Title: Mistakes
Disclaimers: NCIS, the rights to the show and its characters do not belong to me. No money was made by this.
A/N: English is not my native language. So please forgive me my grammar and spelling mistakes.
Spoilers: none really, kind of AU
Pairing: none stated
Summary: You're human, and as that, you're bound to make mistakes. Doesn't mean it's easy to live with what you have done.
WARNING: CHARACTER DEATH! You have been warned, though it is not explicitly stated who dies, I think you can draw your conclusions.
Sometimes her thoughts keep her awake the entire night. Past mistakes that crawl from the shadows and stare at her in the darkness, their hard eyes accusing.
How she wishes she wouldn't have made them. How she wishes that she had known what would happen if she decided like she had. But she hadn't known. And now she has to live with the consequences of her actions, no matter what she would give to made them undone.
Even as director, she has made mistakes. And other people had to pay the price. They put their lives on the line because they trusted her. And she let them down, again and again, one after the other.
The phone calls are the hardest. After a wife broke down on the line and she had had to listen to her crying and sobbing for almost an hour, she decided that she would not give these news on the phone ever again.
So the next time one of her agents fell in the line of duty, she went to his house. For a while, this worked, better than the phone calls had before. She could comfort and listen and feel like she was actually helping those people with their grief, by simply being there and praising the deceased. But then, one evening when she rang a previously unfamiliar doorbell, she was greeted by the most beautiful eyes she had ever seen. Belonging to a small boy barely old enough to go to school. From then on, she went back to phone calls. It is way easier to deal with the voices than with the eyes.
There is an exception, though. When the calls just aren't enough. When it concerns people she cares about. Because they deserve the comfort of her presence. Because she needs to let their relatives know that she cares, that they had meant something to her, and how deeply she regrets that it came to this.
She blinks and wipes the tears away before ringing the bell. The door opens, and a loud squeal echoes through the night. With a forced smile, she bends down and picks up her goddaughter. Kissing Tali's forehead, she watches as the face of the little girl's father slowly transforms from a look of surprise and welcome to a face full of pain and grief. And she knows the exact moment that he realizes why she is there and not his wife.
THE END
Review? Pretty please?
[If there are any tense shifts that shouldn't be there, I'm sorry. I started writing this in simple past but halfway through, I changed my mind and went back to edit it. My apologies if something slipped past me.]