#my fandom references are getting so convoluted soon even i won't be able to decipher them

[itwoodbeprefect]

for the prompt request - undercover as a couple, mcdanno? (or, if that doesn’t work for you, mcdanno bodyswap maybe? idk idk, it’s straight crack but god i love bodyswap fics)

Fdfjdk I would have loved to have written undercover as a couple while bodyswapped for you, but I’m honestly not sure if I’ve read a single bodyswap fic in the last ten years, so I wouldn’t even know where to begin with that trope. Undercover as a couple it is! Sort of. Even that got a little weird, maybe.

>>> Read it on ao3 here

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“What kind of world do we live in, anyway,” Danny asks, shaking open a paper from yesterday someone must have left behind, “where gay hitmen are a thing?”

Steve’s been perusing a National Geographic. He licks his index finger to turn a page. “What, would you rather have homophobic hitmen?”

“I’m just saying it would make a little more sense, you know. Instinctively.”

Steve lifts his magazine to tap the glossy cover. There’s a dramatic picture of a whale in the familiar yellow frame, with a month and a year printed all the way at the top. “It’s 2021, Danny. Two guys can get married and still do freelance work for the mob.”

“Until we arrest them,” Danny reminds him. “And Tani gets into their Google Calendar and it lets us know that they had a first meeting with another client in Hawaii planned this afternoon.” He gives up on the paper and folds it again. Way too much of a cliché for an illicit meeting, anyway. “Which all sounds like fiction. You know that all sounds like fiction, right?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Steve says, turning another page in his National Geographic, like he’s actually reading it, here, in a dentist’s waiting room, while they’re trying to impersonate the married hitmen they arrested this morning. Danny supposes there’s nothing that says a hitman can’t have a passion for nature. Probably good for climate change, knocking a few people off the Earth every now and then. “As long as whoever’s meeting us here buys it.”

Danny glances at his watch. “They’re about to be late.”

About to be, but it never gets that far - one of the three doors in the far wall swings open. Out steps a tall white man, greying, with a good haircut, and exactly the look one would expect a dentist to have. Little more handsome than average, maybe. “Rafferty and O’Brien?”

Danny doesn’t frown, because that might be suspicious, but he hopes this isn’t their guy. He pushes the glasses he had lying around from his stint as professor Jeffries back up his nose.

They get up perfectly in sync, like they planned it that way. Steve tosses the National Geographic back on the pile of magazines on the little side table. “I’m Rafferty,” he says, his hand finding the small of Danny’s back, “he’s O’Brien.”

“Of course. I’m Dr. Vos.” Danny already knew that, but he smiles dutifully and shakes the this-man-has-definitely-been-to-a-tanning-salon-even-though-he-lives-in-Hawaii hand he’s offered. “Come on in.”

They follow Dr. Vos into the dental treatment room. It’s a familiar sight: crisp white decor, cabinets along the walls, a large window looking out onto the little park alongside the building, and the large dark blue leather chair as a central piece.

Steve lets Danny go through the door first, which is suspicious until Danny remembers the parts they’re playing. He has to be someone who’s willing to take money to kill another human being, and also be in love with Steve. It’s a very layered role.

Apparently, Steve has decided that his interpretation of Rafferty includes having manners. Must be hard, playing a character that’s such a far stretch from Steve’s actual personality.

Dr. Vos sits down in the wheely chair he uses when he’s working on a patient and studies them for a moment. “I have to admit to some curiosity,” he says, and Danny thinks shit and has to keep his hand still to not go for the fake glasses again or the real gun strapped to his ankle. High class hitmen aren’t twitchy. Dr. Vos continues, “Neither of you took the other’s last name?”

Steve glances at Danny. “We became partners first, then we got married,” he says, and it sounds very natural. Danny blinks. “We already had a reputation at that point. Would’ve been bad for business.”

“Ah,” Dr. Vos says, giving a rueful little smile. His teeth are an excellent advertisement for his practice. “Very smart. Marriage can certainly be complicated in the most unexpected of ways, can it not? Especially on a fiscal level.” He sighs, turns his chair, gets a little frame from a corner of one of the cabinets, and turns back to them. “This is my wife,” he says, handing over the frame.

Steve takes it, so Danny gets close up against his side to have a look. He grabs Steve’s wrist to turn it a little for a better view and then doesn’t let go. Steve drops an arm along Danny’s shoulders to accommodate him. “Pretty,” Danny says, even though the woman in the picture looks like her husband is a plastic surgeon, rather than a dentist.

“Yes,” Dr. Vos agrees absently. He reaches behind to get something else from the cabinet: an unmarked white envelope that appears to contain a pretty thick stack of paper. “Unfortunately I’ve done the calculations, and it’s really not cost-effective to go through a divorce. The friend that referred me to you informed me of your going rates - I assume paying half now and half after the job is done is acceptable?”

Danny sneaks a glance at Steve. They’ll need a little more than that. “Which job?” he asks, taking one for the team.

Dr. Vos looks at him like he’s a little disgusted by how stupid that question is. “Killing my wife.”

It’s really, really nice when criminals are inept enough to state their criminal intentions out loud. Dr. Vos makes a grab for a very sharp instrument from his little dentist’s tray when they try to grab him, but Danny is quicker, foregoing his gun in this tiny indoors space to tackle their perp to the floor and pin him there, knee between the shoulder blades.

“Ugh,” Danny says, and really means it.

Steve has put down the little photo frame of the intended victim and is sweeping up some of the money that fell form the envelope when Dr. Vos dropped it in the scuffle, but he pauses and looks Danny over, sharply, at Danny’s verbal complaint. “You okay?” There’s a glint of gold on Steve’s finger, where his hand still hovers in the air just over the money on the floor. The ring doesn’t look half bad on his hand.

Danny shakes his head. “No. Wanna hear something that sucks? This is my dentist.”

Dr. Vos frowns, handsome face pressed against the floor. “That’s a lie. I’ve never seen-”

Danny takes off his glasses. There’s a gasp from the guy under him, even though Danny’s knee is still in his back and to see anything Vos needs to twist his neck at an angle that looks uncomfortable.

“What?” Steve asks, a little annoyed, while passing Danny a pair of handcuffs. God knows where he was hiding those. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

Danny yanks Dr. Vos’s hands close enough together to cuff him, and then pulls him into an upright sitting position on the floor. “I was hoping it would just be the girl working the front desk, or something.”

Steve shakes his head like he can’t believe it. “She looked like a student. How’s she going to pay for college and a pair of hitmen?”

“I don’t care. Now I have to find a new dentist.” Like life isn’t scarring enough without a guy who’s been in your mouth with a little drill turning out to be a murderer.

“Use mine.” Steve offers a hand - the one with the ring on it, Danny notes - and pulls Danny up from his crouch. “They’re popular, but I’m sure they’d be able to squeeze in their favorite patient’s spouse.”

“Why are you their favorite patient? Your teeth are perfect, what do you need-” Danny pauses in the middle of his sentence and decides on a different thing to focus in on. Steve has this unique ability to include at least two or three preposterous implications in everything he says. “Wait, you know we’re not actually married, right?”

“Yeah, I know,” Steve says, and Danny can breathe again, letting go of the horror stories unfolding in his head in which Kono set their cover up so well she hacked some government servers to file legally binding marriage certificates. Marriage is one bad idea - being married off is a way worse one.

“You’re not?” Dr. Vos asks, from the floor. He sounds genuinely surprised. 

They both ignore him. Steve continues, “But we’re pretty good at pretending that we are.”

Danny looks at the ring on his own finger. It, too, perhaps does not look completely terrible, which is a strange thought to be having post-Rachel.

He slips it off anyway, but then lets it drop into his shirt pocket, instead of Steve’s again outstretched hand. Steve doesn’t protest, even though he’ll probably have to explain to the Governor why the wedding bands they requisitioned were never returned. “I’ll keep this close for now,” Danny says, with a pat to his shirt. “Might need it in the future.”

Steve grins. “Good thinking, buddy.”

“Ugh,” Danny’s ex-dentist says, and this time he seems to really mean it. “What kind of world do we live in, anyway?”

Danny pats Steve on the ass on the way out, just to show him.