He let her cry for awhile, awkwardly and slightly unsure of what to do besides sinking down into the half made hull. His hands cradled her into the movement with him, letting her head find the curve of his neck to his shoulder as her hands stayed grasped up into fabric.
Crying women had... never been his niche. Crying women had generally been something clearly to be avoided (at all costs).
Crying women tended to echo an ache through his chest that made him think of his daughter and nightmares.
Crying Kate? That was something that made him want to rage and wallow and adore all at once.
Jesus, fuck... please stop crying. I can't... you're stronger than this.
"Kate," he slid his fingers up the back of her head as he spoke, used the other hand to tilt her chin up as he turned a look down over her, "he was dead before you left. He was dead when he decided to hurt the men and women you protect."
You don't cry – even while we're raging at each other.
"Gibbs - "
Ya gotta stop crying.
"Get right with it," he told her quickly, squinting into the fact she nudged his hand off her face with curled up knuckles and then avoided the pointed brightness of his eyes. "He was already dead. You understand me?"
He watched her look away from him, the back of her hand tucked low into her sleeve as she wiped at her face. Not a sound came off her, though. Not a breath of a noise or a murmur as she shook her head slowly back and forth, her glance cast blankly forward as she seemed to silently argue what he was telling her.
"Didn't matter who did it," Gibbs told her. "He was already dead. You need to accept that and move on."
She huffed off his argument, still shaking her head blankly. "But he wasn't."
"He was walking dead." He ignored the soft innocence of her sadness, if only long enough to tread on a tone he used when something needed to be unequivocal, understood, when it needed to be fact. "Accept it and move on."
A reactionary stubbornness still shone in her eyes despite the tears - and at least that was some sort of sign that she was still down in there as she looked at him, his sharp and brassy girl was still ready to scrap with him about the assertion he kept giving.
So good, maybe he could get her to rile and roil back.
He'd poke at her if he needed to, just to bring her back.
He'd grab her up and shake her if he had to, he wasn't shy.
"You did what you had to, Kate." A hushed grit in his tone, his head shaking minutely. "He didn't care. He wanted to kill and you didn't let him."
"I didn't want to - "
"No, but you did." His tone was intentionally snappish and curt, roughed over her as he dug his fingers farther into the dry warmth of her hair.
He let the ponytail crush up tangled into his fingers as he jerked tighter and forced her head back a margin to drive the point home. A graze of pained betrayal paled her face and he leaned closer over the angle of her head in response, ignoring how angrily she was wide-eyed staring at him. His thumb started flatly rubbing her hair against the side of his hand, holding the warily watchful way she was staring up at him.
"So that he couldn't. Accept that." Gibbs nodded sharply before the other hand rose, the full flat of his palm pressing a coolness to her cheek as she just kept watching the movement of his lips. "He was already dead. You just put him in the ground."
She frowned as she drove her face back toward his shoulder, a rush of breath heating on his shirt.
She felt, self consciously, childish and ridiculously weak - not to mention a little exhausted and wrung out. She felt more like someone he'd taken sympathy on, someone who had needed more than the strength they had on their own two feet. And especially considering that more half an hour later he hadn't let her up from the way he'd curled her down into his lap and cradled his spine back into the half finished hull. He'd secluded them closely together, hushed and curled in the half made silence of his hand made refuge.
Despite the continued gentleness of his hands and their resumed quietude, she felt less like a lover and more like a rescue, a mission he'd been handed, a job he'd needed to get done – possibly even the victim of his casework. Hell, was 'lover' even the appropriate phraseology anyhow? She was almost as loathe to use that as she was 'girlfriend'. It seemed too... sophomoric for him. Too young. Too overly dramatic.
In any case, she felt less like a woman and more like a protection detail.
One that couldn't seem to stop crying, despite the fact she'd probably already embarrassingly gotten snot on his thinly worn NIS tee.
Get your shit together, Todd. Jesus.
You're terrifying the man deeper into silence than usual... he'll be rendered completely mute by the time you figure yourself out.
"Not quite how you expected to get me into this boat again." It came up her throat on a slightly hysterical laugh, the sound lifting off her lips before she tucked her sleeve around her hand and wiped at already raw cheeks.
"How doesn't matter, Caitlin." So casually clear in his shrugging tone, so matter of factual and accepting. "You're in it. You're home."
"You've gotta stop saying it that way."
"What?" his voice teased lower into a lighter hush. "Home?"
Her throat rolled out a quietly agreeing noise, her nose rubbing into the side of his throat as she snugged closer and tighter and farther avoided looking directly at him.
God, he's warm. And solid and sturdy and big.
"Why should I?" He sounded stubborn, mulish and pig-headed and perfect in the disbelief of his response. Just how contrary and absolutely Gibbs it sounded was more of a home than she figured she was momentarily worthy of keeping. "It is home."
Home smells like soap and sawdust and coffee and bourbon.
Charmed embarrassment brushed heat on her cheeks and they felt gentler and less raw for a moment, head tipping into the fact he was still twisting her hair in his fingers. "Jethro."
Home smells like you. I don't know why that's so unarguably true.
"It is home, Kate." He was threading up beneath the loose hold of her hair tie and she let him continue, felt the tug of his long fingers sliding it from the strands of her hair before both hands lifted into intentionally loosening it. "Thought I'd shown you that. Look."
He shook her hair out over his fingers and down against her shoulders, confiscating the tie so that she couldn't use it again even as he nodded across the room. The tip of his head aimed her glance toward the right of the work bench, a slight flex in his jaw as he urged her to search the room that she'd yet to really take in. She'd been comforted by the reality of just being in the basement, clouded by the familiar smell of it and closed up by its secluded safety. She hadn't needed to study the room to know that she was in a place that would, at least momentarily, make her untouchable. And the way he was silking her hair down her back solidified the feeling as she entirely turned her glance over the table he'd been motioning toward.
She took in the drawing table silently, biting into her lip to keep from making a sound as she studied the angle of the clip bearing board, the way it was a perfect sliding fit to the sturdiness of the rest of the flat top table. The split top, the storage drawers beneath and the small ledged shelf along the bottom, they all seemed to meld into something unexpectedly amazing to her. A sliding drawer was visible beneath the table top and a straight backed stool fit into the way it was happily waiting to be used. It was nudged up into the wall and near enough to the bench to be close, but far enough to be solitary. Jesus, there were even slats running the opposite side from the drawers, open spaces that she didn't doubt he'd meant for her sketchbooks.
She quietly studied the smooth sanded warmth of it as her fingers unconsciously rubbed along her lips, enjoyed the pretty polished tone of the wood and the way it seemed to nearly glow under the yellowed light that cast over half the basement. It was a deep russet color and the varnish had a shimmer in the light that seemed too near a mirage to be true. It was too close to more than perfect to really actually exist. She didn't dare touch it, or move closer.
It was an impossibility.
Maybe so was he.
Unconsciously she leaned back into how flatly sturdy his palm had spread against her spine and a small noise took over her throat, a sound that was appreciatively humbled as her body sank back against his. "That for me?"
It had to be, obviously. He'd told her about it, sleepily let it slip before. He'd kept it hidden in unfit pieces under a slate gray and thin sheet before she'd left and once he'd caught her nearly peeking a glimpse under it. And he'd growled into grabbing around her waist and playfully swinging her up away from it. The sway of movement and drag of her reflexively gripping fingers had nearly jerked the sheet off the unfinished parts of it but he hadn't cared so much when he'd raised the growl up along the laughing rise of her jaw and his fingers had found the ticklish spot just below her last right rib.
He'd made her half forget it had even been there, still drawing gasping laughter off her lungs as he'd grunted astonishment and loosened from her when she'd elbowed right hard into his stomach. Then he'd flared her the sharpest challenge of a wicked grin, scrabbling right up the stairs after her, catching her somewhere around the couch and laying her out along the living room floor while he'd swallowed each new laugh from her mouth.
She'd left the next day.
Feels like months ago...
"You know it is," his voice was dryly patient in response, though a little crisp as he turned his head toward the way she was staring across the room.
I know a great many things... but I couldn't imagine this.
Kate sighed as she stared at the drafting table, her shoulders swinging loose and lower as her hands nervously twisted into the sleeve fabric of her shirt and she unconsciously rubbed her wrists together. "You'll never get that out that door."
He cocked her such a dryly sardonic look before making a show of glancing at the boat that was half enclosing them into some sort of safety, glancing back to her with a trademark grin. "I have ways."
"You need a linen cabinet for the bathroom." The innocently wide face she swung up at him was still rashed from crying and she could feel how brittle her skin felt, sensitive below her eyes and probably shadowed. She'd be puffy in the morning, that was a given. "Shoulda saved the lumber for that."
He blinked at her as though she was saying something unendingly ridiculous, as though he couldn't cleanly comprehend why she wasn't already at the seat, hands pressing against the smooth wood.
Because you may realize that this is... not what you actually want.
Especially when I end up sobbing in your lap like a little kid after a nightmare.
One brow went up and blue eyes sparked. "I need one or you need one?"
"At least a towel rack." Kate shrugged blithely away from him and back toward the table, keeping her tone as neutral as possible considering he was capable of twisting her lungs into her throat.
"Katya," he said it with nearly a laugh. "I need one?"
"I need one, I guess."
He hummed an all too knowledgeable noise up his throat, made it sound simplistically sexy. "Or?"
We need one.
God, he was looking at her like he'd momentarily read her mind (again), charmed and pleased and entirely full of himself. Smug son of a bitch. Beautifully smug, so perfectly so, comfortably so.
She felt the blush completely warm her cheeks, the urge to look away from how sparkling amused his eyes went at her expense sudden and involuntary. "You made that for me? Down here?"
His smile wended affectionate and she suspected even... loving, his fingers turning her hair back from her face. "I work at the bench, Kate. Or right here. You know that."
"You're not getting it up the stairs." She shook her head closer to the twist of his fingers, her cheek bending into the way he intently studied the leftover redness on her skin as he stroked against it. "I'll annoy you if I'm down here all the time."
At first he dipped her a thoughtful nod, as though it was a certain truth. Which, really, at times, it would be. She knew that. He was possessed by his own need to be alone sometimes, to just work his frustration out. Thankfully she tended to recognize when, though. Thankfully, she didn't much blame him. His need to put his hands to work felt awfully similar to the salvation of just putting a pencil to paper.
Then he laughed and just shrugged on a smirk, dropped his hand with broad shoulders swaying back as he stretched his spine into one of the ribs of the boat. "I like watching you draw."
"I like watching you work." Kate tugged against the thin fabric of his shirt, feeling awkwardly warm and flushed by an emotion she was having trouble naming (rather, that she refused to recognize) when he was just half smirking at her, eyes thinned but brightly amused.
He caught against her fingers and squeezed briefly. "So if we're fighting stay on your own goddamn side, Secret Service."