I'm so glad everyone continues to enjoy this ride I am taking you on! And I'm glad you like the fact that I brought Catherine into the fic…Kajal, I promise to try and treat her fairly!
Anna, did you sneak a copy of my outline? Because some of your insight is just too scary! Here is your Danny/Harper chapter! I was going to have it be a Kono/Harper chapter because I adore including a good "girlfriends" chapter in my fics…but I decided that Danny was going to work better for my needs. Plus, I just think Danny has so much more personality than Kono…I hope the show changes that soon!
So, here is a little more Steve/Harper backstory and some Harper backstory. But be careful believing everything Harper says in this chapter because she is going to learn a thing or two about her own past in the next chapter! Hold on tight gang, we're almost to the first big reveal…
Chapter Ten – Common Ground
"Divorce is the psychological equivalent of a triple coronary by-pass. After such a monumental assault on the heart, it takes years to amend all the habits and attitudes that led up to it."
~ Mary Kay Blakely
Hotel Bar, a few hours later...
"A beautiful woman sitting alone at a bar is one of my favorite sights."
Harper instantly recognized one of the new voices in her life and smiled as Detective Danny Williams sat on the barstool next to her. She had returned to her hotel, as she had told the 5-0 team that she would, but had only managed to make it to the bar area.
"Pink fruity drinks?" he scoffed, glancing at the ridiculously sweet concoction in her glass before signaling the bartender for a beer.
"Don't judge," she answered defensively, "Rum goes down much easier when it is mixed with fruit and obnoxious colored liqueur."
"You just didn't strike me as a girly drink kinda woman," he replied, looking around the room, "Or the drinking alone in a hotel bar kind woman, for that matter."
"Well, you obviously don't know that much about me then."
"That is correct," Danny said, taking a swig of the beer that suddenly appeared in front of him, "But one thing I do know is that you have had one hell of a week and the fact that you are not so intoxicated that you are falling off this barstool is a credit to your sense of self control."
"Thanks…I think," she drawled and then asked, "What are you doing here?"
"The first time I saw my ex playing kissy-face with her new husband, I ended up in a joint like this," he informed her casually, "although you don't get too many little paper umbrellas in the middle of Jersey."
Harper grinned and nodded before she said, "Thank you for coming to check up on me. But I know your loyalty is to Steve, so you don't really have to be nice to me."
"Steve is my partner," Danny agreed, "but until you arrived on the island, I had no idea he was ever married. Besides, you're not that hard to be nice to. Although the color of that girly drink may give me a headache after awhile."
"You ain't seen nothing yet," Harper informed him with a wicked smile, "they have a melon drink here that compares to the neon green color of that slime you skim off the top of a pond."
"Mmmm, yummy," he grimaced, taking another swig of his beer.
"Don't knock it till you've tried it," she retorted, "Besides, my drink choice is basically the only girly thing about me these days.
"Well, I wouldn't say that…"
Giving him a little shove with her shoulder, she laughed and said, "Don't be a perv."
"Well, don't give me that kind of opening!" he informed her joining in on the laughter, "You don't understand the intricacies of the male mind…"
"Oh no?" Harper smirked, "Explain it to me, I've got a minute."
This time it was Danny's turn to smirk as he turned to look at her and said, "You're a little bit crazy, you know that?"
"So I've been told."
"I like that."
She didn't know why the Danny Williams seal of approval suddenly meant so much to her, but for some reason it did so she smiled and joked, "Don't worry…it happens to the best of 'em."
They sat in comfortable silence for a little while longer before Harper blurt out, "Two years."
"Two years what?" he asked in confusion.
"Steve and I were married for two years," she explained, "but if you add up all the time we spent together in the same city, it was more like eight months."
"I didn't ask," he informed her smoothly, trying to hide the grin.
"Yeah, I know," she drawled, "And it was killing you, wasn't it?"
"Little bit," he answered, finally letting the grin spread across his face.
"What about you?" she asked, after taking a sip of her martini, "How long did your marriage last?"
"Longer than yours," Danny stated dryly, "We made it to the five year mark, but not much farther than that."
"And she's remarried?"
"To a millionaire Ken Doll, who moved her and my daughter, Grace, to Hawaii," he told her bitterly, "causing me to have to move to this God forsaken island to be near my kid."
"You moved all the way to Hawaii for your daughter?" she asked in surprise, "Wow."
"You moved to San Diego for Steve," Danny pointed out.
"Touché," Harper conceded and held up her glass in a mock toast to him. He held up his bottle to clink her glass and they both sipped their respective drinks before she asked, 'Do you know the most surprising thing about divorce?" When he shook his head in answer to her question, she told him, "It doesn't actually kill you. I mean, like a bullet to the heart or a head-on car wreck it should kill you dead. When someone you've promised to cherish till death do you part says 'I don't love you anymore,' it should kill you instantly. You shouldn't have to wake up day after day after that, trying to understand how in the world you had managed to screw everything up so completely."
"He told you that he didn't love you anymore?"
"Right before he walked out the door," she admitted, unable to look Danny in the eye anymore so she looked down at her drink. "It was humiliating. I just stood there and watched him go. My damn pride didn't even let me run after him. Although I probably should have been expecting it."
"Why is that?"
"It's been so easy for me to blame Steve for ending our marriage because he was the one who walked away," Harper explained with sadness in her voice, "But the truth is that while he was the one who walked out the door, I'm the one who flung it open for him."
There. She had finally said it out loud. To this virtual stranger sitting next to her on a barstool in Hawaii. She thought that it would have been harder to admit, but it turned out to be pretty easy. Yet she still couldn't bring herself to admit it to the person who really needed to hear it...her ex-husband.
Danny didn't ask the question that hung in the air between them and she gave him credit for that, so she decided to reward him by telling him the whole sordid story.
"I'm not good at the whole damsel in distress thing," Harper confessed, causing Danny to smirk and raise his eyebrow at her as she continued, "I was raised by a tough Chicago cop…it's not a role I was ever taught to play. I was taught to handle anything life throws at me and to never flinch. My dad taught me to be tough, strong, and independent and I learned my lessons well. I wasn't like other girls." The detective couldn't keep the emotion out of her voice as she added, "That's what I thought Steve liked about me. It's what I thought he loved about me."
"Well, he married you," Danny pointed out, "so I don't think you were wrong."
"And then he divorced me," she reminded him and then went on, "Did you ever that one case? The one that kept you up at night…the one that invaded your dreams and haunted your every waking moment?"
Danny nodded somberly, knowing exactly what she was talking about. Every cop had one. And they could ruin everything.
"Mine came in San Diego," Harper told him, pausing to take another sip of her liquid courage before saying, "Serial rapist and murderer. Southern California had never seen anything like it. He abducted five young women, raped them, murdered them, and left their bodies all over the city before we finally caught up with him…"
"That's where I know you from!" Danny said suddenly, interrupting her story, "The 'Crazy Joe' Prisco case. You caught 'Crazy Joe'!"
She nodded in confirmation as she said, "One of the biggest busts of my career. But what didn't make the six o'clock news was that while on that case I broke the first rule of being a cop…I let it get personal. I let it consume me. Day and night I worked on that case and nothing else mattered. I knew those girls' names, memorized their faces, could recite any known fact about their career or personal lives. I'm the one who had a relationship with their families…the one they called in the middle of the night when they heard that another dead girl had been found somewhere in the city and they wanted to make sure it was not their child."
"They were young, successful women at the top of their game," Danny recited, recalling what he could remember about the victims of the case and then said instinctively, "You saw yourself in them, didn't you?"
Harper let out a heartless little laugh as she asked, "Why is it you're the first person to ever understand that?" Danny looked at her for a long time before covering her hand with his, encouraging her to continue her story, "I just…it was the first time that I wasn't tough, that I couldn't handle what life threw at me. And Steve didn't know what to do. We were like two strangers living in the same house. We grew so far apart in such a short amount of time."
She shook her head and ordered another drink from the bartender before she said, "I don't do the 'screaming, crying, temper tantrum' thing when I get upset. I was raised by men, so I do the 'shut down and focus on my work' kind of thing. And the 'drink till it doesn't hurt anymore' thing. So I pushed him away…I shut down. Completely. But Steve does the same thing, so when I pushed him away…I thought he would push back. Call me on my crap like he always did. But he didn't. He let me push him away until he couldn't take it anymore. And then he left."
"Left?"
"He got promoted to Commander of S.E.A.L. Team Two out of Virginia Beach," she explained unhappily, "And it was an offer he couldn't refuse. A promotion and his own platoon was better than a wife who could barely look at him anymore. So, he took it. And then a few months later, I got served with divorce papers. No phone call, no last chance to talk it out. Just an envelope of documents from my husband's legal representation telling me that my marriage was over."
Danny shifted on his barstool and took a moment to digest this information before saying, "I know that Steve is lacking in certain inalienable social skills, but I gotta tell you…that doesn't sound like him at all."
"Shocked the hell out of me, too," Harper agreed, "Because up until we hit that rough patch, we lit the world on fire. My marriage to Steve didn't last long, but when it was good he made me feel like this whole world, this whole big beautiful world, was lucky to have me…little me. Some trick, huh?"
Taking a sip of the fresh drink the bartender put in front of her, Harper confessed, "Until he came along, I was just Mickey James' pretty little girl. You could look, but don't touch. My brothers made sure of that. It's how men always saw me. I wasn't the smart girl or the interesting girl, I was the pretty girl. It's the red hair thing and the boobs thing…big boobs are a key to 'obvious pretty' if you know what I'm saying."
Danny choked on his sip of beer and gave her his patented "You're crazy" look as she continued with a smile, "I grew up surrounded by men, so you were wrong earlier when you thought that I don't know how they think. I know exactly how you think." She grinned and winked at him, causing him to chuckle as she continued, "Anyway, then Steve goes and asks me to marry him. He never made me feel like I was just a pretty girl. He made me feel like… like me. I think he just knew me…the good, the bad, the ugly…and he accepted it. In fact, I think he liked the fact that his girl could kick some ass. And then all of a sudden...it was over." She shook her head at the absurdity of it all and said, "After he left, I cried for a week. I cried for Steve, for me, for those girls and their families…I just curled up into a pathetic little ball in the corner of our bedroom and wept. Sometimes it hurts so much to remember. But, then again, I think it would hurt even worse to forget."
"And that's when you went back to Chicago?" Danny asked, making it sound more like an interview question than he intended it to be.
The redhead nodded in confirmation as she explained, "Word of my work on the 'Crazy Joe' case made it up to Chicago and the interim superintendent the Mayor had appointed when my grandfather retired thought it would be a big political score if he could be the one to entice Mickey James' little girl back to the Windy City."
The detective from Jersey just sat and drank his beer for a little while longer as his mind processed this story that he had just heard. Steve walking out on the love of his life when she needed him most? Leaving this tough, amazing woman crying like a baby in the corner of her bedroom? Two promotions that came at the perfect time? Something didn't add up.
Finally, he asked, "Let me ask you something that has been bugging me since we met…?"
"I'm not going to tell you where I hid the gun, Jersey," she joked, relieved that he had steered the conversation away from her sad marital woes.
"Why the hell would a woman like you become a cop?" Danny asked, shaking his head at her reference to their first meeting.
"A woman like me?"
"Well, we've already established that you're beautiful. And smart. And have family connections all over the place," he explained his reasoning, "You could have done anything in the world. Why crime fighting?"
"It's the family business."
"No, I think it's more than that," the intuitive detective told her, refusing to let her off the hook that easily, "Come on, I know you've got one more story in you…"
Taking a deep breath, Harper looked at him and said quietly, "When I was eight years old, my mother was gunned down right in front of me."
Whatever Danny had been expecting her to say, it hadn't been that. If he had been attempting to lighten the mood, he had blown it big time.
"The son of a bitch just left her there to die in the street…like a dog," she continued, unaware that she had just sent him reeling, "The guys in my dad's squad worked overtime to find my mother's murderer…followed every lead, leaned on all of their contacts, called in every favor anyone ever owed them. It went on for weeks…none of them slept, they barely ate, and no one ever complained. Because Mickey James was family to them and his children deserved justice. When they finally brought in a suspect, my dad's partner brought me down to the stationhouse and took me into a little room where I sat and positively identified the scumbag who had killed my mother. And when it was all over, he brought me out to the squad room to wait while my father had a 'few moments alone' with my mother's killer."
She smiled a wry smile and continued, "He told me how proud he was of me and bought me a Coke…which was a real treat back then…and gave me a donut and sat me behind his desk. And all these cops…these big, tough guys who I always thought of as larger than life…kept coming over to me to tell me how brave I was and how strong I was and how because of me the man who killed my father was going to spend the rest of his life in jail. And he wouldn't be able to hurt anyone else ever again. Because of me."
Smiling a genuine smile this time, she confessed, "That was night I decided that I wanted to become a cop. I wanted to be like my dad and the guys he worked with. I wanted to do what they did, I wanted to be who they were in the community. I wanted to serve the people of Chicago and all of mankind. I believe that this is my purpose in life and I was guided to that purpose in a unique way, by being the daughter of Mickey James."
Again, Danny was silent. He took a long slug of his beer before he put it down on the bar, turned to her, and asked, "You know something, Harper James? You're not so special."
"Oh no?" she asked, raising an eyebrow at him and suspecting that something else was coming.
"Nope," he said with a shake of his head, "What happened to you in San Diegeo…we all go crazy at some point. Happens to every cop who gives a crap about what they do. That's why we're alcoholics. That's why our husbands and wives leave us. We're broken toys. But," he added with a grin, "what makes us different from those folks in the psych ward ... We keep each other sane. That's what it's about. Any decent precinct house ... We keep each other sane."
Harper raised her glass again, but this time it wasn't in a mock toast It was in a real one, asking, "You gonna keep me sane, Jersey?"
Clinking his glass with hers, he winked and promised, "If you return the favor."