Disclaimer: I don't own NCIS: LA, or any of it's characters. I'm simply borrowing them for literary purposes.
Reviews are appreciated!
Prologue:
Half-hidden in the slanted evening shadows of the bayside pier. Three of you with guns, and more crouched in corners with pistols and hands at the ready. Waiting for footsteps and all you find is silence.
Somewhere, in a distance that is not entirely out of your reach, you recall when this day was still something you could only dream about. And then you remember that justice is subjective and that words can sting more than punches. You are far too gone to save yourself.
A woman slinks across a patch of sunlight, and you all tense because you have been waiting for this to happen for such a long time.
(A childhood that was yours, and was almost hers. How you forgot before you even knew you remembered and how free she already was.)
Six seconds and you do not breathe.
(And this cannot end well and you have all started off on the wrong foot because it's what you do best.)
Emilio could not have planned it better, because she moves almost perfectly into your line of fire, and the weapon is raised and ready before your mind has caught up with what you are doing.
Strong voices and weak little feet that will never run fast enough to save your sleeping little heart. You were young, and maybe you still are, but you were never innocent enough to be pitied and never alive enough to die.
Waiting for a signal. The men that have come with her are not as light on their feet, and they fumble along behind her like small children in a single file line. As if they have come ready to be taken out like accessories. They shiver and peer into the darkness, but they will never make the connection.
It's all part of the plan and they will play their parts perfectly, for they always do.
She is looking right at you, but does not quite understand the stillness that surrounds her.
Two seconds longer and you want to call out but don't.
(There is a small stir from somewhere above you, beginning in a second of leftover time.)
It begins with the creak of a floorboard and the crack of a gun that is not your own.
Fire seems to erupt from the earth itself and it almost breaks you to see the panic in her eyes. The men around her fall in tandem, as if this scene has been rehearsed and perfected. Some have made it behind the crates that take up much of the room, and you watch her tend to the wounds of one of the fallen.
Hands working furiously to bind the gunshot that has made him useless, she will waste her time on someone who can only slow her down and you are slightly stunned but mostly sad.
(Mind focused on her task, as if she may not really die here and this is just a game that neither of you really wanted to play.)
Emilio grabs the woman from behind and you think that she never had a chance. Kicking and clawing, but they grab her by the neck and she falls limp much too quickly for your comfort.
You worry that they have been too harsh.
But you follow them all out of the boathouse in a rush, only pausing as you pass the agent she had been helping. Blood trickles from a gash in his thigh.
He will live.
"Wh-why?" The words tremble, and they are answered with a shrug and the wringing of hands.
Because they have convinced themselves that she has answers and that this is their chance. To make amends and to make it big and to make it count for something. To replace the echoes of empty rooms that ate them all up and all the funerals they never attended.
You step over his aching form, the crescent scar on your shoulder pulsing suddenly and fearfully.
For those brown eyes of hers are foreign and familiar. Because this is long past due and still all too soon.
They are asking all the wrong questions and running in circles and it all leads to boathouses and graveyards eventually because this is wrong and they have only just started.
She has left behind a trail that she might not be able to retrace. Two decades and two hundred wrong turns to find her.
And oh, how you pray.
xxx
She comes to know them by the sound of their footsteps, the smell of their breath.
Heavy boots and silent homecomings. She draws pictures in the dust, sits criss-cross and does not make a sound. The walls are falling down and the storm is always moving in, but she feels some sort of safe in the silence because she knows all their secrets anyways.
She was supposed to be a boy.
She was supposed to grow up to be big and strong and someone they could all be proud of, and she came out sticky and pink and did not cry.
They say her mother died from the grief of bearing the bright-eyed child, and they do not speak of her father, so she decides that she does not have one.
Unafraid and so eternally disappointed. The hall outside her room smells like sweet tobacco and the smoke stings her eyes at night. She is three and half years old, and counts on her fingers and reads the books they leave her when they think no one is looking.
Red is her favorite color until she is whipped for standing too close to the doorway and bleeds all over her dark blue dress. White is her favorite color until she realizes that in white, she cannot hide. So she shrinks into the black shadows and calls it home and it is familiar and safe and she likes it there.
There is an old nurse who bathes her once a week, who sings her sweet songs and gives her sad looks.
"Anjinho," the woman murmurs in her ear as she lays the young girl down to sleep. "How very empty your life shall be."
And the child grips her wrinkled hands tightly and whimpers at the idea of being alone again. So the night becomes something that reads like a short story, tales of daring escapes and brave brave soldiers who never came home.
When the world outside the damp walls that surround them both becomes harsh and unforgiving and neither really wants to leave but one always does.
The expectations she will never meet and the person she cannot become.
"Anjinho," the woman murmurs in her ear, and the words are sad and they mean something that she is still too young to understand.
She asks about her father one day because she cannot pretend forever and the answer is distant and not all there.
She asks if she will ever meet him and the answer is a soft laugh and the ruffling of hair.
She asks about the other children, because she hears them outside her walls and wonders about them sometimes.
So the nurse sets her down on the small cot.
Tells her that there are nine parts to every story.
And she will tell them to her one by one.