TITLE: The Uncommonly Happy Disposition of Kono Kalakaua
AUTHOR: Doqz
SHOW: Hawaii 5-O
ARCHIVE: Please ask.
DISCLAIMER: Main characters mentioned belong to CBS. No profit is being made.
Kono "Kona" Kalakaua has one, albeit quite insurmountable, problem. She's perfectly happy.
But then it's not a new condition for her; she has always been very open to the idea that her life was pretty damn awesome. It is, after all, hard to bitch about growing up in Paradise.
It's not a never-ending parade of unicorns of course, and Kona still cries sometimes, before sleep, when she catches a glimpse of Ian's picture on her windowsill.
And she knows perfectly well that Chin has warned Danny and Steve to walk gingerly around her when the rain season starts. Kona has no real problem with it - fair is fair. Her knee... twinges in bad weather, and she's no great fun to be around about then.
Boys deserved a warning. Could be worse. Some of her fellow cadets at the Academy figure it is the height of humor and ingenuity to map out hers and the rest of the girls' in her class periods and post the 'Bitch Calendar' online.
But then, by that time, that was more or less what she has come to expect from the HPD. Unfair, perhaps - but Chin's hurt is still fresh then, and some of her own bruises are just blooming.
Kona never tells him that her hazing goes far beyond normal. But then she doesn't have to. Chin knows, knew before she ever entered the Academy. He warns her, she promises she can handle it, and he backs off.
That is, after all, why he is her favorite relative.
There are no quiet visits to her tormentors from him, no pulled strings, no macho games. He has her back, but he trusts her to keep her promise.
And Kona does.
She's been fighting for the waves since she was five, after all, and her kupuna kane puts Kona on her first board.
She collects demerits like they were postcards her first month, and is not shy to ask advice. Not from Chin - no sense in pushing his restraint too far, after all. But John McGarrett takes her out for a beer and, in between discussing the football season, mentions, in passing, that his philosophy has always been to hit first, hard and below the buckle.
Kona laughs and agrees heartily.
By the fifth week or so, her left hook is quietly admired and her propensity to start any physical confrontation with a crotch-kick is widely known. The calendar disappears quickly somewhere around that point.
Life proceeds apace and she's happy.
A lot of people in her life are dead certain that cop-work is her aspirin, something to do while grieving over her knee, over the life that never was. Even Chin, who should really know her better than that.
The truth is that she has been planning to be a cop ever since she was thirteen, and her big, awesome cousin listened to her gravely and promised to find out why Mary Jenkins was showing up in school with bruises after every visit with her Mom and Stepdad.
She is a brat, of course. Even excusing most of the grief she gives him then with the fact that Kona *was* thirteen, she is a perfectly horrid little beast for that brief (yet, among her kin, quite vividly remembered) period during her mid teens.
Yet she understands even then. She remembers Chin's face, after Mary runs up to him after the Coolidge game and throws her ice-cream in his face, slapping and scratching. His uniform - of which he is still covertly but oh so painfully obviously proud - covered in stains, tears and mucus of a hysterical teenage girl, whose mother has just been arrested for abuse.
Chin holds Mary gently but firmly, and the look in his eyes makes Kona want to cry for him. And Mary. And the unfairness of the entire world.
She sees, she understands, even then. And deals with some of the fallout herself. Mary doesn't talk to her again, until the high school prom.
Kona remembers, and thinks, and plans. Surfing career was never going to be long-term. For all the talk and hooplah around her, she knows her own worth. She's good. But only that, not good enough to rise above the pack, to make splash so big that it will carry her for the rest of her life.
And, in the end, another professional surfer is not what Mary Jenkinses of the Island need. But perhaps another Chin...
She thinks she's prepared for the job. For what it means to walk through life as a distanced, marked figure of fear and dislike. Chin is honest about it all, and he has few illusions himself by the time their talks grow serious.
In the abstract the 'boys and girls in blue' are feted heroes, he tells her. Glory and honor. In theory.
But on the street...
Chin drums those long, deceptively graceful fingers on his desk and shrugs.
On the street you are a guy with a gun and the uniform, and your authority over the civvies is too great for them to love you. Fear. Respect, if you are lucky. More often simply resentment.
Is she ready for that?
Kona is not fool enough to lack doubts. But she thinks she's ready. That she can make the transition from a surfing queen to a beat cop.
And, after all, Chin himself tells her that for every asshole on the street she'll have a new brother in blue, a family behind her back. A new tribe.
And then she comes back home.
It takes months for her to drag Chin out of himself. And even then he would only fully wake up once Steve comes back and gives him back the life.
Months of determined disregard of Chin's new, sad, scary way of seeing life as something that just happens to him.
Months of making him cook her dinner and teach her choke holds.
Months of tricking him into going surfing with her.
But she knows that he's in there, somewhere; under this new, broken and badly-healed Chin. So she sticks with it. And wins in the end. Because eventually she always does.
Life always works out in the end, if you put your mind to it.
The H5O is proof enough of that, if there ever was.
The only drawback - beside the increasingly suspicious frequency with which her bikini keeps being integral to the mission - is the fact that she's surrounded by a trio of dedicated stress-freaks.
The boss - fondly treasuring his delusion that his crazy-ass quest to grow up into Inigo Montoya is a secret - spends most of his time trying to get Danny killed. Which is problematic, since Kona knows within first five seconds of meeting him that 1 - she is going to get him into bed, and 2 - he might be the real deal.
But it turns out he's from New Jersey and over the next weeks Kona slowly realizes what that means.
A lot of work.
And she's much too young and pretty, she decides, to undertake the reclamation of yet another cop with Issues. Personally, Kona feels she has her hands full with Chin.
When she finds out about his and Danny's regular drinking sessions she's about equal parts pissed and terrified. The combined psychosis inherent in that dynamic boggles the mind and is almost enough to drive her to her very own alcoholic adventure. And it hurts, just a little, that they didn't invite her.
But she likes Grace. And underneath the weirdness and damage, she still likes Danny.
And she loves her job. Loves everything about it - from gross crime scenes and vaguely psychotic coroners, to the car-chases and shootouts. Loves it all.
She is still friends with some of her yearlings from the Academy, those few who had decided to overlook her brother, even after leaving the safety of the Academy's walls and getting co-opted by the Blue Machine.
They meet for drinks sometimes. It takes Kona a while to figure out that they feel as sorry for her as she does for them.
Maybe she should be worried. Their assessment, cribbed freely from the common wisdom of the HPD, mirrors that of Chin and Danny.
The H5O is not long for this world, they tell her. Soon it will all come tumbling down. And so they try to commiserate with her and offer plans, suggestions, advice for how to escape with her career intact.
Kona laughs and tells them about the time Steve taught her to make a detonator out of a toaster, shows them the trick to getting out of the leg restraints that Danny swears was taught to him by a retired mob hitman, and hustles them at darts that Chin taught her to play.
She takes them all night-surfing and they sit quietly on the boards, cross-legged and buzzed as they watch the moon sway across the sky. And Kona is happy, from inside out, deeply and utterly content with the rightness of it all, with the way her life is, where it is, and where it will be.
And then she grabs the half-finished six-pack and knocks on Danny's door.