braddah. Wo Fat."

"Ah," Danny said, sitting back. He'd heard stuff about this guy—used to be a professor of War Studies, wrote some landmark book on the history of tactical warfare that apparently earned him an in with people in the Pentagon, before moving sideways into administration and the nice little bump in pay that went with it. The main reason he'd heard of him, though, was a savage flame war he'd once had with Steve in the comments of some other historian's blog, on the comparative benefits of end notes versus footnotes in scholarship on the Crusades. Steve had a bee in his bonnet about the guy—which of course didn't mean that Wo Fat was necessarily evil or anything.

Down at the front of the room, Wo Fat succeeded in getting the projector working properly, and the first Powerpoint slide appeared on the screen. Towards an Economy of Digital Knowledge Producers, it proclaimed. The Semiotics of a Modern Academe.

In Comic Sans.

Okay, scratch that. Danny would hold him down while Steve punched him in the face.

"You can't tell me you've never thought about it."

"I've never thought about it, Danny." Steve was very busily pretending to be updating his grade book, but it wasn't like his computer screen was that far away from Danny—Danny knew a game of Minesweeper when he saw it.

"That is a barefaced lie. This is a list every historian thinks about at least once in their life, because you know you'd try it if someone ever invented a time machine."

"Really. The first thing you'd do if you could go back to the eleventh century—"

"Are you kidding me? Who wouldn't hit on Eleanor of Aquitaine?"

"Louis VII?"

"Yeah, well, Louis." They both snorted.

"So that's my list, in no particular order. Eleanor of Aquitaine, Alexander the Great, Frederick Barbarossa, Matilda of Canossa, Amelia Earhart." Danny ticked them off on his fingers. "Historical badasses all, you can't tell me you wouldn't at least be tempted. And you can't tell me you never thought about this stuff."

Steve swivelled around in his chair, frowned at Danny for a long moment, and then said, as willingly as if Danny was pulling teeth, "Han Solo."

Danny spluttered. "Han Solo is a fictional character—"

"If you manage to build a time machine, I think you could engineer it so it could also travel to a universe where Han Solo is real."

"You are no fun," Danny said, "I don't know why I put up with you"—which was a phrase Danny found himself throwing out at Steve more and more during their mock arguments, maybe because in a weird way it was true. Maybe—

Goddamn Dr Kono Kalakaua and her stupid questions.

"What the hell are you doing?" Danny said. He'd pushed up the sash window and was leaning out to get a better view of the weird pantomime going on out in the quad. "Is that a trebuchet?"

Steve beamed up at him, hands on his hips, like this was something awesome, the giant freak. "Final exam," he said, students swarming around him as they put the finishing touches to what appeared to be a functioning piece of siege weaponry—and forget about the admins losing their shit over Danny leaning out of a window, there would be so many memos when they got wind of this.

"You know," Danny said carefully, "Just because your class is called 'Defensive Fortifications and Battle Strategies in the Crusading Levant' doesn't mean you have to teach them how to wage a medieval war."

"It's active learning!" Steve said, and then his smile took on a little bit of an edge. "Just like Dean Wo wanted."

"Steven." Danny paused, but no, there was no way he could phrase this question without it being innately weird. "Tell me you're not going to launch, like, a cow carcass over this building in order to piss off the Dean. Please."

"It's a pretend carcass," Steve said, all wide-eyed innocence. Yeah, like that look was going to convince anyone. "And we're going to be producing knowledge."

Danny narrowed his eyes. "What, knowledge of how long it'll take maintenance to get a stuffed cow off the roof of the building?"

Steve just blinked up at him.

Danny sighed. "If anyone wants me, I'll be in the library," he said. Reading Merovingian Chancery script would probably be less stressful than this. "Call me when you want me to make bail."

There was, of course, a meeting about the Trebuchet Incident. Steve and the Dean glared at one another across the table, all flat stares and clenched fists. According to Chin, who was there in his capacity as the faculty's union rep, it was like watching a shark face off against the Terminator. Was Danny a little sorry he'd missed it? Sure, especially since Sanders and Jameson had both had to intervene at least twice in order to ensure that no blood was shed.

"Brah," Chin said, "it was worse than the time Steve protested the ten cent price hike on grilled cheese sandwiches in the faculty dining hall."

That, Danny had heard stories about his first week here—Steve had tipped off some of the university's more radical students to this proposed injustice and there had been flash mobs all over campus. Danny maybe didn't have a brain for politics, so he was a little unclear how routines cribbed from Glee had saved the grilled cheese sandwich, but that it had worked was undeniable.

This time, there were yet more rote, insincere apologies all around, according to Chin, and Steve had made a terse commitment not to use siege weaponry to bombard any more campus buildings in return for this "latest unpleasantness", as the Dean had termed it, being put behind them.

"How soon do you think before Steve starts looking for loopholes?" Danny said.

Chin arched an eyebrow. "He started doing that before he made the promise, Danny."

Danny didn't see much of Steve for the rest of that week—he seemed to commute in, teach his classes, and go straight home, stopping off in the office only to hold office hours and pick up a couple of books that he needed for reference. It wasn't that Danny objected to having an office to himself for a bit—the quiet was conducive to him trying to work on a book review that was already ten days overdue because of how difficult it was to find a professional way of saying "Professor Schmidt's monograph, while novel in its methodology and use of the English language, nonetheless sucks syphilitic donkey cock"—but it was sort of weird to spend most of the day by himself once more.

Since he got here, he'd been in Steve's space—technically out of necessity, true, since apparently the asbestos had been harbouring some really nasty bacteria and the disinfecting process took even longer than removing the asbestos had, but it'd been a long time since Danny had minded. He'd grown used to having someone around to commiserate with over terrible papers, to double-check his Chicago style citations, to mock the leftovers he heated up for lunch and tell him he should be having a tofu salad or something instead.

It was weird. It was maybe even a little lonely, and Danny tried to tell himself that it was just that, loneliness—in an entirely platonic, not at all homoerotic manner—which made his stomach flip a little when Steve walked in on Friday afternoon. It wasn't a usual time for Danny to be there—normally he picked up Grace from school on Fridays, had father-daughter time that involved some combination of ice cream, picking out this week's read at the public library and a visit to the movies—but Rachel had a thing and so here Danny was, doing some much-needed but often-neglected filing instead of going home to a still apartment.

"Hey," Danny said, not knowing why he felt so awkward all of a sudden—maybe it had something to do with the odd expression on Steve's face, a jumbled mix of surprise and happiness and something else, all of which he was doing his best to smooth away. "How you doing? Feeling any better?"

Steve shrugged, stacked his armful of books onto his desk, dropped his beat-up leather satchel onto the floor. "I'm fine. Sanders suggested keeping a low profile for a bit might be wise, until the Dean's stopped with the legal threats."

"Ah," Danny said. "Well that's—good? The no more threats, I mean, not the... other stuff."

"Yeah," Steve said. He was standing facing his desk; the late evening sun filtering through the window made a dark-and-gilded silhouette of him. "He, uh. Said some stuff about maybe having to review recent tenure track hires in light of budgetary concerns, so..."

"Recent hires? What recent hires, I'm the only—"

Steve looked guilty, did something that was close kin to shuffling his feet, and Danny had to repress the urge to yelp. "What the hell, McGarrett! Do I look like some damsel in distress to you? This is not your own personal chanson de geste, you realise, you could have made like a normal person and asked for help, oh my god."

There was a flush high on Steve's cheekbones; he shrugged and mumbled, "I was just trying to help. Seemed like a good idea at the time."

Danny watched with a kind of dreadful fascination as Steve scratched at the stubble on his jawline, found his gaze caught by the curve of Steve's mouth, and came to the abrupt, oddly anticlimactic resolution that maybe it was time he did something about this. What the hell, even if this all went very badly wrong, even if Danny ended up spending three or four more very awkward months in a very confined office space, letting Steve know had to better than continuing with this aimless shuffling around one another.

He dropped the rest of his filing on top of the filing cabinet, took the two steps that brought him right up next to Steve. Danny snagged the cuff of Steve's shirt between two fingers, tugged until Steve turned to look at him. "Just so you know," Danny said, grinning up at him, because this was going to be good, this was going to be so good, "This is not an endorsement of your previous actions, because seriously, there's some deeper damage going on there, don't think I'm not going to find out what that it—"

Steve frowned down his nose at him. "Danny, what—"

Danny held up his free hand, shushing him. "But, but, first I feel I should say: having your students build a trebuchet for a final was sort of amazing, and I really wish I'd seen Wo Fat's face when he saw that cow up there."

Steve was always a good looking guy, but his whole face transformed when he smiled—one of his real smiles, the sincere ones that held nothing back. "Danny—" he said tentatively, clearly confused but happy to be so, and Danny couldn't help it—he rolled his eyes, grabbed Steve by the collar of his shirt and tugged him down into a kiss.

And jeez, okay, whoever came up with that old saw about the tweedy, undersexed academic who blushed at the sight of a woman's bare ankle had obviously never kissed Steve McGarrett. For the first five seconds, Steve seemed stunned: his mouth slack against Danny's, his spine rigid. But there was a reason why this man had fellowships out the wazoo—he was a fast learner and, Danny realised as one big hand worked its way up underneath his shirt, the other cupping the nape of his neck, a tactile one as well. Steve's kisses were focused, greedy, and Danny worked at giving back as good as he got, grinning at the way it made Steve shiver against him. That sensation—having six feet something of stupidly gorgeous man rumbling with pleasure while plastered along your body—was one that Danny wanted to explore in a whole lot more depth.

By the time the kiss trailed to an end, Steve was sitting on his desk, books and papers shoved to one side, with Danny comfortably trapped between his thighs. Steve's forehead rested warm against Danny's; Danny idly pondered just how unprofessional it would be to leave a bite mark on Steve's collarbone, traced the tips of his fingers down the tanned line of Steve's neck.

"Danny..." Steve said after a moment, and Danny huffed out a sigh because he knew that tone—that was the tone Steve got when he started second-guessing himself. It wasn't exactly a tone that Steve used a lot, what with him having probably the healthiest ego this side of the Mississippi, but Danny'd heard it enough to know the necessary approach in response.

"Don't even start with me," he said, thumping Steve in the bicep just hard enough to make Steve say ow—as if it'd actually hurt, the big baby. "Do I look like the kind of person who hits on people when he's not sure about it?"

"I just don't want you to—"

"Or that he doesn't want to do?" Danny pulled back enough that he could look at Steve. He grinned. "Because I find that pretty insulting, my friend. Just for that, I'm going to make you buy me a coffee later on."

That little crease between Steve's eyebrows was back. "A coffee?"

"Or some form of beverage, maybe with a bit more Irish to it than your average coffee. Regardless, point is that I don't put out on the first date, so between now and the third date there's going to be some serious wooing, you hear me?"

"Third date?" Danny hadn't heard Steve sound that honestly bewildered since the time an undergrad declare that like, aren't the medieval times mostly made up? Like elves, or Finland?

"Yes," Danny said, speaking with ostentatious slowness. "Now, first date. Tomorrow, maybe, second date. Next weekend, you might just be getting lucky—do I have to say this in Latin? Maybe you need me to say this in Latin, Occitan, Middle English, what? Because I'll do it, you know, what with us maybe having a case of amor omnia vincens right here." His mouth felt a little dry for having said that, because that was a big word, no matter what language you said it in, and whatever point you took as the beginning of them—that afternoon; the first time Danny'd noticed Steve starting to get under his skin; the day Danny had walked into this office—this was sudden. This was soon.

But it felt right—just like the way Steve smiled at him felt right, just like the way Steve's arms tightened around his waist felt right. His grin was starting to edge over the line from tentative into a very McGarrettish smugness, which told Danny that maybe he'd gotten through to Steve, convinced him of his manifesto that could be boiled down to pretty much you and me, dumbass.

"I thought you said I was nuts," Steve said. Danny found himself admiring the way Steve's eyes crinkled up at the corners; he was so screwed. "Uncivilised, deranged..."

"I believe the term I used was boorish, thank you, and there was no other possible response to you having ideas like that about Duby. Besides, you know, nemo quidem tam ferox est ut non molliri posit, cultura data," he said, because don't think he'd never noticed how Steve tried to hide the fact that being able to speak multiple languages got him all hot and bothered. Danny didn't even have to make a linguist joke for Steve's eyes to glaze over, which was sort of gratifying.

"Well," Steve said, clearing his throat, "I mean, uh—"

"I think the word you're looking for is yes," Danny said.

"Yes," Steve said, without any hesitation this time—his expression was set and determined, as if he'd just made a decision of real importance, and Danny was glad to know he wasn't alone in this. He was so very glad, and he leaned in and kissed Steve again, hard and fast—cupped Steve's face in his palms and let his teeth scrape against Steve's lower lip. Steve made a very satisfying sound in the back of his throat.

"Now come on," Danny said, before they did something in the office that could legitimately get them both fired, "you're going to buy me a delicious beverage. You play your cards right, I'll even talk Catullus to you."

"Sweet talker," Steve said, smiling.

"What can I say," Danny said, taking him by the hand and pulling him out of the office, "I make excellent life choices."