Grimm Fic - To All The Girls I’ve Loved Before (PG-13) 1/1

[luvsbitca]

Title: To All The Girls I’ve Loved Before
Author: Moonbeam
Written For (grimm_exchange): karrenia_rune
Characters/Pairings: Gen
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: brief mention of OC death, angst
Disclaimer: I don’t own anything, alas.
Word Count: 3222
Summary: Hank loved women, he’d always loved women.
And lots of women have loved Hank, this is a look back at some of Hanks life and all the girls he’s loved before (well some). 

A/N: I didn’t have a title to this until it was edited and everything but the song fits so nicely I’m really quite happy with it.
Thanks so much to <a href="1729trix.livejournal.com ">1729trix</a> for the excellent last minute beta, all remaining mistakes are my own.
There was a request made for a little background on one of the characters and I love Hank so I decided on him and this all just kind of came out, I have not seen the second season yet so I hope nothing stands out at too incorrect.

 

 

To All The Girls I’ve Loved Before
by Moonbeam

 

To all the girls I've loved before
Who travelled in and out my door
I'm glad they came along
….
To all the girls I once caressed
And may I say I've held the best
For helping me to grow I owe a lot I know
To all the girls I've loved before  

‘To All The Girls I’ve Loved Before’ – Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias </i>

Hank loved women, he’d always loved women.

 

He had met his first wife on the first day of his last year of high school. She had hated him from the second she saw him. Later, when they were married, he could admit that she had a point and that he might have come across just a little too strong when he saw her. He can still remember it twenty years later. She was sitting in the very back corner of the classroom, her hair had been in one long braid over her shoulder and her glasses were too big for her face but the second he saw her he was a little bit in love with her.

 

Then he’d opened his mouth and that’s when things turned bad.

 

Unfortunately that wasn’t the first time Hank shoved his foot into his mouth when it came to Isabel. There was something about her that just made everything come out sounding like he was a jackass. She had been unsurprisingly dismissive of him for exactly that reason. Even after she’d told him that she really, really wasn’t interested in going to the movies with him, or to get a milkshake or anything else for that matter he had still kept trying.

 

He had taken up kickboxing because he saw her coming out of the building one day and he wanted to show her he really wasn’t anywhere near as idiotic as he generally sounded when he spoke to her. Hank had always been athletic, playing football and baseball but he’d never done anything that was designed to defend himself or to attack someone else. He had started to do it because of Isabel and in the end it had been something that he enjoyed, he liked the control he had to have and the different ways his body had to learn to move. He ended up sticking with it even after he and Isabel had got together though he hadn’t attended a single class in almost fourteen years.

 

Hank had convinced one of the guys on his baseball team to teach him Spanish after he heard Isabel talking to her mother as they left the school one day.

 

Isabel hadn’t been particularly impressed with him asking her how she was going with the essay on ‘Romeo and Juliet’ just like she hadn’t been impressed when she saw him in the beginners class at kickboxing. He tried to be nice and he tried asking her out and nothing had worked. In the end it had nothing to do with anything he said or did to her that made her change her mind.

 

Hank’s little sister was in year four and he went to pick her up every Thursday after school while his mum was working late. He’d been late one Thursday and was running through the car park when he heard someone arguing. He needed to get to Jane but whoever he could hear sounded like they were being bullied and Hank really hated bullies.

 

Hank had found a couple of older kids pushing some younger kid around. He’d broken it up and he convinced the kid who had been picked on to come with him. He grabbed Jane from where she normally waited for him and convinced the kid, Miguel, to tell Jane’s teacher what happened.

 

On the Monday after that Isabel had cornered him between classes and thanked him for looking after her little brother. Hank had been surprised but if there was some good that came out of the situation it was definitely the fact that she stopped glaring at him all the time.

 

By the middle of the year she had agreed to come with him to a movie if, and only if, they went to see something with her little brother. Hank had taken his sister Jane who was a year younger than Miguel with them. After that it took him another month of their weird group excursions before Isabel agreed to go out with him, just the two of them.

 

From there things had been good, they had dated for the rest of their last year of high school and that summer they spent more time together than they did with either of their families. They still spend a huge amount of time with Jane and Miguel but they were inseparable.

 

Over the summer Isabel’s father sat him down and told him that when Isabel went to university, Harvard, she was going to be serious. Isabel was going to be a doctor and her father did not want Hank to do anything to make it harder for her to get there. Hank knew he wasn’t as book smart as Isabel and he wasn’t going to get in between her and her goals but he wasn’t going to stop dating her either.

 

Hank went to Boston University to complete a degree in criminal justice, his grandfather had been a cop and Hank intended to be one as well. He had loved his Grandpop even though he’d died a couple of years ago there was nothing else that Hank really want to do. His dad wasn’t very happy with Hank’s choice, he remembered with sadness a father who had always been working when he could have been at home. Hank was determined though and he went to university with only one goal in mind.

 

They were in their third year when Hank asked Isabel to marry him, she thought he was insane, they were only young and she had some intense, long years ahead of her. Hank didn’t care; he loved Isabel and they were going to get married. She had agreed but neither of their parents was happy with the idea of them rushing into anything before they finished university.

 

Isabel ignored them all and worked a month of double shifts for them to afford to fly to Vegas, they called their parents from the airport before they left but they were going to do this regardless. Isabel was normally serious in everything but she told him late one night that she had always wanted to get married in Vegas, Elvis presiding over their nuptials. They both turned twenty-one a couple of months before so it was really a gigantic party since they hadn’t done much for their birthdays. Hank’s mum and dad got there a couple of hours after Hank and Isabel arrived but Isabel’s parents couldn’t make it until the next morning.

 

Elvis married them and kissed Isabel on the cheek before Hank pulled her close and kissed his wife. Their parents took them out to dinner and to the casino where they bet for a while before Hank took his wife to their, too expensive for them really, hotel room for their wedding night.

 

Six months later his father died of a heart attack in the middle of the night. The doctors all said that he went peacefully but Hank felt like his world had fallen apart. Isabel had been the only thing that seemed to get him through the next year. He graduated, as did Isabel but she was headed to Harvard Medical School, and he applied for the police. He made it in and the small amount he was paid was split between him, and Isabel, and helping his mum out with suddenly being a single income household.

 

Hank helped his mum out until Jane went off to university but by then things were very different. He had been promoted a few times and Isabel was working as a resident. Isabel had always told him that family was the most important thing and when sometimes they couldn’t afford to go to a nice restaurant for their anniversary or birthdays she’d just smile at him and they’d make something fun at home and spend the night curled up under as many blankets as they could. Hank had sworn to himself when things were better he would take her away somewhere amazing and spoil her like she deserved.

 

A few months later his life fell apart again.

 

He got a call from his Captain, there had been an accident, Isabel was gone. She had been driving and a tree fell. There had been a witness. She had had no chance to stop. She died on impact. Hank’s entire world fell apart in thirty seconds.

 

They had talked about children but they thought they had time, they thought there was all the time in the world, they were in their twenties; she was in the middle of her residency and they thought they should wait until she was settled before they started a family. For years after he cursed the fact they had been stupid enough to believe that lie, he was a policeman, he had delivered death notifications, he should have known better.

 

He had almost quit the police force when she died. He did leave Boston though when he was finally able to think straight. He still travelled back once a year to visit her grave but he couldn’t be in Boston once she was gone.

 

He met his second wife almost four years later and everything was completely different. She had come after him, she was a teacher in Portland and she was nice. The first time they had met he’d been out at a bar having a couple of drinks with some of the other cops in the precinct. She asked him out and he’d been about to say the same thing he’d been saying for four years; that he didn’t date. Something stopped him and he said yes.

 

He had loved Samantha in a completely different way to how he loved Isabel and in so many ways meeting her had been the thing that finally allowed him to lay Isabel to rest in his mind, he knew he would never completely get over her but as things progressed with Samantha he found himself feeling in ways he hadn’t since the day of her death.

 

They were married just under a year after they met and Hank’s mother had shook her head at him and said he was moving too fast but he loved Samantha and nothing about it felt too fast. They were married at city hall and then there was a party in Hank’s backyard.

 

Samantha taught year three and they had been happy for a year before she ran off with one of the parents from her class. Hank had been surprised by the whole thing but like his Grandpop before him he probably spent too much time at work and not enough at home. It hadn’t been a problem with Isabel who worked even more than he did and somehow they had been able to find time together with greater ease than he could with Samantha.

 

Samantha sent him divorce papers from England where she had gone with Michael and his two children.

 

Hank’s third wife was an anthropologist who came to the precinct to complete her research work for her thesis. He had been made a detective only a few months before and they worked closely together. She had been focussing on newly promoted detectives as well as senior detectives and their perceptions of their work and the constantly changing ideologies in police work. They hadn’t started dating until after the research was done. Hank asked her out, she was smart and interesting and she would tell him the most fascinating things about society both now and in the past.

 

Catherine, who preferred to be called Katie, had been the reason he took a leave of absence. She needed to travel down to Brazil for her graduate work. It was six months and they’d been dating for almost nine by that point. He agreed to go with her and took the time off from work. It had opened his eyes in a lot of ways and by the time he had come back he was married and had a wider understanding of people. He would love Katie forever for the trip they took, he had loved Brazil and all the things they had done together. 

 

Not long after they went came back from Brazil his sister called him and told him to get to Boston, it was his mum. They had only just found the cancer but it had already riddled her body and made it from, what they thought had started as, lung cancer to her liver and bones. Within the month his mum was gone. Katie had been there for Jane, who had two small children by then with her husband, as well as Hank. They stayed in Boston for two months trying to sort out all of her things but for Hank it was time to spend with Jane and the niece and nephew he didn’t get to see much. Hank held it together until he and Katie got back to Portland and then like a wave the grief hit him as he realised he was an orphan.

 

His marriage to Katie had been the best one to end in divorce, they were married for three years and they got to a point where they were fighting more than they were enjoying each other. They had gone to a marriage counsellor and things had started to get better. One day Katie had come home and made him dinner. She asked him what he thought about how things were going and by the end of the night they had got to a point where they realised the reason things were better was not because they had fixed their marriage but because they had fixed their friendship. Katie had said she loved him but she wasn’t in love with him anymore and by the end of the month with the therapist they had managed to make it to a point where they agreed to separate, just a trial, and six months later they agreed to divorce. Hank had hated himself a little for not being able to make it work but after a while he realised that it was better to have her still in his life than to have stayed married to her and have her eventually hate him.

 

Katie had ended up getting a position at Oxford and they kept in touch, she’d married a tall redheaded man from Scotland with such a thick accent Hank had trouble understanding a word he said. They had twin boys and a little girl, Hank had met them all last year when Katie came back to Portland to see her sister.

 

Katie was his absolute favourite ex-wife.

 

His least favourite wasn’t the woman who cheated on him but was his fourth wife.

 

They met a few months after he and Katie split up but nothing happened for a while after that. Anna was a physical therapist who worked at the clinic he visited after he had been injured on the job. He had given up kickboxing after Isabel died but he had kept fit so that he could keep eating chocolate cake. When his divorce to Katie had come through Anna asked him out and he’d accepted. He never intended for them to become serious and to this day he has no idea how they managed to. Before he knew what was happening they were living together, she made him think he asked but he couldn’t remember at the time and the haze of time hadn’t made it any easier to remember asking her. From there they had ended up engaged when she asked him, she planned a big wedding, the biggest and whitest he’d had, she wore white, he wore white, there were white flowers and white linen, no one thought they were virgins but Anna had been determined. They had the church wedding and the honeymoon in Niagara Falls which Hank also hadn’t understood but it had been so important her so he’d gone along with it.

 

Honestly, for a detective he should have noticed earlier.

 

She had been great for another six months but then she seemed to change, she complained about his work, how long he spent there and how much he ignored her. He had done the right thing, he sat down with her and they talked about it. Anna had been feeling down lately and she was just finding it harder to deal with his work. She decided to take a month off work and see if she could find something else, she loved her work but her colleagues were a problem.

 

After a while things seemed to settle down and go back to normal, she didn’t like his hours but she seemed to be dealing with it and she quite liked her knew practice. Over time she became less and less happy with things between them, more fights broke out and he discovered that not only had he missed how completely she hated his job he had also missed how much she was drinking. He tried to get her some help but by that point she resented him more than she cared for him and she refused to admit she had a problem. Finally, in a spectacular fight that involved his captain, not Renard, three men from the local fire house and his next door neighbour she stole his car and divorced him taking him for almost everything he had.

 

Anna and Hank got divorced not long after he got a new partner, a younger man named Nick who seemed to be a good cop. Nick had been quietly supportive during their divorce and had become over time one of the most important parts of Hank’s life.

 

Hank knew that people couldn’t understand why he was still so positive about love, why he was so willing to keep trying. The terrifying experience with Adalind as well as the way his marriage to Anna had ended could easily be enough to put him off women but there had to be saner women in the world than there were insane ones. He couldn’t prove that Adalind had actually done anything wrong but it had been a truly disturbing experience.

 

Of all the things in his life the one most likely to stop him from trying again had been Isabel’s death but if he could find love like that once maybe it could be found again. He had come close with Katie but in the end he loved her dearly as a friend and they were never meant to have more.

 

If he could have love like that again he wouldn’t stop until he did.

 

Hank is a policeman and no one ever asks him how many times he’s been married only ever how many times he’s been divorced. That is an easy answer to give. He had been divorced three times, he never talked about Isabel but once a year he flew back to Boston and visited her.

 

The End