Chapter 28, "Lovebirds."
A companion to chapter 27, "Bold."
"Do you know what today is?"
His scruff is tickling her ear as he wriggles his face into the space at the crook of her neck from behind, his voice vibrating through the pillow her face is resting on.
She grumbles an incoherent, sleepy negative into the pillow. Why is he awake already?
"It's our meetaversary."
"Our what?" she grumbles sleepily, flipping over and squinting her eyes and then stretching them wide to try to wake herself up.
"Our meetaversary," he repeats, and her sleepy brain takes a moment to sort out his meaning.
"You know that anniversary just means yearly return, right? So anything can be an anniversary, you don't have to make up a new name for it."
"Whatever, Wikipedia. We met five years ago today."
"So our partner anniversary."
"No, we didn't become partners, really, until like a week later. Actually, I became your liaison a week later. I guess you could say we didn't technically become partners until like six months later, since I was gone for the whole time in between, and you technically still had a different partner."
Huh. True. So their partner anniversary is in... September?
"I got you a present," he continues, ignoring the issue of other anniversary dates and dropping a box on her lap.
"I didn't get you anything."
"Maybe we can sneak off to the burn room today and make out a little bit. That sounds like a great present," he grins, raising his eyebrows enticingly.
"Hetty probably has hidden cameras even in there," she retorts as she unwraps a small, lightweight box. She draws out a gray fitted t-shirt and bursts out laughing.
"Get it? Cuz the guys call us lovebirds and you're my Ladybird?" He asks eagerly, clearly pleased with himself.
"I get it, Deeks. If you have to explain it, it's not funny."
It's a simple gray shirt, v-neck like she's so fond of, with the dark silhouette of two birds nestled together on a branch painted across the front. Lovebirds.
"Is this going to be our thing now, birds?"
"It can be the next metaphor for our relationship," he grins.
"Oh, please no."
"Hey, you started it."
"YOU started it. I merely repeated it once."
"Twice."
"I was speaking in code so Granger wouldn't know who it was referring to."
"And you bought me eggs. Birds eggs."
She looks at him, confused.
"My Ladybird gave me eggs," he repeats, enunciating carefully. "Something symbolic there, maybe? For a few minutes there I thought maybe I'd missed a hidden message you were trying to send me."
She stares at him blankly. What?
"But then I figured you probably wouldn't tell me something like that at work."
Ladybird. Bird. Woman. Eggs. Offspring. Oh.
"Oh, my gosh Deeks. No. We're not— There's a whole lot that needs to happen before we even think about thinking about that. Isn't there?" She finishes feebly.
"Sooo, you're saying I should put a ring on it first,"
"Yes! Wait, no!— I didn't mean... I guess if we—before we... That's not exactly what I meant to say."
"But you're maybe not opposed to the idea at some point in the future?"
"The egg part, or the ring part?"
Are they actually talking about this?
"Uh... both?" He ventures tentatively. "But I guess I meant the ring part. Yeah, first the ring part."
"Like your ten-year-rule kind of sometime-in-the-future?"
He catches her eyes and seems to weigh what he sees in them, gauging his response on the level of fear in her eyes.
"I wouldn't be necessarily opposed to upping that timetable. Assuming, hypothetically, that my girlfriend was on board with the idea. Not, like, right now, but maybe not five years from now either."
Her heart is racing, but the answer comes out easily, more easily than she ever would have expected it to.
"Well, then hypothetically, no." Her hands that are holding the box in her lap are trembling, but she's not entirely sure if it's from fear or from the nervous excitement that's racing through her. This is so not how she expected to be feeling during this conversation. "I'm maybe not opposed to the idea at some point in the not-now-but-not-five-years-from-now future."
When she catches his eyes she sees her own fear reflected in them, but she sees more than just that. She sees hope. Joy. Love. He holds her eyes as the fear and the hope and the nervous excitement pass between them like a current, wild and unfamiliar and thrilling.
"Okay then," he finally says lamely, dropping his eyes and clearing his throat. "That's... good to know. Good to know."
Hopping off the bed, he takes the covers with him, causing her to curl into a ball at the sudden rush of cool air.
"Pancakes in the kitchen!" he yells, heading out the bedroom door, his familiar cheerful morning voice quieting the thoughts and emotions that their conversation had started whirling. She loves this man. Whatever the future brings, she doesn't see that ever changing. They can do this. One step at a time, they will do this.
I don't know where this came from. All I had planned when I started was Deeks' gift in honor of Densi day, and the rest just kind of appeared out of thin air. Stories do that to me sometimes.
I know that some people call Ladybugs Ladybirds, but that's a strange foreign concept to me, so I assume that Ladybird in this context is not referring to a bug, but an actual bird.
I'm not sure this actually fits with the canon right now as their tensions are high and the pressure in on them with whatever is going on with LAPD, but I can see them having a conversation like this randomly somewhere in the not-too-distant future when things are a little lighter. I have a feeling the next couple weeks of the Deeks storyline are either going to throw a wrench in their relationship and back them further away from this point, or bond them and make their relationship even stronger. We'll see, I guess.
