Fifteen-year-old Kensi took the phone from her father, her whole being radiating the anger and betrayal she felt. The only reason she was even taking the phone was because her father had asked her to.
"Kensi?" The traitor's voice asked. She sounded hurt and concerned and for a moment Kensi almost apologised. The thought quickly left her though and she found a tighter hold on her own pain and bitterness.
"What?" Kensi all but spat out.
"I'm sorry Kensi. Just let me explain."
"There's nothing to explain mother," She said the word like it was poison on her tongue. "I know exactly what happened. You decided you didn't want to be part of this family anymore but that's not a choice you get to make for me."
"Kensi, please." Julia all but begged. "You're my little girl. I love you."
"Funny way of showing it." The stubborn teen scoffed. "The moment you gave up on this family you gave up on the right to call me your daughter. I never want to speak to you again. Lose this number." Her voice was cold and steely and unmistakably steady. With a calmness she didn't feel she placed the receiver gently back into its cradle and went to find her dad in the kitchen.
"You okay Kensi?" Don asked as his daughter approached him. Kensi nodded.
"I'm pretty tired though. Long day. I think I'm just going to have a shower and go to bed." She wrapped her arms around him, hugging him tightly.
"Okay."
Kensi rose onto her toes and kissed his cheek.
"I love you Daddy."
"I love you too Baby Girl. Goodnight." He released her.
"Night Dad."
Kensi picked her duffle off the floor and brought it upstairs with her. It wasn't until she was in the shower, the hot water beating down on her skin, almost burning her, that she cried. She cried out of anger, out of loss, out of hurt and confusion and regret but mostly she cried out of love for a mother who didn't deserve her affections, but whom she couldn't stop loving no matter how hard she tried.
—
Kensi all but ran to the nurses' station when she arrived at the hospital. She had very little memory of the drive over and it was probably a miracle she hadn't wound up as a patient rather than a visitor.
"Excuse me. I'm Kensi Blye. I was told my mother was here." She spewed the words out before the nurse had a chance to greet her.
"What's your mother's name?" The nurse, her name tag read Sarah, asked.
"Feldman. Julia Feldman."
Kensi watched as Nurse Sarah's face dropped in sympathy. That, combined with the fact she hadn't needed to reference the computer, told Kensi more than she was currently prepared to know about the extent of her mother's condition.
"Let me take you to her." Sarah moved from behind the station to lead the way. "I need to warn you, she's in pretty bad shape. She's on a respirator and she's attached to a lot of monitors. There's a lot of cuts and bruises on her face and arms as well." The nurse paused at the door, hand poised to push down the handle. "Are you ready?"
Kensi nodded stiffly, words refusing to form on her tongue. She wasn't ready, not even a little bit, but she knew this wasn't something one could prepare for, you just had to let it hit you full force and hope you could still stand after the collision.
The nurse opened the door and Kensi let out a gasp. Even with the nurse's warning she hadn't expected her mother to look quite so fragile. Moving further into the room she stood next to the bed, wringing her hands, unsure what to do with them. She was afraid to touch Julia lest she hurt her more. Her head was wrapped in so many bandages she could hardly make out her face and the portions of her hands and arms that were visible were mottled with dark bruises.
"Her doctor will be in to see you soon." Sarah told Kensi before ducking out of the room, closing the door behind her.
Kensi nodded, only vaguely aware the nurse was no longer there to see her response. Her eyes never left her mom's face. She bit her lip to contain a whimper and tasted metallic blood as her teeth punctured skin.
"Mom?" The word was a fractured sob as her tears started to fall.
—
"Do you have any family?" Her plump case worker asked her.
"Yeah." Kensi shrugged. Her cold and uncaring exterior veiled how her heart had been ripped from her chest not twenty-four hours earlier.
"That's great. Let's give them a call. What's their relation to you?" Ted, the child services worker, asked patiently, endlessly understanding and seemingly unperturbed by the stubborn, sullen teen.
"My mother." Kensi replied bitterly. With her father's sudden death, the emotions caused by her mother's betrayal were again fresh in her heart and mind. "I don't have her phone number."
"That's okay. We can find it. Would you like to talk to her or do you want me to do it for you?" Ted offered.
"I'll do it."
"Great. I'll be right back with a number. Hang in there kiddo." Kensi wanted to roll her eyes and stand up and yell at the overweight man for being so cheery and blasé when her whole world was falling apart but instead she just nodded her head and watched him walk away.
He returned moments later, breaking the starting contest Kensi was having with the wall.
"Here you go. There's a phone just over there you can use. I'll give you some privacy."
Kensi took the scrap of paper handed to her and pushed up from the chair with an unseen weight on her shoulders. She trudged across to the phone and dialled the number before she could give herself the opportunity to process her movements.
The call connected on the fourth ring.
"Hello?"
Kensi couldn't breathe, couldn't think. All the pain from the past six months combined with the trauma of the past twenty-four hours hit her like a steam roller. Her chest constricted, her stomach revolted, and her whole body began to tremble. She was paralysed.
"Hello? Is anyone there?"
She hung up the phone with haste, taking in ragged breaths that barely made it into her lungs. She tightened her hands into fists in a futile attempt to stop them shaking. A few minutes later her mask was back in place and she returned to Ted.
"How'd it go?" He asked, the cheeriness and optimism in his tone enraging Kensi. She didn't let it show.
"Good." She lied smoothly. "She'll be here to pick me up in two hours. Do you think we could pick up a bag of my things before she gets here?"
"Absolutely."
After an awkward drive which involved Ted trying to make polite conversation while Kensi stared expressionless out the passenger window, Ted waited in the living room as Kensi packed her bag upstairs. A week's worth of clothes, a sleeping bag, her passport. She snuck to the safe in her father's room and punched in the code. She packed the emergency cash she found there and carefully folded her dad's medals in amongst her clothing. Finally, she took the photo from his bedside, a picture of the two of them from a camping trip a few months back. She kissed it and stowed it in her bag amongst everything else. Padding back to her own room, she silently pushed the screen out of the window and climbed out.
That first night on the street it occurred to her that she'd made the wrong choice. She was cold, she was alone, and the pain she felt was soul-crushing. In that moment, as she lay on the park bench, tears flowing in an unstoppable stream, she realised that she didn't want space, or time, or to go it alone so no one could ever hurt her again. What she really wanted, what she really needed, was her mom.
—
A knock sounded on the door and a doctor in her mid forties walked into the hospital room.
"Hi. I'm Doctor Daly. You must be Ms. Feldman's daughter."
"Kensi." She sniffed and shook the doctor's hand. "How… how is she?"
"I'm sorry to say it's not looking good. Your mother's car was struck by an SUV this morning and flipped down an embankment. The top was down. Her seat belt held her in but she suffered extensive head wounds. She also sustained a few broken ribs, a collapsed lung, and a complex fracture in her right arm. She coded in the ambulance on the way here and two more times on the operating table." The doctor paused to let her absorb the grave news.
In a last ditch effort to hold herself together Kensi squared her shoulders and switched to agent mode, doing her best to take in the doctor's words while closing herself off from the emotions threatening to take her over.
"When will she wake up?"
"That's the tricky part. Her head wounds were quite severe and, in my professional opinion, I'm sorry to say it is unlikely she will wake up from the coma she's currently in. And even if she does, there's no telling the extent of the brain damage she'll have."
Despite her best efforts to concentrate, Doctor Daly's words swirled around her head in a tangled mess. Even when she managed to grasp hold of one it wriggled away before she had time to string it together with the rest of its sentence.
"There's a chance though, right?" She was pleading with the doctor, with God, with the universe.
"Frankly? Her brain stopped showing activity when she came out of surgery." Her tone was apologetic.
"So the only thing keeping her alive right now…" She trailed off.
"Is the machines, yes." She finished.
"And they could keep her alive…"
"Indefinitely. I've seen patients survive months, even years. Some wake up, most don't. I don't want to sound callous but the odds of your mother recovering from this are less than 1 percent."
Kensi nodded. Tears burned behind her eyes and began to slowly leak out. She swiped at them, chastising herself for her crumbling Agent Blye facade as the cracks in her armour began to show.
"What do we do?" She feared she already knew the crux of the answer.
"In cases like this, life support is used until family arrives, to give loved ones the chance to say goodbye. It's not meant to sustain her until she wakes up as it's very unlikely that she will. Of course, it is completely up to you if and when you want to turn off the machines."
"I see." Kensi swiped more desperately at her eyes as the tears fell quicker.
"I'll give you some time, there isn't a rush."
"No. I… I just need to say goodbye." She all but whispered.
Doctor Daly laid a sympathetic hand on her shoulder. "Is there anyone we can call for you?"
Kensi thought of Deeks. She touched her fingertips to the phone in her back pocket but shook her head at the doctor.
"Okay. Take all the time you need. A nurse will be outside when you're ready."
—
She sat on her couch, feet resting on the coffee table, having an aggressive staring contest with the scrap of paper in her hand. It was so unassuming, so innocent-looking, but that small scrap of paper with ten numbers scrawled in her messy handwriting brought back thoughts and emotions she thought were behind her.
Honestly, she didn't know what she had expected to come of using her position at NCIS to look up her estranged mother. The first thing she'd noticed when she pulled up the DMV photo of Julia Feldman was how old she look. No doubt she'd aged gracefully and she was most definitely beautiful, stunning really, but the passage of the last ten years had undeniably left their mark.
As she'd stared at the photo Kensi found herself hoping that the creases by her mother's eyes were laugh lines and not the result of the pain and sorrow of losing a daughter.
A case had come in then, pulling her from the screen and her gut-wrenching guilt. She'd hastily scribbled down the phone number and shoved it in her pocked where it had haunted her for the rest of the day.
She ran her fingers over the numbers, tracing each one. She had them memorised now, she no longer needed the paper they were etched on. She wouldn't be forgetting the string of digits any time soon. She glanced at the time, it was nearing on three in the morning in D.C. which meant it was midnight in Los Angeles. Even if she could will her fingers to dial it was much too late to call.
She hid the number in her wallet, behind the business cards of handsome men she wasn't going to call, and went to bed.
A few years later, during her first months back in Los Angeles working in OSP Kensi swore she saw her mother in the grocery store. Startled, stubborn, and scared she'd booked it out of there and drove home where it was safe. Some days, when she was feeling particularly brave, she would return to that store. She'd spend two hours walking up and down the aisles only to buy a loaf of bread and a case of beer. She never saw her mother there again.
—
Kensi sucked her bottom lip into her mouth but it wasn't enough. The sob that had been attempting to burst free since she first got that phone call that morning finally escaped and then there was no turning back.
She reached forward and wrapped a single finger around her mother's thumb, one of the few places on her body that was both visible and unmarred by bruises and abrasions. It took close to five minutes for the sobs to subside but the tears continued to fall steadily as she spoke.
"Mom, I'm… I don't even know what to say. We were just… We were just getting back to… I'm sorry. I was so stubborn and stupid and I'm sorry. And I'm sorry I wasn't strong enough to push past my hurt and bitterness sooner. I'm just… sorry. I love you Mom. Even in all those years, I never stopped loving you. God knows it would've hurt less if I had. I have so many regrets when it comes to our relationship but I always loved you." Leaning forward she gently pressed her lips against the bandages on Julia's forehead. "Say hi to Dad for me Mom."
Before she could fall into another fit of sobs she rushed out of the room.
"I ah, she's… we're ready." How did you tell someone you were done saying goodbye? Could you ever be done? Kensi didn't think she'd ever feel ready to have her only remaining parent slip away but she knew that putting it off would only cause her more pain.
"I just need you to sign these forms. Would you like to stay?" Nurse Sarah handed her a clip board. Kensi signed quickly in the indicated spots.
"No… I… I'm going to go." She replied to the question. The sterilised hospital was beginning to feel like a cage. She had to escape.
"Of course. Arrangements to make."
The thought of planning a funeral for her mother had yet to cross her mind. It only made her need to run away greater. She nodded silently to the nurse and all but shoved the clipboard back onto the station ledge. She left the hospital with a similar urgency to that with which she'd arrived. She climbed in her car and started to drive.