WEDNESDAY MID-MORNING
Kensi shoos Deeks' hand away as he tries to help her walk through their front door.
"Kensi, you were shot five days ago, I don't think offering you a hand is really out of line," Deeks tells her.
"If it were Sam, he'd have been back at the office Friday night," she responds, only to hear Callen's voice from another room.
"But he's a SEAL. Did you know he's a SEAL? Has he ever mentioned it, because I think he may have mentioned it," Callen points out.
Kensi's face shows her surprise. "What are you doing here?" Sam, Fatima and Rountree all appear from wherever they were throughout the house. She begins giving hugs. "What are all of you doing here? I didn't know you were coming to welcome me home."
"Well, we like you plenty," Sam jokes, "but most people get forty weeks to get ready to bring a little one home and you are getting forty hours, so we thought maybe you could use a few extra hands. Deeks will be a great dad, but I don't know how handy he is."
The whole team laughs.
"Who's in Ops today?" Kensi wonders.
"Kilbride," Fatima tells her, her eyebrows raised in some suspicion that the computer systems there may not survive his attempts to manage OSP. "He insisted. This is our duty station today unless the world falls apart."
"Well, let's hope that doesn't happen," Deeks says.
The team explains the piles of things in the living room. Sam and Callen went to Tiffany's place the night before and with permission from LAPD and the NCIS forensics lab they cleared out all of the stuff that belonged to the little one – clothes, blankets, diapers, soap, formula – just to get a sense of anything familiar.
Callen is unpacking things from Tiffany's house. Devin is deep in laundry, washing every single piece of fabric that Callen brings in. Fatima is cleaning every toy, and preparing them for decisions that Kensi and Deeks will make about what stays and what goes. Sam is installing a state-of-the-art video capable baby monitor in the room. Fatima will make it hacker-proof as soon as Sam is done.
Rountree changes a load of laundry and heads out to grab lunch to keep the team energized and motivated.
The group works hard to let Kensi make the choices. Fatima shows her pictures of jungle themed décor and a few different ideas for cribs. She points at things and people go in motion. The order of operations was established before she got home.
Bring over the baby's things that could be salvaged, clean everything while Sam installed the monitor, scrub the room, and then put it together. They order things online for pick up, and they come and go all afternoon with more pieces of the puzzle. Callen and Deeks put together the crib, and Sam hangs with Kensi in the living room folding a pile of laundry that is unimaginable big for the size of the child.
"Don't let yourself get bogged down in the minutia of it."
"That's harder than it sounds. It's all so minute," she jokes, holding up a tiny little sock while she looks for a match.
"You know, we may be cramming forty weeks of planning into forty hours, but it's good. People obsess over the room and agonize over the sheets, but none of that is what really matters."
"It all seems pretty important."
"The green rug or the leaf print curtains – that isn't what determines the future for that child, Kensi. It's you. And Deeks. It's the love you give and the life you build. Together. You guys are going to be just fine."
"I've never even changed a diaper," she says, full of self-doubt and insecurity.
"No one gives you a kid to practice on. Whether people have been planning on becoming parents for years or months or weeks or days, when you hold your first baby in your arms for the first time, at home, in the quiet of your own house – it's the same for everyone. Everyone starts from zero. And trust me, I've never seen anything you couldn't pick up. And you put up with Deeks, so I know you have the patience to make it happen."
She drops the laundry and hugs the man, the gentle giant who she has seen go through so much. If he believes in her, maybe she really can do this.
That is the moment when everyone else makes their reappearance. The clothes are clean, the crib is up, the curtains are hung, the rug is down. Everyone carries everything that needs to go into the room, careful not to let Kensi carry anything yet, and lay it all out looking for instructions.
Kensi looks around, slightly overwhelmed by the scope of what needs to happen next. And maybe a little by the number of people in the room. She imagined nights of putting all the finishing touches on a baby's room as something special, intimate – something she and Deeks would do together. She almost feels like the team is invading their privacy, and despite her gratitude, she's ready to go the rest of the way with Deeks.
She suggests dinner, and they order in food. They sit at the table and eat and laugh, and she relaxes. When it's done and Fatima suggests getting back to work, Kensi realizes Deeks is in the exact same spot.
"I think Kensi and I will take it across the finish line."
He says it with a smile, but everyone hears him. Sam has one more thing to do.
"OK. Let's go get the car seat strapped into whatever car you're taking tomorrow, and then we'll get out of your hair."
Deeks' expression is completely dismissive. "You just strap it in. How hard could it be?"
"Ha," Sam says. "See, I would make you eat those words, but I don't want to see you walk that baby all the way home from the courthouse. Let's go."
Fatima and Devin clean up dinner, Sam and Deeks go outside, and Callen looks at Kensi.
"You're a mom," he says in wonder.
"Can you believe it," she says, letting Callen see the excitement that is hiding just below the surface of stress.
"I'm so happy for you, Kens. For you both. For all three of you. Luckiest kid in the world."
He leans over and gives her a kiss on the head, and then takes a few last boxes out to the trash.
WEDNESDAY EVENING
Kensi and Deeks dance in elegant choreography as they put the finishing touches on the room. The changing table is stocked and organized, the sheets are on the crib and the twin bed that sits across the room. The recessed drawers have plenty of space for all the little articles of clothing.
"Can you do me a favor?"
"Anything!" he says energetically, the excitement and closeness of the evening written on his face.
"In the back room there's a white box, it's just labeled 'someday'. Can you grab it?"
He looks at her suspiciously, but retreats and returns, box in hand. He puts it on the comfy chair and takes a step back, waiting for the big reveal.
"I was sort of afraid this would never happen for us. And sometimes I just needed hope. So every once in a while when I needed to believe, I would get a little something for the baby we didn't have yet to remind myself that it was still out there, somewhere. That there was still hope."
She opens the box. The first thing that she pulls out is a copy of The Jungle Book, and puts it on the recessed shelves. Deeks cranes his neck a little to peek, but decided to stay where he is and let her unveil the other contents at her own pace. More books come. Then she reaches in and grabs a few stuffed animals – all jungle themed. A hippo, a gorilla and a crocodile all make an appearance, and Kensi arranges them carefully. The final items to leave the box are a soft little leopard and a soft little tiger.
She has one in each hand, and she pretends they hug each other, and then she scrunches them a little when she shows them to him so that their front legs move, and she makes them pounce at Deeks. He chuckles at the general cuteness, both of the stuffed animals and the woman in front of him. He comes closer, taking one of them out of her hand and making a tiger noise as best he can imitate it. His attempt makes her giggle.
She takes it back and places the leopard and the tiger in the crib.
"Little jungle cats for our little jungle cat," he says as he slides up behind her. He wraps his arms around her, holding his hands together in front, and they both look into the empty crib.
"She'll be sleeping here tomorrow night," Kensi imagines wistfully.
"Well, I don't know how much sleeping they do at this stage," Deeks jokes.
"You know what we should do?"
"No, what?"
"Figure out a name for her."
"Yeah, that would be a good idea."
They sit in the nursery, taking it all in and trying out name ideas.
"Princess Sunshine?"
"No. That one hasn't grown on me."
"Sunshine Princess?"
Kensi's eyes make it clear that reversing the order hasn't improved it.
"Alina?"
"I don't know that name," Kensi tells him.
"Yeah – we could name her after you. You're Kensilina, she could be Alina?"
Kensi wrinkles her nose and they are off to the races. Martina? Julie? Aelia? It means 'sun' in ancient Roman. Not the most useful language. Aurora? It means 'dawn.' So why not just pick Dawn. She'll have Deeks as a last name, so her first name should have two syllables. Why don't you take Deeks as your last name so we all have the same one? Never mind. Miriam? It means 'a wished for child'.
"Genevieve?" Kensi asked.
"Like King Arthur's queen?"
"No that was Guinevere. Genevieve. It can be Jenni, Evie, has lots of nick names and means 'god's blessing'."
"That's a lot to teach a kid to spell at first, I think," Deeks points out.
"How about Gia? It means 'a gracious gift,' Kensi says, peeking at her phone to get the meaning right. She looks up from the screen with a smile. It's the first one that struck her. "Gia."
"Gia Marie Deeks," he says, listening to how the ring of it hits him.