He's pretty pleased with the fact that he started the day twenty minutes ahead of schedule. Rather, he was early, at least, until she beats ahead of him in line at the coffee shop. Because she smells, in her rushing by, so perfectly and innately close to something he'd once considered comfortable. She smells like a woman he'd once known, more-than-once watched, and even more often wanted to protect – regardless of the fact she had been perfectly capable of handling herself.

She smells so unexplainably the same. Hot-sweet all at once. No weight to it, though. All dry warmth and heady with a floral haze, something spiced and something airy. And all too sudden it's all too closely familiar to have been so vacant from his life for years.

It's just… she smells like "Caitlin."

And he's not even sure himself that he's said the name, let alone in its entirety.

Because he'd always refrained and restrained from using more than one syllable in regards to her. Always and ever-ever, because anything other than 'Kate' would have inexplicably led to 'Caitlin' (which Ari had ruined) or even –

"Katie."

Christ, had he just…? Done it again.

Because that warm smell was so perfectly on point and rising up on him like the first, second and third milliseconds after a detonation– crash up clouded.

"Sorry, bud." She looks at him, lazily and as though she gets mistaken for murdered women all the time. "You got the wrong girl."

She doesn't even look like a Kate to him. Not really.

But she absolutely smells like one.

And she has absolutely no idea how correct she is in her sharply spoken assessment. Because she's tall and blonde and she doesn't fit back into him the way Kate always had. Doesn't let the span of his chest ever so slightly curl the (not at all) petite run of her shoulders. She certainly doesn't angle her head to the side and haze him up with a smell that's near divine in its breathing. This woman's too tall, too bright in the eyes, too young and far too… alive.

His head turns his jaw angling toward her as he breathes out a snort of honest acceptance. "Sorry. Reminded me of someone."

He's taken to breaking his own rules in regards to Kate since she'd died. Starting with the apology he'd dropped over her casket and ending with this most recent one.

He doesn't quite understand how the universe can make a stranger so different from what he knows but so simplistically the same in smell and the very spark in her eyes as she smirks a Kate-like bemusement at him. "Ex-girlfriend?"

He snorts out a breath again as he shakes his head, finding it somewhat annoying that he's got to keep his head up to be honest with this stranger rather than smirking down on a five and a half foot perfect little pain in his ass. "Never got that far."

"Ah," Understanding brings her head higher and he knows, down to center core, she's not what he knows, not at all, "the one that got away. You should call her."

And he damn well knows for a fact, "She wouldn't answer."

He empirically knows this because he'd accidently speed-dialed her cell a few days after in trying to call Abby for something that he can't recall now. And thank Christ he'd been alone, because the hushed warmth of hearing her voice, even a recording, had plowed him right in the gut and had him sitting still in his desk chair for longer than should have been acceptable.

"Never know." She's teasing him, just like a young and attractive girl might if she had a penchant for older grumpy stodgers - same as the woman she reminded of him sometimes had, "Maybe you're the one that got away."

He blinks once and offers a smile that says he's already forgiven her innocent misstep, "She's dead."

"Shit." She still looks horrified from blue eyes to high heels and he just softens his glance farther, waving it off even as she exhales, "Oh, shit… Sorry."

"It's okay. It was years ago." She's still looking at him while he speaks like she's just danced across his shoes with matching left feet, "It was your perfume."

"It's a specialty oil actually. Little shop in Georgetown makes it."

Figures. Leave it to Kate to have been so damn finicky and perfectly picky about having something as superfluous as a specially made perfume.

He… he tells himself not to ask.

And he can see that she's absolutely waiting for him to ask anyhow.

Ah, screw it to hell. "Can you, maybe, write down - "

"Yeah." She laughs, but it's not the same as what he knows and he almost misses her pause as she rifles her purse for a pen. "Know what? Take this."

"No, I can't."

He really can't. Not and stay some semblance of stringent for the rest of the day.

"Just take it." The small bottle has a greased oily feeling to the outside of the glass and he rubs the pad of his thumb along the label as he accepts her pushing, suddenly welled so deep into the smell he's been savoring that he can't fucking breathe past it, "I have to go that way today anyhow."

"It's not necessary."

Oxygen, oxygen is necessary, Jethro. It's pretty much the primary necessity, remember?

One of these days, he thinks, he'd like to try some of it in his locked up lungs again.

"I think it is." She's very quickly more serious that she's been the entire rest of their interaction and he sees sympathy breeding in the blue of her eyes and he doesn't doubt that it's a sweet response to the look that's sure to be on his face, "You should take it."

"Make it a trade - I'll buy your coffee." The only reason he can breathe again is because he's got the bottle clamped in his downwardly dropped hand, "This isn't flirting."

"I didn't think it was." Not sympathy, not in her eyes, but empathy in her slowly made and nodding smile, "The biggest, blackest cup they have, sir."

He didn't understand how cruel the cosmos could be to create something so close to perfect, only to shatter it by being so far from right.

Add that to the list of the universal mysteries he'd yet to suss out.

File under: 'Women'.

Sub-category: 'Lost'.

"Her name was 'Katie'?" She's obviously more than interested in the rest of the story but smart enough to keep it so (supposedly) innocuously simple.

He steps into the space she's made for him and realizes that he's next in line, letting the bottle loose into his jacket pocket as he turns to order. "No, I called her Kate."

She must actually be fairly intelligent, because she doesn't point out that it's the very first time he's audibly used a single syllable descriptor in reference to this particular ghost.

Well, except for 'dead'.

He's damn well not gonna sit on a rooftop with a bottle in his jacket pocket and a near empty coffee cup in his hand while he tells the air "Met a girl that smells like you today.".

Except that he is…

Except that he does.

He misses sharing coffee with her, because she seemed to enjoy her own version of whatever-the-hell was in her cup nearly as much as he still enjoys his own. And he realizes so subtly, in the back of his head, that brewing coffee was the backdrop to him tripping into the smell of Miss Her-But-Not-Her. That it had maybe been that cosmic combination of the two that had made him stutter his steps and lean toward a girl that may not have looked anything like her but had, for just one bright second, brought her so closely back to him.

What he actually misses (but doesn't admit to even himself) is the slight down-to-her-cheeks flutter of dark lashes as she took the first swallow of a really really good cup of coffee.

Or whatever the hell she'd referred to as coffee.

Because it sure as shit hadn't been 'good' coffee.

But what he really, in all actuality, really misses… it's the sound she made in her throat.

It always sounded like a woman completely sated and pleased.

It always sounded like a sound he wouldn't allow himself otherwise.

He'd only once (fess up, Gunny, more than once) let himself wonder what sweet leftover creamy coffee would have tasted like if he'd slicked his tongue against hers and swallowed her inevitable sound of surprise.

The startling realization that it would have made him reconsider his own 'stronger is better' theory was what had shut down that thought process - not that she was his subordinate or any remembrance of his own rules.

But that she could have shaken up something he was so very sure of in any other situation.

That's another thing he's still so very sure of – that she could have shaken him up entirely if for one, two, three milliseconds he had let her.

She had always been infinitely better when she was stronger, he thinks.

(She'd been more than strong for him when she'd put herself between him and a bullet.

And yet, he's still sitting ass down to gritty rooftop with his knees drawn up and his empty hand pressed round exactly where years of sun, rain and sometimes snow had finally finally, finally bleached out the color of her blood.)

When Tony finally calls to track him down, voice a little nervier than it really should be, he realizes he's more than just late - he's setting an extraordinarily bad example. Frankly, he's pretty far outta shits to give, though. Wrangling a ghost that smelled too good to be true was worth making a bad example.

"All good, boss?" The younger man's voice unintentionally implies that he knows that not all is good, not all is well, not all is right with the morning.

"I'm fine." Gibbs scrapes his shoe against grit and wallows deep into the angry sound of it, "Don't you have work to do?"

They're both staring at a satellite image on the computer that, really, they don't need to look at to be able to see clearly. It's been mapped in their heads for years now and the gridded visual of an otherwise innocent rooftop is so familiar… they don't need the actual coordinates.

"How often does he go up there?" Pinging Gibbs' GPS coordinates by cell phone had been the other man's idea and, honestly, Tony had been bemused by the fact McGee had mentioned it first.

He shakes his head, leaning over McGee's desk as he lets his head continue swinging on a lethargic back and forth, "I have no idea."

"Really?"

"Really, Tim." He admits into a sullen shrugging, pressing off the desk with a feeling on his skin that prickles like someone's having a raging kegger on his grave.

Or sitting alone, stewing rather, on hers.

McGee's voice still sometimes manages to sound like it's innocent and Tony bites down into the way it rises behind him, "Doesn't feel like it's been this long, does it?"

"Depends." He avoids looking across the office and just kicks his chair out a little so that he can rest his surprisingly exhausted bones into it, "Sometimes it feels like it's been forever."

He sees the instant recognition in Abby's eyes and hates himself all over once again. Because he'd meant to put the bottle to the table in front of her as a connection but now it feels like an intentional betrayal. Instead it has her surprisingly close to tears and she's looking at him like he's used her stuffed hippopotamus for target practice.

Sometimes he forgets that he's a complete bastard and that she's softer than the visual representation of her is meant to portray.

That's an internal lie – sometimes he just ignores that he's a complete bastard.

Ends justify the means in some moments. Shoulda made that a rule.

And she's got the means for the end of this last mystery.

"You know what this is." He points to the bottle and keeps his voice low.

She looks at him like she's been busted smoking in the Women's Lav and he keeps his face stoic as she slowly squints her head marginally forward, "How'd you find this? How'd you know?"

"I have my ways." He feels it whisper off him in a shrugged explanation but it even sounds wearily faked outside of his own head.

"Where?"

"That's what I want you to find out." He's laying up along her arm in a conspiratorial fashion, letting his jaw nearly lean on her as the both of them stare at a small taunting bottle, "Somewhere in Georgetown. Specialty shop."

"Got it." Abby's voice when it's soft like that is pretty much the only thing that stops him quite so often as this, "Gibbs?"

At first, he just doesn't turn around, because he doesn't want to re-hash this same situation all over again. Not today, at least. Maybe tomorrow. When the lab doesn't smell like a full bloom hothouse. "Yeah, Abs?"

"You ever gonna admit it?" He does turn into her question though, because it'd ding up his pride not to face her in this not even remotely subtle interrogation, "It's been six years."

It's a battered up but still breathing moment before he signs 'no' and simply shakes his head at her.

"Gibbs… you're carrying her perfume in your pocket."

Why's she gotta look at him like he's possible of a love story when he's obviously proven once, twice, thrice, that he's shit at relationships since Shannon? Why's she always have to remind him that Kate was almost his possibly-more-than-a-like story?

"Just for today." He tells her that like it's a promise because she seems too obviously worried about his emotional state.

He means it, though. It's a very rare occasion that he lets himself sort through the little jumble of material things he still has left of one Special Agent Todd. Her badge and her extra keys. ID tag and the hand scribbled notes she'd had on her desk about everything from lunch orders to appointments to case files. The sketchpad Ziva had graciously handed over to him like some sort of unearthed antiquity. The crucifix that nobody but Ducky can accuse him of keeping because the good doctor himself had been the one to drop it into his hand. The neat little Swiss-made blade that kept her within the drawn lines of his rules but proved that she'd found some of his quirks just too close to ridiculous. Usually the act of sorting through those and the other ephemera involves a little tumbler jumble of Bourbon.

"She really liked you."

He knows this. He doesn't need to have it told to him, not again. He'd known it since he'd laid a long look down the slim stretch of her on an airplane couch and she'd hadn't just shifted into the looking, she'd slimmed her eyes like she was daring him to start longing too. Like she wasn't just giving him permission to want and watch, but gilding the goddamn invitation.

"You should have… sometimes your rules are just stupid."

As though she's saying something else that he doesn't already know.

As though he can just take a step backwards by years and fix it for her.

Fix it, Gibbs, bring it back to what it was – it's always that same look on Abby's face when they find something of her back between them.

Broken doesn't get fixed when imperative parts are missing though, and he turns for the door with one shoulder higher than the other, "Just find the place, Abby."

Tony imagines that he's obviously gone completely round-the-bend to the tune of Gibbs' louder than usual silence and the smell of a dead woman. He can smell her on the other man like she'd been so close to him that it's been wiped onto his skin directly from hers. The very subtle smoke-twist of her has been too close all day and it's making him question everything he knows is true about the end of Caitlin Todd.

And he's horrified to taste something like jealousy in the back of his throat – not the general sexual sort of jealousy, either. Which, admittedly, he's more than passingly familiar with... But he's surprised to realize that it's really just more a jealousy of affection and aching than possessiveness.

It's just… if the ghost of her is making rounds then it's unfair she'd spend the whole morning-into-afternoon with Gibbs and not visit with him awhile at all.

"So, where were ya this morning?"

"Sounds like you already know the answer to that, Dinozzo." There's a sick little twanging of degradation in the older man's voice, "You trace my cell?"

He flinches a bit, wipes his fingers on the edge line of his boss's desk and can't meet too knowledgeable blue eyes. "I miss her too, ya know?"

"I told her that."

He's thrown completely off and sidelong by that softer than usual response. "Gibbs."

"She's gone, Tony." Gibbs rises quickly, already brushing off how close to emotional range they'd wandered, "Trust me."

"Then why - "

"Why what?" The older man's voice seems impatient, but more in a wearily sorrowed way than an annoyed one.

He shakes his head quickly back and forth into littered confusion, "Why's it feel like she's here today? It's… it's been years."

The smile that Gibbs gives him is indulgent in unusual affection and it only lasts a moment before it's gone and he's stepping around his desk to leave. "Olfactory memory."

"What?"

He watches wide shoulders shrug at him, "Look it up."

"No, I mean - "

"Good night, Dinozzo." It's not a smack that lands on him but instead a flat palmed cuff against the arm.

And he has to accept that it's all he's gonna get, "Night, boss."

The next morning and she's gone.

In a finger snap and just like on the day she died.

There, not there. Close, not close.

And all he can smell is the citrusy pungent bloom of Ziva's orange as she knifes it open and offers him a piece. "Gibbs is late again."

"No, he's not." He takes the orange slice she hands him and holds it dumbly, as though he doesn't actually know what it's meant for. "He's got another twenty minutes. Probably getting coffee."

"Getting more than coffee, I think. Showing up late and smelling like he's been with a woman? Morning tryst?" She's shrugging into the implication as she thoughtfully slices deeper into the orange, her hip leaned up onto the edge of his desk, "Maybe he's - "

"He smelled like Kate."

His jaw flexes into the surety in the other man's voice, "Shut up, Tim."

"Coffee and lavender and - "

"Am I speaking a different language, McGee?" He can tell he's throttling up and that his emotions are blaring because Ziva's staring at him in a manner that makes it seem like she's deciding whether to hug him or slap the crap out of him, "Just shut the hell up."

"It's hibiscus." He's not a Probie anymore and the voice he's using in response proves it far better than well.

Tony just turns him a sullenly apologetic glance, "I don't wanna know."

He doesn't want her to be dead. Nor does he want to be reminded that she is dead.

He sure as hell doesn't want to still feel this way over half a decade later.

So he's relieved that besides Ziva's breakfast, coffee and sawdust and soap are the only things in the air when Gibbs finally brushes past all of them, fifteen minutes ahead of schedule.

Because just coffee? That he can handle.

It's enough, but not more than.

It's a reminder and not a memory.

"Forgetting something, Gibbs?" Ziva's tone is arched and dry and it says that she's got many more questions than the single one she's waved toward the extra coffee cup that's on his desk.

He dumps his own empty into her (Kate's) garbage bin on a supposedly lackadaisical shrugging. "Nope."

His tone is probably so searing because he's just really comprehended that a plastic bin's lasted his office longer than Kate had. It makes the coffee he's just finished swill bitter bile up the entire length of his throat.

Thing was… he hadn't realized he'd done it until after he'd ordered – that he'd blankly, vacantly, gotten two. But he also hadn't corrected the order as he'd paid for both cups of coffee, one stronger and one sweeter.

He stares another moment at the cup and realizes that stronger isn't necessarily all that much better. It's just that sweetness had created a sort of vulnerability in her, and therefore in him. And, if he were to be completely honest, she had been one of his favorite weaknesses since the first slap in a cramped up bathroom right up until she'd hit that rooftop deck the second time.

That's why out of all of them, she'd gone first – and that's how he'd lost her without ever having her.

"Let's go."

Retreat. At that moment, it was his absolute most practical tactical decision.

She's leaned over his desk with her hands wrapped up and knotted at her back, because she doesn't want a single witness to be able to accuse her of snooping about in his things. Gibbs just doesn't like people in his things. Well, similarly, Abby doesn't like people touching her equipment. So he doesn't fiddle with the Major, and she doesn't rifle through the Gunny's desk.

But he's got a cup of coffee on his desk that looks farther full than empty and it's not from his usual shop and here comes Curiosity, tugging at her forward leaning pig-tails as she studies the label. She sniffs at it, purely out of a need for some sort of factual evidence to support what she already suspects - knowing from the cream tinted scent of it that it's not his coffee.

It's Kate's.

With a sighing she tucks the shop address slowly under the cup, affectionately angling the note so that he'll be able to read it without touching it when he sits. Or he would be able to, if he'd just suck it up and use his glasses.

She traces a semi-circle against the lip of the cover, marking exactly where the lipstick half ring would-should-have been. "He misses you."

And she knows she's been around Gibbs too long – because that's what she said when maybe really she meant 'he loves you'. "We all do."