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The first thing he hears is beeping. It’s incessant and aggravating and he wants it to stop. It’s probably his alarm, and that probably means that he needs to get up. He wants to swing his arm out – if he aims just right he can usually hit the button with minimal coordination and also minimal destruction to his alarm clock. But for some reason his arm won’t move much. Or it will, but it hurts. Opening his eyes hurts. Breathing hurts. Swallowing hurts. And that’s when he remembers.
“Deeks?” Kensi says, breathless and tired and worried. He can tell, even though he’s shut his eyes again. He can always tell what her voice means. He had to learn quickly, because she doesn’t say much about how she feels, but he can always tell. “Deeks, are you awake?”
He lifts his hand a little bit. He can do that for her, while he waits for the memories to come back from whatever explosion or gun shot or…
He remembers. For a moment his mind is a blank canvas, just a hazy image of Sam convulsing with electricity and blinding, tearing pain coming from his own jaw. And then the image is slashed, ripped to shreds and black with an icy cold anger in the pit of his stomach. He lets his hand drop back to the bed, but Kensi seems to interpret the sudden harsh lines in his face, his sudden tension, as pain, and she calls for a doctor.
The doctor makes him open his eyes, makes him look into a bright light, makes him answer some stupid questions about his name and the president and where he was before this. He answers them all satisfactorily. He can tell, because Kensi breathes out this relieved little sigh with each answer, as though she really wasn’t sure he’d be able to.
He tunes out when the doctor starts listing his injuries. He was there, he remembers them, and he doesn’t particularly care at this moment in time how long it’s going to take him to get back on his feet. He’s not going back to NCIS and the LAPD can just jolly well wait until he’s ready. He’d done trying to prove anything to anyone.
“Well Mr. Deeks,” the doctor was saying with an indulgent smile, when he finally tuned back in. “I hear from your partner it might be a little rough for you, but you should avoid talking at all for the next day or two, and once we’ve got a better sense of how your jaw will heal, we’ll start working you back up to your usual loquacious self.”
Her smile falters somewhat under Deeks’ blank gaze. He shouldn’t be mad at Kensi. It’s not her fault. He does talk a lot. Last week he might have shot her a playful glare. Last week, he might have mimed a lock and key or waggled his eyebrows or anything. He kissed her and she was still sitting next to his bed, with a fond, relieved, worried expression stretched tight across her face. He knows that she trusts him. But right now, at this moment, with this unbearable ache in his jaw and his ribs and his heart, all he sees are three years of bloodshed, of bullets and sharp metal, of lies and hospital visits, of endlessly throwing himself in front of danger, only that once again he wasn’t good enough.
The meds work. He falls asleep again to Kensi’s confused expression.
When he wakes again, the hall outside his room is darker. There are fewer people milling around, and the lights in his room are turned down low. Kensi is still sitting in the chair next to his bed though. She was playing with her phone, but when he shifts, she looks up. He’s still not allowed to talk, but it doesn’t matter much. At the moment, he can’t think of anything to say. She smiles at him, soft and tentative in a way she never is.
“Callen came by to see you earlier, but you were asleep,” she says, standing up smoothing out his blankets. Deeks looks away from her, back to the ceiling. He can feel from the slight flinch in her hands, the way she starts to pull her hands away, that she knows it was purposeful. She doesn’t know how to read his expressions though, the shifting of his eyes and the tightening of the line of his mouth. She’s never had to learn. For all she accused him of poor communication, she’s never had to do much more than ask.
“Deeks?” she says quietly. And then again. “Deeks?”
He doesn’t answer – he can’t. But he also doesn’t look at her. Doesn’t take his eyes off of the impeccable ceiling structure above him. His jaw tenses, causing a sharp spike of pain. His heart moniter picks up its pace with a jolt.
“Alright, I don’t know what’s wrong,” she says quietly as he tries to relax, fumbling with his pain pump, his eyes still on the ceiling. “But it doesn’t matter right now. What matters is that you’re here, and you’re alive and you’re going to get better, and I’m not going to let you do it alone.”
He’s honestly not sure if it was the pain medication or the feeling of her hand brushing over his hair that pushed the pain away and helped him drift off to sleep again.
When he wakes up the next morning, they let him try drinking through a straw. It hurts like a bitch, but he’s glad to lose one of the tubes in his arms. Kensi leaves for a little while at the nurse’s insistence so that she can check out Deeks’ range of motion, get him cleaned up a little bit and help him to the bathroom. When she comes back, she has a cup from the soda fountain in the hospital cafeteria and a straw.
“Thought you might like some Diet coke to vary your all liquid diet,” she says, handing it over. His bed is raised up so he can drink, and it is nice to have some texture. He gives her the ASL sign for thank you. Her expression brightens. It takes him a little while, but he finishes a whole cup of water, and about half the cup of soda before he hands it back to Kensi to put on the table next to him. He shivers. They must have been talking about a fever yesterday, when he wasn’t paying attention, and an infection. He can’t figure out why else he’d still be here
Kensi must have noticed the way he trembled a little, but instead of calling the nurse, she just rustled through something on the floor and pulled out the blanket that had been laying across the back of his couch the last time he’d checked his apartment.
“I went by your apartment to grab some stuff for you,” she says, spreading the blanket over his lap and then moving back so he could arrange it to his liking. “I hope you don’t mind.”
He shakes his head slightly. He doesn’t mind – he likes the thought of Kensi in his house. He always has, that’s why he kissed her. She’s not talking about it, and he can’t bring it up, but he thinks that’s okay for now. The conversation probably wouldn’t go well right now anyway. He doesn’t have much to say besides “they don’t trust me,” and “you didn’t help.”
She must be able to see that she’s losing him, that he’s curling under his blanket to stare at the ceiling again. He’d like to fall back asleep, but he hasn’t quite managed it yet, so he starts counting the ceiling tiles.
He might have drifted off, but then the door to his room opened up and Sam and Callen walked in. Sam who he remembered Kensi saying had no open wounds, and no infection, was released earlier that morning. He must have already done the whole wheel chair out thing because he was on his own two feet now, though he looked wan and worn out. Deeks spared them a glance, and then resumed his contemplation of the ceiling. He couldn’t make anyone trust him, didn’t want to force anything. It wasn’t even necessarily their fault if they thought he had character flaws that made him a liability. But he’d spent three years trying to prove them wrong and it hadn’t worked. He was done.
There must have been something in his expression, because Sam and Callen stopped grinning, stopped making their way toward his bed. He had probably been in for some ribbing, some teasing, but instead, Kensi stands up, shoots him a concerned look and then ushers Callen and Sam out of the room. They shoot glances back at him. He catches Sam’s eyes once, and turns away. He’d be more appreciative of Kensi’s efforts if he wasn’t sure they were out there talking about him.
When Kensi comes back in she’s alone, and there’s something of sympathy on her face, and something like curiousity. He wonders what Sam told her.
His fever breaks in the evening. Kensi leaves for a little while to go home and take a nap, and get something to eat, but she’s back in time to get the news that he’s probably going to be discharged in the morning. She listens to the doctor’s instructions, hovers while the physical therapist walks him through some really painful jaw movements. He can tell she wants to hold his hand, but he clutches the bar lining his bed instead.
In the morning he’ll go home and he’ll be free of Kensi and her puzzled gaze, of NCIS and bone deep feelings of inferiority. He thinks for a second about moving, but L.A. is his town – his beaches, his surf, his beat. No one is taking that. He falls asleep with the kind of deep ache in his jaw that no pain medicine can shake.
In the morning, the doctor walks him through some more jaw exercises, bringing back whatever pain sleep had dissipated during the night. Kensi is mysteriously absent when the nurse comes around with his discharge papers to sign, and it isn’t until he’s nearly done that he realizes that Kensi is missing because Hetty has come to drive him home.
She lets him get away with gestures and nods, and the occasional ASL sign until they are in the car and pulling out onto the freeway.
“Alright, Mr. Deeks,” she says. “Spit it out.”
He glances at her, one eyebrow raised in question. She huffs exasperatedly.
“Whatever it is you haven’t been saying, Mr. Deeks, you should go ahead and say.”
He doesn’t have anything to say anymore. Well, that’s not true. He has all the same things he’s always said, and a few more bitter things to say besides. But Hetty doesn’t deserve his ire. She trusts him, and she always has. He pretends to think for a while. Opens his mouth, winces like it hurts. It does, but probably not enough to stop him from speaking. Hetty’s expression softens and he thinks she’ll let him get away with silence until they reach his house.
Neither of them speak again until she cuts the engine in front of her house. He’s out of the car before she can say anything, or unbuckle her seatbelt, but since it’s a convertible, it’s kind of a moot point.
“Mr. Deeks,” she starts, but he cuts her off. He doesn’t think he’ll be able to stand any kind of firm if he lets her get started.
“I quit, Hetty,” he says quietly. “I’m sorry, I just… I quit.” And then he turns and walks up his front walk. The door is shut behind him for five full minutes before he hears her pull away from the house.
Kensi stops by later, but he claims he’s already done his jaw exercises and doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t leave until nearly 1 a.m. and by then he’s already asleep. He has been for hours, since he finished the smoothie she brought over. He feels a little lighter, but tomorrow Hetty’ll have told her he quit, and he doesn’t imagine that’s going to go over well. In the mean time, though, she stocked his fridge while Hetty was bringing him home. In the fridge there are sword shaped popsicles with a post-it note. "For Sir Deeks" with a smiley face. It's so not Kensi that it must have been the girl at the grocery store. He wonders how long Kensi will freeze him out for that.
He’s right. The door bounces off the wall the next morning with a vicious, concussive blast and is left swinging wildly in the wake of her madness. He’d say she looks like a crazy person, but he’d be lying. She looks like she always does, sharp and insistent and beautiful.
“What the hell does Hetty mean, you quit?” she demands. It gives him a headache, the timbre of her voice. She doesn’t look like she’ll care much. He wants to tell her that he’ll stay for her, but he can’t.
“You can’t quit,” she says, bringing her voice down a notch. It’s taken on that quality of so emotionless that it trembles. “You can’t.”
She sits down. He sits down next to her.
“Ask Sam,” is all he says, reaching out to wrap a hand around her wrist, thumb stroking over the heel of her hand. Abruptly she stands, almost pulling him with her before she shakes off his grip. She storms out.
He gets another reprieve of a few days. He moves his jaw around, works up to eating progressively more difficult foods. He talks to himself sometimes, says the lines along with movies and reads out loud. He doesn’t want lose himself. He just wants to get away from the places that make it seem worth it. By the time Callen pounds on his door, it still hurts like a bitch to talk and eat, but he’s managing solid foods and whole chapters. He doesn’t get off the couch, doesn’t answer the door. Just like he hasn’t answered his phone any time that it rings.
He’s not trying to be petulant. He’s just done. There’s no reason to drag this out any further.
Of course, his reticence doesn’t stop Callen. After a mere minute of knocking and waiting and knocking again, Deeks hears the quiet, familiar snicks of a lock being picked. The door swings open much more quietly than when Kensi came over, but it feels more violent. At least he knew what to expect from Kensi.
“Oh good. You didn’t collapse and die,” Callen says with a wry grin as he steps into the house and sees Deeks sprawled on his couch with America’s Next Top Model playing on the T.V. He sounds casual, but Deeks watches as he pulls his hand away from where his gun is holstered.
“Not yet, anyway,” Deeks answers, matching Callen’s tone. He’s relieved to find that the hostility has faded. He just wants to get this over with.
“So Sam would have come himself, but he’s been ordered not to do anything too strenuous, and apologizing his strenuous for him, so I said I’d at least get it started for him.” Callen sits on one of the chairs that’s almost directly across from the couch. Deeks pulls himself into a better sitting position.
“It’s not…”he starts, and then trails off. He can already tell that even though he’s thought about this a lot, he’s not going to be able to say this right. The urge to make a stupid joke is consuming. It’d be easier than saying this.
“I’m not…” he says. “No, it isn’t about an apology. It’s about – he can’t trust me, and I don’t think you can either, and I can’t force you to. But it’s been three years and it’s only gotten worse, and.” He cuts himself off. He can feel the heat rising in his cheeks, doesn’t want to get hysterical. He takes a deep breath.
“Apology accepted,” he says finally, evenly. “But it isn’t why I left and I’m not coming back.”
The muted surprise on Callen’s face rankles a bit, but Deeks just shuts his eyes with a pained grimace and that does the trick. Callen gets up and opens the door and Deeks hopes, prays that’ll be the end of it.
It isn’t.
“Don’t think you’re getting rid of us that easy,” Callen says. Deeks can tell he’s grinning. He’s basically lived with these guys since he started with NCIS, no sense in letting that knowledge go to waste. He doesn’t respond. Partially because he’s afraid Callen’s right.
He is getting ready to go to the Police Department one morning, when he can mostly eat without pain, mostly talk without wincing and has been told by the owner of the coffee shop near his house that he seems “almost back to normal.” Instead he finds Sam standing on his front porch. He might actually roll his eyes, which probably doesn’t help his case.
“Can I come in?” Sam asks, and Deeks, who was frankly looking for a reason to get out of going to the LAPD today, gestures back through his door with one arm. This would be the time to make a joke, he thinks, the time to show Sam he’s not going to be cowed by aspersions cast on his character. But he honestly can’t think of one. And maybe he proved his point enough by quitting. He has his exit interview scheduled for Monday.
“I’m not here to stop you from quitting,” Sam says when they are both seated in the living room. He looks relaxed too, sighing with exhaustion as he sank into the chair. He might not have had as much overt physical damage as Deeks, but he’s been through a lot.
“I’m not at all surprised,” Deeks says wryly. He thinks he does an okay job of masking his bitterness.
Sam doesn’t rise to the bait. He leans forward, rests his elbows on his knees and thinks for a second.
“I don’t doubt your character,” Sam says finally. “I just don’t understand it. And it’s difficult for me not to extrapolate that. I trust you to be honest, and moral. I trust that you’ll always have our backs. It just doesn’t make sense to me how you can seem so sloppy and also be that good at your job.”
It takes Deeks a minute or so of silence to understand the difference between what Sam is saying, and what Deeks is hearing. Sam is saying I trust you but I don’t understand why and Deeks is hearing I trust you with the little stuff, but you’re going to get us all killed. And he’s not sure either one of them can move past it.
“That’s not really what you said though,” Deeks says finally, leaning forward too. “You had doubts about my character.”
“I didn’t intend to,” Sam says honestly, bluntly. “That was not a good time for that conversation since I was pretty convinced my kids were about to lose one of their parents.”
“That’s fair.”
“Glad you think so,” Sam says, and it’s only his grin that keeps Deeks from reminding Sam who is doing the apology here. “I get the desire to be somewhere where you don’t have to fight people into trusting you, so I’m not going to ask you to come back. This whole thing has always been more about me than it has about you.”
“I appreciate that,” Deeks says, and doesn’t remind Sam that the reason he was on the NCIS team in the first place is that no one at LAPD trusted him, or even particularly liked him. The difference was that at LAPD, he didn’t much care.
“You are good at what you do,” Sam says, getting to his feet. “It’s going to be a bitch to replace you.”
Deeks will lie outright to anyone who asks him about this moment and say that it was just whatever, that his heart didn’t warm and that his stomach didn’t clench. But all those things happened, and he might have squeezed Sam’s hand a little harder during their farewell handshake because of it. When the door closes, he searches for some regret about leaving NCIS. But he can’t find anything. He tried as hard as he could for as long as he could, and this is where it got them.
Maybe he’ll call Kensi and ask her out on a date like dinner. Maybe she’ll say yes, if only to yell at him some more about quitting. He probably won't explain it to her. It'll probably make her feel better to yell, to blame him, than it ever would to hear the truth. Maybe she'll kiss him good night. Maybe she'll ask him out next.
Maybe, in a month or so, Callen will call and ask for his help on something. Maybe he’ll come back on a case by case basis.
Maybe.