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delicataleAuthor: ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
delicatale
Recipient:willow_fae_20
Title: Your voice fading to pale
Rating: PG-13
Pairing(s)/Character(s): Steve/Danny
Summary: Steve has reasons to run. But when he can’t find the colors of Danny’s voice anywhere else than close to Danny, he comes home.
Warnings: n/a
Word Count: 3,819
Disclaimer: All Hawaii Five-0 characters herein are the property of CBS. No copyright infringement is intended. All characters engaging in sexual activity are 16 years or older.
Author's Notes: Written forwillow_fae_20 for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
h50_exchange! Hope you enjoy! I apologise for the lack of Grace. Thanks go to tailoredshirt for the beta.
Steve closes his eyes, tilts his head up and lets the flashes of green and yellow of the wind rustling through leaves and small animals create, letting the symphony of rhythm and colors lull the pain to a dull throb in his leg. There’s a drop of sweat rolling down along his temple, and it’s hot, it’s ridiculously hot and damp, despite being the middle of the night. Someone shakes him lightly and Steve blinks his eyes open, focusing on the face in front of him instead of the bursts of color at the edges of his vision.
“You’ll be okay, Smooth Dog?”
It’s just a whisper from Einstein, tainted with light brown and full of worry. Steve smiles, as big as he can, and nods. It’s just a graze, he’s not bleeding out to his death and when he doesn’t think about it, it almost doesn’t hurt. Just a graze, yet Steve knows Danny will give him Hell for it anyway.
“I’m fine.” Steve’s voice sounds raspy and dry but it doesn’t hurt to talk. Just a few hours of rest and he’ll be good to go, get to the extraction point, get the fuck out of dodge, go home, and not leave again.
It’d made sense to jump on that mission when he’d been offered it - prison had made the shadows in Steve’s head sharper and more present than ever and he’d felt jumpy, angry, all too ready to start a fight with just about anyone when he got out. And then White, and his mission and his offer and Steve had seen the opportunity to let go of his pent-up frustration and anger, and he’d taken it.
Chin and Kono had made him promise to come back, and Danny had let him go, just asking him to be careful, something guarded in his eyes, his voice a deep red that Steve can still see when he focuses on the memory, even two months later, in the deep of the jungle, with so many other colors swirling around him.
They’re just not the same. Ever since he stepped out of the plane that took him from Honolulu to Coronado, all the sounds gave him washed-out colors, a little sad and less vibrant. He thought it’d be good for him.
But now he misses home.
;;;
“So, I’ve done my research.”
Steve looks up from his computer when Danny walks into his office, raising an eyebrow at him. His voice is a soft gold today, sounding amused and looking soothing.
“You did?”
“Synesthesia, huh? Which one’s yours? Numbers have colors or something?”
Oh, Steve should have known. Also, he should never have allowed Chin to show Danny the intricacies of Wikipedia.
“Sounds have colors, actually.”
“Hmm. So tell me, what color am I?”
Steve smiles to himself, already shaking his head. There is no way he’s divulging any of these little pieces of info, too much easy ammo for Danny.
“No.”
“Oh, come on! I have a right to know!”
Steve’s eyebrow arches up again, the tilts and accentuation of Danny’s voice turning a little orange, aggravation evident to Steve. He smiles, shakes his head, and turns back to his computer.
“No, Danny. Get back to work, I want a report on the Grahams case before 3.”
Danny grumbles. “I’m not letting this go, McGarrett.”
Steve just grins to himself.
;;;
The extraction point is this drab clearing in the middle of an US controlled zone and Steve sits in the shadows of the trees as he waits for the chopper to arrive. The sound of the rotors is a sparkling gray that makes Steve squint, but the louder it gets the closer Steve feels from home, and it makes the pain less harsh and his head less hazy.
He feels like he’s going to throw up - he’d ripped his makeshift stitches while sleeping, which resulted in unnecessary blood loss, and then there was the fact that they didn’t have had any breakfast, and the whole of it is making him feel sick, dazed. He’s lost the edge he used to have before his father died, mellowed by a year of Danny and his rants, Chin and his comforting looks, and Kono and her trusty roundhouse kick.
And here he was, unable to keep a bullet from grazing him, and feeling dehydrated and hungry and sick after three weeks in the jungle, like he never went through the BUD/s, like he’s been through worse. And still, instead of feeling angry and helpless, all he wants is a taste of his family again, of being somewhere he belongs to.
“Commander McGarrett?” The sailor that just ran from the back of the chopper grabs his arm securely when Steve nods. “Come on, Lt. Commander, let’s get you some medical attention.”
;;;
“Grace wants to do her science project about synesthesia, because of you.”
Danny’s voice is a rich dark yellow, like honey dripping down the edges of Steve’s vision, and Steve finds himself relaxing into it, leaning back into his chair, a cold beer held between two fingers. He’d lean into Danny and try to find all the different hues Danny can sound like, but - but.
“Does she want an interview? Because I wouldn’t mind.”
“Probably, yeah. I’ll get her to call you if she wants.”
Steve nods, tilting his head back to the dying sun, soaking in the last few rays as he watches the little sound of Danny’s breathing.
“I’ve picked up this book about it -”
“About what?”
“Synesthesia. It’s from Nabokov. The guy at the bookstore said it was great.”
Steve cracks one eye open. “You bought a book about synesthesia?”
Danny shrugs, and he seems almost embarrassed, looking away from Steve when he takes a mouthful of his beer. “Why not? You don’t talk about it, I wonder how it affects your performance on the field, and all that. Need to know if it can put me in danger.”
“So you bought Nabokov?” Steve turns his eyes back to the ocean. Danny’s full of shit and they both know it, but for some reason, Steve can’t bring himself to point it out. “For the record, it does not affect my performances on the field. Don’t worry, okay?”
“Okay.”
Steve nods, keeping all the questions, rolling around the light pink of Danny’s word behind his eyelids, to himself.
;;;
In the hospital, Steve dreams about his mom. He remembers the color of her voice, a rich purple that wrapped itself around him and made him feel warm, safe, when he was a kid. When he wakes up in his starched white sheets, he thinks back on her, on how her purple mixed and melted with his dad’s deep green so seamlessly.
Steve’s own voice doesn’t have a color. None of the sounds he makes do, and maybe it’s normal, he hasn’t thought of it all that much. But he can’t help but wonder, if it did have a color, would it weave itself around Danny’s like his dad’s used to around his mom’s?
It’s a stupid idea, but it’s been sticking to Steve like a second skin since he left Hawai’i. He can’t find any color as striking or enthralling as those Danny creates anywhere else, and it could just be a reflection of Danny, or it could be more, and Steve is tired of trying not to think about it. Right now, he’s got nothing else to do than to think about it, than to miss Danny.
Relaxing into the pillows, Steve watches the sparks of red and black from the beeping machines around him, the shuffling of feet along the corridor, the hushed whispers, some moans of pain. They’re not nice colors, bleeding out around Steve’s eyes, making him want them to disappear, making him want not to see, for once, be normal.
He realizes he’s rubbing at his eyes too hard when a nurse rushes to his side and pries his clawing hands off his face, her soothing words penetrating the haze of sensations and colors filling up his head, making him moan desperately. The panic attack takes him by surprise but there’s nothing he can do to fight it, sweat breaking out over his brow as the sounds multiply and burn him with aching colors.
The nurse sticks a needle in his IV before a headache starts pounding a rhythm against his temples, and Steve falls back asleep with the honey gold of Danny’s memories soothing him.
;;;
Danny’s angry. It’s obvious in the flush of his cheeks, the flurry of his hands, and, most importantly, the crimson tint of his words, the staccato rhythm of his attack on yet another reckless thing Steve has done creating sparks along Steve’s corners.
“You, you - are you even listening to me right now?”
“Huh? Oh, sure, Danno.”
Danny deflates as quickly as he inflated a few minutes earlier, when he started his monologue about how Steve should really not consider drowning suspects as a proved method of arrest.
“You could at least have the decency to listen to me rant at you, McGarrett, do you think I do it because I like it?” Steve almost replies to that, before allowing the words to just become an amused smile as he stops at a red light. “Why do I keep on thinking that, maybe, at some point, you will learn? I should know better, I really should, there is nothing I can do or say that will get you to act like a proper emissary of the law!”
Danny’s words are already lighter, bright and sharp because he’s loud, but his red is less deep, less aggravated. slowly turning to Danny’s usual orange-tinged annoyance.
“Emissary?”
“Yeah, why not, I’m not going to call you a policeman, am I?” Danny sighs, loud and long-suffering, and Steve’s smile twitches bigger.
“Yeah, okay.”
“Promise you won’t do it again?”
“The man was uncooperative, Danno!”
“Steve.”
This time, Steve is the one sighing, but as he starts the car again, keeping an eye on the now green light, he nods.
“Okay, okay, fine, I won’t do it again!”
Danny sits back, and when Steve throws him a look, he sees Danny’s smiling.
“Good. Hey, tell me something?”
“Hmm?”
“What color is my voice when I’m angry? Does it scare you?”
Steve laughs. “No, Danno.”
;;;
The doctors switch his meds when they realize they make him feel worse instead of better, but the whole deal of his panic attack and sleepless nights make them keep him under observation longer than Steve would like. He doesn’t like this place, doesn’t like the way it smells and tastes and sounds. He wants out, he wants to sit in his lana’i and have a beer with Danny, burrow himself in the comfort of these feelings.
It’d been a stupid idea, to accept this mission, and Steve can’t remember the reasons why he’d said yes to it in the first place. Bits and pieces come back to him when he’s awake, feeling like maybe he needed to uproot himself, that he’d spent too long in one place, that he was too mellow now.
But now, all he can think of is that, so what if he is mellowed out? What if he’s not as cold as he used to be - it surely can’t be a bad thing. For a while, during his time in the SEALs, he’d trained so hard to keep his feelings at bay and keep his sense sharp that he’d almost lost how to conjugate sounds and colors, letting the colors become flashes at the periphery of his vision, that he’d give no credit to.
It’d been coming back to Hawai’i, the sounds of the rifle shots at his father’s funeral - blackest of blacks - and Danny yelling at him - deep red and flecks of orange - that reminded him of what he had, and how special it was. Why did he want to throw it all away again? He has no more reasons to stay away.
It feels like a bruise blossoming in Steve’s chest when he realizes exactly what he’s done. He’s jumped at the chance out of habit, running away from things he didn’t feel ready to face. He rubs his knuckles against his chest, over his heart, a weird taste in his mouth. He’s done, now.
;;;
“Pink.”
“The waitress?”
Steve nods, stuffing half a pancake in his mouth, and Danny looks down at his own plate with a little smile.
“Does everything has a color? Say, if I scratch my fork on my plate?”
“No. And if you do that, I’ll have to punch you in the face.”
Danny raises an eyebrow at Steve, looking mildly amused by the threat, guiding a forkful of fluffy scrambled eggs to his mouth. Thankfully for Steve, sitting in front of him, Danny waits to have swallowed before speaking up again. He’s sounding a comfortable, pale yellow today.
“So, what, is it only voices or something?”
“No, not necessarily. Usually strident, or irritating noises don’t have colors, though. I don’t know, maybe it’s a selective thing. I know that, for some people, it’s only a few sounds that have colors, but I seem to have a wide range.”
“Must have been a pain when you were in the SEALs.”
“I...um. Yeah.”
Danny looks at Steve too sharply for it to be good for Steve. “What?”
“I kinda blocked it out? I mean, they were still there, but I learned not to pay attention to the colors anymore.”
Danny looks a little destabilized, his eyes flickering over Steve’s face, as if Steve just told him he moved from Jersey to Hawai’i because he wanted to. Steve can’t help but feel slightly embarrassed, like he’s done something wrong.
Danny plants his fork in his bacon, looking from it back up into Steve’s eyes. “But you pay attention to them again, now?”
His voice has grown richer, with emotions Steve is pretty sure he doesn’t want to reflect on too closely right now, moving towards a golden hue that would be blinding if it wasn’t so gorgeous. Steve dry-swallows, feeling warmth spread in his stomach.
“Yeah. Yeah, I pay attention to them again, now.”
;;;
Steve is waiting for the dots in the ocean to appear. Looking out at the space in front of him, it reminds him almost too much of the last time he was in a military place, going to Honolulu. Only this time nobody is dead and people are waiting for him.
He’s called Danny the night before, and refused for Danny to come pick him up, he’d be okay, he’ll be fine. Maybe he should have accepted, but Steve feels like he might need a few hours of getting reacquainted again with his life in Hawai’i before being able to face anyone, let alone Danny.
The pilot’s voice is a burst of blue around Steve’s head when he speaks to tower control, and Steve shakes himself out of his thoughts, seeing the string of dots that are the Hawai’ian Islands in the ocean.
“Should be twenty minutes, Commander.”
Steve nods, the nostalgia invading him a bittersweet taste at the back of his tongue. It’s all too much of the same, and yet it’s so thoroughly different he knows he probably shouldn’t feel this way. He’s stopped questioning his feelings, though, now, he’s done with that, ready to embrace them, now.
Steve runs the heel of his hand against his injured thigh, the pain sharp as the healing muscles and skin scream at him to leave it alone. He hisses through his teeth, and the resulting throbbing ache in his leg shakes him completely out of old thoughts of his father and funerals and unresolved feelings.
He’s coming home, now, done with the running and the being scared and the hiding himself away. He should have known the minute he’d heard Danny’s voice and it exploded a bright red into his eyes, a color so vivid Steve didn’t know what to do with it, having lost the habit of them being this fierce. From the moment they met, Steve should have known that there was no way he could be turning away from this, from Danny’s range of honey to crimson, from Grace’s happy pink, from Chin’s deep blue, from Kono’s confident, sexy burgundy; the way they all worked together, painting Steve’s family in vibrant colors.
;;;
It’s fully dark when Steve hears the front door of his house open and close, the alarm code being punched in. He doesn’t move from his spot on the lana’i, the beer he’s been pretending to drink for a few hours now warm under his fingertips.
“Hey. Shouldn’t be sitting down? I’ve been told you were injured.”
Steve can hear the little insult that doesn’t cross Danny’s lips at the end of his sentence, a lilting note of orange cut off abruptly through the yellow. Steve turns around, watches Danny for a moment, because he wants to make sure his memories match up to the real thing, once again. It’s only been a little more than two months, but it feels like so much longer.
“I’m okay. Stretching the muscles.”
“Hmm. Hey, so, I brought beer and fried chicken.”
Danny drops a six pack and a KFC bucket on the table, looking for all to see like he was invited to join Steve tonight. He wasn’t - Steve hasn’t asked anyone to come over yet, he’s only landed a few hours ago, but he should have guessed four hours would be the best Danny can do.
“Thanks. I got beer, though.”
“Yeah, well, you can stock it, that’s the beauty of it. Steve?”
“Hmm?”
“How are you?”
“I’m okay.” He is. Danny nods.
“Okay. Good. I’m okay, too, by the way. Been busy since you left.”
“I’m sure you’ll fill me in soon enough.”
Danny sits heavily on one of the wood chairs around the table, fingers plucking the cardboard top off the fried chicken bucket. “Yeah. Not tonight, though. Is there anything you can tell me about your mission?”
Steve tries drinking some more of his beer, but it’s grown flat and too warm. He leaves it on the table, watching Danny pluck a leg out of the bucket and bite into it.
“Not much. There’s something, though.”
“Yeah?” Danny, when curious, sounds dark pink.
“I can’t find anyone else that has a range of colors. Even on the other side of the world.”
Danny leaves the half-eaten piece of chicken on the overturned top of the bucket, looking up at Steve with confusion written plainly over his face.
“What?”
Steve takes his time to formulate an answer, watching the ebb and flow of the tides for a while, instead of looking at Danny.
“My Mom, she sounded purple, and my Dad green. Chin’s sort of a Royal blue, and Kono’s this rich dark red. Gracie is pink but I suspect it’ll darken as she grows up. Rachel sounds turquoise. They all have this one color, and it changes and flickers, but you -” Steve takes a deep breath, licking his lips as he sits in front of Danny, who’s looking at him with his lips parted and his eyes wide.
“You, you have a range. When you’re happy, you’ve got this honey, golden yellow, that grows paler and paler when you’re worried. And when you’re annoyed, you sound orange. When you’re angry, you go towards a strong red. Sometimes it’s really hard to pay attention to anything else, and even when you try to hide it, I can always tell what mood you’re in because of it.”
Danny closes his mouth, and Steve’s stomach bottoms out, not sure he’s managed to say exactly what he’s trying to convey. The chicken is left abandoned in between them.
“And - and I left, I said yes to that mission because I got scared. Suddenly I was settling down and I’ve not done that for 10 years, so, so maybe that was my version of a freak out. But then I couldn’t find anything, or anyone that had a range like you.”
He wants to say more, how it was thinking about Danny’s colors that made the nights so gorgeous, out there in the jungle, how the memories kept him going after he got shot, how he couldn’t understand why he was scared, or what he was scared of. But the words crowd his tongue, the back of his throat, but refuse to come out. In the end he deflates, looking away.
The silence stretches between the two of them, and Steve starts fidgeting, daring a look towards Danny, only to see him looking perfectly serene, fingers tented under his chin. When Steve looks at him again, and holds his gaze, Danny makes a little noise at the back of his throat.
“This is the most convoluted sort-of declaration I’ve ever heard, and that includes a lot of chick flicks, because Rachel has guilty pleasures,” Steve blinks at the faint smile on Danny’s face, following Danny around when Danny stands up and moves to the chair closest to Steve’s. “But you know what? I’ll take it, because I guess, as declarations go, that one is pretty special.”
He sounds this very honey golden Steve talked about earlier, filling Steve up with warmth. He’s missed it, and he closes his eyes to make the most of it, feeling Danny’s fingertips against his eyelids and eyebrows for a second.
“Oh, to be inside your head, Steve. You’re not going to run away again?”
Steve shakes his head, blinking his eyes open again. Danny’s close.
“Good,” Danny says before he leans in and bridges the distance between the two of them, his eyes fluttering close a second before Steve’s as they kiss, and there’s a raw edge to the softness, quickly expanding as Danny’s hands curl under Steve’s jaw and Steve threads his fingers through Danny’s hair, testing its silkiness. They pull away before Steve can pull Danny on his lap and reopen his stitches, and Danny brushes his thumb along Steve’s cheekbone, his grin devious.
“Wanna discover what color I sound when I come?”
Steve groans. “Oh, gladly.”
delicataleRecipient:
willow_fae_20Title: Your voice fading to pale
Rating: PG-13
Pairing(s)/Character(s): Steve/Danny
Summary: Steve has reasons to run. But when he can’t find the colors of Danny’s voice anywhere else than close to Danny, he comes home.
Warnings: n/a
Word Count: 3,819
Disclaimer: All Hawaii Five-0 characters herein are the property of CBS. No copyright infringement is intended. All characters engaging in sexual activity are 16 years or older.
Author's Notes: Written for
willow_fae_20 for h50_exchange! Hope you enjoy! I apologise for the lack of Grace. Thanks go to tailoredshirt for the beta.Steve closes his eyes, tilts his head up and lets the flashes of green and yellow of the wind rustling through leaves and small animals create, letting the symphony of rhythm and colors lull the pain to a dull throb in his leg. There’s a drop of sweat rolling down along his temple, and it’s hot, it’s ridiculously hot and damp, despite being the middle of the night. Someone shakes him lightly and Steve blinks his eyes open, focusing on the face in front of him instead of the bursts of color at the edges of his vision.
“You’ll be okay, Smooth Dog?”
It’s just a whisper from Einstein, tainted with light brown and full of worry. Steve smiles, as big as he can, and nods. It’s just a graze, he’s not bleeding out to his death and when he doesn’t think about it, it almost doesn’t hurt. Just a graze, yet Steve knows Danny will give him Hell for it anyway.
“I’m fine.” Steve’s voice sounds raspy and dry but it doesn’t hurt to talk. Just a few hours of rest and he’ll be good to go, get to the extraction point, get the fuck out of dodge, go home, and not leave again.
It’d made sense to jump on that mission when he’d been offered it - prison had made the shadows in Steve’s head sharper and more present than ever and he’d felt jumpy, angry, all too ready to start a fight with just about anyone when he got out. And then White, and his mission and his offer and Steve had seen the opportunity to let go of his pent-up frustration and anger, and he’d taken it.
Chin and Kono had made him promise to come back, and Danny had let him go, just asking him to be careful, something guarded in his eyes, his voice a deep red that Steve can still see when he focuses on the memory, even two months later, in the deep of the jungle, with so many other colors swirling around him.
They’re just not the same. Ever since he stepped out of the plane that took him from Honolulu to Coronado, all the sounds gave him washed-out colors, a little sad and less vibrant. He thought it’d be good for him.
But now he misses home.
;;;
“So, I’ve done my research.”
Steve looks up from his computer when Danny walks into his office, raising an eyebrow at him. His voice is a soft gold today, sounding amused and looking soothing.
“You did?”
“Synesthesia, huh? Which one’s yours? Numbers have colors or something?”
Oh, Steve should have known. Also, he should never have allowed Chin to show Danny the intricacies of Wikipedia.
“Sounds have colors, actually.”
“Hmm. So tell me, what color am I?”
Steve smiles to himself, already shaking his head. There is no way he’s divulging any of these little pieces of info, too much easy ammo for Danny.
“No.”
“Oh, come on! I have a right to know!”
Steve’s eyebrow arches up again, the tilts and accentuation of Danny’s voice turning a little orange, aggravation evident to Steve. He smiles, shakes his head, and turns back to his computer.
“No, Danny. Get back to work, I want a report on the Grahams case before 3.”
Danny grumbles. “I’m not letting this go, McGarrett.”
Steve just grins to himself.
;;;
The extraction point is this drab clearing in the middle of an US controlled zone and Steve sits in the shadows of the trees as he waits for the chopper to arrive. The sound of the rotors is a sparkling gray that makes Steve squint, but the louder it gets the closer Steve feels from home, and it makes the pain less harsh and his head less hazy.
He feels like he’s going to throw up - he’d ripped his makeshift stitches while sleeping, which resulted in unnecessary blood loss, and then there was the fact that they didn’t have had any breakfast, and the whole of it is making him feel sick, dazed. He’s lost the edge he used to have before his father died, mellowed by a year of Danny and his rants, Chin and his comforting looks, and Kono and her trusty roundhouse kick.
And here he was, unable to keep a bullet from grazing him, and feeling dehydrated and hungry and sick after three weeks in the jungle, like he never went through the BUD/s, like he’s been through worse. And still, instead of feeling angry and helpless, all he wants is a taste of his family again, of being somewhere he belongs to.
“Commander McGarrett?” The sailor that just ran from the back of the chopper grabs his arm securely when Steve nods. “Come on, Lt. Commander, let’s get you some medical attention.”
;;;
“Grace wants to do her science project about synesthesia, because of you.”
Danny’s voice is a rich dark yellow, like honey dripping down the edges of Steve’s vision, and Steve finds himself relaxing into it, leaning back into his chair, a cold beer held between two fingers. He’d lean into Danny and try to find all the different hues Danny can sound like, but - but.
“Does she want an interview? Because I wouldn’t mind.”
“Probably, yeah. I’ll get her to call you if she wants.”
Steve nods, tilting his head back to the dying sun, soaking in the last few rays as he watches the little sound of Danny’s breathing.
“I’ve picked up this book about it -”
“About what?”
“Synesthesia. It’s from Nabokov. The guy at the bookstore said it was great.”
Steve cracks one eye open. “You bought a book about synesthesia?”
Danny shrugs, and he seems almost embarrassed, looking away from Steve when he takes a mouthful of his beer. “Why not? You don’t talk about it, I wonder how it affects your performance on the field, and all that. Need to know if it can put me in danger.”
“So you bought Nabokov?” Steve turns his eyes back to the ocean. Danny’s full of shit and they both know it, but for some reason, Steve can’t bring himself to point it out. “For the record, it does not affect my performances on the field. Don’t worry, okay?”
“Okay.”
Steve nods, keeping all the questions, rolling around the light pink of Danny’s word behind his eyelids, to himself.
;;;
In the hospital, Steve dreams about his mom. He remembers the color of her voice, a rich purple that wrapped itself around him and made him feel warm, safe, when he was a kid. When he wakes up in his starched white sheets, he thinks back on her, on how her purple mixed and melted with his dad’s deep green so seamlessly.
Steve’s own voice doesn’t have a color. None of the sounds he makes do, and maybe it’s normal, he hasn’t thought of it all that much. But he can’t help but wonder, if it did have a color, would it weave itself around Danny’s like his dad’s used to around his mom’s?
It’s a stupid idea, but it’s been sticking to Steve like a second skin since he left Hawai’i. He can’t find any color as striking or enthralling as those Danny creates anywhere else, and it could just be a reflection of Danny, or it could be more, and Steve is tired of trying not to think about it. Right now, he’s got nothing else to do than to think about it, than to miss Danny.
Relaxing into the pillows, Steve watches the sparks of red and black from the beeping machines around him, the shuffling of feet along the corridor, the hushed whispers, some moans of pain. They’re not nice colors, bleeding out around Steve’s eyes, making him want them to disappear, making him want not to see, for once, be normal.
He realizes he’s rubbing at his eyes too hard when a nurse rushes to his side and pries his clawing hands off his face, her soothing words penetrating the haze of sensations and colors filling up his head, making him moan desperately. The panic attack takes him by surprise but there’s nothing he can do to fight it, sweat breaking out over his brow as the sounds multiply and burn him with aching colors.
The nurse sticks a needle in his IV before a headache starts pounding a rhythm against his temples, and Steve falls back asleep with the honey gold of Danny’s memories soothing him.
;;;
Danny’s angry. It’s obvious in the flush of his cheeks, the flurry of his hands, and, most importantly, the crimson tint of his words, the staccato rhythm of his attack on yet another reckless thing Steve has done creating sparks along Steve’s corners.
“You, you - are you even listening to me right now?”
“Huh? Oh, sure, Danno.”
Danny deflates as quickly as he inflated a few minutes earlier, when he started his monologue about how Steve should really not consider drowning suspects as a proved method of arrest.
“You could at least have the decency to listen to me rant at you, McGarrett, do you think I do it because I like it?” Steve almost replies to that, before allowing the words to just become an amused smile as he stops at a red light. “Why do I keep on thinking that, maybe, at some point, you will learn? I should know better, I really should, there is nothing I can do or say that will get you to act like a proper emissary of the law!”
Danny’s words are already lighter, bright and sharp because he’s loud, but his red is less deep, less aggravated. slowly turning to Danny’s usual orange-tinged annoyance.
“Emissary?”
“Yeah, why not, I’m not going to call you a policeman, am I?” Danny sighs, loud and long-suffering, and Steve’s smile twitches bigger.
“Yeah, okay.”
“Promise you won’t do it again?”
“The man was uncooperative, Danno!”
“Steve.”
This time, Steve is the one sighing, but as he starts the car again, keeping an eye on the now green light, he nods.
“Okay, okay, fine, I won’t do it again!”
Danny sits back, and when Steve throws him a look, he sees Danny’s smiling.
“Good. Hey, tell me something?”
“Hmm?”
“What color is my voice when I’m angry? Does it scare you?”
Steve laughs. “No, Danno.”
;;;
The doctors switch his meds when they realize they make him feel worse instead of better, but the whole deal of his panic attack and sleepless nights make them keep him under observation longer than Steve would like. He doesn’t like this place, doesn’t like the way it smells and tastes and sounds. He wants out, he wants to sit in his lana’i and have a beer with Danny, burrow himself in the comfort of these feelings.
It’d been a stupid idea, to accept this mission, and Steve can’t remember the reasons why he’d said yes to it in the first place. Bits and pieces come back to him when he’s awake, feeling like maybe he needed to uproot himself, that he’d spent too long in one place, that he was too mellow now.
But now, all he can think of is that, so what if he is mellowed out? What if he’s not as cold as he used to be - it surely can’t be a bad thing. For a while, during his time in the SEALs, he’d trained so hard to keep his feelings at bay and keep his sense sharp that he’d almost lost how to conjugate sounds and colors, letting the colors become flashes at the periphery of his vision, that he’d give no credit to.
It’d been coming back to Hawai’i, the sounds of the rifle shots at his father’s funeral - blackest of blacks - and Danny yelling at him - deep red and flecks of orange - that reminded him of what he had, and how special it was. Why did he want to throw it all away again? He has no more reasons to stay away.
It feels like a bruise blossoming in Steve’s chest when he realizes exactly what he’s done. He’s jumped at the chance out of habit, running away from things he didn’t feel ready to face. He rubs his knuckles against his chest, over his heart, a weird taste in his mouth. He’s done, now.
;;;
“Pink.”
“The waitress?”
Steve nods, stuffing half a pancake in his mouth, and Danny looks down at his own plate with a little smile.
“Does everything has a color? Say, if I scratch my fork on my plate?”
“No. And if you do that, I’ll have to punch you in the face.”
Danny raises an eyebrow at Steve, looking mildly amused by the threat, guiding a forkful of fluffy scrambled eggs to his mouth. Thankfully for Steve, sitting in front of him, Danny waits to have swallowed before speaking up again. He’s sounding a comfortable, pale yellow today.
“So, what, is it only voices or something?”
“No, not necessarily. Usually strident, or irritating noises don’t have colors, though. I don’t know, maybe it’s a selective thing. I know that, for some people, it’s only a few sounds that have colors, but I seem to have a wide range.”
“Must have been a pain when you were in the SEALs.”
“I...um. Yeah.”
Danny looks at Steve too sharply for it to be good for Steve. “What?”
“I kinda blocked it out? I mean, they were still there, but I learned not to pay attention to the colors anymore.”
Danny looks a little destabilized, his eyes flickering over Steve’s face, as if Steve just told him he moved from Jersey to Hawai’i because he wanted to. Steve can’t help but feel slightly embarrassed, like he’s done something wrong.
Danny plants his fork in his bacon, looking from it back up into Steve’s eyes. “But you pay attention to them again, now?”
His voice has grown richer, with emotions Steve is pretty sure he doesn’t want to reflect on too closely right now, moving towards a golden hue that would be blinding if it wasn’t so gorgeous. Steve dry-swallows, feeling warmth spread in his stomach.
“Yeah. Yeah, I pay attention to them again, now.”
;;;
Steve is waiting for the dots in the ocean to appear. Looking out at the space in front of him, it reminds him almost too much of the last time he was in a military place, going to Honolulu. Only this time nobody is dead and people are waiting for him.
He’s called Danny the night before, and refused for Danny to come pick him up, he’d be okay, he’ll be fine. Maybe he should have accepted, but Steve feels like he might need a few hours of getting reacquainted again with his life in Hawai’i before being able to face anyone, let alone Danny.
The pilot’s voice is a burst of blue around Steve’s head when he speaks to tower control, and Steve shakes himself out of his thoughts, seeing the string of dots that are the Hawai’ian Islands in the ocean.
“Should be twenty minutes, Commander.”
Steve nods, the nostalgia invading him a bittersweet taste at the back of his tongue. It’s all too much of the same, and yet it’s so thoroughly different he knows he probably shouldn’t feel this way. He’s stopped questioning his feelings, though, now, he’s done with that, ready to embrace them, now.
Steve runs the heel of his hand against his injured thigh, the pain sharp as the healing muscles and skin scream at him to leave it alone. He hisses through his teeth, and the resulting throbbing ache in his leg shakes him completely out of old thoughts of his father and funerals and unresolved feelings.
He’s coming home, now, done with the running and the being scared and the hiding himself away. He should have known the minute he’d heard Danny’s voice and it exploded a bright red into his eyes, a color so vivid Steve didn’t know what to do with it, having lost the habit of them being this fierce. From the moment they met, Steve should have known that there was no way he could be turning away from this, from Danny’s range of honey to crimson, from Grace’s happy pink, from Chin’s deep blue, from Kono’s confident, sexy burgundy; the way they all worked together, painting Steve’s family in vibrant colors.
;;;
It’s fully dark when Steve hears the front door of his house open and close, the alarm code being punched in. He doesn’t move from his spot on the lana’i, the beer he’s been pretending to drink for a few hours now warm under his fingertips.
“Hey. Shouldn’t be sitting down? I’ve been told you were injured.”
Steve can hear the little insult that doesn’t cross Danny’s lips at the end of his sentence, a lilting note of orange cut off abruptly through the yellow. Steve turns around, watches Danny for a moment, because he wants to make sure his memories match up to the real thing, once again. It’s only been a little more than two months, but it feels like so much longer.
“I’m okay. Stretching the muscles.”
“Hmm. Hey, so, I brought beer and fried chicken.”
Danny drops a six pack and a KFC bucket on the table, looking for all to see like he was invited to join Steve tonight. He wasn’t - Steve hasn’t asked anyone to come over yet, he’s only landed a few hours ago, but he should have guessed four hours would be the best Danny can do.
“Thanks. I got beer, though.”
“Yeah, well, you can stock it, that’s the beauty of it. Steve?”
“Hmm?”
“How are you?”
“I’m okay.” He is. Danny nods.
“Okay. Good. I’m okay, too, by the way. Been busy since you left.”
“I’m sure you’ll fill me in soon enough.”
Danny sits heavily on one of the wood chairs around the table, fingers plucking the cardboard top off the fried chicken bucket. “Yeah. Not tonight, though. Is there anything you can tell me about your mission?”
Steve tries drinking some more of his beer, but it’s grown flat and too warm. He leaves it on the table, watching Danny pluck a leg out of the bucket and bite into it.
“Not much. There’s something, though.”
“Yeah?” Danny, when curious, sounds dark pink.
“I can’t find anyone else that has a range of colors. Even on the other side of the world.”
Danny leaves the half-eaten piece of chicken on the overturned top of the bucket, looking up at Steve with confusion written plainly over his face.
“What?”
Steve takes his time to formulate an answer, watching the ebb and flow of the tides for a while, instead of looking at Danny.
“My Mom, she sounded purple, and my Dad green. Chin’s sort of a Royal blue, and Kono’s this rich dark red. Gracie is pink but I suspect it’ll darken as she grows up. Rachel sounds turquoise. They all have this one color, and it changes and flickers, but you -” Steve takes a deep breath, licking his lips as he sits in front of Danny, who’s looking at him with his lips parted and his eyes wide.
“You, you have a range. When you’re happy, you’ve got this honey, golden yellow, that grows paler and paler when you’re worried. And when you’re annoyed, you sound orange. When you’re angry, you go towards a strong red. Sometimes it’s really hard to pay attention to anything else, and even when you try to hide it, I can always tell what mood you’re in because of it.”
Danny closes his mouth, and Steve’s stomach bottoms out, not sure he’s managed to say exactly what he’s trying to convey. The chicken is left abandoned in between them.
“And - and I left, I said yes to that mission because I got scared. Suddenly I was settling down and I’ve not done that for 10 years, so, so maybe that was my version of a freak out. But then I couldn’t find anything, or anyone that had a range like you.”
He wants to say more, how it was thinking about Danny’s colors that made the nights so gorgeous, out there in the jungle, how the memories kept him going after he got shot, how he couldn’t understand why he was scared, or what he was scared of. But the words crowd his tongue, the back of his throat, but refuse to come out. In the end he deflates, looking away.
The silence stretches between the two of them, and Steve starts fidgeting, daring a look towards Danny, only to see him looking perfectly serene, fingers tented under his chin. When Steve looks at him again, and holds his gaze, Danny makes a little noise at the back of his throat.
“This is the most convoluted sort-of declaration I’ve ever heard, and that includes a lot of chick flicks, because Rachel has guilty pleasures,” Steve blinks at the faint smile on Danny’s face, following Danny around when Danny stands up and moves to the chair closest to Steve’s. “But you know what? I’ll take it, because I guess, as declarations go, that one is pretty special.”
He sounds this very honey golden Steve talked about earlier, filling Steve up with warmth. He’s missed it, and he closes his eyes to make the most of it, feeling Danny’s fingertips against his eyelids and eyebrows for a second.
“Oh, to be inside your head, Steve. You’re not going to run away again?”
Steve shakes his head, blinking his eyes open again. Danny’s close.
“Good,” Danny says before he leans in and bridges the distance between the two of them, his eyes fluttering close a second before Steve’s as they kiss, and there’s a raw edge to the softness, quickly expanding as Danny’s hands curl under Steve’s jaw and Steve threads his fingers through Danny’s hair, testing its silkiness. They pull away before Steve can pull Danny on his lap and reopen his stitches, and Danny brushes his thumb along Steve’s cheekbone, his grin devious.
“Wanna discover what color I sound when I come?”
Steve groans. “Oh, gladly.”
