seashoregirl 
Cooper Crazy
(6/25/05 1:20 pm)
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The Courage Within- Chapter 1
I posted this on the GusH board, but thought I would put it here too, in case anyone wants to read it.
*Author’s Notes: I just have a few things to let you know before I begin this story. One is that the Coopers still own the Diner and the Reardons/Bauers still own Company. I always wished that GL had fixed that so in this story, I did it. Alex is in prison for the drug stuff, but Gus and Alan managed to escape it. Phillip isn’t dead but is still a ratbastard. Harley is still living in her house with the awful (imo) Southwestern theme. Anyway…that’s it for the notes.
Chapter 1
Harley waved as Cassie drove away after coming to pick up her wonderful little boys for a play-date. After a minute of standing outside the front door, she shivered, looked at the gray sky, which indicated snow, and quickly went back inside. Even though it was the beginning of March, the ground was completely covered with snow and had been since late November. Springfield was experiencing one of its worst winters in years, which suited Harley just fine. Her heart was just as cold and icy as the weather outside and had been since that day six months ago. Her wedding day…the day that should have been the happiest in her life but ended with her sitting on the den floor in her underwear, surrounded by wedding gifts and crying her eyes out.
Determined not to let those horrible thoughts creep into her head, Harley went upstairs and made up Zach and Jude’s beds and then went down the hall into her bedroom to make up her king-sized bed. As she was smoothing out the covers and putting the pillows back in their proper place, she picked up a shirt from Gus’s side of the bed. Bringing the wrinkled shirt to her nose, Harley inhaled deeply still hoping to smell Gus’s scent. It had been six months and she still thought of right side of the bed as Gus’s and that shirt, which she had found in the bottom of the hamper a few days after Gus had packed up his things and moved into a suite at the Springfield Inn, Harley either slept in that shirt or had kept it beside her every night since. She knew that it probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do when she was trying to get over Gus, but she just couldn’t make herself get rid of it.
After she had first called off the wedding, Gus had tried so hard to get her to listen to him, to understand, to forgive him. Harley remembered all the times he would come over to the house and she would let him have his say, and put on her most determined face and show him the door. He had tried calling and left message after message, which Harley would erase without even hearing them. He tried sending flowers and notes, asking her, pleading with her for another chance but the flowers ended up in the trash and the notes in the fireplace. And then about two months ago, Gus just stopped. He stopped coming by…didn’t even see the boys anymore, which he had still done even after the non-wedding. The calls and the flowers and the notes, they all stopped. And even though Harley tried to tell herself that it was what she wanted, she knew that she couldn’t. Not hearing from Gus at all broke her heart even more. And the thing even stranger was a conversation that she had overheard between Buzz and Frank at the Diner. Frank had said that Gus was going to be able to go out and do field work again after a two-month suspension and two-months of paperwork and then he had suddenly asked for an extended leave of absence. Harley was very curious and somewhat worried by that, but she didn’t ask Frank about it. She needed to keep herself as emotionally detached from Gus Aitoro as possible seeing how badly he had hurt her the last time.
The shrill sound of the phone ringing brought Harley back to the present. She reached over and picked it up from the bedside table. “Hello”
“Hi, kiddo” Buzz answered. “Are you in the middle of anything important?”
“No, just trying to clean house…what’s up?”
“I just need to you come by the Diner and don’t bring the kids.”
“The boys are with Cassie today. I’ll be right over.” Harley hung up the phone and wondered what could be so urgent that her dad needed to see her right now.
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“Ok…Daddy. I’m here.” Harley announced as she walked through the double-door entrance to the Diner and took a seat on one of the stools at the counter. “The least you can do is get my a cup of coffee. It’s started to snow again. And if you wanted me down here just so you could give me another lecture about not eating enough…please let’s just skip it.”
“Harley” Buzz said as he handed her a cup of coffee. “I didn’t want you here so I could lecture you.” The expression of his face looked so serious and sad that Harley began to get worried.
“What is it…is it Frankie? Did something happen to him?”
“No, baby…it’s not Frank.” But the grim look on his face remained as he walked around the counter and took a seat on the stool next to Harley. “I went to see Alex in prison yesterday.”
“But Daddy…why would you do that?” Harley asked. “After all that she did to Frankie and the rest of this family…you can’t possibly forgive her.”
“No, I haven’t forgiven her yet, and I don’t know if I ever can. But I hope that someday I will be able to because I love her and those feelings just don’t get shut off even if we would like them to be. Anyway, she is serving her time and asked me to come see her. So I went and she told me something that you need to know.”
The look on Buzz’s face scared Harley. She knew that she wasn’t going to like what he had to say. She wished that she could cover her ears with her hands like she did when she was a little girl and Frank or Pops told her something that she didn’t want to hear. But since she was a grown woman and a mother, instead she bit down on her lip so hard that it bled as her father told her something that would test her strength, determination, and courage more than anything else in her life possibly could.
“Harley…Gus is sick. It’s cancer.”
 
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sarah!
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