Fair Game, H50, 1/1

[gilascave]

Title: Fair Game
Author: james
Recipient: perspi
Pairing: Danny/Steve/Chin
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1800
Disclaimer: not mine, no profit made
Notes: Thanks to embroiderama for the beta! No kittens were harmed in...er.. No, nevermind. Some were.
Summary: Danny has a family which is neither normal, nor particularly easy on the nerves. As usual, he's blaming Steve.



Danny wandered into the living room, took in the scene with a casual glance -- couch potatoes playing video games wasn't a completely surprising event in this household, though more often he was tripping over surfboards on the lanai. Well, actually more often he was standing on the shoreline shouting that they were all going to miss lunch and if they didn't get their butts onshore and in the house inside of twenty minutes he was feeding their lunches to the sharks. When had he become his mother, Danny wanted to know.

But not much farther down the list from corralling his family out of the ocean, was finding them parked on the couch playing video games. He didn't even make much note of it until he caught sight of the TV screen.

Danny stopped, stared for a moment as the figures on the screen beat the crap out of something small and furry, then his jaw dropped as the monster rolled onto its back and died -- complete with animated ghost rising up out of its corpse.

"Are you kidding me?" he shouted, whirling on his soon-to-be-deceased something-they-still-didn't-have-a-name-for. Chin raised his eyebrows at him, looking as nonplussed as ever, holding the game controller in his hands. Beside him on the couch, Grace glanced up at him, fingers still pounding away at the buttons. Danny pointed at the screen. "Are you two seriously playing a game where the object is to kill cats?"

"Zombie kittens, Danno," Grace said happily, and she looked back at the TV again, tongue flicking out across her bottom lip as she concentrated on her next kill. "They're evil invaders!"

Danny turned his not-amused glare on Chin, who grinned and shrugged. "She said Rachel bought it for her. We're trying to get past the first three levels before Steve comes home and wipes us all out."

"He always wins," Grace agreed, nodding but not looking entirely put-out. "Even when I make him play the hardest level and I'm on easy mode. Well, I beat him at the gardening game, but that one was kind of boring." Grace wrinkled her nose, and Danny had to bite his tongue. He'd made her get that game because it had been rated appropriate for her age and was, according to all the reviews, utterly free of violence and even somewhat educational.

All four of them, taking turns, had managed to play for an hour before heading back outside to the water. The next day Danny had dropped the game off at the game store, not even waiting around to find out what the trade-in value was and took home a used copy of Unhinged 3. Grace had been forbidden to play it, of course, which meant she'd gotten all the way up to level twelve with Steve beside her shouting pointers and direction.

Steve, who was still not out of the doghouse for that one, now had Chin corrupting his precious daughter as well. Danny got his hands on his hips and asked himself when he'd become the only grown-up in the entire household.

"Am I the only one who remembers that we agreed on a certain level of forbidden gameplay until Grace was at least old enough to have a license for a real gun?"

Grace suddenly looked at him, smiling in that deceptively innocent way he had never, ever fallen for, except maybe once when she was four. Never again. "I can hunt now, if you got me a license. Uncle Steve says he'd go with me and be the non-hunting adult--"

Danny cut her off with a single finger, pointed right at her. She closed her mouth, started to pout, then an explosion from the game grabbed her attention and she went back to pounding on cats. Zombie kittens, Danny thought. Lord help them.

"Why are we even having this conversation?" he asked. "Why did your mother buy you this and where is Steven so I can yell at him, too?"

"He isn't back yet," Chin said, glancing at the screen. Danny saw his thumb jerk against the controller before returning his attention to Danny. "Told you, we're trying to level up before he gets home. He doesn't even know we have this, yet."

"And yet I find myself willing to believe this is all his fault, somehow," Danny retorted. "Tell me you two would not be playing games where you kill zombie cats, had you never in your life met Steve McGarrett."

"Then this is your fault," Chin said, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth.

"And how is this my fault?" Danny gestured at the TV, then folded his arms, waiting for an explanation.

Chin gave a half-shrug, looking guileless, which Danny could have told him only made him look as guilty as it did when Steve tried to same thing. They'd been practicing on each other, Danny just knew, because they were only getting worse in exactly the same ways. And still neither of them was as good at it as a toddler with cookie crumbs on her mouth.

Chin just said, "You're the one who got the three of us together. Which means we wouldn't be sitting here if it weren't for you."

"Oh, so this is my fault?" Danny just nodded. "So we should blame Rachel, because if she hadn't hit my car with hers, we would never have got together, had Grace, and ended up in Hawai'i."

Clearly repressing a grin, Chin nodded. "That sounds good, too."

"Perfect!" Danny clapped his hands together. "I love it when I can blame my ex-wife. She bought the game anyhow; it's obviously her fault."

"Mommy said that if you said that, I should say 'MegaDeath Racers Extreme'," Grace said, then she glanced over at him, confused.

"Which is a game you will never play, ever, not even when you are fifty. And just because I play stupid, violent games doesn't mean you are allowed to. Besides which, you were seven months old and the music and pretty colors distracted you from crying, which made it worth its weight in gold." Danny reached down for Chin's controller; Chin handed it to him without comment. Danny's thumb was poised over the 'pause' button, but -- because he wasn't completely heartless and clearly they'd already been playing, so the damage was already done -- he looked to see if they'd passed a save point or if Grace was close to finishing her current level. But he could feel the words rolling in his throat, about how they'd discussed this sort of thing: how to raise her, what sort of things she was and was not allowed to do.

All things considered, a cartoon video game was fairly minor, but Danny knew it was the principle of the thing. If they were going to ignore him about this, what else would they ignore him about? Grace was going to be a teenager soon enough, and the questions and problems would only get exponentially harder.

Danny had had to fight with himself more than anyone, when the three of them had made that final step and moved in together, letting a handful of people know they were a family. He'd had to ask himself if he wanted to retain the final word over how his daughter was raised, or if he could admit that Chin and Steve were going to be part of her family regardless, and as such deserved the right to have an active hand in raising her. Compromise had been easier when it had been he and Rachel raising an infant; it had been nearly impossible when he'd had to watch Step-Stan become part of his daughter's life.

He knew Chin and Steve would never let anything hurt Grace. He'd seen just how much they loved her, too, from watching them over the long summer weeks when they'd had Grace every day and night. It was just that Steve's definition of protecting her meant teaching her how to be prepared, and Chin's definition was to let her make her own choices and be ready to step in afterwards to fix what went wrong. It was aggravating and nerve-wracking and, Danny swore, the final test of his dedication to this poly-whateverous thing that he hadn't grabbed his daughter and run back to Jersey the first time Chin and Steve came back from taking her spear fishing. Dripping wet and beaming and holding a speargun that was as tall as she was and Danny had nearly had a heart-attack right there, and no amount of good cooking had made the fish they'd brought home taste like anything other than fear and salt water.

He'd told Grace the fish was awesome, told Steve and Chin later they were never, ever to do that again, and secretly it had been the most amazing fish he'd ever tasted. Three weeks later all four of them had gone spear fishing and Danny still didn't know how he'd ended up underwater, as well, or how he'd managed to spear an actual fish.

Regardless, Danny was of the mindset that Grace should be protected from anything that might hurt or upset her, but he knew that would mean locking her in her bedroom for the next seven years. Short of being allowed to actually do that, he had to trust those around her to do their best by her. And sometimes that meant letting them play video games that had no redeeming features at all, and in fact taught his precious little girl to kill cartoon alien zombie kittens, and made him listen to her laugh gleefully as she pounced on the next one to make it vanish in a sparkle of pink smoke.

Maybe there were some limits he would impose anyhow, Danny thought, and he started to press the 'pause' button.

"Hey, is that Zombie Cats From Outer Space?" came Steve's voice over his shoulder, and Danny didn't jump as the man appeared practically behind him. Steve grabbed the controller out of Danny's hand, slipped past him and sat down on the couch beside Grace.

"You can't play yet, Uncle Steve!" she shouted, even as she flung a zombie cat's head off a bridge, using her elbow to run interference with Steve's grip on the controller. "Not until I find the scout ship and blow it up!"

"All right, all right. I'll just watch for now." Steve settled himself onto the couch, Grace on the edge between him and Chin. Steve reached over, brushed his fingers against Chin's arm in greeting, then leaned back and stared, fixated at the TV screen.

With a sigh, Danny dropped his face into his hands. Somehow he knew that back in Jersey, his mother was laughing hysterically at him.