First of all - my apologies that it has been so long since I updated this story. Illness has kept me away from writing for far too long.
Secondly - I hope you can remember what was going on! In brief, Kensi and Deeks are visiting Pendleton, when they run into her former lover, Jack. Later that evening they see him again, this time in the company of a young girl. Who turns out to be his daughter...
Yes, I know I've skipped the previous 40 chapters in that summary!
Anyway, here is a nice long installment and I promise that I won't be so long in updating next time.
Now, Darla looks like a nice kid – it's not her fault her father is a complete jerk after all. And I find myself thinking that it's actually kind of a relief to know that Jack is her father, rather than the alternative, which is discovering he's having an unhealthy relationship with a teen. Only I'm guessing Kensi won't see it that way. It's not every day you find your former lover hid the fact he had a daughter, after all. When I look more closely at Darla, who I reckon can be no more than 15, or maybe 16 at the outside, I'm going to go right out on a limb and say her relationship with Daddy Dearest isn't too healthy either. Just for starters, she looks terrified of him. And the way she cowers when Jack shoots her a look makes my hands ball up into fists. I know that look and I know exactly how Darla feels, because I've been there a hundred times myself. You learn to recognise a fellow-victim and you never quite forget how it feels to be so helpless and so trapped with no prospect of escape.
Kensi sees all this too, and she manages to bite her tongue. More remarkably, she manages not to kick Jack in the junk, which is really restrained of her. Far too restrained, if you ask me. He doesn't deserve such consideration – in fact what Jack needs is to have his balls handed to him on a plate, with a garnish of humility on the side. The thing is, Darla is the innocent one here. This isn't her problem and we all know that if Kensi says or does one thing wrong, then Darla is the one who will pay later on. Behind closed doors, of course. That's always the way.
So Kensi fixes a sweet and insincere smile on her face. It doesn't fool me for one second though. "Oh, we were friends a long time ago. And we've kind of lost touch. It was a real surprise meeting your Dad earlier on today."
"Tell me about it."
Would you believe that Jack actually smirks when he says that? Quite how Jack has made it to his advanced age without someone succumbing to temptation and putting him out of his misery is totally beyond me. There must men and women lining up around the block just longing to smack him senseless. His day will come – it's just a pity it's not going to be today, that's all. And when it does come, then Kensi and I are going to be right at the front of the queue.
Darla isn't stupid: she knows that something is going on. Obviously she must get her brains from her mother. The poor kid just gives her father an anxious look and shifts nervously from one foot to the other. It's not her fault: she doesn't deserve this. No kid ever does – and yet it keeps on happening. You learn to recognise the signs a mile off and I kind of want to grab her and get her the hell out of here. Only I can't. I'm as helpless as she is. What makes matters worse is that I've been in her situation and I can remember feeling so lost and powerless, scared to say a word and conditioned to think it is my fault.
So there we all are, in this surreal situation – and Jack has all the power. He knows it; hell, we all know it, Darla included. And that's why he's smirking fit to burst. Because there's not a damned thing anyone can do about it. Not now, at any rate. But the moment I get back to LA, I'm going to have a discrete word with Hetty. No, scrub that, I'm not going to be discrete at all. I'm going to tell her that I think Darla is being abused and that I need Hetty to get me as much information as she can. Hetty has powers that we mere mortals only dream about, and connections that would make the President of the US look like Johnny-no-mates. Once I've got all the details, I'm going to get onto my contacts in Children and Family Services. When I was still practising law, I worked with abused kids and I made a lot of useful contacts. I also saw way too much and it kind of got to me. Well, to be truthful, it got to me big-time. Which is why I jacked it all in and joined LAPD. It was either get out, or burn out. But now I'm going to call in a few favours and one way or another, I am going to wipe that smirk of Jack's face. You just watch me.
"Listen – it's been unreal seeing you again, Jack." Kensi has always had a way with words, but I think she's excelled herself here. "And I'd love to stay and get to know you better, Darla – but we've got a big day ahead of us tomorrow, so we're going to have to go."
"Maybe I'll see you around?" Jack suggests smoothly. As if. I'm going to come at him when he least expects it and in a way he will never imagine. His little power-games are about to come to an end, sooner or later.
"You never know." I favour him with an enigmatic smile that would make the Mona Lisa jealous. All abused kids learn how to be really good actors early on.
Darla gives us a shy smile. "It was really nice meeting you."
"You too, sweetheart. You stay safe now, okay?"
I can't resist saying that, and it is worth it just to see the way Jack jumps. He knows, you see. He knows that I know. I just hope that knowledge keeps Darla safe for another few days, just long enough until I can get her away from this man. Some men shouldn't be left in charge of a goldfish, far less a child. And some women are just as bad. And then there are the men and women who are just crying out for a child – like Kensi and I are. And that's just the way it is, because life isn't fair. I learnt that when I was just a kid, way younger than Darla. That doesn't mean to say I've ever learnt to accept it though. Quite the contrary, actually.
Kensi waits until we get back to our hotel room before she explodes.
"That bastard. All those years and he never said a word. Not one single word. That lying, cheating bastard."
She's got Jack down pat. That's a pretty good summary of who he is. Other than the fact she left out his control fetish, egomania and lack of height. Oh and one other thing. "That lying, cheating, abusing bastard," I amplify.
"You spotted it too?"
"Couldn't miss it. Once you know the signs, they kind of scream out of you. Darla's afraid of him."
All the anger just seeps out of her, and Kensi sinks down onto the bed. "I guess you'd know."
Well yes, I would, seeing as how my father made Jack look like Ben Cartwright and Bill Cosby rolled into one, and my mother could match him all the way – punch for punch, if you really must know. But I don't want to talk about that, because I'm still trying to put those demons behind me. Most of the time I'm pretty successful, but this meeting has brought it all back, so that the memories are biting at my heels. I'm guessing Jack is careful, just like my parents were – he'll have learnt only to hit Darla so that the marks aren't visible. The thing is that the worst scars are the mental ones – the ones nobody can see.
"We've got to do something," Kensi says. "We can't just leave her."
I sit down beside her and pull her into my arms. "I'm going to do something. I promise. You've just got to trust me on that." I don't want to say too much, not until I find out all the facts.
"I trust you. And I know why you need to do this. Just tell me what I can do to help."
There are times when nothing more needs to be said, because you are just instinctively in harmony, not only knowing what the other person thinks or feels, but why they say it. We've got a rare bond, Kensi and I, it's like nothing can pull us apart. But Darla has got to me. She's really got me, and I hate feeling so helpless. And Kensi senses this and she starts to kiss me, just melting into me like warm chocolate: sweet, pliable and utterly irresistible. Kensi gets me on her wavelength and she pushes away all the shams and drudgeries of this world so that I start to believe again.
Sign #4 Your Partner Is the Right One – You Share the Same Values
What do you value most? What values make up the life you have chosen to live? These are important questions to ask yourself, as they will help determine if your partneris the right one for you.
Afterwards, we talk, wrapped in each other's arms and in the safe darkness.
"You never knew about Darla?" I'm stroking her back and burying my face in her hair.
"I never knew," Kensi confirms, and her voice is as bitter as I have ever heard it. "He never said one word about. Not one single word. All those years we spent together and Jack never even mentioned he had a daughter." She goes rigid with anger. "How could he do that?"
"Because he's a complete dick?"
Kensi pulls back to look at me gravely. "If only he had been." And then she smiles.
Really? Well now, isn't that interesting. So Jack is somewhat underendowed? That's very interesting indeed.
"Lucky you found me then," I say modestly. It's one of my best points, my modesty. Along with great hair and a definite complacency where it matters. If you get my drift. Like I said, I'm a modest guy and I don't want to brag about what God gave me. Well, not too much.
"It's like I never really knew Jack," she muses.
"He never knew you either – he can't have, because he'd never have left you."
"You say the nicest things, do you know that?" Kensi moves closer, sinuously curving her body around mine. It's like nothing can part us.
"I wonder what other secrets he had?"
"I bet they were really boring ones, sweetheart." She's going to drive herself crazy if she starts to try to forensically examine their relationship, but I get why she needs to talk about it. I just wish I could remember how to perform an exorcism. How come there's never a handy priest around with bell, book and candle when you need them? And actually, the thought of Jack's head spinning around sort of works for me.
"He had disgusting habits, you know? I mean, he cut his toenails in bed, you know." I can feel her whole body start to shake with laughter. "And he bought one of those clippers for nose and ear hair and used to use it at the breakfast table."
And yet this sorry excuse for a human managed to almost break Kensi, leaving her thinking that she was the one at fault and that she was worthless. And now he's doing the same thing to Darla. Not for much longer though.
"Why did I stay with him for so long?" Kensi wonders.
I don't say anything, but I know why: because she loved him and wanted to be loved back. Kensi was reaching out for love after her Dad died, and Jack came along and seized onto her vulnerabilities. I know all about loving the wrong people, and I bet Darla does too. Most battered kids do, along with being convinced they don't actually deserve to be loved in the first place.
We almost sleep in next morning, what with one thing and another – well, mostly the other, because Kensi can be very distracting when she puts her mind to it and she simply won't take "no" for an answer. Not that I have ever actually said "no", because like I said, she can be very distracting. So it's kind of a mad scramble to get ready and out of the hotel in time for our session on the gun range at Pendleton. I only manage to have one cup of coffee, that's how bad it is. Yeah, I know I said I'd given up java for chai, but last night and those espressos made me realise how much I was missing. There is nothing like a decent hit of caffeine in the morning. Well, apart from making love, obviously. But like I said, we were running late. Mainly because we'd spent most of the previous night making love. And anyway, it wasn't like giving up coffee had made a blind bit of difference on the baby-front anyway.
I notice that Kensi takes just a bit more time over her make-up than normal, but I don't say anything, mainly because at the time I'm busy running the clippers over my face. I even go so far as to comb my hair. She doesn't make any of the normal remarks about how she needs to book a joint appointment for me and Monty at the groomers either, in fact Kensi doesn't say a word about my sudden interest in my appearance. Now, that's partly because she's busy putting on a second coat of mascara, but mainly because we both want to look our best, just in case Jack shows up again.
Now, would you like to try and work that one out? I've tried, and I still can't figure it out. I mean, we obviously weren't trying to impress him or anything like that, because who cares what Jack the Jerk thinks? So, are we trying to show him how cool and sexy we are and make him jealous? Maybe. I don't know and I've given up trying to make some sense of it. Suffice to say that Kensi is wearing one of her low cut v-neck tshirts, along with her tightest jeans. You practically have to peel them off, but believe me, it is well worth the effort. She's a sight for sore eyes, but the poor Marine in charge of the armoury doesn't know where to look. Well he does, obviously – but he's not about to go there. So what he does is to go bright red instead. He called us "Ma'am" and "Sir" and from the looks I get he would happily kill me on the spot. And that kind of makes me feel good, if you know what I mean. If you don't, then you probably shouldn't be reading this in the first place.
Anyway, we go out onto the range, and I have this brilliant idea – I pretend like the targets are Jack. It works. In fact, it works brilliantly. I'm getting head shots and bulls-eyes by the bucket-load. Or magazine clip, I suppose. Let's just put it this way: whne they tally up all the scores, I almost equal the all-time Pendleton record. Now, given that said record was set by one Leroy Jethro Gibbs, that makes me feel pretty good about myself. And when I learn that I've easily beaten both Callen and Sam, I feel like doing a victory dance. Not that I'm going to rub it in - well, not too much. I might just copy my score sheet and put it in with their Christmas cards this year though. It's just that these things seem to matter an awful lot to them, like it proves something. Well, it does, I guess. It shows you can shoot to kill. And that's the problem for me. You see, when you shoot to kill, there's an awful lot of dead people left in your wake. There are times when I feel like a state-sanctioned killer. If we do ever manage to have a child, how the hell are Kensi and I ever going to explain what we do for a living?
"You really are quite competitive" Kensi says. Which is rich, coming from her. Do not ever play Monopoly with Kensi Blue, that's all I'm saying. Mind you I think Callen and Sam are partly to blame, what with their little male-bonding routines, cunningly disguised as point-scoring exercises. It's kind of like watching one of those documentaries where a couple of wild animals vye for supremacy. And for a long time Kensi felt she had to compete right alongside them. And then I waltzed in and just didn't have time for all that crap. I was a lawyer, for crying out loud. You don't get much more cut-throat competition than that, what with everyone judging everyone else on the cut of their hair, and how sharp their suits are. And that's even before they open their mouths, whereupon there's a whole new game begins: which school did you go to? Much to my disgust I found myself getting dragged into that whole stupid game and I played right along with it, determined to beat the big guys at their own game.
I know, you can't quite believe it. But once upon a time I played the game: I had the corporate haircut and I wore the dark suits with pristine white shirts and silk ties and the shoes that are so shiny you can see your face in them. And actually, I looked quite good. Only it was all just a pretence. I was the same person underneath the shiny exterior. And I learned how all the window-dressing in the world can't hide the sordid facts about what one human can do to another. After a while, I grew tired of seeing how the law couldn't protect the weakest people – the ones who needed help the most. By the time things got to the stage where lawyers became involved it was already too late. So I ditched the suits and joined the LAPD. Whereupon I discovered that while there are a lot of girls who love a man in a suit, there are just as many who love a man in uniform. What you lose on the swings, you win on the roundabouts.
However, I'm going to place the majority of blame for Kensi's need to win on Jack. He made her feel worse than nothing, so I can understand why she feels the need to prove herself. Working with a whole lot of guys isn't easy on her either. So I don't say anything.
"Don't look so superior." She takes the sheet out of my hand and studies it carefully. "Okay, I take that bad. You can look superior. This is actually amazing. I never knew you could shoot like that."
You see, a lot of the time I goof around, even on the shooting range. There was that time when some bright spark in NCIS (and I've got Eric fingered as the guilty party) thought it would be amusing to make a target in the shape of the one and only Hetty. And I thought it would be equally amusing to shoot her bang in the centre of the forehead, accidentally on purpose. It was just a slight misjudgement on my part that Hetty happened to have done of her 'materialising out of thin air" acts. Let's just say she was less than amused, shall we? Which isn't exactly the truth, but the ritual humiliation I went through was bad enough the first time without having to relive it in retrospect.
"Ray taught me how to shoot when I was just a kid. We used to go out into the woods and practice target shooting."
I haven't thought about that for years… Ray was a lot older than me, but his aunt lived in our street and he used to come round and do her garden. I guess I was just hanging around at a loose end, because when you move houses as often as my parents did, and change schools each time, then it's not that easy to make friends. Anyway, for some reason Ray took a shine to me that summer and he kind of looked out for me. I never talked about what went on at home, because I'd been well-drilled as to the consequences, but Ray knew things weren't great. I just never realised how much he guessed until the day he gave me this hand-gun.
"You need to learn how to use this kid. To keep yourself safe."
I didn't actually think that much about it at the time, mainly because I was amazed at how heavy the gun was. Like I said, I was just a little kid, about seven or eight, but I took it and I kept it hidden for years. As it turns out, Ray was right. I guess he saved my life by teaching me how to shoot straight. In fact, it's because of Ray that I didn't kill my old man a few years later. I was aiming for his shoulder you see, and even though I was kind of in agony from that punch to the face, I managed hit him in the shoulder. And then I threw up. I don't remember much about what happened next, which the social workers was normal, as I was blocking out the trauma. But I do remember how shocked my Dad looked when I fired the gun and the way he clamped his hand over the wound before dropping down onto his knees. And it's not easy to forget the way my Mom screamed at me. I've tried to forget, only I can't quite manage it. She stopped screaming though when I turned the gun to point at her.
Would I have fired? I don't know. Really, I don't know because the cops arrived at that point and they took one look at me – covered in blood from a broken nose - and that was the beginning of the end as far as my less than happy childhood was concerned. As it turns out, Mom and Dad were right, because when I finally spoke about what was going on in the seemingly respectable Brandel household, I was put into foster care. That was possibly the best thing that ever happened to me. Anyway, they were both found guilty of child endangerment and battery. And that meant I was free at last. I never saw either of them again.
Of course, I don't say all this at the gun range. Kensi's picked up most of the salient points over the years, though, so she can read the subtext and hear all the things I'm not saying.
"I'm glad he did," she says. "I'm really glad Ray taught to you to shoot." And then she wrinkles her nose. "Now, if only I could teach you to stop shooting your mouth off, I'll die happy." But as she kisses me after that, I'm going to hazard a guess that she wasn't entirely serious. I think. I hope so anyway. Anyway, where would we be without my witty repartee and sparkling dialogue? The Mission would be a whole lot duller, I'm telling you. I like to think I bring a little linguistic levity into what can be a killer of a job. That pun was ironic, by the way. You should know me well enough by now to realise that while I might make light-hearted remarks, I never joke about what I do.
"You want to know the truth? I was thinking about Jack each time I squeezed the trigger." Well, they say confession is good for the soul. While I'm in a penitent frame of mind I'll just add that I will derive an inordinate sense of gratitude when Jack is finally brought to book.
Kensi laughs. "So was I. Only I had to make a real effort not to aim all my shots at his groin."
That's my girl.
And that just about wraps up Pendleton for us. Technically, there's enough time for me to hit the beach and catch a few waves, but for once my heart isn't in it. Too much has happened here and there is work to be done back in LA. So we hit the road, with the Porsche just eating up the miles.
"It really bugged Jack to see us this car." I can't help noting the rather smug tone in Kensi's voice. "It hit him right where it hurts. He was a real gear-head. Only he could never afford something like this. Not even in his dreams."
Excellent. I love it when I score points without even trying. I conveniently ignore the fact that we couldn't afford this car either, not in a million years. Why sweat over the small details? It's what Jack thought that counts.
It's a good thing there aren't any Highway Patrol guys on the horizon because this car can reach insane speeds. I put my foot down and watch as the scenery just slips by. Eat your heart out, Jack – because I've got the car and I've got the girl. She used to be your girl, didn't she, Jack? Only you threw her away like some worthless piece of trash. That was your first mistake, although I'm more grateful for that than you could ever know. I've got Kensi in my life and, because I'm not stupid like you, I'm never going to let her go. Your second mistake was walking into that restaurant with Darla, because tomorrow I'm going to start the process that will take your other girl away from you – I'm going to take Darla away to safety. You don't know what's about to hit you, Jack. That's a promise.
I hope you've enjoyed this long-overdue installment. A few more secrets from Deeks' past revealled. Evil plot bunny wants Deeks and Kensi to beat up Jack. For once, I think he has a point.