I found another one! Forgot I'd been working on this!

Many thanks to everyone who read, reviewed and favorited the last chapter, it really was appreciated. Hope you like this one too!


If you could pick a day, just one single day from your life to live again, which would you choose? How would you choose?

Every day is different, each 24 hour cycle unique. Far beyond our control are those fixed occurrences, those daily events which frame and encompass the canvas upon which we paint our lives. The morning ascent of the sun in the east, its fall in the west merely form the boundary. How we choose to create the picture within is up to us.

Like each and every person who experiences it a day is quite singular, but throughout it, folded, wrapped and sewn are the permanent threads we leave behind. The choices and the decisions we make, as well as the events and experiences which shape and influence not only us, but those around us. The good, the bad, the often somewhere in between.

So which day would you choose?

One that made you smile? The happiness so big and so bright that the joy remained with you long after the day drew to a close. A Christmas, a wedding, a birthday, or perhaps even an actual birth – a day worth far more than simply remembering when it's one you could happily relive over and over again.

Or would you pick the saddest of days? A day when the brightest of sunshine failed to penetrate the dark; when the loss you felt was just too much to bear; when your soul felt a pain so deep and so raw as to scar it, and all because you had lived through those 24 hours. By going back to that day maybe you could try and change it, and perhaps stop the darkness from falling all around you?
Or perhaps you could simply take the chance to understand and accept the outcome of that day in order to allow the fear and hurt to leave your heart, and for peace to fill the void.

For Callen today wasn't either of those days.

He needed no peace, he wished for no change, however he also knew with an absolute certainty that this was not a day he would ever want to relive.

So much of this day had been balanced upon the sharpest of knife edges, decisions and choices so narrow in their variance that a breath could barely pass between them. The potential for that knife edge to cut hard and deep through their hearts and souls was as real as it had ever been, yet not a moment of hesitation had passed through his mind.

Lives had been lost this day and lives had also been taken. Their passing mourned by those who'd fought alongside them, by those with whom they'd held a kinship, by those they'd considered family. But lives had also been saved.

Callen, Sam and Deeks had arrived in Afghanistan as a fractured group, a Kensi sized hole cut into their hearts in desperate need of healing. Rescuing their team mate had been the most soothing of balms and in having her back with them, in knowing she was safe they could, and they would fly home as a family.

Watching unabashed as Kensi remained wrapped tightly into her partner's eager embrace ,Callen smiled to himself. This day didn't need repeating, it didn't need altering. This day was as good as it was going to get.

He could cope with that.

The End