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Danny never thought of himself as someone who wrote things down.
He talked. He argued. He complained with a precision that bordered on art. But writing, writing was something other people did. Poets. Teenagers. People with too much time and not enough responsibility.
And yet, here he was.
The notebook had been sitting in the bottom drawer of his desk for weeks, untouched, unopened, like it knew better than to ask for his attention. Danny only found it because he was looking for a spare battery and came up with something heavier instead.
Literally and otherwise.
He stared at it for a long moment before pulling it out. Black cover. No label. No pretension. Just paper waiting to be filled.
Danny huffed quietly to himself.
"Great," he muttered. "I’m officially losing it."
He didn’t open it right away. He leaned back in his chair, eyes drifting to the glass wall of Five-O headquarters, beyond which Steve McGarrett was arguing with Chin about something tactical and unnecessary. Steve had that look on his face, the one that said he’d already decided what he was going to do and was only tolerating the discussion out of politeness.
Danny knew that look better than he knew his own.
That was probably the problem.
They weren’t a secret. Not really. Everyone knew they were close. Closer than partners. Closer than friends. But there was an unspoken line between what existed and what never would, and both of them had spent years pretending it wasn’t there while never once stepping over it.
Because some things were obvious.
Because some things were impossible.
Because the world had opinions, and rules, and moral judgments that never quite bent far enough to make room for this.
Danny had learned early how to live inside constraints. Marriage. Divorce. Custody agreements. Promises made and broken. He knew how to love people he couldn’t keep.
Steve was different.
Steve didn’t belong to anyone. Not really. He belonged to duty. To the ocean. To the ghost of a father and the weight of a legacy that wrapped around his ribs like iron.
Chains, Danny thought, watching him.
Even if Steve didn’t call them that.
Danny opened the notebook.
The first page stayed blank for a long time.
Then, without planning to, he started writing.
Not names. Not confessions. Just moments. Fragments. Things he noticed and couldn’t seem to stop noticing.
The way he squints into the sun like it’s personally offended him.
The way he always stands between me and danger without thinking.
The way his voice goes quiet when it’s just us.
Danny didn’t write I love you.
He wrote everything else.
It became a habit.
After work, after the kids were asleep, after the house settled into its nighttime creaks and sighs, Danny would sit at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee he didn’t need and write things he’d never say.
He wrote about cases. About exhaustion. About the strange way Steve could be infuriating and grounding at the same time. He wrote about the dreams he didn’t let himself have, places they’d never go, freedom that belonged to other versions of themselves.
Venice came up once, for no real reason. A city on water. No cars. Just walking and drifting and getting lost.
He closed the notebook after that one and didn’t open it for three days.
Because wanting was one thing.
Imagining escape was another.
Steve never asked why Danny looked tired lately. He just showed up with coffee more often. Stole Danny’s chair. Leaned too close.
It would have been easier if Steve had been oblivious.
He wasn’t.
One night, after a long case and longer hours, they ended up on the lanai at Steve’s place, beers sweating between them, the ocean breathing steadily in the dark.
"You ever think about leaving?" Steve asked suddenly.
Danny stiffened, just a little.
"Leaving what?"
Steve shrugged. "Everything. The job. The island. All of it."
Danny snorted. "What, like just… disappear? You don’t do that. You implode first."
Steve smiled faintly but didn’t argue. He stared out at the water instead.
"I used to think if I just wanted it enough," Steve said quietly, "I could make it happen. Whatever it was."
"And now?"
"Now I think wanting isn’t always the problem."
Danny watched him carefully.
"Then what is?"
Steve didn’t answer.
That was how it went with them. Circling. Skirting. Speaking in almosts.
Danny went home that night and wrote until his hand cramped.
He wrote about chains he hadn’t seen because he’d been too busy looking at someone else. About how easy it was to forget your own limits when you were focused on another person’s burdens.
He wrote about smiles, how some of them didn’t belong to happiness so much as endurance. Every word, every line he penned, he felt he drew from the ink of Steve’s eyes.
He never wrote Steve’s name.
The notebook filled slowly, then all at once.
Time passed. Cases came and went. Life layered itself over longing like sediment, dulling the sharpest edges without ever erasing them.
Danny told himself it was enough to be this. Partners. Family. Whatever shape they’d settled into.
He even believed it, most days.
Until the dreams started.
Steve walked through them like a recurring tide, always arriving from the same direction, light at his back, presence unmistakable. Sometimes they talked. Sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes Danny woke up with the echo of a conversation that had never happened and never would.
And sometimes, rarely, Steve turned away.
Those were the mornings Danny couldn’t write.
The notebook began to feel less like release and more like proof. Evidence of something unfinished. Something that would follow him long after he convinced himself he’d moved on.
He told himself he’d stop once the pages ran out.
They didn’t.
The case that finally broke the rhythm was supposed to be routine. Arms deal. Offshore transfer. Too many moving parts. Too many unknowns.
Danny hated boats. Steve loved them. That alone should’ve been a warning.
The explosion wasn’t big. Just enough. Enough to knock Steve off balance. Enough to send him over the edge and into the water hard and wrong.
Danny didn’t remember shouting his name, but his throat burned like he had.
Everything after blurred into instinct. Diving, grabbing, dragging Steve back aboard with hands that wouldn’t stop shaking.
Steve came to coughing and swearing, stubborn as ever. Insisted he was fine. Insisted they finish the op.
Danny let him.
He hated himself for it.
Later, in the hospital, when the adrenaline faded and the monitors settled into steady rhythms, Danny sat beside the bed and watched Steve sleep.
There were bruises already blooming along his ribs. A shallow cut near his temple. Nothing life-threatening.
Nothing that explained the way Danny’s chest felt like it had been cracked open.
He reached into his jacket without thinking and pulled out the notebook.
He didn’t open it.
He just held it there, fingers curled tight around the edges, like it was the only thing anchoring him to the room.
Steve stirred, eyes fluttering open.
"Hey," Steve murmured. "You okay?"
Danny laughed weakly. "You almost die and you’re asking me that?"
Steve’s gaze sharpened. "Danny..."
"You don’t get to do that," Danny said quietly. "You don’t get to scare me like that and then pretend it’s nothing."
Steve swallowed. Looked away.
"I didn’t mean to-"
"I know," Danny cut in. His voice softened despite himself. "You never do."
Silence stretched between them, thick and fragile.
Steve glanced at the notebook. "What’s that?"
Danny hesitated.
"Nothing," he said. "Just… something I write in."
Steve studied him for a long moment, eyes unreadable.
"You should keep writing," Steve said finally. "You’re good at noticing things."
Danny almost smiled.
After that, things shifted, not dramatically, not visibly, but enough. Steve slowed down, a little. Danny spoke up more. They were careful with each other in ways that felt new.
Danny told himself it was because of the scare.
He told himself a lot of things.
The notebook filled its last page on a quiet afternoon, sunlight slanting through the kitchen window, coffee gone cold beside him.
Danny closed it and sat there, staring at the cover.
He realized, with a strange sense of calm, that he didn’t regret any of it.
Even if Steve never read a word.
Even if this was all it ever was.
The words had still been drawn from somewhere honest. From a place that mattered.
They smelled, he thought, faintly of regret, but also of truth.
That night, Steve showed up unannounced, holding a paper bag.
"Dinner," he said. "Don’t ask."
Danny stepped aside to let him in. "I wasn’t planning on it."
They ate at the counter, easy and familiar. The ocean was loud tonight, restless.
When Steve finished, he didn’t move to leave.
"Danny," he said.
Here it is, Danny thought. Whatever it is.
"Yeah?"
Steve took a breath. Then another.
"I found your notebook."
Danny froze.
"You...what?"
"It was in my truck," Steve said quickly. "Must’ve fallen out... I didn’t mean to-"
"You read it," Danny said flatly.
Steve nodded. "Not all of it. Just… enough."
Danny felt exposed in a way he hadn’t since his divorce. Like someone had turned the light on without warning.
"I’m sorry," Steve said. "I should’ve stopped."
Danny looked at him, really looked at him and saw not judgment, not pity, but something raw and shaken and unmistakably present.
"What did you think?" Danny asked.
Steve’s voice was quiet. "I thought I didn’t know you felt like that."
Danny exhaled slowly. "Neither did I. Not until I wrote it."
Silence again. But this time it felt different.
"I used to think that some things just weren’t meant to be lived. Only felt. Only written."
Danny’s heart kicked hard against his ribs.
"And now?" he asked.
Steve met his eyes.
"Now I think maybe we were wrong."
Danny didn’t move. Didn’t speak. He let the words settle, let them find their place.
Outside, the ocean kept breathing. Steady. Endless.
Steve stepped closer, tentative for once, like a man approaching something fragile.
"We don’t have to decide anything," he said. "Not tonight. Not ever, if you don’t want to."
Danny looked at him for a long moment.
All the years sat between them. Every almost, every silence, every word he’d written instead of spoken. The certainty he’d wrapped around himself like armor: we won’t live this together. The way he’d made peace with loving from the side, from the margins, from ink instead of skin.
He’d believed it. Truly believed it.
That was the cruelest part.
Danny reached past Steve, picked up the notebook from the counter, and turned it once in his hands. He didn’t open it. He didn’t need to.
"I wrote all that," he said quietly, "because I thought this was the only way it could exist. Safely. Without ruining anything. Without asking you to choose."
Steve’s throat worked. "Danny-"
"I told myself we were just unlucky," Danny went on. "Wrong place. Wrong rules. Too many people with opinions about how a life is supposed to look."
He looked up then, eyes steady.
"But that’s not true, is it?"
Steve didn’t answer. He couldn’t.
Danny took one step closer.
"The truth," Danny said, voice low but sure, "is that I decided for both of us. I decided it was impossible, so I never let it be real."
Steve’s breath hitched.
"And you?" Danny asked softly. "You let me."
Steve nodded once. Barely. "Yeah."
They stood there, the weight of that honesty settling. Not heavy, not crushing, just real.
Danny set the notebook down.
"I don’t want to write you anymore," he said.
Steve’s eyes widened. "Danny-"
"I don’t want dreams where you walk away," Danny continued. "I don’t want words that smell like regret. I don’t want to keep pretending that this is all we get."
He paused, then added, almost gently, "I want the thing I convinced myself we couldn’t have."
Steve stared at him like the world had shifted under his feet.
"You’re saying..."
"I’m saying," Danny interrupted, "that if we’re going to be fools, we might as well stop being lonely ones."
For a second, Steve looked like he might laugh. Or break.
Instead, he stepped fully into Danny’s space, close enough that Danny could feel the warmth of him, the steady presence he’d built a thousand words around.
"I’ve spent my whole life thinking peace was something you had to earn," Steve said quietly. "Turns out it was standing right here, next to me."
Danny swallowed. "Took you long enough."
Steve smiled, slow, soft, unmistakably real.
"Danny," he said. "If we do this… I don’t know how it ends."
Danny tilted his head. "Good. Neither do I."
That was it. No thunder. No grand declaration.
Just Steve’s hand coming up, hesitant for half a second before settling at the back of Danny’s neck, warm, grounding, undeniably there.
Danny leaned in.
The kiss was unhurried. Careful. Like they were proving something to themselves more than to each other. Years of restraint dissolved not into urgency, but into certainty.
When they pulled back, Steve rested his forehead against Danny’s.
"So," Steve murmured. "This is us?"
Danny smiled, small, satisfied, finally free.
"Yeah," he said. "This time, we’re not writing it, we’re living it."