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“I heard them lift the chorus that drowned the breakers’ song – /The Beaches of Lukannon–two million voices strong.” - Rudyard Kipling
Once, when Kate had just reached adolescence, her mother took her out to the desert and left her there for an hour.
It wasn’t meant as a cruelty - Kate was left under a shelter for shade and had two full cases of water, more than she could possibly drink.
Her mother drove away, and when the sound of the car faded, there should have been no sound left. No wind to stir the dust up. No people talking in the distance. No sound of faint death songs getting stronger by the day.
It should have been silent.
But Kate still heard the music.
Her music. Just as her mother had warned her she would.
Like the sound of her own heartbeat, it was normally too faint to hear. Now it was the only sound she heard.
Normally, they didn’t sing the death songs until the death was near, but that was only because in the crowds of a city, the songs were too faint to hear otherwise and because people were superstitious about banshees singing before their time.
Out here it was different. Out here there was no one to frighten. Out here there were no sounds to confuse with the song.
That was why her mother had left her out here, of course. It was every banshee’s right to sing her own song, because no one would sing it for her when her time came.
She was a banshee, one of the fey. Her time might not come for centuries.
Kate hummed the notes and tried to capture the distant song.
For a banshee, the Secret Service was willing to relax certain standards.
Kate worked ten times harder than anyone else to prove that in her case, they wouldn’t have to.
She still had to put up with a lot, of course. Some thought she had only gotten in because of her blood. Some had a problem with her being a woman.
Once, and only once, she got pushed far enough that she snapped.
So she looked up at her smirking tormentor and smiled pleasantly at him before softly beginning to hum.
She probably shouldn’t have enjoyed the way he turned pale so fast.
It wasn’t his real death song, of course. Those were far too sacred to use for such a minor cause. It was just a few notes composed off the top of her head.
His real death song was jagged and painful and far too easy to hear. She tried to be nicer to him after that, now that she’d noticed.
That didn’t seem to make him feel any better.
People were wary of her, so she had few friends in the Service, but Major Kerry was an exception. He knew what she was, but he never seemed to particularly care.
She warned him when his song grew louder, but careful as he was, it didn’t do any good.
She should have known better than to try.
After that, she just wanted to rest. To work for a superior she had no obligation to die for. To deal with cases where the music had already been silenced.
Tony made that easy. She was pretty sure that if she ever took the time to untangle his song from everyone else’s in the bullpen’s, it would be just as annoying as he was. Abby’s death was so far in the future that Kate could barely hear it, and Gibbs -
Gibbs was human. She was sure he couldn’t hear his song.
But he still accepted it somehow, in a way she’d rarely seen before. On a case where one witness was a little girl who talked Gibbs into dancing with her, he twirled her around slowly, and it took Kate’s breath away.
Because Gibbs was dancing to the rhythm of his song’s beat.
She wasn’t sure if she couldn’t hear McGee’s song because he was going to have a wizard’s prolonged life, or because of his shields. It bothered her some, but not so much as the lack of scent did Tony. D.C. was bursting with music, and it was easy to pretend McGee’s notes were just lost in the throng.
NCIS was easier than the Secret Service had been.
Or, normally it was.
Then there was the case with Suzanne, the poor woman that had been buried alive, and Kate stuck close to her, because the woman’s song was thundering to a close.
There was only one way to stop that, and Kate - Kate wasn’t sure. She didn’t know Suzanne, not like she did her team, but she liked her, and she was a civilian. Kate might not be sworn to protect her, but she wasn’t sure she could live with herself if she just stood aside.
Then they met with the man Gibbs was sure was guilty, and Kate heard his song, just as loud. The two melodies entwined together, fast and furious, and she desperately tried to sort it out.
“They’re going to die,” she warned Gibbs. “We shouldn’t leave them alone.”
Tony was already starting forward when -
“Bomb!” the guilty man shouted.
And two songs ended with a flash of white light.
That was the part she hated. No matter how beautiful the song, it always came crashing to an end, and it normally sounded a bit unfinished when it did. There was always more that could have been sung.
Tony grew on her more than she wanted to admit. So when they were on a stakeout and trying to pass the time, she didn’t make the assumptions she once would have when he asked his question.
They’d been discussing music, and he’d asked, in a voice that was trying too hard to be casual, “What’s my song sound like?”
It was just the two of them in the car. There were other people close by, but they were alone enough for her to hear the notes with little concentration. All she’d have to do was listen.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I’ve never listened to it.”
“I bet it’s something catchy,” he mused. “Like ‘It’s a Small World.’”
She started to answer, but her attention was caught by the view out the windshield. “Look! Movement.”
The moment was lost.
She never told him that she was afraid to listen because she was pretty sure that whatever it was, it would be impossibly sad.
When Ari caught her, she tilted her head to listen and then smiled at him. “Want to know what your death song sounds like?”
“Death is death. What does it matter how it sounds?”
She leaned forward, still smiling. “It matters because your’s doesn’t end with a bang, Ari. It doesn’t even end with a thump. All you’re going to get a whisper, and no one will care when you’re gone.”
She shook him a bit, she could tell, which was the whole point. And what she said was . . . mostly true. Ari’s song was quiet and tension laden, but there was also the sound of faint Hebrew singing in the background, mournful enough to give her chills.
The song had a bad habit of fitting neatly into the background of the songs of her team in a way that could have been coincidence or could have meant their deaths were tied together.
“No explosions for you,” she told him with a smile, “just a tiny little squeak.”
Ari flinched.
Banshee songs sounded different to everyone who heard them. Music, after all, could be interpreted differently; a banshee’s song cut straight to the heart of the matter and sang truth to all who heard.
To Kate, the song she heard that morning sounded a bit like “Taps,” a bit like gunfire, and a bit like a child crying for her father not to go. The sound was familiar, like she’d heard it in the past, before it had morphed into its final chords. She hummed it absently, trying to translate the sound into something more easily understood so she could sort out whose it was.
The sound grew louder, and Kate abruptly caught the all too familiar undertones to the song.
Gibbs.
She wasn’t exactly surprised when Tony drew her aside. She’d have to be blind not to see how much he depended on Gibbs. Of course he’d want to save the man’s life.
She was expecting, however, for him to ask the sacrifice of her.
But he didn’t. He stood there and asked her how to take the sacrifice onto himself.
It was possible, technically. That was what few people outside the banshees knew. A life was a life, and that was all that was demanded. Since Tony was willing, she could guide him into being the sacrifice.
For the first time, she allowed herself to listen to his song. His lonely, desperate, beautiful song.
A song that was not even close to being finished.
She could cut it off early. She could leave it alone and let Gibbs die. She had options.
“We’ll save him,” she promised him, still not quite sure what she meant to do.
She listened to her own song, late that night in the office. She put in the noise canceling earbuds she used sometimes when it all got to be too much, and she focused on the song rushing through her blood.
The song was coming to the end of a verse now. It could end here naturally, or it could flow on for verse after verse. The choice was hers.
And the choice was: Could she look Tony in the eye if she broke her promise? Could she look Gibbs in the eye if she helped Tony die for him?
She looked across at Tim, sleeping at his desk, and wondered how it would feel to have magic that deadened your emotions instead of grabbing your heart and tearing it to bits.
She thought about calling her mother or her sister, but she couldn’t do that to them. How would she even begin a conversation like that?
“Hey, mom, have you ever considered dying for someone before?”
It would just worry her family. She couldn’t do that to them.
But the song was growing louder and her time was running out.
And then the day arrived. Gibbs’ song was so loud that she had to sing it if she was going to hear anything else. She sang it quietly to release it while they crept up the stairs, the notes barely breaths in the hot, still air.
The roof. The heat. The gun.
Kate flew forward into its path, Gibbs’ song screaming in her blood.
Speaking of someone worth dying for.
She had her answer.
The bullet couldn’t pass through her vest, but that didn’t matter. Gibbs’ song was abruptly quiet again, and her own was loud in her ears.
If Gibbs had died, she could have lived, but she had found something worth her life and now it was time to pay the bill.
Gibbs and Tony were saying something, but she couldn’t hear them over the rushing of the song in her blood.
She stood up slowly.
No one will sing your song when the time comes.
No one but her.
She opened her mouth, and the notes tumbled out. It sounded like triumph, like a valkyrie victorious, and it was even more beautiful than it had been in the desert, because now it was playing in time to Gibbs’ hero’s march, and Tony’s lament for the pack.
And Ari’s suddenly loud, tension laden song.
Kate’s song cut off halfway through a note.