Authour's Note: After having been an NCIS:Original fan for many years, I only recently discovered NCIS: Los Angeles...and somehow the newbie has superseded the veteran, and I am absolutely in love. I've been devouring fic and vids and watching old eps until I am practically obsessed. So much so that I find myself writing fanfic for the first time in years. Literally. I've got a longer, more complicated fic brewing in my head, but this one just plopped itself out first.

I, of course, own nothing, not even my beloved Kensi and Deeks. I just want to play with them a bit before I return them.

Special Agent Kensi Blye did not want to go.

Mostly when Kensi doesn't want to do something, she doesn't. Strong-willed and more than able-bodied, she's reached a point in her life where there are very few who can make her do anything against her will—and fewer still who would try. Her partner certainly wouldn't, unless he thought it'd be good for her. Her team knows better, except for maybe her team leader. And the diminutive Operations Manager would be the most likely to have any success.

But for the most part, Kensi makes her own rules and her own plans and certainly her own travel itineraries.

This one should have been no different.

She'd started planning only a couple of days ago. A phone call late in the night courtesy of a different time zone. A semi-urgent request, an old friend who dates way back. Someone her father had known. Someone who'd known her father and who, she suspects, may know something about his death. She can't completely dismiss the idea that the request for her presence may be somehow related to her father, and for that reason alone she couldn't just refuse it out of hand. And at first, it had sounded appealing. Back to Hawaii, land of sunshine and pineapples and people who smiled at her and where she didn't face even the possibility that she'd have to pull out her service weapon and shoot someone. She hated Christmas anyway, hated the festivity and the greeting cards and the carols and just every part of it. Christmas was little more than reminder of what she didn't have, what she'd had and lost, every person who'd slipped through her slender fingers since she was 15 and a kind-hearted Marine was trying to explain the inexplicable. Flying to Hawaii over Christmas should have been the most appealing offer she'd had in years.

But she'd forgotten about Deeks. Forgotten about last year's "date". Forgotten how his blue eyes had softened at a homeless shelter filled with people who should have been miserable, but somehow weren't there in the warmth and glow of a shared holiday. Forgotten about how lonely Deeks himself was, with his history of never ever having had even the brief happiness that a young Kensi herself had known. And forgotten about how Deeks could somehow rise past the loneliness he'd always known to make Christmas about helping others.

And now this—a special bottle of a home-brewed potion, made no doubt by one of his numerous lady friends. Something that could have been corny, but instead had warmed Kensi from the inside out and begun to thaw out some of the frozen places that always crept in during this particular holiday. Something to keep her skin soft and tender, and maybe—just maybe—to keep her heart that way too.

She sighed deeply, looking down at the bottle still with its festive green-and-red bow attached. All of a sudden, Hawaii didn't look nearly as appealing. Instead she thought of a homeless shelter and warm blue eyes and a mop of ragged blonde hair, and before she knew it her phone was in her hands.

Travel plans could always be postponed. Especially when Kensi Blye decided she wanted to stay right where she was.