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It’s been weeks since Kate’s altercation with Lucy. Agent Tara. Although altercation isn’t really the right word, not if you’re being precise about it, which she always tries to be. Altercation is the word she uses to hide behind, to somehow try and convince herself that she were on anything of an equal footing during the incident. It’s more palatable than the truth. That she allowed herself to be both professionally and personally disrespected, in public no less, by the woman who she’d genuinely started to see herself falling for.
It hurt because Kate was just doing her job. She knows that people don’t always like it, a prerogative which isn’t solely reserved for Lucy or NCIS, and she expects a degree of pushback. In a way she welcomes it, when people really argue their case it gives her a gauge for exactly how important her information might be. Sometimes she is able to offer more than she initially thought, something adjacent to the initial request, but helpful nonetheless. Not always, but sometimes.
What she does not expect is to be bullied and belittled when the answer has to be an outright no. And of course it happens, to varying degrees. She had been warned about it when she took up the role, not that she’d even required that warning - it was only to be expected. It’s why she keeps her walls up so high and why she is so reluctant to step beyond the bounds of professional. One of the reasons.
Or did, at least. Because with Lucy she had let her guard down. She’d started to think Lucy might be safe. She had been mistaken. The NCIS agent had tried to use whatever relationship it was that they had been building; first as a means to get what she wanted, and then as a weapon to punish Kate when she did not. And so she did the only thing she could - she closed it down. The investigation as well as her feelings for Lucy.
She’s only relieved that she’d not let things go any further than they had. But she had wanted them to. She'd wanted Lucy with an intensity she didn’t think she had ever felt before. A craving that only grew the more time she spent around her. She knew it had only been a matter of time until her resistance failed.
It had been hard, at first, almost impossible. To walk through the bullpen and not look across to where Lucy sits, or to keep the beginnings of a smile from her face when she makes a witty quip in one of their briefings, or to feel impressed at her passion and intelligence when she connects the dots that have been eluding them and then runs out into the field regardless of any threat to her personal safety.
It is still hard, if she’s honest, because she wishes it could have been different.
She makes less in person visits down to NCIS. In reality, over the last few months, she knows she’s been finding excuses to go there, things that could’ve been handled with a phone call or email. She has rectified that indulgence. Something she should have done the moment she realised her motivations were purely personal. It allows her more time to focus on some of her other projects. It makes her bosses happy.
Of course she can’t avoid NCIS completely. But things have thawed, the hurt has receded. She manages to work with the team again, even with Lucy, though she makes sure to maintain that professional distance. Lucy tries, Kate thinks. Tries to tamp down on the impulse to argue. To bate and goad her whenever the team don’t get the answers they want. It doesn’t matter. Kate has learned her lesson.
She also thinks that Lucy might still be trying to get her attention. She thinks it frustrates the agent that she’s unsuccessful. It gives Kate a sense of satisfaction in a way. They aren’t playing a game, Kate knows, and yet if they were she thinks she might finally be winning it.
*
It’s always a bad time of year for Kate.
It’s not the same as the uncontrollable agony she used to feel, of course. Where on her worst days she could barely see any hope for the future, where she felt as though she were trapped in a black hole, and on bad days couldn’t get out of bed. Now there are some days she doesn’t even think of him at all, now that the years have started to number in their double digits.
Often she can picture his smile and hear his laugh without feeling any pain, just a sense of warmth and happiness that she’d been able to know them at all. Even more frequently she’ll speak to him, either in the confines of her mind, or out loud in the privacy of her apartment when she knows there’s no chance of anyone overhearing and assuming she’s mad. She tells him about her day, the pride she feels in doing her job. Moans about a particular boss who she feels is unfair to her. And she’ll talk to him all about a certain NCIS agent who happens to drive her crazy.
But it’s still hard, even if the pain now has dulled to an ache. It can still flare. It can still debilitate.
The night before his anniversary she decides to raise a glass of wine to him. She’s already had one, and on a work night she’s normally good at being able to keep it that way. But this night she feels the loneliness and pain of his absence more acutely than she’s done in a while, and decides a second glass won’t hurt. She toasts to his memory, alone on her balcony, and tries to remember the good times and not the knock at her door or the soft sympathy in the voice as if that could possibly change the fact that her heart had just been ripped out of her chest.
Self pity turns the second glass into a third, and the next morning she awakes late and hungover and still with the familiar ache of loss inside her. She doesn’t have time to wash her hair, and her makeup doesn’t quite conceal the bags under her eyes or diminish how bloodshot they still look. She turns up to work only a few minutes tardy, but decidedly less well put together than normal, and having completely forgotten about her morning briefing with NCIS.
She manages to push it back by an hour to gather some intel that might be of use, as well as down a large coffee. But as she enters the NCIS building her mind isn’t really on the briefing at all. She knows she’s not her normal self. There’s a chaos inside her that she hasn’t felt in a long time. Every noise irritates her, voices are too loud, the incessant tick of a clock that seems to beat against her skin drives her to distraction. Her clothes feel too constricting, and she works to use the techniques she’s become so familiar with to centre herself. She’s become good at them through the years of therapy.
The team are all assembled in the war room when she arrives. Tennant greets her cordially, and though Kate is one hundred percent sure that the woman notices her less than pristine appearance, she makes no comment but invites her to get started right away.
She catches Lucy’s eye before she can remember not to. She looks good, as always. Her hair is pulled back into a pony and she’s wearing a cute shirt with a couple of buttons undone at her neckline. Kate’s eyes are drawn down of their own accord before she can stop them. Lucy watches her smugly. Too smugly and it sets Kate on edge.
She has to take a deep breath or two before she begins. She still feels nowhere near centred, her chest is tight and her mind doesn’t seem to want to focus. But she knows she has a job to do, and she’ll be dammed if she lets her old anxieties stop her from doing it.
It’s as she starts the briefing she notices it. She sees Lucy take a drink from a mug of what she can only assume is coffee, and then replaces it on the desk quite purposely just to one side of the coaster. She stutters as her thought process trails off. She can feel Lucy’s eyes on her. She looks to the rest of the room and notices each agent has a mug in front of them and yet none of them are using the coasters which are clearly available.
And it’s such an insignificant detail, it shouldn’t bother her at all. But now she’s seen it she can’t un-see, and it’s all she can concentrate on. She’s still dimly aware of all of them watching her, waiting. And she can see the smug look on Lucy’s face, and she knows without proof that this is her doing.
She tries to set her face into it’s usual mask, but there’s a tick in her eye and no matter how hard she clenches her jaw she can feel her control slipping. Her thoughts unspooling. There is a trickle of brown liquid slowly running down the outside of the mug closest to Agent Boone, about to come to rest on the exposed worktop. Up on the big screen the face of a man appears, and she is supposed to be filling them in all about him. Boone lifts the offending drink to his mouth and there’s a ring of coffee-coloured fluid where the cup had been sat. She struggles to remember the target’s name. Blood rushes in her ears. He puts the cup back and its almost in slow motion. It looks for a moment that he’ll set it rightfully onto the coaster, but he changes course at the last second and puts it back on the desk.
Agent Tennant is talking to her, asking if she’s okay, and Kate finally pulls her attention away. She manages to take a deep breath. Assures the woman that she’s fine to carry on. The smug look is gone from Lucy’s face. She looks unsure, contrite. Kate notices that she’s put her own mug back onto the coaster in front of her. She catches her doing the same for the one in front of Ernie. Kate feels her face burn.
Somehow she gets through it. She stumbles over details. She snaps at Agent Boone when he asks a completely reasonable question. And she wraps the whole thing up somewhat prematurely. It’s obvious that everyone in there knows something is off. She doesn’t care. She just needs to get out. To get somewhere she can regain some control. To do her breathing exercises.
She can’t go back to her own office like this, that’s for sure. She can’t risk having to share the lift with one of the brass, or her colleagues talking behind her back when they notice she’s on the verge of falling apart.
So she goes to the NCIS bathrooms. They are mercifully empty and she splashes icy cold water on her face and grips the edge of the sink until her knuckles turn white. She looks into her reflection and sees her wild eyes staring back. Noah’s eyes. She focuses on them until everything else falls away. Until she can breathe in through her nose and out through her mouth, in and out, repeating it once, twice and a third time; willing it to become natural.
She is only dimly aware of the door to the bathroom opening.
“Kate.”
It’s so different to how Lucy has ever said her name before that she’s momentarily caught off guard. There’s been teasing, flirty, angry, and even perfunctory. But never this. Soft and caring and unsure. They lock eyes through the mirror. Kate wants to turn away, to hide her face. She doesn’t want anyone to see her like this, but especially not Lucy. She finds she’s frozen in place.
Lucy closes the distance between them, reaching out to her until at the last moment seems to think better of it and let’s her hand drop.
“Are you okay?” She asks, and Kate doesn’t begin to know how to answer that. She squeezes her eyes shut and finally she can turn away.
“I’m sorry, that was a dumb question.” The agent continues. “Is there anything I can do?”
“I think you’ve done enough.” Kate manages, but there’s nowhere near as much bite to her words as she intends, and they sound flat and tired instead.
She still expects Lucy to jump on the defensive and refute the accusation, and so she’s taken aback when the woman sighs.
“I’m sorry.”
“Why?” Kate manages through clenched teeth. She’s still facing away.
“I’m sorry because it was my idea. I’ve seen how it bugs you when things are out of place. I’ve even seen you go out of your way to move a mug on my desk onto its coaster. I thought it’d be funny if we all did it. I had no idea it would affect you like this.”
Kate releases a breath and turns back around. Lucy is watching her. Her eyes are shining with unshed moisture, and Kate thinks she looks more genuine than she’s ever seen her.
“I am truly sorry, Kate.” She repeats.
Kate swallows. “It’s a form of OCD. Trying to impose order on the world as a way of ordering or controlling my own emotions. Or so they say...” She doesn’t know why she’s telling Lucy this. More than she’s told anyone before. “I was already having a bad day. You don’t get to take all the credit. Just helped me over the edge.”
“Can I do anything?” Lucy sounds sincere, but Kate’s emotions are still all over the place and the truth is she hasn’t a clue what she needs, and so she just shrugs.
Lucy moves an inch closer. She’s invading Kate’s personal space now, and she’s torn between taking a step back and leaning in. She knows she’s in no frame of mind to make that decision.
“Why?” She asks again, breathing the word in nothing more than a whisper. “Why did you feel the need to make fun of me, what have I done to make you detest me?”
Lucy’s eyes fly wide open. Shame and regret battling for dominance within them. “I could never detest you Kate.” And there it is again, Lucy using her name and it makes her feel something. “I think...” She looks down, breaking their eyes contact. “I think that I just wanted you to see me.”
Kate feels her murmured confession like a soft caress. She closes her eyes against a sudden rush of emotion, and when she opens them Lucy is looking back at her. There’s a heat in her gaze, a hunger, that Kate has missed these past weeks.
“You don’t have to be mean for me to notice you Lucy. You want my attention; you already have it. I don’t think I could ever not see you.”
She starts to lean in, aware that Lucy is doing the same. Some magnetic pull drawing them closer.
And then the sudden bang of a door breaks the spell and they jump apart, moments before someone comes striding in.
Kate clears her throat awkwardly. “Well that was a good talk Agent Tara. Thanks for clearing that up.”
She knows she’s blushing and Lucy is smiling up at her shyly.
“Have a good day Officer Whistler.” Lucy says as she turns to leave. And it might just be her imagination but Lucy’s voice sounds too low and gravelly and full of promise that it sends a shudder down Kate’s spine all the way to her core.
*
It’s later that afternoon and Kate has decided to call it a day early. She’s feeling better than she was. Not perfect, but she no longer feels as though the walls are closing in on her, and her thoughts are going at a sensible speed again and not at a thousand miles a minute as they were earlier. But she’s tired. Drained really, and all she wants is to go home, maybe have a nice long bubble bath, and then fall into a deep, hopefully dreamless, sleep. Of course she needs to factor in a phone call to her parents, and possibly finding some form of sustenance, but those are both things to be considered later.
She’s almost out of the building when Special Agent in Charge Tennant sticks her head round the door and smiles at her and Kate knows she’s not going to be able to make her escape just yet.
“DIA Whistler, I’m glad I caught you. Do you have a second to spare? I’d like a quick word.”
“Of course.” She responds obligingly, unsure why she’d not made up some pressing engagement she just had to run off to immediately.
“My office?”
Tennant allows her to lead the way, and then gently closes the door to her office behind them. The bullpen is quiet, assumedly most of the agents are off chasing down some lead. Tennant leans herself up against her desk, leaving Kate to hover awkwardly in the middle of the room. The senior agent looks at her, and she feels very exposed.
“I just wanted to check in with you.” Tennant starts after a moment of painful silence between them. “Make sure you’re doing okay.”
Kate feels herself automatically straighten up. Hating that this woman who she could probably count among her peers, had been able to perceive her weakness. She searches the other woman’s face for any hint of deception or malice, and finds none. Although the observation is only mildly reassuring given her history in the CIA. She wouldn’t have made a very good agent if she’d been that easy to read.
Apparently Kate is that easy to read, however, as Tennant puts her hands up.
“No ulterior motive. Like I said, just checking in.”
Kate adjusts the watch on her wrist then moves it back again, whilst Tennant waits too patiently for her response.
“This morning wasn’t my finest hour.” She admits eventually, allowing a wry smile to cross her face. She takes a shaky breath. “Today is the anniversary of my brother’s death.”
“I’m so sorry, Kate.” The woman sounds sincere.
“Thank you... but it was a long time ago. I guess some years it still hits harder than others.”
Tennant nods her head, still watching Kate closely. “I know it may not always appear that way, but I am here if you need anything.”
Kate is somewhat taken aback by the unexpectedly genuine offer, and she has to answer around the sudden lump in her throat.
“I’ll bear that in mind. And I do appreciate the offer, but really, I’m fine. Just gonna go home and indulge in a little R ‘n’ R.”
“Sounds like just what the doctor ordered.” She smiles at Kate, then adds after a beat, “So there was nothing else going on then?”
Kate understands the loaded question. Understands that Tennant is giving her an opportunity, if she wants one. She’s more than a little surprised that she doesn’t want to take it.
“No.”
“How are things with the rest of the team?” Tennant clearly isn’t buying her hastily spoken reply.
Kate tries not to squirm or show any discomfort, though it’s likely her lack of reaction is just as much as a giveaway. It’s always such a minefield having to navigate conversations like this, that border on being too personal. She’s never been very good at it.
“The rest of the team? Or are you talking about a particular someone who’s five foot in heals and doesn’t know how to let things drop when she should?” She thinks perhaps her words come out sounding more fond than exasperated.
The SAC let’s out a laugh. “Perhaps. Let’s just say she seemed a little remorseful after the brief. I wondered if it had anything to do with you.”
“If I had any complaint to make about your special agent, I’d already have done it through the correct channels.” And she had been very close after the previous occasion.
“Understood.” Tennant backs off, and Kate thinks her words had come out more prickly than she’d meant them to.
“I think she’s been trying. Mostly. I guess I should thank you for having a word with her...” Kate hazards.
“Not a problem.” The other woman looks at Kate like she’s sizing her up, weighing whether she should say more. “You know, Lucy is... different, to people like us.”
“People like us...” Kate challenges. Because she wouldn’t have thought the special agent in charge would have put any thought whatsoever into what kind of person Kate is, let alone have decided they are anything alike.
Tennant gives her an amused stare. “People who find it difficult, for one reason or another, to show others who they really are.”
Kate’s silence is as much of an affirmation as she’s willing to give, and Tennant seems to take it as leave to continue.
“Lucy wears her heart on her sleeve. She’s not afraid to show her feelings, she’s not afraid of being herself, and people like us, I think we can sometimes find it intimidating. I think we look too hard for a hidden agenda that’s not there. And sometimes I think we find it easier to shut those people out, because they are the ones who run the risk of seeing us for who we really are.”
Kate frowns at the words, even as they make more sense than she could ever have anticipated.
“And you’re telling this to me because..?”
“You and I, people tend to have to earn our trust, it’s something we don’t tend to give away easily.” The woman continues, ignoring Kate’s question entirely. “But Lucy trusts easily, until you give her a reason to doubt you. She doesn’t deal in secrets and deceptions and lies. And it doesn’t make her naive or weak...”
“It would make her a terrible intelligence officer.” Kate huffs out interrupting the other woman.
Tennant laughs. “It would. But around here, it makes her a breath of fresh air.”
Kate is still at something of a loss as to what it is the NCIS agent is getting at. But before she can worry any further about it, Tennant’s attention is drawn back out into the bullpen. Kate follows her gaze and sees that Lucy and Jessie have arrived back. Her eyes linger as the two talk animatedly, and she struggles to pull them away and back to the woman in front of her.
“Speak of the devil.” The SAC drawls with a slight smirk and raise of the eyebrows.
“I’ll leave you to your investigation. I’m sure you have more important things to attend to.”
“And I’m sure you’re more than ready to get home and start that relaxing.” Tennant pushes herself up off the desk and heads to the door. Her hand pauses on the handle before she can push it open. “I meant what I said before, Kate. My door’s always open.”
Lucy catches her eye on the way out. And Kate wants to stop, wants to talk to the agent about everything and nothing, wants to tell her that it’s okay and that she doesn’t blame her for what happened earlier. And she thinks what she might really want is to stop hiding.
But Lucy is busy and now’s not the time for any of that. And so she holds the gaze a moment longer and keeps her pace through the office steady. Her drive home is pleasant. There’s a warmth inside her chest that’s been lacking of late, and considering how her day had started, she’s feeling better than she has in ages.