Chapter 219: Aftermath
It took Ducky an hour to get all the glass out. And though
there were long cuts, none of them were deep enough to warrant stitches. An
entire box of butterfly bandages and half a roll of surgical tape, but no
stitches.
Abby took him home, held onto him until morning. He may have
slept. Mostly he remembers just hurting all over. Mental pain that hurts so bad
your body aches along with it.
They both took that next day off and rested. And he worked
on trying to heal.
The problem with a big, messy more or less public hissy fit
is that it's big and messy and public. And if you do get out of it looking like
you got into a fight with a ream of paper and got seventy million paper cuts,
and you don't want everyone to know why you ended up in that shape, you need
some sort of cover lie.
And it's not even so much that he doesn't want everyone to
know… well, that's part of it.
And not everyone. It's just… He's sensitive to the fact that
Ziva's dad makes his look like a good guy, and 'Hey your Dad dropped you in the
middle of the desert to be tortured and raped and left you for dead,' and 'Mine
said mean things to me, and I'm handling it with less than a quarter of the
grace you did,' just feels really nasty.
So he doesn't want to get into that with Tony and Ziva. It's
not even that he thinks they wouldn't understand or sympathize, it just feels
like he's complaining about a sprained ankle to a double amputee.
And part of it is just not wanting to say it. Not wanting to
keep talking about it. Gibbs' quiet seems like a really good plan now. He's
liking quiet. Quiet is his friend. It's warm and comfortable and maybe this is
a response to not being quiet and then really not liking what talking got him,
but right now he's not in a big let's-talk-about-this sort of place.
He took two days off to let the worst of the swelling go
down and the cuts start to heal.
But Abby went back to work, because officially he was
putting up a mirror, accidently dropped it, and cut the hell out of himself.
And she wouldn't stay home with him for something like that.
Officially that's a plausible lie.
Officially no one like Vance is going to say anything or
question it. Tony and Ziva might wonder how he got his face cut up by dropping
a mirror, but they aren't asking about it. They're probably assuming he was
doing some sort of stupid sex thing, like trying to install it on the ceiling
or something, and got hurt like that.
It'll hold until they actually see him, and since that's all
it's got to do, he's fine with that.
Or he was until Jimmy came over.
Jimmy hadn't been in the house long enough to get through
his first sentence. "Ducky wanted me to—" And then he saw Tim and
stopped dead. "Oh God, what the hell happened to you? No way you did that
by dropping a mirror."
Tim, who'd been sitting on the sofa, watching the second to
last episode of Supernatural, stopped it, looking surprised to see Jimmy in his
house. The don't-talk-about-it plan was a whole lot trickier to pull off if
people who love you can see how damaged you are. "Why'd Ducky send
you?"
"Supposedly to do a wound check, but I'm getting the
sense it's not your cuts he wants me looking at. What happened?" Jimmy
says as he sits down.
"Long damn story, and I promise, one day I'll tell you,
but right now I don't want to talk."
Jimmy's looking him over, voice worried, nervous expression
on his face. "Okay. Let me check your cuts."
"I'm fine. Abby's already doused me in Neosporin and
changed the band-aids this morning. She'll probably do it again tonight.
Neither of us want any of this to scar."
"Good." He pauses, looking at the cuts. "Did
you do this to yourself?"
"Yeah."
"On purpose?"
"Not exactly."
Jimmy gently touched his jaw, tilting his head a little to
see the long cut across his cheek better. "Might want to see a plastic
surgeon on that one if you don't want it to scar."
"I'll keep that in mind."
"Ducky and Abby know the full story of what
happened?"
"Yeah."
His hands are gentle and competent as he looks over Tim's
cuts. Tim can tell part of what he's doing is making sure Ducky didn't miss any
glass. His eyes aren't as good as they used to be and glass can be awfully easy
to miss. "None of them are very deep. That's good. I'm fairly sure Ducky's
sent me over to just be here with you."
"Yeah. He and Abby are sort of keeping watch on
me."
Jimmy nods at that, looking pretty disturbed. "You at
least want to tell me how you did this to yourself?"
"Broke six beakers by throwing them as hard as I could
at a wall less than four feet away from me."
Jimmy's eyes go wide. "You are so lucky you didn't lose
an eye."
"Abby put safety goggles on me."
"Oh." Jimmy thinks about that for a moment.
"When I needed to do something stupid and violent you were there for me. I
am here for you. You need this, you pick up your fucking phone and you call me!
You can't/won't talk, fine, I won't press, but you get off your ass and call
me, okay?"
Tim nods. "I thought about it. Didn't want to wake you
up."
Jimmy raised his hand, like he was about to headslap Tim,
looks at all the cuts, and drops it. "Wake me up! If there's ever a next
time, you wake me up!"
"I really hope there won't be a next time."
"Good." Jimmy sits next to him for a moment, not
moving or saying anything. He looks like he's trying to figure out how to say
whatever's in his mind.
"Just ask."
"Are you… hell… I don't know what to ask. I'm scared.
And angry. Something hurt you bad enough or pissed you off so hard you did
that. I don't want to make it worse by demanding you talk, but I don't know
what's wrong, so I don't know how to be comforting, and I'm worried."
"You're here, so that means it's a paperwork day,
right?"
"Yeah."
"Call Gibbs and pour me a scotch. Big one. I don't want
to do this twice."
Jimmy was back two minutes later with a much smaller scotch
than Tim would have liked. "That's a big scotch?"
"You're on pain meds, right?"
"Oh."
"So, yes, that's a big scotch. Much more than that and
all Jethro and I'll be doing is tucking you into bed for a nap."
"Might like a nap."
"We don't have to do this. I mean, I want to know,
but…"
"I know. Just… might as well." He blows out a
frustrated breath. "'Course, 'might as well do it now' is why I'm in this
shape, so maybe that's not a great plan."
Jimmy's looking at him, eyes wide and earnest, pain for his
friend clear on his face. "Tim, talk to me."
He drank half of the scotch down. "This should be fully
kicked in by the time Gibbs is here. I'll give both of you the whole
story."
Gibbs got to his place in eighteen minutes, which means he
was channeling Ziva behind the wheel. Like Jimmy he checks the cuts, hands
gentle and careful on Tim's skin. Abby'd already told him why Tim was in the shape
he was in, but actually seeing it made his eyes go wide, and then narrow in
anger.
"You've both offered to listen, so here's the
story…"
He finished up by telling both of them about talking with
his mom and how he'd spent basically his whole life blaming his dad, pretending
his mom had been outside of it… "But she wasn't. Maybe he made the rules,
but he was gone all the time, so she upheld them. She knew. She might not have
approved of every tactic he used, but she was with him on the general plan of verbally
beat the living shit out of Tim until he's tough enough. Though God alone knows
what the fuck tough enough is. I couldn't get it together enough to ask, and
I'm honestly not sure I want to know."
Tim shakes his head. "In a lot of ways, this is worse
than what actually happened. That was anger and pain and rage, and this is…
betrayal."
Jimmy and Jethro are just looking at him. There's nothing
either of them can do to change or help this, so they sit there, trying to be
comforting, and let him talk.
"I don't even know what to do with this. Since…
Annapolis… she's been nothing but supportive and encouraging of me. She's not
the one who called me names or belittled me. She never was. It was like good
cop/bad cop from Hell.
"The Admiral didn't go to any of my graduations. He was
pissed about turning down Annapolis, so even though he got home the day before,
he skipped the high school one. Mom and Penny were nervous enough about us
being together that the day after graduation I was on the other side of the country.
He was afloat for Johns Hopkins and MIT. Hated the idea of me at NCIS so he
refused to attend FLETC. She was at all of them. She's got a wall covered in
pictures of us kids… I mean, how the fuck do you do that? I get him. I wasn't
who he wanted me to be and disappointed the shit out of him, fine. I get it.
"But… I mean, what the hell did she think she was
doing?"
Unfortunately, Jimmy and Gibbs don't have the answer to
that. And right now, the one thing Tim knows he doesn't want to do is get on
the phone and talk to the person who does.
After Jenny died, Ziva had explained the idea of sitting
Shiva to them. She had told them, that after everything had gone wrong, after
God had ruined Job's life, his friends came to comfort him. They didn't say
anything. They didn't try to fill the air with useless words. They just came,
saw Job in pain, and sat with him, sharing his pain in silence, only talking
when he was ready.
And thus Jews sit Shiva. They go to the home of the one who
mourns, sit with him, and only speak when he wants, about what he wants.
When Jimmy told him about the "comforting words"
people kept abusing him and Breena with after they lost Jon, he thought he got
the idea. He thought he understood the power and value of comfortable silence.
But now, sitting on his sofa, between Jethro and Jimmy, both
of whom aren't saying anything, because there's nothing to say, because right
now words would be hollow, meaningless, almost an insult to the gravity of this
pain, he gets it. He truly, deeply understands the gift of silence. Words might
make this easier for Jimmy or Gibbs, but it won't for him, and they're
respecting that.
Sitting on the sofa, Gibbs' arm around him, they are
allowing him the space he needs to grieve, and providing him the safety and
love he needs to do it.
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