"Got a few, Doc?"

She hadn't expected to see him and especially not outside the clinic, regardless of the date.

A phone call? Maybe. In a few days, when he'd come down from whatever case he'd thrown his entire spinning existence into. He'd called before and always spoken so very softly. On other birthdays, on the death days, anniversaries of memory.

He'd called once just to tell her that Caitlin had been incomparable.

(And it had only taken her seventy two hours to put together the fact that it'd been round the anniversary of the day he'd offered the youngest Todd a job.)

That was the exact word he'd used. Incomparable.

Like she hadn't known that already.

Rachel sighed as she shifted her bag higher on her shoulder, head tipped into studying him. "I didn't actually expect to see you, Agent Gibbs."

"Didn't actually plan to be here." The admission was stilted and slightly awkward, his hands stuffed into the pockets of the long coat he was wearing. "No case. Office is quiet."

Which meant the day had probably been painstakingly slow for him too – plenty of time to spend too much time thinking about Kate and the fact that it was another birthday that hadn't been earned. Normally she wouldn't expect a former employer to remember a small thing like a birthday, and certainly not so many years later, nearly a decade. Didn't seem like Gibbs did normal, at least not when it came to his team. What he did do was fiercely protective.

To the rest of the world it was just a Wednesday. Halfway spent, stalled in the middle.

To them, it was a reminder of everything that wouldn't happen anymore.

"I know a place she liked. Half hour away." He was thumbing toward his truck, looking oddly self conscious. As though he wasn't even sure how he'd gotten to her DC office parking lot. As though he was concerned she would make assumptions about his invitation that meant more than just somebody to share a meal with on a memorial Wednesday.

Rachel nodded, waving in the same direction. "You drive. I'm tired today."

"He took her because she was a woman." He said it forward and to the windshield as he drove, his body seemingly relaxed, his voice anything but.

Rachel stared forward into traffic as well, letting him avoid her eyes. "I think you're intentionally omitting a second half from that statement."

A surprising chuckle came from his side of the cab that drew her attention, his hand loosening from the wheel before it tightened there again as he nodded. "You teach her to argue every little thing or is it just a familial trait?"

"Katie didn't need to be taught to be argumentative, Gibbs." She could almost match that laugh, her head banking back into the headrest. "She was born that way."

He'd visibly winced when she referred to her sister as 'Katie'.

She'd noted it before, caught sight of how the thin skin around his eyes twitched at the softly made sound of it.

"Katie." She repeated it intentionally, a slip of an ache almost sadistically enjoying the fact that someone else in the big wide world hurt when that name breathed into the air. "He took Kate because she was a woman and..."

They were stalled in traffic, he had no escape. "And it would hurt me."

"Because?"

"Because I cared about her." Seemed the longer the conversation took, the slower the cars in front of them crawled, the quieter his voice went.

She fleetingly thought that he probably had a remarkably sensual bedroom voice.

Wondered how close her sister had really gotten to hearing it.

"Sometimes she thought maybe you hated her." Rachel shook her head forward on a little laugh, breathing the words out on sweetened memory.

"Never." That voice was hushed down to whispering range as he blankly stared forward.

"I know." She nodded into avoiding his eyes, just as much as he was avoiding hers in the small space. "She knew that too, Gibbs."

"How much did she know?"

Rachel smiled, let her head tip toward the window and back before she let off a breath, "Only marginally more than you wanted her to."

"I wasn't in love with her, Doc." His voice was still so quietly flush, still warm enough, but wary and careful in his words. "It's not... it's not what you think it is."

"Okay." She was doing her absolute best to hold tight to the doctorly tone, because they were treading on territory she knew could split them both up within the breath of the wrong word at the absolute wrong time. "I didn't say you were."

Could have been, though. That was what he was subtly and secretly implying.

If there'd been time enough. He could have been.

"The weapon he used... it's what I used. When I was in the Corps." He looked at her briefly then, to be sure that she was getting the point he was trying to make, a sort of desperation making his eyes clear to blue in the sunlight that flicked off the windshield.

"Intentionally." She agreed.

"Completely." His tongue raked against his bottom lip as he shook his head back forward. "That model's got a nickname that... he was very specific about taking her away from me. I mean, in the way he did it."

From you? He took her from you?

I'll just sit over here with thirty some years worth of more memories than you.

"He didn't just take her from you, Gibbs. He took her from all of us."

"The way he did it would say differently. The way he treated his ammunition, the rifle? Bravo 51's called a 'Kate' in quick jargon. Snipers and spotters will usually decide which weaponry best suits each target depending on environmental variables. But," a sudden breath in the middle of that quickly rattled information, like he'd found a place to hold on, "I used an M40A1 or that rifle almost exclusively. He knew that."

He wanted her to blame him as much as he blamed himself. That much was clear. In his eyes, his tone of voice, his churning of information that should make him the murderer.

A small part of her had wanted to blame him twice as much for years and years.

What was left of her sister in her head had just not allowed that to be.

(Kate had always been so defensive of him, even while complaining about him.)

"He didn't miss me and hit her, Rachel." There was a clean surety to the words that barely sounded over the hum of the engine. "He aimed for her. Took her from me, in front of me."

"And he used your preferred weapon, the thing you trust to keep you safe, to hurt you."

"In more ways than one." A coughed noise came off his lungs, one that signaled he was surprised by how much he actually had to say on the subject. "Tony's... he's senior agent to all of them. I can rely on him for everything on a case. But Kate? I just relied on her in general. She was..."

Yes, she was. All of that. I know.

"Kate was incomparable." She supplied for him.

"Always."

She nodded forward again as he let his foot off the brake, the movement of the vehicle sluggish but, at least, some sort of forward momentum. "And she was a woman."

"One I made the mistake of keeping closer than I should have."

"But not as close as either of you would have liked." She replied as she watched him, intentionally studied the starkness of his profile.

He'd aged even since she'd seen him last. Looked exhausted.

"I wasn't in love with her." And he was so defensive suddenly. So brashly intent.

She wondered if Kate had been able to so easily tell when he was lying too.

"I think part of you was, Gibbs." Rachel let her shoulders shrug complacency into the response. "And I think he knew that too."

He was silent a moment but it didn't last nearly as long as she'd expected it to as she turned her head toward the passenger window. "Did she know it?"

"Yeah, Gibbs. I think she did."

"I have... things. Things you should probably have."

"I have plenty of reminders, Gibbs. Keep them." She fussed her fork a little farther aside from the plate, shifted her water glass higher to the left of her wine glass, turned one of her knives across the bread plate.

Aw hell, that had to have been a Todd dinner tradition, ingrained in them as children.

Because he'd repeatedly caught her sister doing the same damn thing whenever they'd ended up eating out anywhere mid-case. And he'd always given her an unintentionally smitten smirk, to which she'd always just half glared and half smiled.

The repetitive haunting of Rachel just being who she was... it cracked open something cold in the center of his chest. The aged possibility of what could have been if he'd just simply stepped another six inches to his right one afternoon in May. But he couldn't seem to stop contacting her after she'd found her way to them. Couldn't cut that connection that had, suddenly, brought him circling back to thinking about her when he thought he'd managed to side-step past it.

He swallowed, watched her fold the top corners of her already folded napkin under as she shrugged. "Sketchbooks?"

"I have some." She finally looked up at him again, head still down but eyes lifted in a way that made his breathing catch still. Kate. That's how Kate had looked at him whenever she'd caught him unconsciously turning his head toward her desk. "Mom and I have refrigerator drawings from age five and up. She never could get her rainbow colors in the right order back then."

Right. Little Katie Todd. The full faced little munchkin of a girl he'd seen in pictures years before. Ducky had found the album in her desolately quiet apartment, lifted it reverently from her book shelf and then taken a place in the center of her couch, slowly turning pages.

"You'll like this one, Jethro. Come over here. This fish is bigger than she is. Must be on a lake somewhere. Must be - "

"Gibbs?"

Ducky had secreted that picture away, he was sure of it. Her scrunched up little face as she half laughed and half squealed. No more than seven or eight, her dark hair wetted against her cheeks like she hadn't just been fishing with a pole but she'd launched into the goddamn water after the sizable fish. He hadn't been able to find that picture again when he'd packed the album into a box for her parents, later and alone. Frankly, he didn't care if the medical examiner had taken it. Just wished he coulda seen it again first. Maybe to see her innocent smile. Maybe to remind himself that she'd really wanted kids someday and to know what they woulda looked like.

They had all been little beggars and thieves, it seemed. In the days after she'd died, when he'd kept her desk as a monument but Abby had repeatedly reminded him that somebody (Gibbs, somebody has to do it and it should be us) needed to pack up her place and send her things home. Vagabond ghosts pocketing any little trinket memories they could, anything her family wouldn't miss, just to somehow keep her close.

"Where are you, Gibbs? You're pretty far away right now."

Right. Rachel. The other sun kissed little girl in lakeside pictures that Ducky had surreptitiously pilfered. Her family. The woman in the picture that had been on her bedside table when he'd stripped off sheets that smelled like her skin and her hair and lavender.

Smiling eyes watching him as he'd choked down deep in his throat and left her mussed pillows and buttery yellow pillow cases for Abby to deal with.

She'd left a shirt on her bed that morning too, clean but discarded. The one she'd decided not to wear. And when he'd unconsciously hung it in the closet (and he wasn't sure why because all of that would need to be packed up too) he'd wished she had stuck with the first choice. Because he'd fucking loved that green shirt. It'd always done something unexplainable that made her eyes twist through all their colors.

Slightly different eyes, same knowing smile, watching him from across the table.

And he was near to choked again.

"I shoulda sent this to you a long time ago." He leaned away from the table, drawing out an envelope from his inside jacket pocket as she watched him quizzically. "I'm sorry it's taken this long."

Her eyes hardened instantly at the sound of his apology, as though she somehow knew it was a verboten and generally inaudible thing. He didn't doubt that she did know, somehow. He didn't doubt at all that she knew so many more things about all of them than they realized. She was intelligent, astute and, hell, she'd had inside information for a couple years. But, regardless of his apology, she graciously took the envelope he handed across the table, let him reach for his water as she turned a scrutinizing glance over her own name in too familiar handwriting.

"This is how you knew who I was? When you heard my name you put it together?" He could see how gingerly she was holding it, fingertips touched to it softly. "It's unopened?"

"Doesn't have my name on it, Doc."

She nodded dumbly in understanding as she tucked it closer, like she wanted to press it to her somehow before she instead decided to reach for her purse. "Kate... she didn't send letters, Gibbs. She rarely called unless she needed to vent."

"About me."

Rachel snorted as she tucked the envelope into her bag. "Usually."

He nodded tentatively as he aimed long fingers toward where she'd dropped her purse aside once again, "This is the sort of letter that doesn't get sent until it needs to be, Rachel. You understand?"

"What sorts of things?" She was fidgeting her fingers against cutlery again, ignoring the implication he was clearly making. "What'd you keep, Gibbs?"

"We had to... we emptied her apartment. Sent most everything to your parents. Abby kept some little things. Things that wouldn't have mattered except to the two of them. Tony's got her PDA. Her cell. Ducky has photos."

She squinted at him as her fingertips wiped the edge of her empty plate, "What did you keep that has you feeling so guilty?"

"Can I steal you away a little longer tonight?" He deflected it with a gentled smile. "Want you to see something."

He kept her little sister, what he had left of her, in an evidence box in his basement... and that seemed perfectly normal and completely understandable when coming from him. She'd just waited in a still and quiet living room, tea happily steaming from the cup in her hands, as he'd lugged it upstairs and then gentled it to the coffee table in front of her.

"It's not much." The tall stretch of him seemed smaller than it had earlier, more tightly compact as he stepped back away from the table, the box, and leaned into the framing of his fireplace. "But if you want anything... I just thought you'd want to check."

The box, after opening, wasn't stuffed full. But it sure as hell wasn't empty either. Lipstick, half used. Cinnamon candies, obviously old and gummed just under their untouched red wrapping. Little things that had little meaning to her but, probably, meant more than something to him. Hairpins, a hair clip and an NCIS cap, her ID but not her badge.

(They'd sent her badge with her body. Her mother had told her that, sobbing angrily over the phone on the day she'd finally absolutely refused to attend the funeral.)

A manila folder stuffed full of paperwork – references and official employment documentation. Certificates, a copy of the letter that awarded her posthumous medal. A copy of her death certificate, the autopsy report. His report regarding the death of the terrorist that killed her.

A handful of photographs, both during cases and during off time. She couldn't bring herself to look at them, though. Not with his watching.

A basketball jersey, one of her sister's favorite college teams, folded gently over and around itself.

A full sized sketchbook that she flipped through slowly, recognizing the faces of the people her sister had undoubtedly loved, little doodles on notes and scraps of paper stuffed in between pages. A memo page, masculine writing on the front, a sailboat shaded gracefully onto the back of it.

That one was worn rough, the paper soft touched enough that it felt more like fabric as she searched over how gracefully the lines had been soothed onto the paper.

"It's a ketch." He murmured sullenly from across the room. "She did that during a harassment seminar and then proceeded to harass me with it."

And, at the very bottom (and likely stuffed hidden beneath everything else), an envelope, a letter.

This one with his name (just 'Gibbs') and in Kate's clean handwriting. And, yet, still unopened.

"This one does have your name on it."

"Can't." He was staring at her discarded shoes as he admitted it, his attention seeming drawn to them and the way she'd lazily tipped them to the floor while he'd been in the basement. "Won't."

"She wanted you to have this." Rachel leaned her arm into the edge of the box, the envelope pinched between her fingers as she searched over him. "Whatever is in this, she felt you absolutely needed to know."

"I already know everything I needed to know, Rachel. She's gone."

"Obviously you don't." If she thought she could stand away from all the little pieces of her sister she'd strewn across his coffee table, she certainly would have. "Not if she felt the need to put it into writing and save it for when she wasn't around anymore."

"I can't read that." The expansive length of his body and the width of his shoulders was obvious in the way he swung away from facing her, a full palm braced onto the mantle. "Not now."

"Then you disrespect her wishes." Her voice shot curtly into his back. "And you disregard the fact that she cared enough to write it."

"Don't see you ripping yours open and diving in."

It was infuriating that he still wouldn't face her, just mouthing off to the side.

"What my sister has to say to me is none of your goddamn business, Gibbs." Rachel answered the the tensing of his shoulder blades. "So, no, not in front of you."

Well, that had finally gotten him to spin back around, the blue in his eyes nearly tinted furious. "But you want me to open that in front of you?"

"I wanna know why you can't seem to open it at all." Maybe some of that blame and anger was still swilling around inside her, because her own voice sounded sinfully wrathful in her own ears. "Years later and a piece of paper has road-blocked the theoretically unbreakable Leroy Jethro Gibbs?"

He blinked confusion over her, head shaking sharply back and forth. "Unbreakable?"

"She thought you were."

He blinked again, still confused. But this time somewhat shattered. "She thought wrong."

"I gave this to her. When she joined the Secret Service." Her fingers caught and trapped the hanging pendant still, squinting at how familiar it was in the yellowed light over the workbench. "Michael is the Patron Saint of Police Officers."

He was idly and unnecessarily fixing the tools that were farther down the bench, avoiding watching how gently and reverently she touched against the medal that had been hanging from a shelf beam for years. "You should take it back then."

"I'm not a cop, Gibbs." The slowness of her hand as she let go and lowered her fingers let the swing of the chain just move marginally, most of its untouched stillness still intact. "It's exactly where it belongs. With the man who taught her to be a better investigator."

One of the tools made a clatter against the table that rattled an ugly echo throughout the basement as he made a noise off his throat and turned away from her, turned toward thwacking his palm into the frame of something half made. "Don't placate me, Doc."

Rachel ignored the swing of his frustration, the obvious offensive thrust of his annoyance, her eyes still fixed on the image of an archangel, strong and unyiedling. "Is it really placating if I'm just repeating something someone once told me?"

"You should take it." She could tell he'd kept his back to her because his voice was oddly warping against the wall before reaching back to her. "You gave it to her."

"You need to keep it. It's where it belongs."

It had taken another half hour and his hand aiming a cold beer in her direction to forgive the uncomfortable frustration that was probably still trapped in his basement.

He'd offered it to her silently, waving his own in the direction of the back door.

"Never told her about my wife and daughter." His full palm pressed the door open for her and held it, the cooler later night air calming the flush that had taken to living on her skin. "Sometimes I wish I could have."

She was surprised by the roses lining the back patio and the walk that dissected the yard. She appreciated them without commentary as she just let her body tiredly plop down onto the stone, lifting the beer in his direction as he let the door sway closed. "Tell you a Sister-Pinky-Swear-Secret? She knew, Gibbs. Before anybody else."

"Rosefern." He'd muttered it quietly enough that she squinted confusion at him, unsure that she'd heard him correctly. But he completely disregarded it, snorting a laugh through his nose and shaking his head up. "Secret Service. She vetted me. Little shit."

"She was that." Rachel grinned into how affectionately he'd said it, watched him lean slowly down to sit beside her with his beer dangled between updrawn knees. "Often."

"Well," she continued quietly, "and she was..."

"Say it." His eyes were closed to the shadows in the yard like he was bracing himself for some sort of impact.

"Enthralled." She chose the word so carefully - just because he was being open didn't mean she felt very secure intentionally baiting him, not when his anger was still so taut on his paled skin. "She knew as much as she could about you."

"I watched her. She was an open goddamn book sometimes." He opened his eyes and allowed himself to take down a long and strong swallow from his bottle.

Rachel let her head dip in quick agreement. "Especially when she knew she'd done something wrong."

"Or something right." He murmured, turning to watch her as she took her own drink down.

She was almost laughing as she lowered the bottle, gently studying the rose bushes, "She could be pretty cocky."

"Yeah, but I liked that."

"She hated her freckles." He'd gotten her another bottle, a third actually. "Absolutely hated them."

"I know. She didn't need the make-up, though." Gibbs flopped down beside her again, his body less rigid and tense than it had been the entire night. "I rarely called her 'Katie'."

"I know." Rachel lifted the bottle in a sort of half-hearted 'cheers' before downing a swig. "She noticed whenever you did, though. She noticed a lot of things."

"She was always observant." He sighed off as his empty hand went back against the patio, steeping his spine to an angle in the night-time quiet. "I wasn't in love with her."

Her head lifted into the way he'd brought the tone of his voice wistfully up at the end of the statement, like he could have continued but decided it was better if he did not. "But you could have been?"

A smile suddenly graced his face that seemed so brashly honest, bright but sad at once as his jaw flexed into the movement, head still lifted away from her. "Almost was."

"Why only 'almost'?" She pried at him, kept her tone simply questioning rather than badgering. "Work? The job? Your rules?"

His head shuffled slowly back and forth, like none of what she'd reference really mattered all that much, like the real reasoning was so much more important. "I didn't want her to hurt."

"Seems silly now, doesn't it? So often trying to save her from the pain you could cause only for her to die right in front of you?"

"I was touching her when she died, Rachel. She wasn't alone." It was as though he was speaking on a sort of automatic pilot as he set the bottle aside, the words coming out of him like they'd been programmed to be released and he had no control over their sudden appearance between them. "She was laughing, teasing me. She was happy. At that moment."

She had no response, not a vocal one anyhow. Not anything that could escape the vice clamp on her lungs.

He'd never once actually described the moment to her, despite the fact that she knew he'd been there.

She'd never once been able to actually bring herself to ask what it was like.

(She'd never been entirely sure that she really wanted to know. But now she really really did.)

"She had no idea it was coming. It just happened, instantly." He looked at her then and it seemed as though his whole body was out of his control, starting with how deeply blue in pain his eyes were. "She died with me."

The mostly full bottle suddenly felt indescribably cold in her hand. "You mean you died with her, Gibbs."

"A little, yeah." It was an unexpected midnight confession, actually threw her off her game a little.

She'd expected, from everything she'd been told, the things she'd seen, read, from their previous interactions, that he'd be a much harder case to crack open. But time had worked him over for her, it seemed. Seemed he was being bare honest with her and with himself at once – and that was disarming.

So... may as well go in for the kill, she supposed.

He was obviously leaving himself open for it, waiting as he watched her.

Waiting for her to accept a semi admission of something like love, but not quite.

"Like with your wife and daughter?" Aim and fire. She seemed to have hit her target just by the mere mention. "That why you wish you'd told her about them?"

"She was a lot like Shannon." He seemed all about the sanctity of doctor/patient/confessional privilege as they sat on his back patio – because he was saying a hundred times more than he'd ever said before. And all of it pretty damn unexpected. All of it a secreted surprise. "Patient with me. She could have made it last. Made it work."

"But you didn't want to hurt her." She murmured the encouragement, caught the way her tone of voice had him shifting her a wary look. "And you didn't want to find yourself in the same position all over again. I mean, to let yourself love her and then lose her? It would have been too close, too similar."

"Better to lose a possibility than a reality."

"Is it, though?" She kept the tone, kept the quietness. "What reality do you really have? Some papers and clothing? Jewelry and half used cosmetics? Her sketches?"

"She saved my life right before she lost hers." There was indisputable pride in his voice, that or an unforgivable regret. "That's my reality."

"No, that was her reality. That she was willing to give her life to save yours. She died with you, Gibbs."

"I'm sorry for that." And he did seem to suitably and truly regret it. "Sometimes I think I shoulda just let her keep walking off that goddamn airplane. Shoulda kept my mouth shut. She'd be shuffling papers at the Hoover Building right now."

"Caitlin wouldn't have shuffled papers anywhere and you damn well know it." A little note of pride hedged into her tone, something bemused by the idea that Kate would have gone stir crazy sitting at a desk for hours and days on end. "She was happy where she was. You made her happy. What'd you just tell me?"

"She was laughing when she died." His repeated admission was made with such a quietly grating tone. "God, she was gorgeous when she laughed. "

It was maybe the first time he'd ever consciously let her see him as a man separate from his career, one that was completely just a man rather than an employer or boss or agent. A man that had been able to look at her sister, sometimes, and see a beautiful young woman, removed from their environment and their duties. That, at times, he'd been unable to separate what she should have been to him from what she was.

It was the first time he let her see and recognize how much he may have really once wanted her little sister.

It was harrowing, if nothing else. That displaced desire and the unguarded surfacing of an impossibly painful ache that would never be dulled or quenched.

Rachel studied his profile in the oddly made shadows, "That's why you can't open the letter."

The rolling noise of agreement that passed his pressed lips surprised her, "I already know what it says."

"She loved you."

"I know that." It was, maybe, the first time he'd let her hear so much unfettered sadness in his tone.

"Let her tell you that, Gibbs." It was mournfully murmured near his shoulder and softly. "She's already dead. You can't hurt her anymore."

She refused his offer to sleep somewhere in his house.

Demanded to call a cab instead of letting him drive her back either.

Because a tiny childish bit of her still wanted to believe that she had Kate with her.

And she sure as shit did not want explain sleeping over at his place.

God, Gibbs. What can I say?

Wasn't supposed to end this way, was it?

Take care of everyone - and try to be patient, okay? It'll take awhile. Tony's gonna lash out but he's stronger than you think. He's a good agent, a good man, and he looks up to you. Tim will bounce back faster but let him be sad. He needs to be sad for awhile and that's okay. Tell Ducky I adore him. He's the perfect gentleman. And don't ever let Abby go. She needs you now almost as much as you need her.

And you? Put down the bourbon and get the hell out of the basement.

Tell me you loved me and let it go.

Because I love you enough for both of us.

Even if you are a stubborn bastard.

He called her at the end of May.

Just be sure that she was okay.

"I'm glad you called today."

She still wasn't okay, couldn't be.

But, really, all in all, neither was he.

"I figured you'd know it was me."

"Why am I here, Gibbs?"

He lifted an unopened bottle between them, shrugging boyishly as he smiled. "Christening?"

She arched a scrutinizing look in his direction. "Why this boat?"

"Because it's hers. Close as I could get to a ketch in my basement. I mean, I still had to get it out somehow, right?"

Because it said 'Kate' in elegantly scrolled black lettering along the back.

She made a noise of sadness in her throat, feeling like her eyes were burning up as she tipped him a steeply angled look. "You finally read it, didn't you? The letter?"

Gibbs just squinted at her and lifted the bottle higher, looking somewhat younger by the worn in hoodie and the way the wind was catching against his hair. "You gonna do this or not?"

"You do it." She nodded at him, fingers waving toward the boat that was still lashed to the dock. "What'd she tell you, Gibbs? What'd she say?"

The humor he'd been near on forcing shrugged off him slowly, his head ducked a little as he squinted over the boat. "That it's okay."

"Is it?"

"Not particularly." He set the bottle down and used both hands to unwind thick roping, flicking his wrists naturally and knowingly into the movement before each line got tossed against the prettily stained wood. "But we move on, right? We let go."

"She told you it's okay to let go?" She let the question follow him as he dumped each line, loosening the boat but bracing one foot against it as he leaned into the rigging.

He grinned at her suddenly, catching into the ropes to start raising the small sail, "She told me to get the hell outta my basement."

She laughed into the way he said it with such sweet bemusement, his movements quick as he finished the sail and stepped gingerly back up onto the dock, scooping up the bottle by the neck. "Now, that sounds like Kate."

"Yeah," a thoughtless laugh rumbled its way through the words as he started back swinging the bottle, "it really does."

She'd expected the sound the bottle made against the wood to be more crackling, more shattering glass than thumping. She'd expected something higher pitched – and she hadn't counted on the hollow echo of the wood bracing the bottle's momentum. She hadn't expected the near sound of an echoing gunshot to make her let out a broken sound as her hand closed up against her mouth.

And she absolutely had not expected his hand to come up against her wrist a few moments later while the other pulled against the back of her head.

Rachel let him tuck her tight into his chest, his breathing solid and even as he stayed perfectly still against the unexpected ratcheting of her lungs. "She told you she loved you, didn't she?"

His good humor was suddenly gone, cut from the dock completely.

"She really was beautiful, Rachel. Your sister was... incomparable. In every way."

That word again. Like he'd rediscovered its existence after her death and it had instantly reconnected her to him somehow. Like it had an epic poetry of meaning that other people in the world (besides, say, her older sister) just weren't going to understand, not when in reference to her.

"She really was. She always was." She pressed away from him, at least enough that he nodded a supportive glance over her face as she turned her head toward the boat. "So is this."

He smiled into passively studying her face, "It'll sink in open water. Once she gets out there she'll have taken on enough water. It'll list, founder."

"You sabotaged it somehow. Didn't you?" Rachel accused quietly, stuttered confusion and the briskness of the air off the water choking up her ability to speak as clearly as she would have liked. "Why? Why would you do that?"

He didn't answer as he shrugged his head up, just lifted his jaw higher into watching the water.

He didn't need to answer as he squinted into a deeper silence. Not really.

She watched him brace and wedge the arch of his boot onto the edge of the boat, giving a solid shove against it as it rocked farther into the rhythmic waves, "You don't want her out there without you, do you?"

He was suddenly smiling, glance cast out sadly over the water even as his lips curved on a sweetly mischievous and bittersweet smirk. "Nope."