Yuletide Reveal

[geri_chan]

This a little belated, but here's the fic that I wrote for Yuletide this year, along with some squee and meta about the characters, and my usual rambling notes about the writing process:

That's What Friends Are For (8269 words) by geri_chan
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Magnum P.I. (TV 2018)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Thomas Sullivan Magnum IV, Gordon Katsumoto
Additional Tags: Case Fic, Friendship
Summary: When Katsumoto's son goes missing, he turns to Magnum for help.

I loved the original Magnum show back in the day, and I didn't expect to love the Magnum reboot as much as I did, but I was quickly won over. I love Magnum's friendship with T.C. and Rick, which is pretty similar to the original, and I love female!Higgins who is badass and a great foil for Magnum. And I loved Tim Kang as Cho from The Mentalist, so I was really thrilled when it turned out he was playing Detective Katsumoto on Magnum.

At first it amused me to think of Cho moving to Hawaii hoping for a more relaxed pace of life, only to find himself stuck with another pain in the ass complicating his investigations, albeit in a less official way than Jane. But I quickly grew to love Katsumoto as a character in his own right: someone a little older and wearier than Cho, carrying the baggage of a failed marriage and an implied distant relationship with his teenage son.

He does share Cho's deadpan humor, though, with his ability to say something completely sarcastic with a straight face. In one of the featurettes on the Season 1 dvd set, Perdita Weeks (Higgins) talks about how Kang can play Katsumoto with a deadpan, emotionless humor and then break out into an adorable smile. And that's exactly what happened in Season 2, when Katsumoto finally forgave Magnum! He'd felt that Magnum had betrayed his trust at the end of Season 1, and in the first few episodes of Season 2, Magnum made many comical attempts to get Katsumoto to forgive him, mostly involving gifts and bribes until he finally realized that all Katsumoto wanted was a simple apology. And when he did apologize, Katsumoto smiles at Magnum in the most adorable way. I love their canonical friendship (as in this fic), but at that moment, I also kind of started shipping them in a way that hadn't occurred to me before. And all Magnum's previous attempts to win Katsumoto's forgiveness almost felt like he was trying to woo a potential lover!

So I might need to go look for some slashy Magnum/Katsumoto fic, though I love them as just friends too. Gen or slash, what I love about their relationship is their adversarial friendship--Magnum starts off just being a thorn in Katsumoto's side, but that gradually grows into a prickly but genuine friendship. I think it starts in the episode where Magnum helps Katsumoto investigate his old partner's murder (A Kiss Before Dying), where they get to know each other a little better, as more than cop and PI. We (and Magnum) find out that Katsumoto is divorced and has a teenage son who lives with his ex-wife on the North Shore, and Katsumoto learns that Magnum isn't just a pain in the butt, but someone who will go out of his way to help a friend in need.

I was intrigued by the hints about Katsumoto's relationship with his son. In a later episode (Make It 'TIl Dawn), he advises a fellow cop to let his family know that he loves them even when his job takes him away from them. It's clear that he's speaking from bitter experience, and when the other cop suggests that Katsumoto follow his own advice, he regretfully says that ship has already sailed, that his son is a teenager going to parties (unlike the other cop's son, who is still young enough to go trick or treating with Dad on Halloween). Still, he calls his son (this is where we learn that the son's name is Dennis) and asks if he wants to go out for pancakes that weekend. Apparently, Dennis says yes, because Katsumoto breaks out into a big smile, so it seems like things might not be as bad between them as Katsumoto feared.

As for Magnum, he can be cavalier and irresponsible, like the way that he borrows money from his friends without repaying them or the way that he counts on favors from Rick and TC (giving out free drinks and helicopter rides to get info for his cases) without asking permission first. That would make him kind of a jerk and not really a sympathetic protagonist--except that it's balanced out by the fact that he's also capable of great loyalty, compassion, and kindness, and that's what I love about him.

Of course, his kindness is a big part of why he's always broke--not taking money from a client who can't pay, or taking the case of finding a little girl's lost cat for about 50 cents. On a more serious note, when one of his friends needs his help, he's there for them and would risk his life for them without hesitation. And even when his former commander betrays him and sets him up to be captured and killed by an enemy (under duress, after his son was kidnapped by said enemy), Magnum isn't angry and doesn't berate him. Instead, Magnum quietly says that he understands why he did it, and offers his sympathy for the death of the son (whom the kidnappers killed). He feels no anger or resentment, only compassion.

And that's the paradox that is Magnum. Yes, he can often be childish and annoying, as Higgins would attest to, but he's got a big heart, and he can be incredibly generous and compassionate. That's probably why his friends (including Katsumoto) care about him so much, even while he drives them crazy at the same time.

I tried to pull all of these things together in my Yuletide fic: the friendship between Magnum and Katsumoto, and their back-and-forth banter (because of course Katsumoto doesn't want to admit that they're friends), and Katsumoto getting to see the compassionate side of Magnum instead of just the annoying side, and also the relationship between Katsumoto and his son. Dennis hasn't actually appeared on the show yet, so I had to speculate as to what he might be like--based on the hints we get, their relationship is a bit strained, but still good enough that Dennis is willing to spend time with Dad on the weekend.

We still know very little about the ex-wife, so everything about Leah (including her name) is all my imagination. It sounded like Katsumoto blamed himself for the breakup, so I figured that he still cared about her, and because he's a decent guy, would try to maintain a civil relationship, for his son's sake if nothing else. After I started writing the story, we learned a bit more about them in the show, that the ex apparently left Katsumoto for another man, and to top it off, another cop in his unit. I decided to leave that part out, since we don't know whether she's still together with that guy or not. In my mind, it was a rebound thing that didn't work out, and that while things were definitely awkward for awhile, they've tried to be civil to each other because of Dennis, and that over the years, they've become friendly enough that Katsumoto talks about that pain in the ass PI with her.

It was my first time writing for this fandom, so I was a little nervous about whether I could pull it off, but I had a lot of fun writing it. I've heard and loved Magnum and Katsumoto's banter so much in the show that it flowed pretty naturally when I tried to write it. And I rarely write first person POV, but because Magnum narrates the tv show, it just seemed natural to write it as Magnum telling the story. Originally, I was planning to write chapters from the POV of both Magnum and Dennis (and maybe Katsumoto), but so much of the story ended up being Magnum's story that it felt like it would be awkward to suddenly switch to Dennis, so in the end, it was all Magnum.

The plan was always to have Magnum and Katsumoto rescue Dennis, but it took me awhile to work out the details. I considered having him kidnapped by someone Katsumoto had arrested in the past, or being held for ransom in exchange for some drugs that had been confiscated by HPD. Eventually I decided to have Dennis get in trouble trying to help a friend who was involved with drugs. I sort of had a vague idea that a girl Dennis liked would ask him for help with her brother who was doing drugs, and maybe being threatened by the dealer(s). Then I decided it was getting a little too complicated and decided to simplify it by just having one character who needed help, and that ended up being Dennis's best friend. Then I needed to decide what kind of drugs Jordan was doing, and I remembered an old Law & Order SVU episode where high school kids under pressure were doing Adderall to help them with their studies and I stole borrowed that plot idea for the fic.

Dennis's school is Kukui High (the alma mater of Chin Ho Kelly) in the story, since canonically Magnum and Hawaii 5-0 exist in the same universe. They've even had crossover episodes since I wrote my fic!

So I had finally settled on a plot and the story was coming together nicely, but I couldn't decide on a title. The rough draft was just listed as "Magnum" in my google drive, and it was a dumb thing to worry about compared to finishing the fic, but I was eventually going to have to come up with a real title, and it was kind of bugging me. Usually I go with something descriptive of the plot or a song title, so I tried to think of some songs with a father-son theme. "Cat's in the Cradle" came to mind, but it didn't really fit, since Katsumoto isn't as bad as the absent father in the song. I tentatively went with "Fortunate Son," going with the idea that Dennis is lucky to have Katsumoto as a dad, but that didn't feel right either, since people might associate it with the anti-war theme of the song rather than a father-son relationship. By this point, I had probably spent way too much time obsessing about it, and then it finally dawned on me that while Dennis is important to the story, the real heart of it is the friendship between Magnum and Katsumoto. And then the perfect song title popped into my head: "That's What Friends Are For"!

So that's the story of how my Yuletide fic came to be. And now I'm imagining Magnum singing along to the title song as it plays on the car radio, much to Katsumoto's embarrassment. ^_^