The worst day of her life started at 4 am. Kensi woke up for a moment. She felt overheated and prickly. She murmured in his ear, "move over."
"You move over," he said but he shifted slightly away. "Go back to sleep."
So she did. She woke up at her normal time. "I don't feel like running this morning," she said.
"Then you definitely shouldn't run," he said. He was already up and dressed. He kissed her and she felt his wedding ring cold against her cheek.
"Do I feel hot to you?" She watched him picking things up around the bedroom.
"Like, sick? No." He looked at her for a long moment and then said, "No, you're fine."
She wondered what he was thinking. She should have asked. They both noticed her period was late. "Where are you going?"
"I take back the part about you being fine. We talked for twenty minutes last night about you not being part of this thing with Callen and the white supremacists -"
"I think I can read as pretty Aryan," she said.
"Are you bragging?"
"No," she said. "Be safe."
He kissed her again. "I will endeavor to do everything possible to always come home safe to you."
It wasn't prescient, he said that all the time.
She did paperwork at her desk. She worked out a little and complained to Nell she felt off. Deeks sent her a text at 10 am: see you after lunch. i maybe got a surprise for you.
She replied: i hate surprises. I don't want it. I love you.
He replied with 100 words on how much he loved her, to show her up, he wrote. He always sent texts like that.
Callen came back around 1pm, Deeks didn't.
She panicked after an hour. Callen said they'd finished, Deeks went one way, he came back. She sent Marty texts, called him. Then she went up to Ops and told Eric and Nell to find him.
It was excruciating the way time moved and lurched around. The next three hours went by in a minute of painful protracted waiting. All she could taste was bile, so strong she threw up at some point. "I know something's wrong," she said to Hetty.
"I know," Hetty said.
There was no value in being right. She sat with her knees by her chest in his chair when the detective from LAPD called. Sam and Callen ran out and she stayed where she was in her ball. Hetty walked by her, her face serious while she talked quietly on her phone. Kensi couldn't concentrate enough to read her lips.
She sent Marty another text, just you promised me. He was going to laugh at her when he came back and he was totally okay.
He would totally understand why she had freaked out.
One night they were watching tv and there were cops at the door on the show because someone had died. The woman who answered just started screaming. Deeks had winced. She'd thought, I am a cop's wife. She'd always assumed they wouldn't come to her to tell her, she and Deeks would get blown up together, he'd get shot standing next to her. It wouldn't be news to her. Except she'd imagined wrong, she thought. Or she was wrong, he would be back. The edge of the desk bit into her shins.
Sam and Callen were back. They didn't have Deeks. Hetty walked in an older man with the saddest eyes Kensi had ever seen.
They were all in ops. There were pictures on the screens. She didn't recognize any of them as anything but colors and angles. The older man said, "Hetty, I have nothing to add to this profile."
She said, "Profile?"
Everyone stared at her like she'd burst out in song. Finally, Callen said, his voice full of kindness that made Kensi want to beat him to death, "We think Deeks been taken by a serial killer."
"Really? A serial killer," she said.
Hetty said, "For the last 12 years, the killer, believed to be male, has abducted 15 men that the authorities know of. There are signs of struggle and personal identification left at the scene of the abduction and then, a body burnt beyond recognition."
She stared at the screens. They would keep talking, she knew. Callen said, "The detective in charge of this case at LAPD knows Deeks. He says he asked for the case file a month ago. Detective Reynolds thought of it when we reported back from the alley. Where we found Deeks's jacket, shield, wallet, phone and ring."
"Oh," she said. "You seem very sure about this."
They talked around her more. One of the pictures on the screen was the bottom part of a dumpster on wheels. The wheel and the screw were red with blood. She saw a ring lying there. Had someone tossed it there? It seemed so mean. Deeks loved his ring.
Somewhere it was already bagged as evidence. She tried to breathe and felt like she couldn't stand. She leaned against the counter as the room spun.
Someone said, "Kensi."
She was sitting at her desk and the sad man was asking her questions. "Would your husband keep files at home?"
"No," she said.
Sam said, "I know where it is."
She said, "How do you know and I don't?"
"I sit next to him," Sam said. He pulled something from the second drawer of Deeks's desk. "And he didn't want you to see it."
She hated surprises. He knew that.
The sad man said, "The key to finding your husband will be figuring out what he realized every other detective who looked at this missed. Okay?"
She nodded and flipped through the pages. She skimmed the description of the victims. She stopped on the map. She knew that road. She pointed to the map. "This is wrong. That road goes all the way through. It's not on the map like that, or gps, Marty drove me that way a few times, he says it's locals only. See, these are parking lots, but you can drive straight through."
She heard them talking. A rise and fall and then they were making calls and going to do something. She felt awful. Something bad happened and she was just in a fugue. Marty would be doing something.
Sam and Callen came back. She could tell by their faces.
She went home. Someone drove her home. Monty needed to be walked, so she did. He seemed like he already knew. He looked up at her and whimpered. She kissed his head and said, "I'm sorry." They went back home. She sat on the floor and brushed his teeth. She scratched his head and hugged him tight. She walked into the bedroom and lay down on Deeks's side of the bed.
XXXX
They'd spent 23 weeks going back and forth about letting Monty sleep on the bed with them. Mostly it had been Marty arguing with himself. He changed his mind a lot.
She woke up to Monty growling by her knee and then saw Callen at the end of the bed. "Kensi," he said.
He didn't ask why Monty didn't like him. He just started talking. He said, "The DNA confirmed it, Deeks is dead. He started looking into the case because he was trying to locate Jack, your ex-fiance. He was right, Jack was victim number eight, back in 2007. Deeks had figured out the guy's hunting grounds and, I don't know, went to check it out, got too close. We were able to identify where he was killing, where the killing happened. But they were both already dead."
"Ssssh, Monty," Kensi said. She didn't care about any of it. People would keep telling her the same stupid story for the rest of her life. Marty was dead and there was nothing she could do anymore.
"We think Deeks somehow got a shot off, I don't know. I left that for LAPD."
She said, "I don't care." She took a deep breath. She said, "All I want you to tell me is that this just an op. Tell me he's okay somewhere and I promise I won't tell. I will be totally convincing, just tell me he's not dead."
Callen stared at her with his sad eyes. "I wouldn't do that to you, Kensi. I wouldn't do that."
"Please," she said.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm so sorry."
XXXX
Her mother came in the afternoon. Hetty had called her. She pulled Kensi close in the tightest hug. Kensi said, "I'm sorry I didn't call, Mommy."
"It's okay," she said. "I know how it is."
Hetty had come after Callen. The three of them had been just sitting there, watching Monty stare at the door.
"Mom," Kensi said. "I think I'm pregnant."
"Oh," her mom said. "Okay." She hugged Kensi tighter and then let go. "Let's go to the doctor and find out."
"Instead of staying here and staring at Callen and Hetty? Okay," Kensi said.
Hetty attempted to smile and looked sad instead. She said, "Kensi, I could help you with the funeral planning."
"I don't, I have no idea," she said.
"I know," Hetty said.
"He's a cop," Kensi said. "That's important to him, he should have all that. I don't care about the obit, neither of us are religious, I just want, I don't want anything."
"That's all I need," Hetty said. "Callen and I will take care of Monty."
"If we're still gone by dinner -"
"Medicine in his special milk," Callen said.
Monty looked at her, like she was the only one who knew how sad he was. "That's true, Monty," she said. No one asked her why she said it.
She pushed her hair back behind her ears and got in her mother's car. Kensi didn't really have a doctor, she got her physicals and check ups at the hospital, usually after she'd almost been blown up.
Her mom drove her to her own doctor. Kensi sat in the waiting room while her mother stood at the nurse's window, talking to someone. Kensi thought she must smell, she hadn't showered since yesterday, she was still in the clothes she'd worn the day before. She must have had numb and dead written in the bones of her face.
Her mom sat down next to her and held her hand. It was twenty minutes before she got called back.
She couldn't pee in the cup. She hadn't anything to eat or drink in about 15 hours. She said, "Sorry," to the nurse.
The nurse smiled and said, "I'll be right back." She arrived with orange juice, a bag of dates and crackers. "Drink," she said. "And then eat."
"So I can pee?"
"No, so you don't pass out when I get blood for the tests. We wouldn't normally, but you're special."
"I'm good with needles," Kensi said. The orange juice tasted good but then her throat felt thick with tears. She said, "My husband's the one who hates them." She wasn't exactly crying, but her eyes were wet.
"Eat up," the nurse said. She started the blood draw.
"You just have food lying around?"
"It's my lunch," the nurse said. "Dr. Jin explained, it's okay."
Kensi was pregnant, five weeks along, just like she thought. Baby, she thought. She touched her stomach and thought, sorry about that. Sorry. Sorry we conceived you pretending to be someone else. Drugged up someone elses, she thought.
XXXX
The funeral was elaborate, everything Deeks deserved. She sat in the front with her mother and Monty. She stood when she was told to and took the things people handed her. Director Vance came, she thought that was nice.
She saw Sam standing with a gorgeous woman. She said, "Is that his wife?"
"Yes," Hetty answered. "I believe he decided to tell her about his work for NCIS yesterday."
"I would have invited her to the wedding," Kensi said. Sam introduced her as Ro.
She had three days to be sad. She gave herself those three days to wallow. She cried when she got up. She sat at home and fed Monty and walked him. People had brought her food, she picked at it. Her morning sickness wasn't so bad. She took her pre-natal vitamins faithfully. She threw out all the beer and other booze. She cleaned her guns. She decided she would wait a month to deal with Deeks's stuff. She put it all away.
She let Monty sleep on the bed.
Day three Ro showed up. She smiled and said, "My husband just last night told me you're pregnant." She had two bags of things she put on the counter. "I've been pregnant four times, so I feel like a little bit of an expert. I guessed you don't have many friends who are moms, right?"
Kensi nodded. She thought Sam had two kids.
Ro said, "I miscarried at 10 weeks the first time, and our baby just stopped growing at 20 weeks the second time. The next two pregnancies were textbook perfect. I don't mean to make you anxious -"
"Oh, like it might happen to me? Yeah, that would suck," Kensi said. "Sorry, I'm not really at my best here."
"If you were, I think you'd be a sociopath."
Kensi smiled at that. They went to lunch and Ro explained all her gifts, mostly lotions and one baby book. "Baby books are all bullshit," she said. "Every one will tell you something different and they all make you feel bad. So just have one and only read it. This one's not so bad. Also, never go on the internet."
"Okay," Kensi said, flipping through the book. "Okay."
The next morning she broke the rules and went on the internet to make sure she was okay running. Luckily the internet was unanimous that she could run. So she did. She felt out of shape from 10 days of grief, but she managed her usual miles. She showered and went to work.
She saw Marty's desk as he had left it. She burst into tears and drove home. She tried again the next day with the same result. She got home from her run on the third day and sat on the steps. She was trying to decide if she could make it in or if she was being cruel to herself and the people she worked with when she saw Nate. Nate was walking up to her door carrying two boxes and a bag.
"You're late," she said, hugging him. "You missed the wedding."
"I'm sorry," he said. "I brought Deeks's stuff."
"I'm bumming everyone out, aren't I?"
"Yes," he said. "And they miss him, too."
"Right," she said. She forgot other people liked him.
They brought everything into the apartment and she told him to leave it in the corner. "I'm dealing with his stuff next month," she said. "I have a schedule."
Nate just looked at her. She said, "You think that's ridiculous."
"Nope," he said.
"Did they drag out of whatever deep cover op you were on to fix me?" Her voice sounded wavery and weak to her.
"I came back because I wanted to when I heard that Deeks had died. I wanted to help my friend." He sat down.
"How do you help? What, what is there to talk about? Is it helpful to anyone that I can't sleep and I miss him all the time and I just want to go back to work except I can't seem to do that -" she stopped herself before she started crying.
"It's probably helpful to you." He waited and she did start crying. Like every morning.
Nate came over every morning for three days. He said a lot of crap about how everyone mourns at their own pace and place and it was okay to cry and it was better to feel her pain than try to run from it. He liked to say things like, "Maybe you don't go back to work. Maybe it's always too hard to do this without him."
She was still sad to see him go back to wherever he was headed. She went into the Mission after lunch and found Hetty in her office. "It's good to see you, dear." Hetty offered her tea, of course.
Kensi declined. "It's too hard to keep track of what I can't and can drink these days. I've been sticking with fruit juice and water." She took a deep breath and said, "I don't think I can do this right now, Hetty. I think, you know, if I tried, I wouldn't be good. I'd try to protect the baby and that's no good."
"I agree," Hetty said. "There's nothing wrong with that, Kensi. It's the best agents who can assess themselves and know they aren't ready."
"Yeah," Kensi said. "I mostly feel useless."
"You're hardly useless. You've experienced a huge loss and discovered you're expecting at the same time." Hetty sipped her tea. She looked old. She said, "Agents Hanna and Callen had expressed some of the same feelings to me."
"They think I'm useless?"
"Hardly. They were both concerned that if you were out in the field with them, they would place you and your safety above mission objectives."
Kensi said, "That's sweet." She stood up. "I'm gonna go home. You let me know what happens next. With me, I mean. I can resign."
"You'll do no such thing," Hetty said. "But do go home and rest."
Hetty called her the next morning. She said, "Director Vance is transferring you to the Navy Yard. You'll be working with Special Agent Gibbs's team: analysis, research, interrogation."
"He gets stuck with me," she said. "I'll start packing."
"He is not stuck with you, Kensi. He asked for you."
She didn't really believe Hetty. Sam, Callen, Eric and Nell came over to help her pack up everything. "Everything goes into storage," she said. "Not all my clothes, and a few other things, but, you know. I won't fit into my clothes soon enough, right?"
It took them all a whole day. Especially since none of them would let her pick up anything heavier than a stack of towels. She sat on the front steps with Callen after everyone else had left. He said, "What did your mom say?"
"She said she'll miss me but she loves visiting DC. I said she better because I am going to be so lost when this baby comes. And all eight months until the baby comes."
Callen said, "Maybe we'll come visit, too."
"I would love that," she said. Monty trotted out and sat between them. "Callen, do you think Gibbs really requested me for this transfer?"
"Probably," he said. "He'll never tell you this, but his first wife and daughter were killed years ago. He knows what it feels like to lose your spouse."
"Oh," she said. "Good to know."
"Also, Abby will take over your life if you let her."
"I am so going to let her," she said.
