Title: Trigger
Author: lyj
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Heart Break
Summary: "Mama," Kate hums to herself, "just killed a man…"
Kate has never before killed anything. There's not a lot of killing in her environment, for all that she wears a gun on her hip at work. Her father and older brother hunt, and her grandfather took her fishing once, but she couldn't even put the worm on the hook.
It's not about killing, per se. Kate eats meat, and wears leather, and feels no guilt. But ending a life for no good reason—
Or maybe it is about killing, and Kate should stop being a hypocrite and should learn to live off of soy burgers. She doesn't know. And there's no one to ask.
---
Ducky asks her if she's all right. Three times. She doesn't hear him the first two times.
"My dear," he says, third time's the charm. "Are you all right?"
He inserts a delicate British pause between "you" and "all right". It makes it seem, to her, as though there's some horrible possibility she hasn't even thought of, yet. Like, maybe she'll turn into an actual leper, or grow two heads, or become a Scientologist.
"Yes," she replies. "Absolutely. Little shaken up, but I'm okay."
Between Tony and McGee and Abby and the agent who wrote up the incident report, Kate has gotten pretty good at that line. You have to hit it just right, midway between G-man stoicism and resigned dismay, or people will know you're faking it. Tony, who was the first one to hear it, looked at her funny.
(Tony is not always as dumb as he would have you believe.)
So Kate got better at it. And Ducky believes her, immediately.
"Good," he says. "You know where to find me if you'd like to talk."
It's a real offer, not the kind you make and forget instantly, and Kate feels a little bad that she's lying to him like this, but she smiles, and Ducky makes his way over to the elevator banks.
She can feel Gibbs not looking at her.
---
There are practical implications to having taken a life she's never really thought of. For one, this boy had family. He has a mother and a father who are horrified and sad and angry, and they're trying to sue. Kate met with a DOD lawyer who was slick and dismissive about it, and who said something about self defense and trespassing and force majeur, and to be honest, she didn't really listen.
Because in the manila folder with her name on it, she knew that he had pictures of the boy's body. She saw the corner of one of them poking out, and with surprising precision, she realized that she was looking at the tip of the boy's left shoe. Hidden under the folder, but visible in her mind, was the Milky Way spray of blood swathed across the tile floor.
Before she killed him, she didn't fully realize how graceless death was. Cops of all varieties tended to use butch euphemisms for killing: "I dropped him" or "I took him out". They didn't say things like "Brain matter is a lot more liquid than you'd think." They didn't say things like "Human blood and chlorinated water make EMTs vomit."
---
Kate told her parents mostly because she was worried they hear it somewhere else, and didn't tell her brothers at all. Her mom asks if she can tell them, and Kate shrugs. She doesn't care.
Over the phone, later, her mom tries to tease the story out of her, and Kate is relieved to the point of tears when her mother buys the same line everyone else does. Later, she realizes that maybe the tears were of disappointment.
She wants someone to call her on her shit. No one does.
---
Gibbs is the one to give her gun back. He comes in late that morning, and slides the holster onto her desk in passing.
Kate keeps it in the back of a locked drawer, and avoids leaving the office, so she doesn't have to strap it on. Gibbs pretends not to notice.
---
She's a little surprised that Gibbs doesn't make her talk to the department shrink. It's offered as a possibility, but it's not like she's going to jump at the chance, and he lets her roll her eyes at the suggestion, and even looks like he approves.
It's not that she's surprised that Gibbs thinks psychotherapy is a load of crap, it's just that she's coming apart at the edges, and she thought that maybe he'd be the one to notice.
---
Three times she tries to go to confession, and three times she talks about smaller things instead.
"Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It has been three weeks since my last confession—"
I took a life, she thinks, but she talks about the lesser sins of pride and anger. The priest lets her.
Afterward, she is angry with God. She doesn't go back to church.
---
Kate sees the doctor because she hasn't slept in three days, and life has slowed down to a trickle. She can't sleep at night, and she doesn't trust herself to leave her house, because she finds herself places she doesn't remember driving.
The doctor asks if she's experiencing any stress in her life.
"I'm an NCIS agent," she says. The doctor looks at her blankly and repeats himself. Stress?
"Not really," Kate says. The doctor gives her a course of Ambien and tells her to knock off the caffeine.
---
Now it's six months later. Kate took a week off, and told people she was going to Florida to sit on a beach, but really she went to see the boy's grave. And then she spent the rest of the week in a no-name motel, getting drunk by herself.
That's probably not good, but she's not worried anymore.
---
She takes up running long distances, and loses too much weight. The clothes she picks for work are loose and dark and can hide twenty pounds either way.
She also stops wearing skirts or short sleeves or shirts that show her collar bones.
A few times she thinks Gibbs is looking at her with concern, but he doesn't say anything.
She doesn't go home for Thanksgiving.
---
At nine months, Kate drives herself to his house on Friday night. She sits in the driveway for almost an hour, and then she rings the doorbell.
His mom answers. Kate can see that she doesn't know who she is.
"I'm Kate Todd," she says. The woman looks perplexed.
"Are you looking for my husband? Harry—"
His dad is a big man who has shrunk in on himself. His skin looks big on him. Kate knows what it's like to look at yourself naked in the mirror and see bones you didn't know you had.
"I'm Kate Todd," she says, again.
"Oh," the father says. He knows.
"I'm. I'm sorry," she says, but that doesn't cover it. There are no words.
She doesn't ask for forgiveness, and they don't offer. She has only come because she wants them to know that there is a third person in this maelstrom with them, whether they want her there or not.
And maybe because she, too, needs to know that she's not alone.
She never talks to them again.
---
She drives to Gibbs' house one Sunday night, for no good reason, except maybe that if she goes home to her empty apartment, something might happen.
She sits on his porch and waits for him to come home.
"Kate," he says, and sits next to her.
"I can't," she says, after a while. "I can't do this."
Gibbs is quiet for a long time.
"Sweetheart," he finally says, and puts his arm around her. "I'm so sorry."
For the first time in almost a year, Kate is able to cry.
-fin-