A/N: In all honesty, I wrote this in probably an hour and did very little editing. I hope you enjoy it, anyway. It's my first time writing Kate, so I'm sorta shaky. Also, tell me what you think of the end because I'm not sure how I feel about it. Happy reading! :)
--
Things are broke, way past mending
Don't look now the world is ending.
~"You've Really Gone and Done It Now" Duncan Sheik
--
Dying is easy. It's the waking up afterward that hurts.
At first, Kate is disoriented, confused, waking in a bed not hers in clothes she doesn't remember owning. There is no blood, no danger, nothing. And she can't remember anything.
And then, suddenly, she can. Images flash before her like a movie playing a thousand miles a minute: Ari. Gun. Bang. Blood. Dead.
Dead, she thinks. She is dead.
It is a funny feeling being dead. Like being somehow in one's skin and yet also floating around the edges of it, uncontainable.
It is nothing like she imagined.
At first, she can't believe it. This is death? This is heaven? This?
Nothing seems right to her still half-human brain. There are no clouds, no wonderlands, no chariots. In fact, there is nothing.
And yet, somehow, that is everything.
It is more a state than a place, she decides one day. (Days? Do those even exist anymore?) The scene changes and melds together with other scenes until she's left dazed and adrift in a sea of images that no longer mean anything.
She's not sure she likes it.
--
Appreciating heaven seems simple, but Kate finds it hard.
She is allowed to do most anything because everything she imagines appears to be real. She can sit in a library all day long, or go on adventures with anyone she can dream up. She can eat, sleep, dream, or lay in a field of flowers.
You can ask anything you'd like, Up There, and you'll know the answer almost instantly. And Kate longs to ask the One—God, Jesus, Allah, whoever it is (she can never really tell)—a thousand questions: why she died, why they lived, why the world hates, why people are so screwed up. Just why.
But when she first arrives in that strange dream of a world, she observes what it does to people. She's noticed how it makes them a little less willing to continue.
She learns a lesson Up There that she never could seem to learn on earth: knowledge is power, but it comes at a bitter price.
The one thing she asks about—the one thing she can bring herself to speak aloud—is hell. If it exists. If it's as awful as everyone says.
Picture if you will, one wiser spirit says, a place in which your emotions control you. In which you cannot think logically. In which you see your life plays before your eyes again and again and again…
To Kate, it doesn't sound so bad. It sounds, at least, better than feeling nothing.
With that realization, she quickly gives up her desire to ask anything at all.
She continues searching everywhere for a friendly face because that in itself might make this place a little less strange, a little more acceptable, and sometimes, she finds one: her grandmother, her childhood best friend, a cousin. They are never as she remembers, though, and that leaves her lonely.
She looks for Ari Haswari everywhere. But he is not there. She does not know why she expected him to be.
No, Ari's in hell. After immeasurable amounts of loneliness, she begins to envy him.
Because heaven and hell are often mistaken, and Kate doesn't know anymore, which she'd really prefer. Probably a result of being too human for too long.
--
When heaven gets to be too much, she returns to NCIS and watches as her team falls apart and slowly tries to pick itself up again. They've never done it before, so they struggle.
She misses them. She knows that they miss her too (she can feel it all around her all the time); she also knows that every day she does not spend on earth, her name grows a little fainter in their memories.
She wonders, sometimes, if one day she won't be totally forgotten.
It pains her to think they can appear to go on living so peacefully—that they can move on while she just can't seem to get started. She tries, she really does. And heaven is exciting and peaceful and easy, she supposes, or it might be, if she bothered to pay attention.
But she can't. All she sees and all she hears and all she's ever known is themthemthem and it takes too much effort to try to pull herself away.
So she watches them.
She watches as they cry for her (Abby) and pray for her (McGee, God bless him), and picture her naked (Tony), and she wishes she new how to make it better. But she can't even make it better for herself.
She resents her replacement for a while. The slinky little almost-woman whose broken morals Live Kate would never have approved of. (Funny how Dead Kate can't find the strength to care.) She hates the fact that McGee smiles at her and Gibbs takes to her and Ducky tries to break down her walls and Tony, oh Tony, falls so fast it's like being hit by a freight train.
Abby is a little harder to conquer. Kate appreciates the loyalty.
For a while, she is tied to her desk. She stands over it in a lording sort of way, as though her co-workers—friends, family—might look up one day and realize she'd still there.
They don't.
Ironically, Officer David seems to notice, though. Perhaps it is because of the necklace around her neck or all the people she has lost that she is somehow more connected with the dead. Kate doesn't really know. All she knows is that sometimes she'll reach out to touch the Israeli in curiosity, and Ziva will tense up, suddenly quite alert.
It frightens Kate that she might not be so forgotten, after all.
--
They all visit her grave repeatedly as the year fly by: Gibbs, Ducky, Abby, Tony, McGee, and even Palmer. She listens to them say they miss her and they wish she was there and then she watches as they walk away back to the lives in which they've moved on.
She'll never move on; she'll always be left wanting. She hates that.
It surprises her when Ziva visits the first time. She comes bearing flowers and a necklace, a solemn expression on her face.
I thought you might have this, she says slowly, staring intently at the tombstone. The one I wear was my sister Tali's, but this was mine. I suppose it is my way of…apologizing. Ari…Ari was my brother. But brothers are often wrong, just as fathers are often cruel.
Setting down the necklace and the flowers, she finishes quietly, I know it is not enough, but I hope one day it might mean something.
Kate stares at the necklace as the assassin walks—saunters, because she always does—away. She tries to pick up the necklace, but it slips through her fingers and falls once more to the ground.
From that day forward, she has a purpose: help Ziva David.
It's strange to think of, but it keeps her from the madness that lurks at the edge of her mind.
She does what she can to push her in the right direction, to change her from an assassin into an investigator, but mostly she just watches.
She watches as the poor Israeli's walls are built up and then forced down my a surrogate family that should have been just another assignment.
She watches as Tony bends over backwards to make her American, to make her female, to make her human.
She watches as Ziva unwillingly falls for him, as Kate would have done if only it had been a different time and a different place and she had been that type of girl.
(But she wasn't. She still isn't.)
When Gibbs says Ziva's dead, Kate cries. Or would cry, if she could. But she can't. Because tears don't exist Up There.
She wants to yell at Tony. Wants to appear in front of his desk and hit him and knock some sense into him to make him to something, do anything except give up.
And she tries. Oh, Lord, she tries. Because Ziva can't be dead; she would feel it. She would know. So she runs and runs until she can't run anymore, and she almost gets there.
Almost.
When she finds out she won't ever make it, that is when she truly gives up on the life she used to have.
--
Two days after she returns home—safe, sound, and much worse for the wear—Ziva appears once more at Kate's grave, her eyes too dry and scars all over her body. She kneels in front of the tombstone, silent for a few moments.
When she speaks, Kate is surprised to hear tears in voice.
I am sorry, she says. I did not know whom else to go to. They…they are biased. I have hurt them. And I want to go back to the way things once were, but I do not know if that is even possible. I cannot seem to even get started.
Kate knows the feeling, so she listens as Ziva pours out her story. She watches as she cries and beats herself up and begs, begs, begs for redemption or deliverance or at least something like it.
She'd like to tell Ziva it's coming, but Kate doesn't know if that's true, and she's never been too fond of liars.
Instead, she reaches forward and lays a hand on the ex-assassin's shoulder, trying to offer some sort of comfort. The touch unites them and for a single moment, Kate is alive, breathing, human. She tastes the air in her mouth, the wind in her hair, the pounding headache of a bullet in her forehead.
Then Ziva looks up and she is gone.
Kate forces the wind to pick up, brushing through Ziva's wild hair, against her face. Standing, the Mossad Officer takes a deep breath, nods once, and turns to walk slowly away.
With that simple action, Kate knows that Ziva understands. That she gets it. The she realizes that she can't give it up because you only get one shot and if you have a chance at happiness, then for goodness sake's take it and damn the consequences.
Watching Ziva walk away, Kate finds peace.