Chapter 74

Baby Kaia stirred in her sleep again and Steve used the opportunity to adjust his position in the chair to stop the impending cramp from setting in. Luckily his movements didn't wake up his daughter and he let himself relax and his gaze drifted around the room. There were a number of framed photographs propped up on the mantel and one in particular caught his eye, it was an auto-timer shot that Kono had set up on her phone and then they all rushed into the frame before the countdown ended. They had been laughing as they jostled for position, Danny picking up Gracie and then at the last second the man mountain that was Kamekona had scooped up Danny and his daughter into a Williams sandwich. Steve grinned at his partner's outraged expression, the man could certainly do 'affronted' better than anyone he knew.

Steve remembered that the photo was taken just after his team had urged him to return to Five-0 and Chin had happily stood down so that Steve could take back the reins. It was bittersweet, as he had still been reeling from the death of Agent Greer and it was the night that he and Catherine had ended their relationship. He looked at his former love, who had just managed to get in the corner of the picture, her hair swinging across her face so that it was almost totally obscured. He let his thoughts dwell on Catherine and sighed sadly as he thought back to about 4 years ago when she had travelled to Afghanistan to help a family who had saved her when she had been badly wounded and separated from her unit during a tour of duty in the country. They were good people and Catherine had kept in touch with them over the years, trying to help them if she could. A panicked phone call from Amir and Farah Khan had her returning to the country to help them find their kidnapped son, Najib.

Steve supposed that had they still been together then she would have asked him to come with her. Instead the lieutenant had approached another Navy SEAL, Billy Harrington. Catherine and Billy had briefly been together before things got serious with Steve, but when they encountered each other again by chance at Pearl it was obvious that the spark was still there and they started dating again. The man had been making plans to leave the Navy and set up his own private security firm but Catherine had asked if he would stay in a little longer and arranged it so they would be stationed together. He was smitten with the lovely lieutenant and readily agreed, it wouldn't hurt to have a few more years of service under his belt and he was in the running for promotion to full commander. He duly got his promotion and the two of them became quite the power couple in their new commission on board the USS Enterprise and then, after the grand old ship was decommissioned, on one of the newer Nimitz-class aircraft carriers.

The details were classified but Steve learnt from Joe that the pair had travelled to the Baoakhan Province and picked up the trail of the Taliban, discovering that a splinter group under the command of Umar Hassan had taken Najib and a number of other young boys. The Navy thought that Hassan had been killed in a drone strike a couple of years before, but clearly that was not the case. Catherine and Billy had then ambushed a convoy of trucks and managed to free the boys, but Billy had been captured by the Taliban while giving his girlfriend time to get the boys out of the truck. Catherine had immediately called Steve, who informed the Navy and told them about the Taliban stronghold in the Panjshir Valley, along with the coordinates of what they suspected to be Hassan's compound. The higher-ups had been furious that active Navy personnel were in the region on an unsanctioned private mission, but Eddie had a quiet word in the ear of Admiral Janderman who in turn managed to convince them that if Catherine's intel was correct then they had another chance to take out a high-value target and rescue Commander Harrington at the same time. They had scrambled a SEAL Team to storm the compound and had been able to retrieve a badly-beaten Billy and confirm that Hassan was there but was definitely killed the second time they tried. They also took out all of the other high-ranking members of Hassan's splinter group.

The fallout had been brutal, ending Catherine and Billy's careers, although they escaped a military court-martial because the Navy wanted to keep their illicit mission completely under wraps. Catherine had been forced to return home without finding Najib; the boy had not been one of the kidnapped children whom she had rescued from the truck.

Billy had been badly affected by the experience. Whilst there was no doubting that he was an experienced Navy SEAL, nothing could've prepared him for being taken by the Taliban; he had been seconds away from a filmed beheading when the SEAL Team had burst into the room and killed everyone else present, bodies dropping all around him as he cowered on the floor. He had covered his ears with his hands to drown out the noise, not quite able to process that he was being rescued. Steve had visited his friend in the hospital when Billy was back on Oahu and quickly recognized that he was struggling, despite Billy putting on a brave face for his visitor. Before he left Tripler, Steve arranged for his psychologist to drop by and talk to the traumatized man, which had helped tremendously. The visible cuts and bruises soon faded, but the psychological scars took longer to heal and Billy was very grateful to Steve for his insistence that he seek professional help. He had also sustained a broken arm, but it was a simple break and had healed in a few weeks.

A couple of months later he felt well enough to set up his private security firm. Fortunately for him, the reason why he left the Navy was not on public record and he had to all intents and purposes 'retired' with a spotless service record. Billy had fully expected Catherine to join him in his new venture, but she felt compelled to return to Afghanistan to continue her search for the missing boy. Her best way of achieving this objective was to allow herself to be recruited by the CIA and in return for access to their resources for her personal mission she would stay with the Company for a further 5 years. With the full weight of the agency behind her, she was able to successfully reunite Najib with his grateful family in just a few short weeks. Billy had been distraught when she explained that she would not be staying, as she had already been given her next assignment before the wheels of the plane had even touched down on Oahu. It had broken her heart to have to leave Billy and the island behind, but it was the high price that she had been prepared to pay to get Najib back to his loving family.

Steve felt very sorry for the couple, Catherine had given up so much to help the people to whom she felt she owed a debt. She had told him during their very last night together that she needed to make a difference and he smiled as he realized that she was most certainly doing that. For Najib's family and then for all the other people that she had helped since then. He just hoped that she hadn't sacrificed her own happiness along the way.

It was at times like this, when Steve was surrounded by his family and had his sleeping daughter laid on his chest, that he let his thoughts drift to his mother and what might have been if she had only made different choices. Doris McGarrett was now being indefinitely detained in a secure institution, having been declared medically unfit to stand trial. The facility itself was lovely, with sweeping grounds that led down to the ocean and the patients were not treated like prisoners but rather like an extended family. The perceptive man wasn't sure how much was real or if there was an element of working the system to keep herself out of jail, but she was still 'imprisoned' whichever way you looked at it and perhaps she always had been; a prisoner of her own actions ever since she had watched with horror as a young mother got into her husband's car and drove away – completely unaware that the bomb sitting just below her in the chassis of the car would take her life and so much more.

He also wondered if the fallout from the incriminating evidence that had been stashed by his mother under their floorboards had come into play as well. The very promising careers of a number of high-profile former agents had mysteriously come to an abrupt halt and he knew that Shelburne had also been implicated in some highly dubious activities.

He had talked with Mary many times about whether to visit, but the feeling of abandonment was just too strong for his sister and she had decided that the past was just that – the past. It couldn't be changed or re-done. When Doris had kidnapped her brother then that had been the last straw for Mary, declaring the woman as dead to her. Steve had been torn, part of him trying to understand things from his mother's point of view. He had taken counsel from the Brown family, listening carefully as they talked him through the pros and cons of visiting his mother without passing judgment.

It was Eddie Brown who had accompanied him to the secure facility, providing quiet support as Steve faced his mother again for the first time since their bitter exchange of words in the log cabin. Anything that he had been thinking of saying left his head and instead he just pulled her into a desperate hug and clung to her like a little boy again. She had sobbed into his shoulder and whispered, "I love you so much, I'm sorry, baby . . . I'm so sorry."

At the end of the emotional visit, Doris asked him not to visit again. She had just wanted to hold him and tell him how much she loved him and now she had done that, she didn't want her son seeing her like this. Her last words were to remember her as the loving Mom who had taught him how to tie his shoelaces and sat next to him in bed as she read him a bedtime story. She implored him to only remember the good and let everything else be taken away like ashes in the wind until it was out of sight and forgotten.

He had mourned his loss with Mary Ann - their parents were now both gone. But they had their own families now and were busy creating their own legacies. The McGarrett family line would continue, eventually leaving all the bitterness and pain from the past far behind.

He stood up with baby Kaia still asleep in his arms and wandered out onto his lanai, Eddie getting up from the rug next to the chair and padding along beside him. Steve looked out across the grass to the pair of faded old wooden chairs. They had seen a lot, from the moment that as a 15 year old he had carried them through the house and first planted them in the sand of their private beach. He could see himself sat in them just shooting the breeze with Danny when they were both old men, bickering all the while they opened up their bottles of beer, leaning towards each other to clink them together in perfect unison. A little smile quirked on his lips and he kept walking until his feet were embedded in the wet sand and the small waves were washing over his toes as they advanced up the beach. Kaia woke up with a little splutter and he smiled at her before he turned and went back inside his house, which was finally a real family home again.

THE END