Duty or Loyalty - Prologue Part 5
Title: Duty or Loyalty - Prologue Part 5
Author: silmanumenel
Disclaimer: Still not mine.
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: None here, will eventually be Danny/Steve
Warnings: None, as far as I can tell.
Word Count: 1.875
Summary: Danny's life is not what you would call normal, and growing up is not exactly easy when half of your family belongs to the mafia. Or: The AU in which Danny is still Danny, but most of his family is on the other side of the law.
In this part: Danny contemplates life in Hawaii and the breaking apart of his marriage.
Notes: Last part of the prologue! We've come full circle, the 'real' action starts in the next part.
Prologue Part 1 / Prologue Part 2 / Prologue Part 3 / Prologue Part 4
Danny is thirty-four years old when he finally has to concede that his life has gone so far off track that he can’t even see the rails anymore and seems to be lost in some kind of wilderness. He’s sitting on a bench in the Ala Moana Beach Park, watching people lying on towels in the sand or splashing around in the water, listening to the continuous hum of dozens of voices talking and laughing, to the children’s excited and joyful shrieks. Palm trees are swaying in a warm, balmy breeze, the ocean is glittering in a perfect bright blue and the beach stretches out for miles on end, the white sand so blinding in places that you can barely look at it. It’s paradise - and Danny hates it with the passion of a thousand fiery suns.
He hates the sand, he hates the water, he hates the constant warm weather and the seemingly ever-shining sun, he hates the language, this pidgin that he barely understands and that never fails to leave him feeling like a complete idiot when he’s talking to a witness or questioning a suspect and has to ask them to repeat themselves at least three times. He hates the freakishly colorful shirts with the patterns that hurt his eyes, he hates the leis, he hates the relaxed, hang loose attitude and the good mood everyone continually seems to be in, he hates the food that he can’t pronounce, much less eat, and he’s not even starting on the pineapple-love that’s going on here.
But what he hates more than anything else is that Rachel forced his hand like this. Everyone always kept talking about the difficult decision he’d made, relocating to Hawaii as well, but in reality there had been nothing of a choice or a decision about it at all. Grace is the best thing that’s ever happened to him, he’d follow her to the end of the world, move heaven and earth to be near her, to see her for the measly two weekends a month and the day a week he got in the Custody Battle - and yes, the capitals are entirely warranted. So he didn’t even have to think about handing in his request for a transfer to the Honolulu Police Department the day after Rachel’s shark of a lawyer called him to tell him in the most dispassionate voice he’d ever heard that his ex-wife and his daughter would be moving to Hawaii with the new husband.
That doesn’t mean however that it hadn’t torn out his heart to leave his family, to leave everything he’d ever known. His first nephew - after three nieces - had been born only a month before; he’d so looked forward to seeing him grow up, to spoil him rotten. Aletta had gotten her first larger role in a little musical production, gushing at him for over an hour before promising to get him tickets for the premiere in the front row. And then, with one phone call, everything had come crashing down around him.
In his darkest moments, when he is missing Grace - missing home - so much that it is almost like a physical ache, Danny truly hates Rachel as well, even though he promised himself he would never let it get that far. The breakup had been inevitable, Danny had seen it coming for a long time before it actually happened, before Rachel packed her bags, told him she couldn’t be a cop’s wife any longer and went to a hotel with Grace. But despite everything, despite their shouting matches and their vicious battle in court over almost every item they owned, he had never thought Rachel would try to take Grace away from him completely. She knew how much his daughter meant to him, and Danny can’t help thinking that she did it to punish him. Because he’s not stupid, he knows that the constant fear for his life was not the only thing that finally made her leave, knows that she resented him for his secretive behavior, for keeping a huge part of himself from her.
In a way, he can’t even blame her, at least not for their separation, because he is self-aware enough to realize that he is responsible for a good deal in the failure of their relationship. He never told her about who his family really was, kept her out of it and in the dark, and he sees now that it was delusional to think that she wouldn’t notice or that she would be content with not knowing. Sometimes Danny asks himself if he should have listened to his sisters, to Debbie who was always the one most vocally urging him to come clean with Rachel. Maybe if he had told her, everything would have been alright and they could have saved their family.
But every time he gets that far in his musings, there is this voice in his head telling him that she would never have understood, that she would have demanded he go to the police - and wouldn’t that have been the height of irony, Danny being the police himself. He doesn’t like where this train of thought usually leads him because it’s at that point, when he has halfway convinced himself that he has been right in not letting her in on his family’s secrets, that this other voices pipes up, telling him that if he could not trust her with this, then their marriage - their whole relationship - surely must have stood on shaky ground from the beginning. And that just sounds too much as if the last ten years of his life have been a complete lie.
So he is prepared to admit that he was not blameless in the disaster that was the end of their marriage, quite the opposite probably, but in Danny’s opinion that does not justify Rachel taking Grace and moving 5.000 miles away into the middle of the ocean. And therefore he hates Stan and his expensive lawyers, and he hates the courts for deciding in favor of Rachel’s petition, and yes, sometimes he hates Rachel herself as well.
Danny sighs, shielding his eyes from the merriment going on around him with one of his hands, and contemplates how pathetic he is, sitting around on a Saturday afternoon with nothing to do and wallowing in misery. But he can’t help it, it feels as if someone tossed him out into the middle of the ocean, with no land in sight. And if that isn’t an appropriate metaphor for this collection of rocks surrounded by nothing but water, he doesn’t know what is.
He doesn’t mind being the outsider, that’s not it. Danny knows he’s a good cop and that his way of doing things usually works, so fuck them if they want to call him a haole only because he dresses professionally. And Meka is a great partner, inviting him to dinner with his family from time to time and listening more or less patiently to Danny’s many and varied rants. But it’s just not the same, and he doesn’t think it will ever be. He’s been here for six months now, and he can’t say that he’s made any friends. Not that he’s been trying overly hard, but still. If he’s completely honest with himself, he’ll have to say that he’s lonely, simple as that, and he misses his family, all of them, awfully.
Not for the first time Danny wonders if he shouldn’t have accepted his uncle’s offer.
We’ll take care of it, Danny, he’d said, We’ll make sure that they stay here, that you get to see Gracie more. Just say the word. It had been so tempting, saying yes, letting Uncle Salvo do whatever he did - and Danny knows he’d have seen it through, would have made good on his promise because family still and always came first and despite everything Danny had remained his favorite nephew.
But in the end, Danny couldn’t. He has no idea what his uncle would’ve done, doesn’t want to have one, but he does know that he wouldn’t have been able to look Grace in the eye again if he’d asked for this kind of help. He’d had good reasons to distance himself from the business, had won against all odds and the reputation that had preceded him and made a name for himself in the police department, and he’d not been about to ruin all that, no matter how hard it was going to be.
And hard it had been, and there are days when Danny wonders if the satisfaction of being able to look at himself in the mirror, of knowing that he stuck to his principles, isn’t a hollow one, seeing as he’s now not only divorced and miserable, but also almost half a world away from nearly everyone he loves.
A particularly loud shout from the beach throws him out of his musings, and Danny shakes his head, trying to get it back on straight and to dislodge all of these depressing thoughts, telling himself firmly that any place where Grace is is a good place. And he seriously resolves to do something about these moods he’s become prone to falling into because he knows well enough that it can’t go on like that. He has no clue what he’s going to do, and he figures he won’t think of anything sitting around and watching other people be happy, so he decides to try and find something that will make this day be not a complete failure.
He’s on his way back to the car when his phone starts ringing and flashing Meka’s name, and Danny can’t suppress the feeling of relief that surges through him. It’s got to be a case which means there’ll be lots to do and no more time to think.
“Hey brah,” Meka starts as soon as he answers, and Danny can hear he’s in a car, “we got a new case, homicide in one of the beachside houses in Aina Haina, Piikoi Street. John McGarrett, retired cop. Neighbors reported a shot, one of the beat cops in the area found him tied to a chair, head shot. I’m already on my way, I’ll send you the address.”
“I’ll be there ASAP,” Danny tells him, getting into his car and turning on the lights before peeling out of the parking lot. He’s already mentally going through what will be important for this case, thinking that they’ll have to get a look at the victim’s files to see if anyone from his past might’ve gone looking for revenge, that there’ll likely be family notifications to be made which is always the worst part about any case, and wondering if they’ll encounter a spouse at the house, perhaps just come back from shopping to a scenario right out of a nightmare.
Danny takes a deep breath, having the sense that losing himself in a routine case is exactly what he needs right now and briefly wondering if feeling like that makes him a bad person, then lets the thoughts drift away and focuses solely on what’s ahead of him.
There’s a murderer to be caught, and Danny certainly doesn’t have the time to be questioning himself.
TBC
Chapter 1
Author: silmanumenel
Disclaimer: Still not mine.
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: None here, will eventually be Danny/Steve
Warnings: None, as far as I can tell.
Word Count: 1.875
Summary: Danny's life is not what you would call normal, and growing up is not exactly easy when half of your family belongs to the mafia. Or: The AU in which Danny is still Danny, but most of his family is on the other side of the law.
In this part: Danny contemplates life in Hawaii and the breaking apart of his marriage.
Notes: Last part of the prologue! We've come full circle, the 'real' action starts in the next part.
Prologue Part 1 / Prologue Part 2 / Prologue Part 3 / Prologue Part 4
Danny is thirty-four years old when he finally has to concede that his life has gone so far off track that he can’t even see the rails anymore and seems to be lost in some kind of wilderness. He’s sitting on a bench in the Ala Moana Beach Park, watching people lying on towels in the sand or splashing around in the water, listening to the continuous hum of dozens of voices talking and laughing, to the children’s excited and joyful shrieks. Palm trees are swaying in a warm, balmy breeze, the ocean is glittering in a perfect bright blue and the beach stretches out for miles on end, the white sand so blinding in places that you can barely look at it. It’s paradise - and Danny hates it with the passion of a thousand fiery suns.
He hates the sand, he hates the water, he hates the constant warm weather and the seemingly ever-shining sun, he hates the language, this pidgin that he barely understands and that never fails to leave him feeling like a complete idiot when he’s talking to a witness or questioning a suspect and has to ask them to repeat themselves at least three times. He hates the freakishly colorful shirts with the patterns that hurt his eyes, he hates the leis, he hates the relaxed, hang loose attitude and the good mood everyone continually seems to be in, he hates the food that he can’t pronounce, much less eat, and he’s not even starting on the pineapple-love that’s going on here.
But what he hates more than anything else is that Rachel forced his hand like this. Everyone always kept talking about the difficult decision he’d made, relocating to Hawaii as well, but in reality there had been nothing of a choice or a decision about it at all. Grace is the best thing that’s ever happened to him, he’d follow her to the end of the world, move heaven and earth to be near her, to see her for the measly two weekends a month and the day a week he got in the Custody Battle - and yes, the capitals are entirely warranted. So he didn’t even have to think about handing in his request for a transfer to the Honolulu Police Department the day after Rachel’s shark of a lawyer called him to tell him in the most dispassionate voice he’d ever heard that his ex-wife and his daughter would be moving to Hawaii with the new husband.
That doesn’t mean however that it hadn’t torn out his heart to leave his family, to leave everything he’d ever known. His first nephew - after three nieces - had been born only a month before; he’d so looked forward to seeing him grow up, to spoil him rotten. Aletta had gotten her first larger role in a little musical production, gushing at him for over an hour before promising to get him tickets for the premiere in the front row. And then, with one phone call, everything had come crashing down around him.
In his darkest moments, when he is missing Grace - missing home - so much that it is almost like a physical ache, Danny truly hates Rachel as well, even though he promised himself he would never let it get that far. The breakup had been inevitable, Danny had seen it coming for a long time before it actually happened, before Rachel packed her bags, told him she couldn’t be a cop’s wife any longer and went to a hotel with Grace. But despite everything, despite their shouting matches and their vicious battle in court over almost every item they owned, he had never thought Rachel would try to take Grace away from him completely. She knew how much his daughter meant to him, and Danny can’t help thinking that she did it to punish him. Because he’s not stupid, he knows that the constant fear for his life was not the only thing that finally made her leave, knows that she resented him for his secretive behavior, for keeping a huge part of himself from her.
In a way, he can’t even blame her, at least not for their separation, because he is self-aware enough to realize that he is responsible for a good deal in the failure of their relationship. He never told her about who his family really was, kept her out of it and in the dark, and he sees now that it was delusional to think that she wouldn’t notice or that she would be content with not knowing. Sometimes Danny asks himself if he should have listened to his sisters, to Debbie who was always the one most vocally urging him to come clean with Rachel. Maybe if he had told her, everything would have been alright and they could have saved their family.
But every time he gets that far in his musings, there is this voice in his head telling him that she would never have understood, that she would have demanded he go to the police - and wouldn’t that have been the height of irony, Danny being the police himself. He doesn’t like where this train of thought usually leads him because it’s at that point, when he has halfway convinced himself that he has been right in not letting her in on his family’s secrets, that this other voices pipes up, telling him that if he could not trust her with this, then their marriage - their whole relationship - surely must have stood on shaky ground from the beginning. And that just sounds too much as if the last ten years of his life have been a complete lie.
So he is prepared to admit that he was not blameless in the disaster that was the end of their marriage, quite the opposite probably, but in Danny’s opinion that does not justify Rachel taking Grace and moving 5.000 miles away into the middle of the ocean. And therefore he hates Stan and his expensive lawyers, and he hates the courts for deciding in favor of Rachel’s petition, and yes, sometimes he hates Rachel herself as well.
Danny sighs, shielding his eyes from the merriment going on around him with one of his hands, and contemplates how pathetic he is, sitting around on a Saturday afternoon with nothing to do and wallowing in misery. But he can’t help it, it feels as if someone tossed him out into the middle of the ocean, with no land in sight. And if that isn’t an appropriate metaphor for this collection of rocks surrounded by nothing but water, he doesn’t know what is.
He doesn’t mind being the outsider, that’s not it. Danny knows he’s a good cop and that his way of doing things usually works, so fuck them if they want to call him a haole only because he dresses professionally. And Meka is a great partner, inviting him to dinner with his family from time to time and listening more or less patiently to Danny’s many and varied rants. But it’s just not the same, and he doesn’t think it will ever be. He’s been here for six months now, and he can’t say that he’s made any friends. Not that he’s been trying overly hard, but still. If he’s completely honest with himself, he’ll have to say that he’s lonely, simple as that, and he misses his family, all of them, awfully.
Not for the first time Danny wonders if he shouldn’t have accepted his uncle’s offer.
We’ll take care of it, Danny, he’d said, We’ll make sure that they stay here, that you get to see Gracie more. Just say the word. It had been so tempting, saying yes, letting Uncle Salvo do whatever he did - and Danny knows he’d have seen it through, would have made good on his promise because family still and always came first and despite everything Danny had remained his favorite nephew.
But in the end, Danny couldn’t. He has no idea what his uncle would’ve done, doesn’t want to have one, but he does know that he wouldn’t have been able to look Grace in the eye again if he’d asked for this kind of help. He’d had good reasons to distance himself from the business, had won against all odds and the reputation that had preceded him and made a name for himself in the police department, and he’d not been about to ruin all that, no matter how hard it was going to be.
And hard it had been, and there are days when Danny wonders if the satisfaction of being able to look at himself in the mirror, of knowing that he stuck to his principles, isn’t a hollow one, seeing as he’s now not only divorced and miserable, but also almost half a world away from nearly everyone he loves.
A particularly loud shout from the beach throws him out of his musings, and Danny shakes his head, trying to get it back on straight and to dislodge all of these depressing thoughts, telling himself firmly that any place where Grace is is a good place. And he seriously resolves to do something about these moods he’s become prone to falling into because he knows well enough that it can’t go on like that. He has no clue what he’s going to do, and he figures he won’t think of anything sitting around and watching other people be happy, so he decides to try and find something that will make this day be not a complete failure.
He’s on his way back to the car when his phone starts ringing and flashing Meka’s name, and Danny can’t suppress the feeling of relief that surges through him. It’s got to be a case which means there’ll be lots to do and no more time to think.
“Hey brah,” Meka starts as soon as he answers, and Danny can hear he’s in a car, “we got a new case, homicide in one of the beachside houses in Aina Haina, Piikoi Street. John McGarrett, retired cop. Neighbors reported a shot, one of the beat cops in the area found him tied to a chair, head shot. I’m already on my way, I’ll send you the address.”
“I’ll be there ASAP,” Danny tells him, getting into his car and turning on the lights before peeling out of the parking lot. He’s already mentally going through what will be important for this case, thinking that they’ll have to get a look at the victim’s files to see if anyone from his past might’ve gone looking for revenge, that there’ll likely be family notifications to be made which is always the worst part about any case, and wondering if they’ll encounter a spouse at the house, perhaps just come back from shopping to a scenario right out of a nightmare.
Danny takes a deep breath, having the sense that losing himself in a routine case is exactly what he needs right now and briefly wondering if feeling like that makes him a bad person, then lets the thoughts drift away and focuses solely on what’s ahead of him.
There’s a murderer to be caught, and Danny certainly doesn’t have the time to be questioning himself.
TBC
Chapter 1