What if...
Disclaimer: I don´t own any characters or anything.
Summary: Kate made a choice about her life and now wonders if it was the right one.
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It´s been almost a year now, but somehow, it seems like forever to me. I watch my 5-month-old son sleeping in his crib. He looks so cute when he´s smiling in his sleep, that´s something he got from his dad, I think. At the same time I think that this shouldn´t be happening, all of it shouldn´t have happened in the first place, but there´s no way to turn back time. It was an accident, that thing with J.T. and Joyce , a one-night-stand that went wrong somehow, I still don´t know how I could have let it come to that. There has been so much going wrong afterwards as well.
All of us had been a bit drunk, it was our Christmas Party after all. I don´t know how exactly I ended up in his bed, I really don´t. When I found out I was pregnant four weeks later, I knew it hadn´t been a dream after all. I didn´t tell him. I went home after work, wrote a letter of resignation to the director in which I told him that I would quit my job at NCIS. It was sent on a Friday and I was gone on Sunday already. I have left everything behind, everything I ever had.
I don´t know if they tried to find me afterwards, if they did, they didn´t succeed. I´ve been trained in Secret Service. I knew how to cover my tracks and start all over again. I don´t think they´ll come looking for me out here in Wyoming. It´s too far away from Washington. I bought a small cabin up in the mountains, there are no neighbors for at least 5 miles around me.
Sometimes I wonder how my life would be if I had told him, if I had stayed in Washington, but then I look at J.T. and realize how wonderful our life is out here. There´s a picture hanging above his bed, a picture of the day he was born and the day his sister died in my arms. I didn´t know I was having twins, they only realized when I came to the hospital, but it was too late to save Joyce. They told me it was twin-to-twin-transfusion-syndrome. I cried a lot, but yet, I had a little boy who needed me. Some day I will have to tell him, but not now.
The place we live at is called Lost Lake, because there´s rarely anyone who finds the way up here. It´s not that difficult, if you trust your senses. It´s a beautiful area with a crystal clear lake. Maybe a year ago, I would have hated it, but now I really like it. I take the truck to Jackson once in a while to get groceries. There are two large freezers in the garage, so I don´t need to go very often. Sometimes, I´m not going down into the valley for a month or two in a row. It depends on the weather. Winter is cold up here and there´s lots of snow, summer is rather hot.
I walk back into J.T´s room and watch him sleep. For a moment, I wonder what they are doing right now, if they are still at NCIS. Dinozzo, Abby, McGee and Ducky, well and Gibbs of course. I wonder if he´s still living it down to the second b in his name. On a day like this, I miss them a bit, but I know I can´t go back. I closed that chapter of my life the day I walked out of the office. I know my thoughts will continue to go back to Washington for a while, because tomorrow it will be one year since I left.
I look at the only thing that I have taken with me, the only bit of my past. It´s my PDA sitting on my desk. I haven´t turned it on since I left Washington. It feels like it´s calling out for me to just open the flap, pick out one of the phone numbers and call one of them, just to hear a familiar voice again. Abby is the one I miss most of all. She´s the best friend I ever had -and will ever have, I think. I also miss the rest of them, especially right now. I look out of the window as the sun is disappearing behind the Teton range and I feel a single tear rolling down my face.
The next morning is sunny, but very cold. I wrap my son into a blanket and put him into the truck. The road is clear this morning, but there is supposed to be more snow tonight, so I have to get my freezers filled up, in case I don´t get out here for a month or something. Jackson is a nice place, they got everything you need and it´s barely an hour´s drive from the Lost Lake. I stop at the grocery store first of all. When I park my truck, I notice an SUV about 30 ft across from where I parked. It´s a simple black SUV, like there are many around a place like this, but something is different with this one. It´s more a gut feeling, something I haven´t felt for a very long time.
I don´t get out and keep watching that truck. The driver is still sitting inside, window rolled down. I can see a blue baseball cap and a hand holding one of those take-away-cups they sell in coffee shops. My window is rolled down half way and I see another person walking over from the store. I would have recognized those sunglasses from a million others. "Dinozzo, get over here now. We´ve got a job to do, so stop flirting." A voice comes from the SUV and I feel my blood freezing. Pictures come back to my mind, pictures I thought I had forgotten already.
Tony -brown hair, kind eyes, megawatt-smile. Gibbs -Silver hair, strict face, icy blue eyes. Abby -black pigtails, black eyeshadow. Ducky -ever polite manners, honest smile and that innocent look in his eyes. I swallow hard and weigh my options, looking down at my son, who is happily watching some birds fly across the sky. I look into his eyes and wonder what I should do. "That´s your daddy out there, J.T." I whisper at my little boy, who smiles back at me. What if I just get out and walk over to them? What if I stay here and wait until they are gone?
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I wrote this as a one shot, so I´m not actually planning to go on, but if you like it enough, I just might. Please review.