Katherine DeLacey's Questionnaire

Kate lives in enlisted quarters at NAB Coronado, outside of San Diego.  Her reason for living there is that it is where her command is based.  To her, one base is the same as any other.  She grew up a military brat, always knew she'd be Navy, and has spent her entire life living on bases except when she is on a mission.  This last mission broke her, though, and she is in the process of being medically discharged.  So where she ends up?  Well, who knows.

Her current base is quite pleasant, if you don't mind earthquakes and wild fires.  

Her actual quarters are sparse.  Even though she isn't subject to inspections and doesn't have a roommate, she also doesn't have any decorations on the walls that aren't military awards, and most of those are hanging in her parents' house rather than in her room on base.  Her bed is always made and her clothes are neatly put away, habits she's had all her life and which boot camp only reinforced.

Kate gets her money from her regular pay with the Navy.  As a SEAL rank E7 with 10 years of service, she makes a decent living at approximately $100k/year.  Especially when you consider that a lot of normal expenses are covered as a member of the armed services living on base.  Kate has no dependents, and so lives sparsely in her quarters and banks the rest of her money.  However, she is currently being processed for a medical discharge after her last mission, so while she has some savings, she also isn't sure where the money will come from in the future.

Though the Navy covers her housing and a lot of her food, and while she couldn't care less about decorating her quarters, she has splurged in the vehicle department.  Like many young sailors, she wanted something fun to drive.  Especially since she was based in San Diego, where the weather is conducive to sports cars and convertibles.  She used her first paycheck after graduating from SEAL training to make a down payment on her baby, an opalized black Porsche Boxter with a ragtop.  Between her payment and her insurance, well, that's most of her pay check each month.    

Kate has spent the last ten years putting her life on the line for people she would never meet.  She did it because she believed with all the fervor of a cultist in the Mission: keeping the country safe, protecting the citizens of the United States by fighting the good fight over there.  Better over there than here.  The lengths she went to, the things she survived, were all to keep other people safe.  War is Hell, and Kate wanted nothing more than to protect the people she loved most from having to experience it.  Kate has a high kill count, but her conscience was clear because they were all justified kills, all in fulfillment of her Oath and the protecting of her country from danger.

Three months in a hole in the ground changed that for Kate.  She's done dying for the faceless, nameless masses.  She gave 10 years of her life to the government, now she's going to do something for herself.  

Her ambition: to make bank using the skills she gained courtesy of Uncle Sam.  Extractions? Hostage Rescue? Assassination?  Show her the money.

Kate is, however, going to have to balance the after effects of her capture with the reward on offer.  Her life is for sale if the price is right.  But, is it?

Her last deployment, Kate was captured by ISIS.  She had been part of an insertion team, attempting to take out a warlord that was putting pressure on then-President Bashir Al-Assad.  The mission was FUBAR from the start, and she'd had a bad feeling about it from the briefing.  The intelligence hadn't been clear, but things were coming to a head and command decided that they needed a team on the ground to run interference.  One seasoned and experienced enough to be able to pivot in reaction to circumstances on the ground.  SEAL Team 3 was activated.  

Kate had specially trained for the mission.  She'd already spoken Arabic, but she'd mostly learned the dialect spoken in Iraq.  Syria spoke the Levantine dialect.  As a woman, she had also taken some time to establish contacts that would help her disappear into the population.  One of the other NCOs was posing as her brother on the mission.  They'd thought they'd gotten in cleanly, set up their headquarters in the apartment building indicated by their in country contacts.

Something went wrong.

The apartment was raided the third night they were there by insurgents and Kate was taken prisoner.

ISIS isn't kind to prisoners.  To women prisoners? Better left faded to black.

Kate survived three weeks as a prisoner before the régime fell to Ahmed al-Sharaa's bid for power.  She was released as a show of faith by the new regime and processed through Rammstein.  She's now back in Coronado and in the process of being medically discharged, although she will be a long time in healing and therapy. 

Michael Shaw: fellow member of SEAL Team 3 who posed as her brother on their last disaster of a mission and spent 3 weeks in captivity with her.  The two of them had already been close the way members of a unit are, but the time posing as family and then enduring both their own and each other's screams has made them inseparable.  They're both going to muster out together, given that they both suffered injuries that would take them out of the field permanently.  They are both dealing with the mental struggle of wondering what they're going to do now with their lives.  Whether they go their separate ways, with memories being too painful to heal, or whether Shaw also becomes a Contractor....

Kathleen DeLacey: Kate's sister who goes by Lena.  She saw what the military meant for her parents' marriage and decided Navy life was not for her.  Instead, she went to college at UVA (dad had been stationed in DC when she graduated high school), majored in marine biology, and now does research at the Cetacean Institute.  She's happily married to Marcus King and has two sons who are nuts about dolphins like their mother.  The sisters aren't close, but now that they're both living in the same general area, at least for now, Kate might like to get to know her sister better as an adult and spend some time with her nephews.

Giselle Arcan: Kate's on again, off again lover.  Giselle was going through Quantico to be an FBI agent when Kate was stationed at NavTech three years ago.  Their careers have taken them in different directions, but they've kept in touch and do care about each other, even if neither felt like they had time in their life for more than career.  At least in the past.  With Kate mustering out, who knows where life will take her now? 

Kate's childhood was not at all typical, and yet it was completely normal for what it was.

Her parents got married young because her mother got pregnant just before her dad shipped off to boot camp.  Not only was she pregnant, but the benefits were better if you were married.  Her mother said it was far from the worst decision she'd made, marrying Larry.  Kate heard in that it was also far from the best.  Wanting to be as unlike her mother as possible, she decided young she would never have kids.  It was really for the best, given the direction her career had taken.  But still, there were times she envied her sister her family.

Her father, Lawrence DeLacey, was a career sailor, enlisting on his eighteenth birthday.  He married the love of his life, Lilian DeLacey nee LaCroix,  before he left for bootcamp, leaving her pregnant with Kate.  Kate grew up with her father on long deployments, often to places that were exotic, while Kate was left with a passive aggressive mother who blamed her for ruining her life.  Even if Lilly hadn't had to drop out of high school to have Kate, she still would have struggled to have a career, even in the 1990s, what with all the moving around a career military family does.

Lena was born five years later, when dad was between deployments following 9/11/01.

9/11 changed their whole family.  It was the catalyst for her father's almost near constant deployments, leaving Lilly with a new born and a six year old, while only 22 herself.  It wasn't that ALL the times were bad.  But, well, enough were.

The girls reacted to this differently.  Kate took on her father's sense of duty, going directly from high school into the Navy, then working her ass off to be part of a SEAL team, an accomplishment for anyone, much less a woman with only a high school diploma.  Lena ran as far from military life as she could, become a scientist.  

Base schools were base schools no matter where you were stationed.  As long as they lived on base or near one, when the majority of her classmates were also military brats, she fit in just fine.  On the rare occasions that she was in a minority because they weren't living on a base, well.  She was just glad that was never the case for very long, or happened often.

Have I ever been in love?  I suppose, although it's never been that light everything up from inside glowing and sappy romance stuff?  No.  But I've loved a lot of people.  Some of the friends.  Some of them more.  Some I even think I could have shared my life with, if somethin had been different.  Timing mostly.  I was focused on my career.  They were focused on theirs.  I didn't want kids, they did.  I wasn't ready to retire yet.  Not even close.  And while partners anonymity had certainly increased in the last 30 years for most sectors of society, well... the military had a LONG way to go to catch up.  Hard to have a two career family, when one of you had to move all over the world every eighteen months or so.

Probably the closest I've ever come to saying let's get married is Giselle Arcan, an FBI agent and my long term off-again on-again lover.  We never really broke up, or even had much of a fight.  It's just that we are both committed to their careers, and both of their careers had expectations of moving and putting the job first always, well.... neither one of us considered ourselves or each other partner material.  Which made us perfect for each other.

That said, as I detach from the Navy and starts finding my own way, anything is possible. Literally anything, as tonight has shown me.  

I'm not going to rule love out like I always have.  I'm going to give it a try, maybe.