Work Text:
There is an order to their mornings—barring 0300 phone calls from the governor or someone hurling grenades at his front door, Steve's woken when his alarm goes off at 0600. He allows himself a moment or two to press a kiss to whichever bit of Danny (elbow, shoulder, temple) is poking out from beneath the covers; by 0602, he's padding down the stairs, grabbing his trunks from the laundry room and heading out for his morning swim. This particular morning, however, he's woken at 0558 by Danny tugging the covers from him and saying, "Rise and shine, sleepyhead; time and yadda yadda wait for no birthday boy."
Steve keeps his eyes closed, huffs out a sigh and curls his toes against the sudden absence of warmth. "Danny—"
"No tone, Steven, not this morning. Do not give me a tone on your natal day." For a man who's been known to declare getting out of bed before 0800 on a weekend a violation of the Geneva Convention, Danny sounds suspiciously cheerful.
Steve cracks open one eyelid. Yeah, that grin is definitely on the smug side. With the exception of a couple of spectacular blowjobs in the back of his truck, few good things have happened to Steve in the immediate aftermath of that grin. "You're not going to make me do paperwork on my birthday, are you?"
Danny rolls his eyes. "I'm going to put that one down to the sleep deficit you're running, babe, I will be magnanimous and ignore it. Come on, put your trunks on, we're going outside."
Steve sits up, focuses for the first time on what Danny's wearing. Swim trunks—not that godawful pair of denim cut-offs he wore on the few occasions Gracie's coerced him into swimming with her, but a pair of actual, honest-to-god swim trunks. "What are you—"
"Surprise," Danny says, grabbing him by the hand and tugging him out of bed, "you'll see."
They step out onto the lanai just as the sky is starting to shade into grey in the east. There's a breakfast already set out on the small table—a pot of what smells like Steve's favourite tea, a French press full of coffee, bowls of oatmeal and fruit, a tall jug of juice; even one of the smoothies Steve loves and Danny swears is an invention of Satan—and beyond, there's something planted in the sand that makes Steve laugh.
"Isn't two surfboards sort of overkill?" Both are wrapped in ribbon and oversized red bows, and from the lines of them, Steve can guess the maker—a local guy who handcrafts all his boards, and work that good doesn't come cheap.
"Ah," Danny says, bouncing on the balls of his feet, the way he inevitably does when he's excited. "A misapprehension—a reasonable one, sure, but only one's for you." He gestures at the one on the left, the taller one with the go faster stripes down the middle. "That's yours. One on the right's for me."
Steve blinks down at him. He knows that Danny's had a lesson or two from Kono, back when Gracie went through a brief surfing craze, but he hadn't thought Danny'd persisted once her first enthusiasm abated. Certainly he hadn't thought Danny had progressed far enough to be thinking of buying his own board.
"You keep making that face," Danny says, "you'll stick like that, stop gaping, you look like a guppy. So here's the deal. You, sit! Eat. I slaved in the kitchen over that for, like, a whole twenty minutes, be grateful. While you do that, I'm going to give you what we call a tutorial."
"Oh really?" Steve says. He can't help a smile from creeping across his face; never has been able to, not when Danny's in a mood like this.
"Yes, really," Danny says, smacking a kiss on Steve's cheek before jogging down the steps and picking up his board. "It's going to get real Jersey up in this piece," he yells back over his shoulder.
Steve shakes his head, laughs a little to himself; sits down at the table and pours himself a cup of tea while watching Danny as he paddles out into the surf. Danny's not the best surfer Steve's ever seen—couldn't be, not when Steve's grown up around people who've devoted their whole lives to the sport—but there's no denying that he's a quick learner. He moves efficiently through the water, and Steve admires the powerful line of his shoulders, the way his hips work as he carves his way through the water. The surf's good this morning, and as the rising sun turns the water blue, Danny rides three, four, five waves in to the shore.
By the time Danny comes back, he's soaked and panting; when he leans in over the table to steal a strawberry from Steve's plate, he drips saltwater everywhere. Steve swats at his hand as a matter of principle, says, lightly, "Excellent tutorial, Danny, I'm very impressed"; knows that he's betrayed a little by his tone of voice, from which he can't quite manage to excise his sense of pride.
"Thank you," Danny says, over-enunciating and grinning and popping the strawberry in his mouth.
Steve drinks some more of his tea, then gestures at the surfboard with his spoon. "I'll have to take it out in a bit—thank you. It's a great gift."
"Pfft," Danny says, leaning back in his chair, his coffee mug cradled against the wet planes of his belly. "You're telling me that my display of surfing wasn't the best part of your present?"
Steve glances over at him, about to make some flippant remark, could watch you shred all day long, babe, but there's something in the set of Danny's jaw that stops him. Danny's not joking, not really. He pauses to consider while he finishes the rest of his oatmeal, tries to work out what Danny means by it. It must be something important, that's plain; but beyond that, it has to be something that Danny's afraid to speak bluntly about, and there are very few areas in life where reticence is a hallmark of his. And those are areas where reticence had become a learned instinct, a reaction, and so Steve clears his throat and says, looking out at the ocean, with all the careful delicacy of a surgeon about to make the first incision, "So Kono taught you?"
Danny shrugs. "Figure she owed me one, after that whole thing with the zip line and the Saudi Ambassador."
"You and Grace?"
Danny shifts in his chair. "Just me."
"Uh huh," Steve says. He squints out at the horizon, the faint line where blue vanishes into blue, and then turns to look at Danny. "And you decided to learn because?"
"Well," Danny says, scratching the side of his nose, "I figured if I was going to be sticking around, you know, I should do a when in Rome sort of thing, and you seem to like it, so, you know."
Something bubbles giddily in Steve's stomach, but he ignores it in favour of saying, as nonchalantly as he can, "I see."
"We've already had a discussion about tone this morning," Danny says, "with your I see, like what, all the effort I put in here was nothing, no big deal, predictable?" His hands wave while he speaks, but there's no bite to his words at all and there's a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.
Steve finishes the last of his tea. "So if I ask you if this means you've finally listened to sense and stopped looking for a new place?"
Danny sniffs, waves a hand magnanimously, looking as regal as a king on a throne despite the way the salt water is making his hair dry in stiff curls. "I would say that I decided that it would not be charitable of me to deprive you of my presence, so I told the agent a couple of days ago that she could stop looking for me."
"You're very benevolent," Steve says.
"So I've been told," Danny says.
He's grinning like he's got the better part of the deal, and Steve knows that's not true, couldn't ever be true—so he leans in and pauses just for a moment, just a bare inch away from Danny's mouth, until Danny's eyelids start to flutter closed and Steve gets that hot kick of excitement in his gut all over again, same as the very first time they kissed. "I love you," he says, "you got that, right? I know I don't say it enough, but I—"
Danny's mouth is hot and wet against his; Danny's hand a familiar, callused weight against the nape of his neck. "Yeah," he says, "yeah, I got it, you big lug," and this close his eyes are the brightest blue Steve's ever seen. "Happy birthday."