They say that in the moments before your death, your life flashes in front of your eyes. They taught her that this is a time to repent of her sins, and to turn toward God. She's seen too much violent death, she doesn't labor anymore under the delusion that most of the men and women she sees every day on Ducky's tables were thinking of God when they died, if they had ever believed in Him to begin with. But somehow, in spite of everything she's seen and done, she's always believed that when her time comes, she'll do as she's been taught. She's sometimes thought that she has too much blood on her hands to be absolved of it all, but she's never doubted that she's going to ask for it anyway. Of all the things they ever told her, though, nobody ever bothered to tell Kate how she should react to her own death when it comes in a split second from a single shot delivered by a man who knows her name and her voice, her fears and her loyalties.
* * *
She remembers that the ballroom had been vaulted.
There had been muted laughter, and the quiet clink of forks on china, soft music and polite conversation and impractical shoes pinching her toes, and a promise elicited from Gibbs that he would call her if and only if the entire US Navy absconded for the weekend without leave. She hadn't been to a wedding in years, the predictability of her hours being what it isn't and never has been, and the last formal event she had attended had been over a year earlier at a dinner given in honor of the President of the Republic of the Philippines, when she had been wired and hadn't taken her eyes off the president the whole time. She wasn't supposed to be a Secret Service agent when she went to seen an old college friend get married, though; wasn't supposed to be a Secret Service agent at all anymore and hadn't been in months. She had tensed automatically at the sound of a champagne glass shattering, and had blushed and smiled when she'd noticed her dinner companions watching her curiously, deflecting questions and hoping that the smile was charming and flirtatious rather than the one she'd honed playing the good cop to Tony's bad cop and Gibbs's scary cop, the automatic and professional 'please get the hell out of my way because I'd hate to have to shoot you' smile. Had reminded herself after that that she wasn't being paid to scan the room for threats and wouldn't have found any even if she had been.
Had reminded herself, too, that she had earned a weekend off and stopped checking her phone after the fifth time.
The man, the curious one, had been a paediatrician, connected to the groom's side of the family in some convoluted way that she hadn't quite been able to follow. He had been good looking, and funny, and Episcopalian, but she could have worked around that. He hadn't remarked on the more generous assets of the other female guests (even when some of the plastic surgery had been so obvious that she had been biting back her own comments, and she'd realised then that she spent way too much time around DiNozzo), had shown no inclination that she could tell to discuss corpses, and while she hadn't been able to work it into the conversation, she had felt confident that he most likely wasn't building a boat of any kind, in his basement or anywhere else.
She remembers the polite, predictable questions from the other strangers at her table about her connection to the bride and groom, and that she had responded by telling a couple of stories about what Clare had been like when they were at UVA together. The clean, relatively sober stories, always mindful that she could have been talking to the best friend's niece of the bride's new grandmother-in-law, and she had tried not to snicker too hard into her wine glass when it had struck her how not unlike that last state dinner all weddings must be. There had been the other questions, too, about her non-existent children and what's your boyfriend doing making a beautiful young lady like you spend the weekend alone and, of course, her job. She'd become skilled at evading that last one years earlier after the first time she'd discovered that finding out they're eating dinner with a cop (and federal snobbery and interagency turf wars mean nothing to these people, NCIS or the Secret Service or the Capitol police or a regular Virginia state trooper, a cop's a cop) will make the most innocent of people look at her a little warily and the conversation flow a little less easily. When politics had come up briefly, she'd smiled and nodded without committing herself to anything, had learned that one the first trip back home after she'd been transferred to presidential detail.
She hadn't wanted to think too hard about Gibbs and Tony and Ducky and Abby, and how they were the only people she didn't have to walk a tightrope around, but it had been right there at the back of her mind.
It had been in the middle of the best man's speech, she's pretty sure, but maybe she's remembering that wrong. A young kid, young enough to be her nephew, had inched his way around the ballroom, and if she'd ever thought McGee was skittish, he's got nothing on this guy. He had leaned over the table and spoken to the best man, or whoever he had been, in a loud whisper. He had taken the microphone and haltingly apologised for interrupting, and said that he was sorry for the inconvenience, but there had been an accident in the hotel and none of them could leave for the time being. He'd been three steps away from the table before he had thought to turn around and ask if any of them knew a man he identified as Carl Matthews, an officer in the Navy. Three hundred pairs of her eyes had been on her before she had really realised that she was out of her seat.
"I need to talk to you," she had said.
The disbelieving looks she had got from her table as she retrieved her purse and her badge (she might not be DiNozzo, but she's never been above using her federal ID to get herself out of speeding tickets, either) had been about what she had expected, and the rolled eyes from the handful of people in the room who'd had at least a vague idea of what she did hadn't been any surprise, either. She hadn't been at NCIS so long that she didn't still feel a vague stab of resentment when the kid's face had gone blank as she'd identified herself, but long enough that she hadn't really thought that he would react any differently. As she had made her way up to the seventeenth floor, she hadn't felt as pissed at being pulled away from her weekend as she had thought she might be.
She had found the manager of the hotel outside room 719, freaking out and left completely unattended, and wouldn't Gibbs have a field day with this one, she had thought wryly. She had found Lieutenant Matthews on the other side of the door, sprawled across one of the two twin beds with his uniform shirt unbuttoned, his uniform pants around his ankles, and a single slash severing his throat, and had remarked pointedly that perhaps accident was too mild a word. She had called Tony's cell and got Gibbs on the other end of it, which hadn't been in her plans, but she hadn't had time to wonder about it before an older and more hard-nosed local officer had appeared outside the door as she'd been hanging up and had been forced to spend twenty minutes arguing for jurisdiction, aware the whole time that she'd not exactly cut the most professional figure in her sundress and sandals. It hadn't been until almost an hour later, shortly before Gibbs and Tony had finally shown up and after she'd borrowed a pair of gloves from the local ME (who had become a great deal less argumentative once she'd invoked Ducky's name, and she'll never cease to be amazed by how much pull their good doctor has) and had taken as good a look around the room as she could manage without moving anything, when she had found herself dialing the Pentagon to get some information on Lieutenant Matthews, that it had occurred to her that she shouldn't technically have been working. She had had this weekend signed off for more than a month, and she'd done her civic and professional duty and had called it in, and even Gibbs wouldn't have been able to argue that she should have done any more than that.
Actually, Gibbs probably would have, but that hadn't been the point.
She had shrugged and dialed the number.
It hadn't been as though she'd had anything better to do while she had been hanging around room 719, and weekend off or not, she couldn't have gone back downstairs. Even in his most benevolent mood, Gibbs would have killed her if she had left a crime scene before she had turned it over to him. Even in his most benevolent mood (and his most benevolent mood is practically horizontal), Tony would probably have killed her, or at the very least would have helped Gibbs hide the body. It had been then that she'd decided that once the two of them arrived, she would turn the body and the room and her page of notes over and return to the wedding, and they would no doubt fill her in on Monday morning. They would have expected her to help them with the paperwork, too, she had thought.
They had arrived, bickering good-naturedly about she hadn't known what and had been pretty sure that she hadn't wanted to know what, not when it came to Gibbs and Tony, and Gibbs had gone right to work pissing off the locals. Tony had set his kit down and looked up at her from underneath his hat, and oddly sincere for him, had apologised for pulling her away from what he had called her 'thing'. Had thanked her for taking care of things, and told her to get back to it.
She had asked where Ducky was.
He had grinned and said that Gerald had been navigating.
Gibbs hadn't repeated the apology, but she hadn't expected him to. He had listened in silence to what she had had to say, and had flapped his hands at her (like he did last night, she thinks now) and repeated Tony's order to get back to what he had called her tea party.
She'd not been certain why she had done it. It hadn't been obligation, she doesn't think, even if Tony and Abby were always ready to drop any plans they had just as soon as Gibbs opened his mouth, just because neither of them minded not having a life had never meant that she hadn't wanted to have one, and besides, she hadn't been asked, had she? It hadn't been guilt, either. Tony'd had a date, she had known that, and Gibbs had been giving people who'd had the nerve to ask about his weekend plans a bizarrely ambiguous smile, one she had thought at the time that she'd been seeing more of lately, but she had been the only one to specifically ask for time off. Nor had it been as though she had had any reason to think that they were incapable of dealing with one very dead Naval officer by themselves, after all, Gibbs and Tony had managed without her just fine for -- come to think of it, she had never known how long it had been just the two of them, and it could have been two days or two years, but they had managed to subvert the FBI and the Secret Service entirely on their own.
"No," she had said as she'd held her hand out for the camera. "I'll stay."
* * *
She knows now, she thinks, that it was simply because she had known that she would have more fun with the two men she constantly wants to slap than she would have had with any of the people down there, even if that had involved a murder investigation, and even if some of the men in that room had been potential boyfriends while Gibbs and Tony were really incredibly not. And she'd known that if she had gone back to her 'tea party', she would most likely have spent the rest of her afternoon wondering what they were doing, not to mention the questions she would have had to field about her disappearance.
Nobody bothers to tell you that when there's a bullet speeding toward your brain, that single second can feel like an hour.
She smells roses and champagne and polished wood, and she smells gunpowder and burned coffee and formaldehyde, and she feels no regret for the life that didn't choose her, the one she knows now that she didn't have because she was meant for other things, another purpose, no less worthwhile or fulfilling than the one she had always thought she should want but never did, not really.
She thanks God for letting her die the way she had lived.
She'd thought, once, when she was a young and naive Secret Service recruit and had possessed a healthy dose of romantic idealism, that if she absolutely had to live a life that revolved around work and no sleep, she would quite like to die in the line of duty. To go out in a blaze of glory while she was protecting the president. She knows now that dying in the line of duty isn't everything it's cracked up to be, and some small part of her thinks it's funny that in spite of seeing the way the football carrier died that fateful day that had spelled the beginning of the end of her career in the Secret Service, and in spite of knowing so many men and women who were there on that other fateful day one morning in September and who never went home, it took her until the day she met her first military widow to realise that. If she has to die in the line of duty, though, she thinks that this isn't such a bad way to do it. It might not be reported on the front page of every newspaper written in English, but the trade-off is that she gets to be standing next to her friends, two men who she loves more than almost anyone else in the world, and that's worth it. More than worth it.
She thanks God for these men, for McGee and Abby and Ducky, too. For a family she hadn't known that she needed, and for a life that was never lived from the sidelines.
She doesn't have time to ask for His forgiveness.
She's fairly certain that He won't mind too much.
Story Notes:
Written originally for the 2006 Femgenficathon with the prompt, "All strange and terrible events are welcome, but comforts we despise." The Gibbs/DiNozzo is very, very implied - really, blink and you'll miss it. Title taken from Ourstory by Carole Satyamurti.
Author's Chapter Notes:
She thanks God for letting her die the way she had lived.
Chapter End Notes:
Written originally for the 2006 Femgenficathon with the prompt, "All strange and terrible events are welcome, but comforts we despise." The Gibbs/DiNozzo is very, very implied - really, blink and you'll miss it. Title taken from Ourstory by Carole Satyamurti.