"There's a danger in loving somebody too much,
and it's sad when you know it's your heart you can't trust.
There's a reason why people don't stay where they are.
Baby, sometimes, love just ain't enough."
-Travis Tritt, "Sometimes Love Just Ain't Enough"
When she withdraws from the world this time, it's different. This time, it's not fear that drives her into herself, it's resignation. The walls are not as high as they were before—she's learned the value and importance of friendships—but they're thicker at the base and the odds of anyone else getting past them are slim.
She has had two chances at love and they both failed. This time, she simply chooses to be alone; love is clearly not meant for her.
She thinks he's the only one of them that has really left willingly, and that somehow makes the old wounds fainter and the new one deeper by comparison. Her father and Dom had been taken by violence, against their wills. They had chosen their lives, but not their deaths. When Jack left her, he hadn't really been himself. She knows that the man who had left her wasn't really the man who had loved her, and somehow that's easier than if he had been fully himself when he chose to go.
But Deeks, Deeks just left. No mental illness, no violent extraction. One day, he was just gone. No notice, no real explanation of why everything had changed, no real goodbye.
Too many people have left, and she is tired of losing the people that are important to her. She's invested herself too many times and lost, so she keeps the circle of important people small, doesn't let anyone new into it.
She heals again, but she heals harder. The Kensi that emerges is more serious again, thicker skinned. It's harder to see through the mask, and the only ones allowed underneath the calluses she's built are the ones who were already there.
For the first year, a small piece of her keeps hoping that he's going to change his mind, that he'll miss her and his ocean and his team too much, and he'll come home. She's angry and she's stubborn and she's hurt, but even though she imagines yelling at him when he comes home, all the scenarios still end in her taking him back. He taught her to believe in happily-ever-after, and it takes a while for that belief to die again.
-o-0-o-
Nell shows up on the one year anniversary with an armload of alcohol. When Kensi wakes up in the morning with a pounding head and very little recollection of the night before, she finds Nell asleep on the couch and a lot of empty bottles and used tissues on the coffee table. Nell wakes and hugs her goodbye, and that gentle, sympathetic look in her eyes tells Kensi that she probably shared a lot more than she meant to while she was inebriated.
After Nell leaves, she wanders into the kitchen to make coffee and find the Advil and she finds a sticky note on the coffee maker:
"Maybe you should call him?"
Underneath the note is a photo she has never seen before. He's sitting on the edge of her desk, looking down at her. His look is half amused and half adoring, and she swears she never actually looked that smitten when she was rolling her eyes at him.
She has to bite down the wave of ache that threatens to overwhelm her, and she slaps the photo down on the counter, face down. With a deep breath, shoulders ramrod straight, she crumples the note and throws it in the trash. That man is gone. That man was gone long before he moved to the other end of the continent. Something in her whispers a reminder that she had thought she caught him looking at her like that more than once in the year before he left, but she stubbornly forces that memory away. Maybe he had, maybe he hadn't. Neither answer changes the fact that he hadn't wanted to feel that way about her any more.
Regardless, she can't quite bring herself to crumple the photo and send it to join Nell's note in the trash, so she tucks it in the back of one of the bottom drawers in the kitchen, underneath a pile of utensils that she doesn't even know how to use. The odds of her ever seeing it again are slim.
She takes another steadying breath and keeps on with her morning routine.
For the first time in two years, she finally acknowledges that the man in the picture is not coming back.
He spends three and a half years in New York. It's a whole different world than anything he has ever known. It's almost culture shock for a while. He loves Broadway. He loves the symphony. He loves Little Italy but avoids Chinatown. He misses the Pacific, but there is something strangely compelling about the Atlantic, too. The water is too cold and too calm to really surf most of the time, but he throws himself into his work and doesn't have much time for that anyway.
The first vacation his boss forces him to take, he briefly entertains the idea of flying back to LA, finding out if she really has moved on. He quickly buries the thought at the bottom of his list of "Very Bad Ideas." If she has, he doesn't want to meet this man, doesn't want to know anything about him. If she hasn't, he doesn't want to face her and see the pain he's caused, doesn't want to make it harder on both of them. By now, she hates him, and as clearly as he knows that he wasn't good for her before, he knows even more that he's definitely no good for her now, after all he's put her through.
He goes to Norway instead.
Three years into his time in New York, Monty dies. With his old friend gone, he feels more and more restless and the city is less and less interesting. Four months later, he's offered a position overseas; he accepts almost instantly.
He bounces across Europe and Asia for the next five years. He sees Hetty occasionally on the big screen at work for intra-agency discussions, and one day he opens his computer to discover that someone has hacked into it—the background is a picture of Eric in a bowtie, dress shirt, and shorts and Nell in a white summer dress. A message pops up:
"Just eloped. Mrs. Beale says hello. Surfing in Hawaii for our honeymoon!"
He sends a card and a gift with his best wishes for his old friends.
He's up to his eyeballs in a case in Seoul when Callen is killed in the line of duty—for real this time. He doesn't even get the message until after the funeral. He sees Sam six months later at a training conference, and the big man's eyes tell him that you never really get over losing a partner. Sam took the first opportunity that came up to transfer to a training position. He's teaching hand-to-hand combat and tradecraft and a host of other things. He tells Deeks that he's just not getting any younger and isn't up to adjusting to another partner. He's creeping into his mid-fifties, and at least training guarantees that he'll get home to his family at a reasonable hour most nights. The adrenaline rush isn't the same, but he gets to know that he's equipping a new generation of heroes to be prepared to save the world all over again. It's different, but it's good.
It's been nine years, nearly to the day, when he steps into the Los Angeles Office of Special Projects again. He's forty-six years old. Hetty's there, about to turn eighty, watching over her flock for a few hours longer. He's back in LA for her final retirement party—the note had been worded as an invitation, but he knew declining wasn't really an option.
OSP has long since moved to a different building, and then another, but he's been through enough NCIS offices in the past nine years to know his way around instinctively. Sam's in San Diego now, and Eric has his own office, designing protocols and software systems for the para-military agencies. Hetty has a new protégé since Nell stepped back with the birth of Baby Beale #1. "Priorities change" she had told Deeks in his annual birthday card from the Beale family—this one covered in tiny footprints. She works as a contractor and trainer for the west coast field offices while raising freakishly intelligent Baby Beale #1 and Baby Beale #2.
He finds Kensi in the back corner of the offices, in the midst of a cluster of desks not unlike the ones they'd sat in nine years earlier. He stays in the shadows for a few minutes. She's team leader now for the west coast's most elite team, but she looks the same to him. There are a few more wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, the shape of her body is a little softer, but she's still the most beautiful thing he's ever seen.
He doesn't know anything about her anymore, really. He's heard a bit of her professional progress through the work grapevine, but that's it. He worked up the courage once to ask Nell about her when he called them to congratulate them on the birth of #2, but her voice had turned cold.
"Why don't you come home and find out for yourself." Leaving Kensi is the only thing she hasn't forgiven him for.
He stands watching her as she finishes filling out her forms for the day and stands and stretches. That deep, empty, longing in the pit of his stomach builds to full strength. It's been with him so long that it seems like it must have always been there; he barely acknowledges it most days. It only gets bad when he lets himself dwell on the silence of his empty apartment or the empty years ahead. The ache eases a little and then hurts worse for several days after he pulls out that one remaining picture from its worn book hiding place. He only does it on the really bad days now, the cases that get under his skin and he can't get out, days when the need for the memory of something good outweighs the price he will pay for those moments of peace in the days that follow. The days that follow are always bad days. The old sore has been rubbed raw again but he won't allow himself the solace of those memories more than once in a blue moon, so he runs himself ragged for a few days, a week, until he's so tired he can't think and it can heal over again. His teammates think it's just his way of dealing with stressful cases.
They have never heard him say her name.
"Time to call it a night; we'll get back to it tomorrow," she says as she rises and stretches and checks her watch. "Go home and get some rest. Cap'll be waiting for me." Her team mumbles their approval and begins the process of shutting down their work stations and collecting their things.
A knot forms in his stomach as she, too, rises and begins to gather her things.
Who is Cap? Husband? Boyfriend? Child? She's not wearing a ring, but she never did like wearing jewelry to work.
She turns and stills as she finally sees him. They stare at each other for a long minute, trying to read each other, but they've both gotten better at hiding over the last decade and they reveal little. Her eyes are a little colder than he remembers. New walls are up, not quite as tall as the old ones, but thicker, fortifying and replacing the old ones.
There are no hellos, just as there were no real goodbyes.
Finally, she speaks:
"I have beer."