Friday, October 10, 2014

Shards To A Whole: Happy (Ish) Birthday.

McGee-centric character study/romance. Want to start at the beginning? Click here.

Chapter 395: Happy(Ish) Birthday


Abby blinks at Sarah and says, "Holy shit!"

"Indeed," Ducky adds.

Sarah shrugs a little. "Can't just let him get away with it, right?"

Everyone shakes their heads. "You think I should tell Tim when he wakes up, or hold onto it for a few days when he's a bit less groggy?"

"When he wakes up is good," Abby says. "I think he'll like hearing about it."

Penny sits down on the porch steps. "So, he's just... done?"

"According to SecNav, everything'll get wrapped up when he gets to Pearl."

Abby's looking at Gibbs, both of them wondering, what, if anything this is going to do to or for Tim's 'deal.' And it's completely clear that neither of them have any idea.

Penny's got a more immediate concern, she can see Sarah's agitated, pacing around, temper all but crackling off her skin. "Are you all right?"

Sarah's shoulders slump, and she goes to sit next to Penny. "No. No, I'm not. All of this is really hitting. He tried to kill Tim… He was more upset about me saying he had a boyfriend than what he did to Tim… Nothing about him was real." She wipes her eyes. "I couldn't see the monster under the mask. But he's still Daddy. And this is just…" Penny holds her near as Sarah starts to sob.



Given the massive shit storm of emotional trauma that just opened up on the family he's about to marry into, Glenn Holland sprang into action pretty well. He'd been… wary's probably a good word for it… when he got a text from Ducky asking him to show up at Tim and Abby's early.

The birthday party is today, but it didn't start until 6:00, so why he was heading there at 3:00 had him curious with a side of dread.

He felt ice down his spine when he saw most of the McGees on the front porch, minus Tim, with Sarah sobbing in Penny's arms.

Then he got the story. Ducky and Abby did the telling, and he's honestly not sure if what actually happened is better or worse than what he was thinking had happened when he saw most of the family outside without Tim.

What he does know is that, 'Dad and Tim don't get on,' needs a whole lot of filling out, and he's also got a lot of pointed questions about Sarah's mom that need to be answered, but not right this second.

Right this second, he's petting his wife-to-be and telling her she did the right thing.



When Glenn comes over, Abby heads back into the house. Tim's sleeping. He wasn't sleeping this much the last day at the hospital, but he also wasn't moving around, so maybe this is just a reaction to actually doing something besides laying around.

Maybe.

Or maybe this is enough emotional crap that he can only take so much, so he's checking out.

Probably a good plan. If he needs to take himself away for a while so he doesn't get swamped, then she'll do what she can to give him a space to do that.

But right now she also wants to be near him. Feel his skin on hers. Not much room on the sofa for both of them, not with him lying on his back, so she sits on the floor, and tips her head back onto the seat. The crown of her head is resting against his hip. It's not enough, but for the time being, it'll do.

She sighs gently, wondering if what Sarah did was a good move or not.

Good for her, for the sense of doing something for her brother, for trying to avenge him if she couldn't protect him, good for all of that. Abby gets that.

But she's not sure if this is good for Tim. 'Sarah was bold…' 'Sarah was brave…' 'Sarah was fearless…' That's how Tim thinks of her. Sarah's active, bright, fire-y, wild. She does whatever needs to be done, when it needs to be done, damn the consequences. He's passive, thoughtful, cautious, laying out ideas and not moving until every option's been considered.

And especially with their Dad… Where he was always smacked for being the cautious one, and she was praised for bold…

She took charge, took the active role, forced John's hand. Tim took the quiet role. Things were put in play, quiet, thought out, plans within plans that would have taken at least six months to come to a head. But they were invisible, and handed off to someone else to execute.

Sarah handled it herself, immediately.

The only thing stopping Tim from that exact same play was a boat-load of drugs and a lack of devious nature. After all the idea of just threatening to press charges, (in Virginia, there is no statute of limitations on any felony, and child abuse is a felony) to blackmail John into retirement hadn't occurred to her, and she's sure it never crossed Tim's mind. And she's sure it never would have crossed either of their minds, either.

She sits there with him and hopes this will be good news. She hopes it will be satisfying. She hopes it won't spiral him into a deep well of doubt. He's got more than enough of that coming, this on top of it?

Another sigh.



It's a bizarre sensation. He's not really asleep. He's aware of Abby nearby, but he can't talk or do anything about it.

Sleep paralysis? Maybe. But he's not hurting or panicked, so all in all, he's not in a hurry to try and shake it.

He can hear voices from outside. Bits of conversation, but he can't make out words, just sounds and rhythms. Some crying. He thinks that's Sarah.

He's idly thinking that at this point they're zero for two on happy first birthdays, and maybe it'd be nice if by the time December rolls around and Anna turns one that they could get a first birthday where no one is crying.

His brain keeps flitting about to little niggly things. Like, where's his computer? When should he go back to work? What might be for dinner? And he didn't get much of a look at the new wrist cuff, so he'd kind of like to really look at it. (His arm and eyes do not cooperate at that, so he doesn't get a view of it.) He'd gotten to pondering what happened in the episode of Twin Peaks that they missed when he slides full on into sleep.



Tim wakes up again to the sound of the stove beeping. Time for more medicine, apparently. He sits up slowly, thinking about how long it would take to get from the sofa to get his meds from the kitchen…

Oh, they're on one of those little folding tables they got as a wedding present from Fornell. Next to a glass of water. Nice.

He swallows one of the pills, and looks around. He's on his own in here, though he can hear footsteps coming in from the porch, so apparently he doesn't have to get the alarm on the stove himself.

"Hey." Sarah's voice, though she appears to be heading right into the kitchen, because he can still hear footsteps but doesn't see her. Abby heads in too, sitting on the sofa, snuggling in next to him. He starts to rest his face against her shoulder, but that aches, so he settles for just having his arm around her.

Sarah's back a few seconds after the beeping lets off. "So, I talked to The Admiral."

He slumps. He doesn't want to hear about how he didn't really mean it, or it wasn't really his fault, or anything. The Admiral always managed to make Sarah look the other way, and he just doesn't want to hear anything else about that, at all.

Sarah sees the defeated look on Tim's face and shakes her head. "Nothing like that. Remember Pop teaching us to play poker?"

Tim nods, not sure where this is going.

"You can only bluff as well as the other guy knows what you've got in your hand."

"Okay." He remembers Pop saying that. The five of them, both kids, Mom, Gran and Pop at the kitchen table, Sarah having a hard time holding all her cards because her hands were little, and Pop talking about how, with the kind of poker they were playing (seven card draw, aces or better to ante, two cards up, no wild) that the key to a good bluff was knowing what was in your hand, what you were showing, what everyone else was showing, and who anted.

"I told him that if he didn't resign immediately I'd have Abby fabricate evidence of child abuse then make a formal complaint against him to Gibbs and that by tomorrow every one of my hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers would know he was a child abuser and that by the time he hit Pearl every news organization on Earth would be waiting for him."

Tim's mouth opens, and then it closes, as he blinks. He sits there for a good minute not sure how to react or feel or anything. He's just stalled out in shock. Eventually he gets out, "What happened?"

"He called SecNav and resigned. He decided I had a hand he couldn't beat."

"If you were willing to use it."

"Yep. Apparently I can do a pretty convincing I-am-going-to-lay-waste-to-everyone-around-me rampage when I want to."

Tim nods, not sure what he's feeling about that. Good… ish? Relieved… maybe? He looks at Sarah more carefully, seeing the puffiness around her eyes.

"You've been crying?"

She nods. "Just because he deserved it doesn't mean it doesn't hurt."

"I know."



He's munching on the apple, sort of aware of the fact that he hasn't exactly been doing too hot on the whole regular meals stuff, but, without an IV you can't eat and sleep at the same time, and right now sleeping is better than eating, so, sleeping rather than eating.

People are filing into the house. Penny and Gibbs and Ducky and… Okay, Glenn's here, too. He's not sure when that happened, but… Why not? (Because he's something of a stranger and right now Tim's got no desire to try and even pretend to hold it together, but also no desire to really let go in front of this guy who will marry his sister soon.)

He looks around the room some, and notices that next to his meds are the electronics for his cast. "Anyone explain how this works?" he asks. Sarah and Penny and Ducky should find this interesting.

Ducky nods. "Jimmy called to ask what I knew about them when it was clear you were a candidate for one. I've never seen one before. Would you like a hand setting it up?"

"Yeah. Thanks." Ducky takes the vibration head, and slips it into the first of the slots, then flips the device on. It makes a quiet hum.

"How's it feel?"

"Right now, fine. Little buzz. By the time I've done it for twenty minutes on ten breaks, and that's just my arm, I may have a different opinion."

"They gave you one vibrational head?" Ducky sounds appalled at that.

"Yeah."

"For…" Ducky's counting the slots that are designed to have the head in them. "For fourteen breaks? They expect you to have this going two hundred and eighty minutes a day?"

"I guess."

Ducky stands up, pulling his phone out. "I have calls to make."



Tim's asleep again when Ducky's off the phone, an hour and a half later. Abby's sitting next to him, gently moving the vibrational head from slot to slot as time elapses, talking quietly with the rest of the family.

"News?" she asks, voice low.

"Some days I am sure the FDA is more trouble than it's worth. They have taken 'do no harm' to mean strangle innovation and glorify paralysis. There are only fifty of these devices allowed in the United States for testing purposes. And, for all my contacts and colleagues, I could not pry one free. Approval in the US is dependent on positive testing data. Timothy can only be one data point for the testing, no matter how many of the units he's using, so no one is willing to reduce the amount of testing data they can get by letting me have one."

Penny can see the anger in his eyes. "They're approved in Europe and Israel, right?"

"Precisely. Japan as well, and Canada, and Australia. Hence more trouble than it's worth. Even though there are extensive studies abroad, those studies aren't good enough for our FDA, so we have re-do the same tests, over and over until someone at FDA gets the correct pay off and allows these devices to be produced and used in the US."

"But, you've got some good news, too, right, Duck?" Gibbs asks.

Ducky smiles dryly. "A friend of a friend is sending us one from Bern. So, as of Monday, we can cut Timothy's time attached to this device down from almost five hours to two and a half. Another friend in Kyoto is hunting around to see if she can lay hands on one more, but that may be a forlorn hope."

Tim doesn't open his eyes, but he does say, "Thanks, Ducky. Any idea if they're supposed to hurt?"

"Minor pain is listed as a possible side effect. The tiny vibrations are supposed to encourage quicker bone growth by making your body think it needs to build a stronger bond. Not enough motion to move anything out of place, but enough to make your body think that it's under assault and respond accordingly."

"Okay."

"Does it hurt, Timothy?"

"First two weren't bad, but everything aches now."

He hears Abby's phone buzz, followed by no sound, so it must be a text.

"What's up?"

"Tony and Ziva want to visit."

"Sure." He opens his eyes, looking over at her. "I'm not real exciting right now, but bring 'em on. Hell, we're supposed to be having a birthday party, right? Tell 'em to pick up more cupcakes, let Jimmy and Breena know we're on, and lets have a bit of happy tonight."

"That sounds like an excellent idea," Penny says, a not entirely forced smile on her face.



Tony hates visiting sick people. He feels completely useless and helpless and just, wrong, so goddamned wrong. All the jokes in the world don't make any fucking difference at all, (Shut it, Patch Adams, if jokes could save lives, Mom would still be here. Okay, yeah, that's a touchy subject for him.) and in a sick room all he's got are jokes.

Jokes that are mostly to just keep him going.

So, he'll admit that he'd much rather go off and kill John (He's checked, John's due in Pearl in six days. Wouldn't be too hard to get over there and take a shot. Not like he doesn't have his own sniper handy. Sure, Gibbs gets all the glory for being a sniper, but Ziva's got better eyes and can hit anything within 500 meters.) but in the end, they've been told to leave it alone, and if John ends up dead ten hours after they hop a flight to Hawaii…

He sighs. They aren't above the law. They can get around it, but they still have to be subtle and clever.

However, he does have the sense that since his MCRT has been handling more terror cases, and since they travel for terror cases, that, should one of them provide him with an opportunity to get in range of John, he'll take it.

Another sigh. Fantasizing different ways to kill John isn't dealing with what's about to happen.

Work is over, and he and Ziva are in the car, with food, heading toward Tim's house, to go see him, and… And he doesn't know what. Not like showing up is going to make him feel better.

A kill shot on John might have made him feel better, but this…

"Fuck."

Ziva squeezes his hand. She knows exactly how useless he feels because she feels it herself. She'd rather be doing almost anything than trying to comfort a hurting person.

"Think I can slap him upside the head?"

Ziva looks at him curiously.

"I told him if that test went FUBAR and he got hurt, I'd slap him for being stupid. And right now, I don't care if Gibbs fines me for it."

"I don't think that's a good plan, Tony."

"Gotta do something, or…"

"It's enough to just be there."

"No it's not! Being there doesn't help."

She gently squeezes his hand. "It is. That's all he and Abby really want or need right now."

He rolls his eyes.

"That's all your mother or mine ever wanted or needed, too."

"Do you really believe that?"

"I know it. It's all I would want."

He shrugs at that. "Does it help?"

"No." Because it doesn't. Because just being there, when being there doesn't solve the problem doesn't feel like much.



It's worse than Tony thought it'd be. He didn't think that was possible, but it is. He can't even pull off a half-hearted joke. He looks at Tim and just… "Oh, God, Tim."

Tim looks back at him, face battered, and says, "Don't look at me like that, Tony, I'm not dying."

Tony can see that if he doesn't muster up some sort of cynicism on this, both he and Tim are going to start crying, so he steps closer to Tim, helps him get sitting up just a bit more, and very, very, very lightly (wincing while he does it) taps Tim on the back of the head.

"Ow." It's a token protest. Even as badly hurt as he is, barely having his hair brushed by Tony's hand doesn't result in actual pain. (At least, not right now, with lots of pain medication flowing through his system, this morning would have been a different story, but this morning air molecules bouncing against his skin hurt.)

"Don't you ever do something that stupid again."

Tim nods.

"When everyone you know tells you not to do something, don't do it. And when you heal up, you're getting the full ass-kicking for making everyone worry like this."

Tim nods at that, too. He's having a much easier time dealing with angry Tony than concerned, sad Tony.

Then Tony very carefully hugs him, for a long time. He pulls back, biting his lip. "Okay, gonna help Ducky get dinner ready," he says, pretty much sprinting out of the living room.

Ziva switches over from sitting on Tim's right side to his left, and also hugs him, gently. He gets a light kiss on the forehead, too.

"I thought dinner was take out," Tim finally says.

"It is," she says gently.

He nods again. "Can I ask you a favor?"

"Sure, McGee."

"When I'm healed up, and have my strength back, and can fight again… I had a knife, pocket knife, small thing, but it still had a blade, but I didn't know how to use it. Ended up throwing it, and that…" He pauses, fighting back the swamping sensations of anger and fear. He reaches up to wipe his eyes, and stops because his face still hurts to bad for that. "It worked…" He takes as deep and calming a breath as he can. "When I can fight, again, I want you to teach me how to fight with a knife. Probably be in better shape if I had known what to do with it."

Ziva nods. "Certainly."

"That's a grim topic for a party," Breena says, heading into the living room, kissing Ziva and Tim. "Feeling any better from yesterday?"

"Little bit," he looks over at Ziva, "Plane travel with…" he can't figure out how many there are, "that many broken bones is not fun."

"No, it is not."

"I was pretty out of it last night."

"I would imagine."

Molly comes tearing in, or at least trying to tear in, her daddy's got a pretty good hold on her hand right now, but she's trying to pull free. "Aunt Ziva! Uncle Tim!"

Ziva scoops her up into a warm hug and keeps a close hold on her while she leans in to get a kiss from Tim.

Jimmy heads over and kisses Ziva's cheek, taking Molly back while saying to her, "And what did we say about Uncle Tim?"

"Very gentle," she answers seriously, "Like Anna."

Tim nods, also serious. "Just like with your baby sister."

Molly looks at him carefully, eyeing him all over, lips pursed, signs of intense concentration on her face. "Why purple?"

"I got hurt."

"Stay that way?"

"No."

Jimmy lifts up her foot, and kisses the two bruises on her knees. "Uncle Tim's got bruises, just like you do."

"Fall down?"

Tim nods. "Something like that."

Molly nods back, and squirms forward a little, and then, very gently, barely touching his skin, kisses each of the bruises on Tim's face. "All better."

He smiles at her, feeling his eyes water. "All better."

"Okay, come on, let's go see Uncle Jethro," Jimmy says brightly, picking Molly up so her back's to Tim, knowing he doesn't want to explain why he's crying and why the kisses didn't make it all better.



It's a very low key party. Partly because pretty much no one knew it was actually going to be on, so the presents are… haphazard at best. Pop was on the job, so Kelly's got some new onesies in bigger sizes, and her very own little, stuffed black lab (Little Mona). And Breena likely picked out Kelly's birthday present back in October (plushie skull), so she had her bases covered.

But the rest of the crew either didn't have (Penny) or didn't bring with them (Sarah) presents for the birthday girl, who, in true one-year-old fashion, could not have possibly cared less.

But Mom and Dad care, and everyone together to sing Happy Birthday matters. So they do sing. And Kelly impresses everyone with her candle-blowing-out-technique. And, in the video (which they don't watch for a while) it's easy to see Gibbs coaching her, and how proud he is that she got it right.
Mom and Dad also didn't have baby presents ready. But, there was one thing Tim did have, and he's feeling really pleased that he's remembered this, and bummed that he can't just hop up and grab it himself, but he does grab Jimmy, whisper some directions to him, and in a minute Jimmy's back with the box in his hands.

Abby's sitting on the floor, moving Little Mona around, making her hop and jump between Kelly, Anna, and Molly, (Big Mona wants to play, too, so she's bounding around the girls, adding her own excitement to the mix) so Tim quickly flips open the lid, check to make sure it's looking right (it is.)

"Abby."

"Mmm…" she's bopping each girl gently on the nose with the stuffed doggie, and just did Mona who looks really confused by that.

"Abby…"

She looks up at Tim, and he sort of tilts his head to his side in a come here gesture. She hands Little Mona to Kelly, who's vigorously hugging her, and goes to sit next to Tim.

"It was a really big day for you, too." He kisses her gently. "And I wanted you to know how much I love you, and Kelly, and that…" he's crying again, and just leans over to kiss her, long and soft and deep. He feels her fingers very gently wiping away his tears, and he presses the box into her hands. "Thank you for my babies."

She kisses him back, just his lips, lightly brushing her words to him. "I love you." She pulls back a bit, and opens the box, for a second just staring and then, "Oh, Tim…" She's about to say, put it on me, but he can't, not with one hand, so she slips puts it on herself, looking down at it.

It's a blood opal pendant. A perfect round cabochon in gleaming red with flecks of purple and blue on a cast silver backing of ivy leaves.

He kisses her again, lips just below her ear, "I was planning on giving it to you when we were alone, but, I'll be asleep by then, and I didn't want to miss today."

It's a heavy moment, not bad, but intense, and Tony, who's been cracking jokes all night, doing a very good job of keeping things light, making sure they don't get bogged down in too much emotional stuff, says to Glenn, "And this is why none of us ever wins Husband of the Year. We've got to compete against this dork, who might as well be a girl for as good as he is on this whole romance thing."

Tim doesn't pull away from kissing Abby, but he does stop cupping her cheek in his hand to flip off Tony, who snorts at his response.

And Jimmy's saying, "Speak for yourself, Tony. He's taking his lessons from me," as he winks at Breena, who gently shoves him while smiling.

Tim, still smooching Abby, shifts that bird toward Jimmy.



Party wraps up early. The main guest of honor goes to bed at 7:30, and with being excited from the party and even more cake and everyone over, she was a bit frazzled by the time bedtime rolled around, so a quiet, easy, tubby followed by stories with Pop worked a treat for getting her down.

The other 'guest of honor' didn't make it to 7:45. Tim was pretty much asleep on the sofa by then, so Abby and Jimmy helped him to bed, where he crashed hard.

Since it was a 'party' no one talked about the assault or what was happening with the Admiral but there's a definite sense of curiosity about what's going on.

And another sense of tentative boundary laying. Who gets to know what, when, and how. So, toward the end its fairly clear that everyone is 'lingering' so they can get a shot to talk to each other about what's going on.

Finally it gets to 8:30, everyone is hovering, and Abby's tired. "Breena, Jimmy, Gibbs, give me a hand. All the rest of you, I love you, but I'm fried, and I want to be in bed by 9:00, so off you go."

It's not a great lie, and they can all see that the group who went to California is getting pulled in for the first level of consultations as to what happens next, but they aren't willing to fight it, either.

Hugs, kisses, plans for more visiting (but not tomorrow, Abby's got plans for tomorrow) pass between them, and then she's at home with Gibbs and the Palmers.

Gibbs explains what Sarah did. Breena looks impressed, and Jimmy whistles long and low at it.

"How's he taking it?" Jimmy asks Abby.

Abby shrugs. "Not sure if it's sunk in. That's part of no visitors tomorrow. Heather's coming over and taking Kelly, and we're spending the day in bed, just resting and talking and touching and healing."
Breena nods at that. "Probably a good plan."

"The other question is, what, if anything, does this do to Tim's deal with Jarvis?" Abby says.

That also gets all of them just looking at each other, because none of them know. However, both of the girls can see that quick non-verbal something that flickers between Gibbs and Jimmy.

"Good God, how many conspiracies can we have on this?" Breena says. "Out with it, both of you. I'm not getting blindsided by whatever you're planning."

Jimmy takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes. "Sniper training starts Saturday morning. He's got a year, and if John's still walking around after a year, then… Then he's not going to be doing it anymore."

Gibbs looks at the girls and shrugs a little. "Trust but verify, right? Jarvis does his part, great. If not, we'll be ready to handle it."

"Tim know that?" Abby asks.

"He will," Jimmy replies. "Probably a good plan to have him have a chat with Tony and Ziva about sitting on their hands for this."

"Better if it happens at Shabbos, and we're all there," Breena adds. "Penny and Ducky'll hear it, too. That matters, right? That's why we're not all chatting together about it?"

Abby and Gibbs nod.

"Penny and Sarah hate this," Abby says. "Just because someone's evil doesn't mean you didn't love them, and it doesn't mean that love just vanishes. This hurts both of them, bad. I'm thinking we don't ask for clarification on the deal. If something happens to John in the next year, we'll just never know, for sure. And not knowing'll make lying easier. And if he is still walking around a year from now, we'll handle it."

The other three nod. That's a functional plan they can all handle.

Next

Shards To A Whole: Sarah McGee

McGee-centric character study/romance. Want to start at the beginning? Click here.


Chapter 394: Sarah McGee

"What happens tomorrow?" Abbi asks Jethro as they get to his place.

He rubs his eyes as he flops onto the sofa. He's tired and feeling pretty lost right now. No case to solve, no revenge to get, just dealing with the emotional fall out of this, which isn't his strong suit. "Pick up Mona. Get over to Tim and Abby's, see if I can be useful. Go get prescriptions or cupcakes or something."

That's a good idea. Concrete plan. Something he can do, but Abbi's looking blankly at him.

"Kelly's birthday is tomorrow. I'm sure they'll be swamped on just taking care of Tim. So, go get at least a cupcake or something for her."

"Got your presents all ready to go?"

He winces a little. "Go get some of those, too. Real party'll probably be once Tim and Abby are feeling like company, but, still, gotta do something for my girl. You?"

She's nodding at that. "Back to work tomorrow. Haven't gone this long without checking in since my sister's wedding."

"Good wedding?" He's wondering how intense it would have had to have been to have gotten her to go five days without calling in.

"Eh." She's looking non-committal. "Out in the middle of nowhere. Sunrise and sunset ceremony at Mt. Kimball, in Alaska. The wedding part was fun. Cold. Grow up in Montana and you think you know everything there is to know about cold and snow, but you're wrong. Because your insane sister really likes the idea of having a wedding that starts as the sun rises and ends as it sets so your ass gets dragged to a mountain in Alaska in December where you can freeze in the cold and miss the damn sunrise and set because it's snowing. No cell reception for five days."

Gibbs nods at that. With the exception of when he went to Mexico, he doesn't think a week passed when he was a cop where he didn't check in at least once. He pulls Abbi close to him. "Thank you. I…" he licks his lips. "I needed that. Needed you."

She smiles and nods, kissing him gently. He holds her tighter.



When he heads over to Breena's place the next morning, she gives him a warm hug, and Mona's leaping all over him, ecstatic to see him again. The doggy version of I thought you left me forever! Don't ever do that again! I love you! I love you! I love you!

He pets her vigorously, with many versions of 'good girl,' and she glows with it.

He looks around, noticing that besides leaping doggy, the house is awfully quiet. "Jimmy and the girls?"

"I'm taking a day on my own. He took them to daycare, I took the day off, and I'm sucking up some quiet time."

Gibbs nods. Three baby girls, one dog, no husband around. He knows Shannon had plenty of days where it was just her and Kelly and she was ready to scream by bedtime. Three girls under the age of three. Yikes.

He hugs Breena, kissing her forehead. "Thank you."

She nods. "You do what you need to for your family."

He smiles. "I'll let you get your down time."

"You going to Tim and Abby's?"

"Yeah."

"Might see you there later this afternoon. Might just jell all day."

"Okay." He hugs her again. "Thank you. Come on, Mona! We're going to Tim and Abby's."

Mona likes trips to the McGees', so the morning looks like it's starting off well.


Tim wakes feeling like his entire body is screaming. He's a bit fuzzy on exactly how many breaks he has in his arm, nose, ribs, and foot, but he's sure he can feel his heart beating in a cacophony of pain in every single one of them.

He thought that half an hour where he didn't get his meds because he was talking to Jarvis was bad. That was a walk in the park compared to this.

He can barely breathe, because breathing involves moving his ribs. He'd call for help, but he doesn't think he can make any noise. He didn't know it's possible to hurt so bad you can't even yell, but he does.

He's slipping into panic mode, unable to think or plan, or anything, all he is right now is a bundle of throbbing, burning, all-consuming pain.

"Oh hey, you're… Oh shit. Pain meds!"

He hears Abby grabbing something, probably the bottle of pills, sprint to the bathroom, water running, and a second later she's pulling him into a sitting position (which he whimpers at, then starts full out cursing because nothing has ever hurt that bad) but she pops one of the pills onto his tongue and is holding water to his lips, so he swallows, and then she gently lays him back down again.

"Oh God, I'm so sorry! Kelly woke up, and Jethro's over and… Oh shit. I forgot you needed to take them. You kept complaining about them waking you up all the time in the hospital, so I wanted to let you sleep… And I just… I forgot. Shit!"

He thinks that's something he would have complained about, he remembers being annoyed by getting poked by someone in scrubs what felt like every ten minutes, but he doesn't actually remember complaining about it, and right now, he'd happily take someone poking him every ten minutes for the rest of his life if it'll make this pain go away.

He also sort of remembers waking up aching in the middle of the night, grabbing one of the pills and swallowing it, then crashing back to sleep before he was even really awake.

But whatever let him wake up then didn't fire this time, and now he's paying for it.



Abby feels so guilty she wants to throw up and cry. First night on making sure he gets his pain meds and she failed.

Every five hours. Four really. Supposed to be five, but at the hospital he was usually getting restless and achy at four. They don't want too much in his system and they're supposed to work for four to six hours. So, enough to keep him not hurting too bad, enough to keep the levels even, but not so much they lose efficiency.

Every time in the hospital, he'd start to come up a bit, not necessarily wake up, but he'd notice he was hurting, stir a bit, and then get more medication.

And last night he did that, too. He woke at ten-ish, he woke at three-ish, and… she just figured he'd wake up this time.

Shit. No excuses. He's drugged, and healing, and a mess, and it's not his responsibility to make sure he gets his medication when he needs it. Right now, that's her job.

And she failed.

Abby calls Jimmy to see if there's anything she can do to get him feeling better, but there isn't. And she knows there isn't because even if there was some sort of miracle drug that instantly took pain away, they don't have it in the house, so she'd have to go get it, wait for the pharmacy to make it up, and bring it back, and by then what he's already on will have kicked in.

She can't touch him. She can see from how he's looking that every inch of him hurts right now and any touch will just make it worse.

"I'm so sorry."

He nods very slightly again, eyes closed, tears leaking from them.



Longest twenty minutes in the history of time, and he's including the time he was trapped in freezer in that count.

But eventually the pain does start to ease up some. Eventually he's noticing he's breathing deeper and not whimpering with each shallow exhale.

Eventually, he knows that he has precisely ten breaks in his right arm, four in his left foot, six in his ribs, and one across his nose, and he knows that because he can feel each and every one of them pulse each time his heart beats.

Eventually, it eases up even more, he starts to notice things like he's hungry, and he has to pee, and Abby's still sitting next to him, looking almost as bad as he feels.

"You feeling any better?" Abby asks.

He nods a little.

"Want help sitting up?"

"Sure." She gives him an arm up, and he looks around some. Home. In his bed, pills and water on his bedside table, crutch leaning against the headboard of the bed where he can get to it easily.

"I'm so, so, so sorry." She hugs him gingerly.

"I'll live. All the phones set to go off every time I'm supposed to get a new painkiller?"

She nods. "And the alarm on the stove."

"Good. I don't want to do that again."

"Once and done. So, food, bathroom, drink? What do you need?"

"All three."

He hears slight clicking sounds and then Mona plops her head on the bed next to his knee. She's looking up at him with big, I-love-you-pay-attention-to-me doggie eyes.

He reaches over and gently strokes her ears. She licks his hand. "Yuck. Yes, you're glad to see me, great. Stop that."

She does, nosing his hand as he pets her.

"I take it Gibbs is here," Tim says as he starts the very slow process of twisting around so his legs are off the side of the bed. Abby grabs the crutch for him, handing it over, and nods at his assessment on Gibbs.

"Think you need to switch to sleeping on the other side."

He nods slowly. His right side is the part of him closest to the head of the bed/nightstand, so he can't easily grab for the crutch once he's sitting up.

He takes as much of a deep breath as he can (not very deep) and steels himself for letting some of his weight slip down onto his right foot and the crutch. A small pained 'uhn' escapes when he does that.
"How long until I can get up and not hurt?"

Abby shakes her head, hovering next to him, ready to catch him if he loses his footing. "I don't know. Visit with the orthopedist on Thursday. He might know."

"I guess." One small step forward. And then one more. And another. Small, slow, each one spent very carefully placing the crutch and his foot, trying to minimize the ache in his leg and the tearing sensation along his ribs and shoulder.

"Do you want to get a shower? Or just take care of business and get some breakfast?"

"Shower eventually." He thinks about how much standing hurts right now. "Okay, bath eventually. Maybe this afternoon. Really am feeling hungry."

"Eggs? Coffee and eggs?"

He nods, that sounds good. Five more steps, and with each one he is going a little further, noticing that he can extend the step a bit more and not hurt himself too bad. Once he gets into the bathroom, Abby shuts the door, and heads off.

As he's staring at the toilet and sink, it's hitting him that with how long it's going to take him to 'do his thing' Abby could probably go and buy some chickens, let them run around the back yard until they lay eggs, then gather them, then cook them, and she'd probably still have his breakfast done before he's gotten halfway down the steps to the kitchen.

Sigh.

Get to it. Not going to get any easier or faster just sitting on your ass not doing it.

And so he does.



Tim's never felt like they have a particularly big house. Four bedrooms and an office, so it's a good size. It's not tiny. But it's not a mansion, either. Twenty-five hundred square feet is comfortable.

But right now, with the trek from his room to the top of the stairs to the kitchen…

God, it's probably about an eighty foot walk (crutch).

One step at a time.

By the time he gets to his bedroom door, he's fairly sure that as soon as he gets done with this, he's going to be getting a nap. Then breakfast. He's so tired.

He can kind of hear Jimmy saying, 'Well, you haven't moved for almost a week, of course this is hard.'

That triggers a memory. Did Breena really kiss him last night, or did he dream that? He thinks it happened. He kind of remembers how it felt. But by that part he was hurting and tired and… just really out of it.

Pondering that gets him to the steps. He's with it enough to know he's not walking down them.
Abby pops up from nowhere (which makes him think the drugs are effecting him more than he noticed) and takes the crutch from him.

"Okay, the physical therapist at the hospital said on your butt, foot goes down to the next step, stabilize with your arm, and then scoot down."

He nods, starts to lower himself down, wobbles, and Abby wraps an arm around his hips quickly, giving him some extra stability as he gets to the floor.

She lets go of him, but stays next to him as he keeps easing down the steps.

"Think I'm getting a nap."

She nods. "I think you getting a nap is a really good plan."

Mona bounds up the steps and tries to lick his face. "Mona! Yuck!"

Abby grabs her collar and gives her a stern look. "Down girl. Just because we're on the floor doesn't mean it's licking time." Mona mopes at that, but she stays a few steps in front of Tim, if there's any chance of him falling, she'll break the fall.

They're halfway down the step when Tim asks, quietly, "Did Breena kiss us last night?"

Abby nods. "Yeah, she did."

"It wasn't just friendly, was it?"

"Nope."

"Oh." She wraps her arm around Tim's shoulders, very gently, and kisses him. "Nap, food, healing, that's on for today, and tomorrow, and at least a few more tomorrows. All of this'll be waiting for when you're not filled with drugs, and we all know it."

"Yeah."

Two more steps, and he sighs. "I need to call Sarah."

Abby nods at that, too.

"Don't think that can wait until I heal up."

"Not if you want whatever you say to really hit. Not if you don't want to have to say much. Right now your body says more than your words can."

"Yeah. Don't know if I can hold it together to talk to her."

"She's your sister, Tim, you don't need to hold it together." She's gently rubbing his back as she says this. "You and her and Penny, you need to talk, and it's okay if you flip out or cry or yell. Or all three at once. And, look… You know they won't clear you for work without a psych eval, and I know you'd rather drill your own teeth, but, please, at least think about really talking to Wolf, you know, more than once. I know you can pass the eval. I know you know the right answers, and with the whole classified thing, you can probably flat out BS what happened and never really talk to him about it, but… Eventually you're going to have to sleep without pain medication."

"Okay."

"Okay?" Her eyebrows shoot up. She was expecting arguing. Then her eyes narrows, she did not just meet this man and 'okay' has some wiggle room. "You'll talk to him? Or okay, you're acknowledging that what I'm saying is true?"

He shoots her his exasperated look. "I'll talk to him, really talk."

"Thank you." She stands up. "And look, we've hit the bottom." She hands the crutch over, and helps him stay steady as he goes from the stairs to standing. "Sleep first or food?"

"I'm tired."

"Futon in your office or the sofa?"

"Futon."

"Okay." And together they get him to his futon for a mid-morning nap.



Gibbs is in the kitchen when he finally hobbles in (three hours after he set out this morning).

"Morning," Tim says, looking around noticing everyone else is eating lunch. "Afternoon?"

"Hi." Abby pulls out a chair for him, and nods.

"You woke up just in time," Gibbs says, getting up, heading over to the refrigerator. Tim's not really paying attention to what he's doing, right now he's just steeping in how normal this is. He's at home, having lunch with his family.

Kelly's babbling at him, and Abby scoots her highchair over so he can touch her.

"Hey, Babygirl," he strokes her face, wanting to pick her up, but he can't, not yet.

"Dada!" She's grabbing his finger, and that feels excellent.

"You want lunch or breakfast?" Abby asks.

He glances around, sees that everyone has bowls of chicken and broccoli, which actually sounds really great right now.

"Lunch."

"Great," she stands up, getting him some.

A minute later she's got a bowl in front of him, and a fork, along with a glass of iced-tea (and more pain meds sitting next to it). He's about to take a bite when he finally notices what Gibbs is doing. Namely, carrying a cupcake with a lit candle on it over to Kelly, singing Happy Birthday.

Kelly sees it in front of her, delighted, and is about to grab the candle, so Pop yanks it back out of range, stopping the song mid-verse for a conversation about how we don't grab fire, how it's hot, and how to blow the candle out.

"Blow, Kelly." He demonstrates, blowing it out.

"NO! MINE!" She's extremely irate at the flame going away.

Tim watches Gibbs look at Abby and him with an amused smile on his face. Then he pulls out his lighter and relights it.

"Yours. Blow."

A big, wet, slobbery raspberry of a breath makes the candle flicker a little, but doesn't blow it out.

"Try again, Kelly." Abby says, smiling.

Second try is a charm, and the candle blows out, and Kelly looks disappointed because the fire is gone, and she liked the fire, but the presence of cake rapidly overcomes disappointed, and she's happily tearing into her cupcake.

"So, did you get more than one of them?" Abby asks.

"Eat all your lunch and you can find out," Gibbs says in his best dad voice.

Tim watches Kelly eating her cupcake and says, "Better late than never."

Abby gently pets his hand. "You lost a day, baby. Her birthday's today, not yesterday."

He blinks. "Really?"

Abby nods. "Really, we made it home in time."

He smiles at that, and feels tears come to his eyes. "Happy Birthday, Kelly. Got some presents somewhere."

"I'll go find them during her nap. This," she gestures to their daughter demolishing her cup cake, ecstatic on sugar, chocolate, and frosting, "is probably enough excitement for right now."

Tim smiles, wipes his eyes (very gently, anything near his nose hurts) and takes a bite of his lunch. It's just chicken and broccoli, same stir fry they've gotten from Chen's two hundred times before, but it's food, at home, and that feels good.

He takes another bite thinking about the five minutes it took to get from his office to the kitchen table. (Total distance thirty-two feet.) At least he can feed himself easily. That's a start. Though as he's chewing his chicken, it hits that he can feed himself this easily. Right now he can't cut anything. Hell, for the next six weeks he can't cut anything.

Actually, no. For the next six weeks he's in this cast. Then comes the wrist and finger braces. He probably can't cut anything for months, because his hand won't be up for anything until after he's been doing PT with it, and that's not happening until whenever the hell he finally gets out of all of this gear.

Tim flashes to the memory of being sixteen, at home, arm in his cast, The Admiral (who was The Captain then) saying, "You'll cut your own food, or you won't eat!"

His dad had already chewed him out, up, and down and inside out for wrecking the car. He'd actually called to chew him out, which was unheard of. (Use naval resources to communicate with his family? NEVER!) Normally, Tim wrote once a week (five hundred words, on the dot), and got a letter back once a week, and then they'd see/speak to each other when The Captain was on land. (He figures that's the only thing that kept him sane all those years.)

But then The Captain got home. He'd been in the cast for a week at that point, and no matter how good he was getting with his right hand, his left was in a cast, only the tips of his fingers sticking out, so he couldn't cut his own food.

His mom or sister had been cutting his food for him, but when The Captain got home that was the end of that. If he wanted to eat, he had to do it for himself. You are sixteen years old, more than old enough to fend for yourself. You got yourself into this, and you will deal with the consequences on your own. You'll cut your own food, or you won't eat!

Three weeks of sandwiches, soup, eggs, mashed potatoes, pasta, and veggies. The only meals his mom cooked with meat he could eat in them was stir fries, which was only once a week. (And the only reason he got to eat meat then was because she didn't keep chopsticks in the house. If, God forbid, they had gone to a Chinese or Japanese restaurant, the Captain would have demanded he use chopsticks, and he couldn't do that right-handed.) And, of course, since the crash was his birthday, and the Captain got home Christmas Eve, it meant he missed out on Christmas and New Year's dinners.

Finally The Captain went back to sea, and his mom started putting plates with the full meal on them, cut up, in front of him at dinner time again.



Abby can see something is going wrong. Tim is eating, fork in hand, chicken on fork, starting a conversation with Gibbs, and then it stops.

He's just sitting there, staring at the chicken.

"Tim?" she asks gently.

He looks up at her, very fragile air about him, eyes wet again, and says, "Stir fry." And then he burst into tears.



Lunch is stone cold by the time he's done crying, and Tim's exhausted, all he wants to do is crash and not wake up again until it's time to get out of his casts.

Abby and Gibbs are staring at him, not sure if they should be asking or not, because they don't know that story, and Kelly's fussing, because if anyone is crying, she's going to join in, too.

Tim shakes his head. Later. He can tell that story later. Or better yet, never.

He starts to push himself up to go back to the futon for another nap, when the fact that he's had one bite of food all day and he's hungry really hits. So he sits down, shoveling the food in, just trying to get himself fed so he can sleep.

Abby's told him about feeling crazy, like she had no emotional control when she was on the painkillers after Kelly was born, and obviously, it's not precisely the same, but right now he feels the same.

Like he's got no emotional reserves at all. Anything that hits the top of his brain is going to come out.

And he hates that.

So, sleep. Sleeping is good. Sleeping means not feeling, so bring on the sleep!

He finishes the last bite of food, pushes himself up, and starts the very slow journey toward his office.
Abby stays near him, helping him get settled onto the futon again, and he sacks out.



Neither Abby nor Gibbs are strangers to dealing gently with traumatized people, but the fact that it's their person makes it harder.

It's fairly nice outside, so Abby scoops up Kelly, and a blanket, and heads them outside. Kelly gets a prime bit of sun-shade dappled grass to hang out on, and she and Gibbs sit on the porch, where she can hear if Tim makes any noise, but they're far enough away they shouldn't disturb him.

Abby sighs, "On the upside, he's so drugged he literally can't just keep it in and let it fester."

Gibbs nods is agreement, and shakes his head, too. "Probably doesn't want this all out in front of everyone."

"I know. So prepare for an extra big helping of prickly, annoyed, irritable Tim to go along with sad, angry, hurting Tim. Not going to be a fun couple weeks at all."

Gibbs shrugs. Not like he's any fun to be around when he's in a bad mood, either. And he's hit them with pissed off, prickly, annoyed Gibbs for much less good reasons in the past.

"Dished enough of it out over the years. I can handle some taking it."

"Me, too."



It's about an hour later when Abby's cell buzzes. For a second she thought she'd lost time, and Tim needed more meds, but then it hit that she had a text.

Up for visitors? From Penny.

Think so. She types back. Really low key, and quiet, and he may be asleep, but yeah, I think he'd like to see you for a bit.

A thought hit, everyone was supposed to come over tonight for Kelly's birthday party. And best she knows no one has told Sarah anything. But she's supposed to be in their living room in six hours, and this is going to be a hell of a shock if she shows up in Happy Birthday mode and walking to assault/child abuse case from hell.

Abby looks at Gibbs. "He said he should talk to Sarah. Sooner rather than later. Penny's getting ready to come over, so… Should I ask her to bring Sarah?"

"Better question for him."

"I know, but I don't want to wake him up. And either we call Sarah in now, or I send her a text and tell her the birthday party is off, so… What do you think?"

"Penny knows here better than you and I do. Ask her."

Think picking up Sarah and bringing her along is a good plan?

Depends on Tim.

He said he wanted to talk to her, but he's sleeping right now, so I don't want to wake him up to double check.

Long silence on Penny's side. Then comes. We'll be there in an hour or so.

Okay. Abby texts back.



"So, what's got you sounding so depressed?" Sarah asks as she opens the door to Ducky and Penny. Penny had called and asked if they could talk, but wouldn't give her any details.

They both glance at each other, and then at her, and just because Sarah isn't "the super smart one" doesn't mean she didn't get the McGee brains double-barrel as well, and she knows that look can't mean anything good.

"What? Is it Dad? Or Tim? Or… Mom?"

Penny and Ducky head in, sitting on the sofa, as Sarah sits on the chair next to them, leaning in toward them to hear what's coming, but holding the arms tight, like she's bracing for impact.

Penny sighs, and her eyes are tearing, which makes Sarah even more nervous. Ducky waits a few breaths to see if Penny can say it, but she doesn't, or can't, so he does.

"Do you remember, last week, Timothy was going to be taking a mission that had everyone nervous?"

She nods. "Oh, God, yeah. Gibbs was edgy, really edgy, I remember that. Is he okay?"

"No." Ducky says firmly, and Sarah winces. "He will heal, eventually, but no, Timothy is not okay. And he is unlikely to be 'okay' any time soon." Ducky exhales. Sarah's already looking hurt and angry, but very curious, too. "The mission is still classified, so… You understand how this works. He boarded The Stennis," she goes white when she hears the name of the ship, "to run a test on the readiness of the Cyberteam to handle a cyber-attack. They failed. Your father was upset by this and attempted to have him murdered. He did not succeed. Timothy fought four attackers, spent the last week in the hospital, and was only able to come home yesterday. His doctors think, that with a lot of work, he will eventually regain the full use of his right arm and hand."

For a moment Sarah sits there, silent, shocked, unable to even begin to process that idea.

Finally she says, "It… just… No! You've got to be wrong. Okay, they don't get along but… No. Dad wouldn't… No."

Penny nods.

"No!" Sarah's tearing up. "NO! It can't… NO."

Ducky's using his 'calm' voice, honed by more years than Sarah's been alive of telling people horrible things they don't want to hear, and trying to, by tone alone, soften the blow of scaldingly painful truth. "Yes, Sarah. John ordered the attack that almost killed Timothy. His personal secretary arrested Timothy on trumped up espionage charges, pulled him away from the crowd, stuffed him in a jail cell with four other men who he told had just had family members killed by your brother, and they almost beat him to death before SecNav was able to get him out of there."

"So, wait…" Sarah latches onto that, desperate. "He didn't do it personally. So, he might not have… I mean…"

"Sarah," Penny speaks for the first time, "What did he always say if you tried to blame something on someone else?"

"Everything that happens on your watch is your responsibility." Sarah curls into herself, silent, shaking. She calms after a few moments. "But… He couldn't… Not…" She's looking for a way to get her dad out of this, because he's her dad, and the cold, hard fact that both of the people sitting in her living room believe he tried to kill her brother is sinking in and hurts worse than she could ever imagine anything hurting.

"Have you met Lt. Mane?" Penny asks.

Sarah nods. "Yeah." She presses on her eyes, trying to stave off crying. "Um. I mean, I don't know, but... I know enough not to ask, 'cause he'd explode, but, I think he's Dad's boyfriend."

"He loves your father?" Ducky asks gently.

"That's always the sense I got from him. Maybe he's just really devoted, but, I always thought there was more. Little things like turning the handle of the coffee cup in toward him when he'd give it to Dad, or just… nothing blatant, but just little courtesies you do for someone you love."

Ducky nods. That fits his idea of John fairly well. "Your brother's attack on The Stennis made the ship think it was under attack. It made everyone on board think that they had targeted another ship, and the people in the computer lab thought they had fired on the Borealis. Things like that happened through the entire carrier group. After the red alert ended, and they moved onto trying to track the hacker, Mane found four people on board who had family on the Borealis, he told each of them that their loved one was unaccounted for, and that more than 200 people were already confirmed dead."

Sarah gasps at that, knowing exactly how that'd go over.

"Then he told them the man who made the ship fire was on board. He isolated them so they couldn't learn The Stennis didn't actually fire. He arranged for them to all be waiting in the brig for Timothy. He 'arrested' Timothy. He brought him down there. He told the Warden to 'take a walk', and then he locked your brother in a cell with those four men. Would he have done that to his lover's son without express permission and approval?"

She whimpers, unable to stop her tears any longer.

For several moments, Ducky sits between them, rubbing Sarah's back, and holding Penny's hand.

Sarah eventually pulls herself together, eyes red and puffy, voice rough. "May get the use of his right hand back? What did they do?"

"They broke his nose, one tooth, dislocated his shoulder, broke his arm in four places, dislocated his wrist, broke it in two places, and then broke his thumb, index finger, twice, and middle finger. They broke his ribs in six places and dislocated his ankle and broke his foot in four more places. They gave him a concussion and bruised probably eighty-five percent of his body."

Sarah whimpers at that, biting her lip.

"He spent the last week in the hospital in traction, and just got home last night. We were hoping to see him, and wanted to know if you'd like to come with us."

She inhales in a quick gasp. "Um, yeah. I do. Dad?"

She sees Penny's eyes narrow, and she knows that look, it's very hot and very dangerous. But Penny still doesn't say anything, so Ducky answers. "Lt. Mane, orchestrated the attack, and then killed himself, leaving a note saying it was all his idea. Your father is in his ship, and last we heard, heading toward Pearl Harbor."

"No one else thinks he did it?" She grasps on that hope, that maybe he didn't, and Ducky can see what's happening with this, anything to try and keep the illusion intact. He crushes it.

"My dear, everyone knows he ordered it. No one can prove it. And, when you are an Admiral, you can get away with whatever you like, as long as there is no concrete proof of what you have done. Mane made sure he could never talk, and thus made sure there could never be any concrete proof against your father. However, as of this morning, he had been quietly dropped from the Presidential Counsel on Drone Warfare. I'm keeping an eye on it, but my guess is that he is likely being quietly dropped from the different high ranking assignments he has as well as the charitable boards he's part of, too. That should tell you everything you need to know about what the people around him think happened."

She's still biting her lip, hard. "So, what, he just gets away with it?"

She sees a quick glance between Ducky and Penny, and then Penny says, "No."

And Sarah, who grew up in a house where some things weren't asked about and other things weren't talked about (like for example, in ninth grade she took biology, and noticed that not only was it impossible for her to have brown eyes, what with no one else in her family having them, but she is also the only member of the family with a cleft chin), sees that glance and does not ask any other questions.



"Hi!" Abby manages to sound fairly perky and excited when Penny and Ducky and Sarah pull up. She smiles at them, and then pulls Penny into a warm hug.

She's not sure, what, or how to convey, I'm really sorry you're hurting, and I don't want you to be hurting, but your son is evil, and if I wasn't following Tim's lead on this I'd hunt him down, capture him, drug him, give him to Jimmy, who'd work him over for months, until every single cell of his body screams for relief, then he'd give him back to me, and I'd make him realize that Jimmy doesn't even know how to find pain on a map, let alone really inflict it. And really, it's probably better not to convey that, so she just hugs Penny, and then Sarah.

Gibbs and Penny look at each other, and there's a lot in that look. A whole lot. Thousands of words about pain and loss and hate and revenge and mercy all distilled down into one long look. Then Gibbs takes a step forward, pulls Penny into a hug, and says, so softly she can barely hear it, and no one else can, "He doesn't want it, so I'm not doing it."

She pulls back from Gibbs, another long look passing between them, and whatever might be going on, they appear to be at some sort of peace. Gibbs holds open his arms and Sarah heads in close for a hug.

"I take it you're getting some sun and letting Timothy rest?" Ducky says as Gibbs holds Sarah. He picks up Kelly, "Hello, Birthday Girl." She smiles wide and bright at her Duck picking her up.

Abby nods at that. "Yeah. Felt like I was inside that hospital room for months."

"Sunshine will help with that."

Gibbs quietly says, "Hoping to get him out here, some, too. Fresh air never hurt anyone."

"May we see Timothy?" Ducky asks.

"He's probably sleeping, but yeah, head in," Abby says. "He's going to need some more pain meds soon, so when you hear the alarm go off—"

"I know what to do." Ducky smiles gently and hands Kelly over to Abby.



They're about to step into the house, when Ducky gently squeezes Penny's hand. He saw the photos that went with Tim's medical records, but he deleted them before the others could, mostly to make sure that Tony and Ziva didn't immediately run to San Francisco and kill John.

But, because he'd done that, Penny knows intellectually, but not viscerally, what they're about to walk in on. And Sarah, who only got the second hand account without any of the real details, is going to have an even less concrete understanding of what they're about to walk in on.

"He's going to look terrible."

They nod. He knows Penny thinks she's ready to see this. Thinks she has an idea of what is waiting for them, but… he knows she doesn't. And Sarah… He's not sure if Sarah's even seen anyone wounded before, let alone the shape Tim's going to be in.

And unfortunately, 'terrible' is pretty much all he can offer. He can list swelling and bruises, and cuts and all the rest of it, but until you actually see it, and feel seeing it, it's at best… academic.

"Sarah," Abby says, catching them on the porch. "Hey, how about one at a time? Besides, I've got a question for you, and…"

Sarah nods, feeling her stomach knot up, getting a sense of exactly how bad terrible has to be.



He's sleeping, on the futon, left leg propped up on a pillow, right arm bound by his cast and sling across his stomach.

And for a second there, before anything else really hits, he could just be grabbing a nap.

But it's only a second because between that first glance, the one that sent the 'reclining grandson' message to Penny's brain, and the next, the part of her brain that registers details like color begins to scream. From what she can see almost none of his skin is… skin colored, his skin colored.

She steels herself to look more closely, see the bruises, see the bandages, the casts, the swelling, the fact that he's asleep and on a pile of pain medication and his face is still pinched and tight, and as all of that filters through a small, involuntary cry escapes the lips she's biting, hard.

"Oh, God, Ducky," she whispers it.

He's holding her hand, other arm wrapped around her back. "I know, dear. I know." He's stroking gently over her back. "He will heal."

She nods, still biting her lip.



"So, what's the question?" Sarah's still looking at the house, like she could look through it and see Tim.

Abby feels a little off asking this, but Tim didn't say, and she wants to know, and more important, she wants him only dealing with one new person at a time, so… "This has… obviously, got him thinking about the stuff with your dad, and… he's on a ton of pain meds, too, so it's not like his filters are really working, but… We're eating lunch, and he looks at it, says, 'Stir fry' and bursts into tears. By the time he got done, all he wanted to do was sleep, so we didn't press him, but if you know…"

"Shit… Yeah." She sighs. "Yeah, I do. He got that car, first car, sixteen-years-old, has his license, and" she hits her palm with her fist, "the bus hits him like a bug on a windshield. Broken arm, traction, finally gets home, and two days later, Dad shows up, chews him up something fierce about being stupid and irresponsible, and then it's dinner, and I'd been cutting up Tim's food because he couldn't cut anything for himself, only the tips of his fingers were sticking out of the cast. Dad says no. Tim's got to cut his own food if he wants to eat. He's okay with vegetables and potatoes and stuff like that, stuff that's small or you can cut with the side of your fork, but he can't eat meat because he can't cut it himself. So, pretty much the only meals where he got to eat everything was when Mom made stir fries."

"Oh."

Gibbs looks ready to ship out and take care of John right now. That level of meaningless pettiness, on top of everything else…

"It was Christmas holiday, so no ham, no turkey, no roast beef. We did lots of holiday parties that year, at least, I think we did, they kind of blend, but I think that was the last year he was still a Captain, pushing toward Admiral, so, lots of sit down dinners, and Tim had to keep turning down food and explaining why. First time he told the truth, and that got one of the other officer's wives looking at Dad like he was a monster, so Tim got chewed out for that, and for all the rest of the parties he had to pretend to be a vegetarian. Navy holiday parties, he took a lot of shit from a lot of guys over 'not eating meat,' and I think Dad kept ribbing him about being gentle and not wanting to kill things, and about not showing proper respect to his hosts by refusing their meals.

"That one really pissed Tim off. We were… I don't remember, but the meal was lamb, and it was good, and he likes lamb, and he turned to Dad and said, 'You're right, this is terribly rude.' He turns to our hostess, 'I'm sorry. I don't wish to offend you. I can't cut anything right now, but if you don't mind my sister cutting it for me, I will be happy to eat anything you offer and accept it in the spirit you've offered it.' Perfect military posture, the right manners, proper little officer in training, which really impressed the hostess, and when he started complimenting her on how good the lamb was, he got a few extra helpings of it, which he enjoyed, until they got home, and then I got sent to my room, and there was a lot of yelling." Sarah's sitting on the porch step, watching Kelly roll on her blanket, but not really seeing it.

"Stuff like that isn't normal, is it?"

Abby rubs her back. "No. Families fight, and yell, and piss each other off, but… No, that's not normal."



Tim wakes up and finds Penny sitting next to him.

"Hey, how you feeling?" she says, managing a really fake looking smile.

He snorts and winces, because that hurts, and says, "Probably about the physical equivalent of where you are."

Penny nods. "Yeah. It's been a shit week for both of us."

"I'm sorry." His eyes are tearing up at that. "If I hadn't—"

"You hush now." She shakes her head. "None of that. You've got nothing to be sorry for. You should be able to do your job without it antagonizing your father so badly that he…" She can't finish that sentence. "It should have been okay."

He nods, tearing up, hating that everything is making him cry. "Yeah." He reaches out his hand and she takes it. "But, I'm allowed to feel sympathy for you, right? This can't be… easy."

"Yeah, it's not," she manages a real, but very sad, smile.

"I'm sorry."

"I know. I am, too." She wipes her own eyes. "I'm so sorry."

Tim swallows, hard. "I know." He breathes as deeply as he can without hurting himself. Not all that deep. "Not your fault. Not mine. Empathy, not blame. It just is how it is." He's got a feeling he'll be telling himself, and her, that, a lot, in the months to come.

"Abby says you'll be out of this stuff soon."

He tilts his head, looking annoyed. "Sooner than if it was a collection of old-fashioned casts, but not 'soon' on any real scale. Probably be winter before my right hand really works again."

She's stroking his hand, deep sorrow, very nervous, some fear mixed on her face. "What happens now?"

He's too drugged to lie convincingly. And it's probably really obvious that he's picking his words carefully. "Out of our hands, now. How much do you know?"

"We have read the report Agent Burley sent," Ducky replies. Tim jerks a little, noticing for the first time that Ducky's in the room. "I've been doing some googling on your father, and saw he was dropped from the Presidential Commission on Drone Warfare. Do you know more?"

"SecNav made it clear that The Admiral is too high up to hit, not without real proof. But this stinks enough that he's political plutonium. He's being cut out of the picture so he can't damage the chances of all those assholes who always ignored who he really was so they could use what he could do."

Tim realizes it's literally the same assholes. Twenty years passed and the exact same people are just shuffling their positions around. He winces at that.

Ducky sees it and asks, "How is your pain?" while helping him to sit up.

"Not too bad right now. Head's swimming every time I move, but I only ache all over."

Ducky nods. "Do you want more medicine now, or would you like to hold off for an hour or so?"

"More now."

"I'll get it."

He sits still for a few seconds, then starts to shift around. Ducky and Penny are both awfully spry for octogenarians, but neither of them finds it easy to sit on the floor. "If you'd give me a hand up, I can get to the sofa."

Penny does, and he slowly gets himself up, and begins the trip to the sofa, one small step at a time. His speed is getting better though, because it only takes him a minute to get there, and once he's down, he opens his arm toward Penny, offering a hug.

She sits next to him, accepting his arm around her, very carefully settling in against him.

"This okay?"

"Yeah. Just, no sudden moves, and don't lean in. Got a lot of broken ribs. Right's worse than left though."

"Oh, baby."

"I know. So… Sarah?"

"Outside, talking to Gibbs and Abby. Didn't want to hit you with everyone at once."

He nods, already feeling tired, but he needs to see her, too. Ducky hands over a cup of tea and an apple along with his pills, which Tim takes.

"This is going to knock me out soon, so let's get her in here before I pass out."

"You want us to stay?"

"Think I'd like a minute alone with her."



Penny and Ducky head out to the front porch, and nod at Sarah. Abby scoops up Kelly, and decides to go in with her. She's got a sense that Tim wants alone time with his sister, but she also wants someone to be able to extricate him from the situation should the need arise.

So, head in, keep a discrete eye on things for a moment, and if all is well, put Kelly down for her nap.

They head in, and Abby starts to head toward the office, when she hears, "In here."

She turns them around toward the living room, saying, "Hey, up and moving around."

Tim takes a bite of his apple. "Sitting up and eating, too." Abby gently puts Kelly on his lap, and he puts the apple down so he can hold her close.

Sarah's stopped dead and is just staring at him, in horror.

He looks at her, tries to give her something of a wry smile, and says, "Tomorrow, I'll have some even more impressive tricks, like being awake for more than an hour at a time."

"Oh, Tim."

She starts to rush over, and then stops a few feet short, not sure if she can touch him.

He holds out his arm to her, saying, like he did to Penny, "Really gentle. Lots of broken ribs, but I can use all the hugs I can get."

Sarah carefully sits next to him, cuddling in with very tentative movements, watching him carefully for any sign of pain.

Abby decides they look like they're all right, so she picks Kelly up, getting kisses for her from Tim and Sarah, and then takes her upstairs.

They both sit there silently. Tim because his brain is slowing to a crawl, tired, pain meds, too much emotional stuff going on. Sarah because she just doesn't know what to do. It's not that she thought he was lying, or exaggerating, or making stuff up. She remembers some of it, and the bits she didn't see, she still remembers the feel of, that everyone walking on eggshells, afraid to make a wrong move and send the whole house of cards tumbling.

But the same man who did this to her brother is the man who knows she loves shot glasses and has brought her one from every city he's ever been to. (Even bought some plain glass ones and wrote things like Al Khobar on them so she had ones to mark the 'dry' cities he'd been to.) Same man who bought 1000 copies of her first book and gave it to every one of his officers with a pre-teen daughter.
And she didn't have a way to make that mesh. So, she filed what happened to Tim as 'very bad stuff that happened a long time ago when everyone was very unhappy and tense and didn't know any better.' Because back then everything was unhappy and tense and everyone was a mess and always fighting about everything unless someone else was watching, then they all plastered the stupid grins on their faces and pretended. But Tim moved out, and Mom and Dad got divorced, and everything got better.

There was air in her home again, and people could breathe again, even laugh.

Tim lived it longer than she did. And he took all of the brunt. And he missed the good years. She knows that, and that's why she didn't hold it against him that he couldn't forgive or forget. That's why she never expected him, too either.

But this didn't happen a long time ago. This is a fucking atrocity that happened last week. And it can't be overlooked, or pushed into a little box, or forgotten, and… And she doesn't want to be the kind of person who can forgive this, either.

She pulls back a little, so she can really look at Tim, see all the damage. His eyes are closed, and she can feel the tension in his body melting away.

"I'm still awake."

"Not for long."

"Yeah, well, pain meds."

"What are you doing in March?"

He licks his lips, thinking, and she realizes she might as well have asked him to factor a quadratic right now. Finally he says, "New baby." He doesn't see Sarah's eyebrows shoot up, and it doesn't hit him that they hadn't let the wider world know about Sean, yet. "Not sleepin', changin' diapers, gettin' spit up on."

She smiles and kisses him gently. "Think you can take a break from that for a few hours, put on your fancy kilt, and give me away at my wedding?"

"Yeah," he nods, and she sees tears slipping down his face.

She kisses him again. "How about you get horizontal and take another nap?"

He nods, and she helps him get lying down, foot propped up, and then heads outside to sit on the porch.



Penny moves closer to her, but she just shakes her head. Lots of thinking to do. What do you do with something like this? Somehow screaming doesn't seem like enough.

"Now what?" she finally asks. "He's still out there, on his ship, sailing around. What happens now?"

Ducky and Penny and Gibbs all have answers to that, but they aren't necessarily answers they want to share with her.

"I mean, he doesn't just get away with it, right? Something's supposed to happen?"

"Something'll happen," Gibbs says, guardedly.

"What, you going to dust off your rifle and get some extra-strength glasses?"

"He's asked me not to do that." And that's as close as Gibbs is willing to get to saying, in front of Penny, that that's exactly what he was going to do.

"Why on Earth would he ask you not to do that!"

Gibbs sighs. Part of him wants to yell the same thing at Tim. But he knows why, knows the logical reason behind it. "Because protecting his family is more important to him than revenge. Because he's a good father, husband, brother, and son, and he loves the people around him enough to not put any of them in a sticky situation."

Most of the time Sarah spends with Gibbs these days, he's in Pop-mode, fun, soft, little goofy, doting over his baby girls. But saying that reminds her of the fact that there's a killer in there. A man who really would have killed her father, and from the looks of it, enjoyed it, and that the only reason he hasn't is that her brother doesn't want it.

"He's in the Pacific?"

Gibbs nods. "Think they shipped out on Monday."

She nods at that, pulling her cell out of her pocket. She hits his contact button, heading over to Penny's car, getting in, not wanting the entire neighborhood to hear this conversation, but not wanting to head inside with it and risk waking up Tim or Kelly.

He's looking sleepy and disheveled when he clicks on Skype, and from the dark lighting and the Navy t-shirt, she's sure he was asleep when she called.

"Tell me you didn't order it," her voice is hot.

"Sarah?"

"Tell me you didn't order it."

He blinks, sitting up, turning the light on, stalling. "Order what?"

"Surprise inspection of the flight deck! I'm calling you in the middle of the fucking night the day my brother got home from the hospital. What the fuck orders do you think I'm asking about?"

He looks nonplussed. "I take it you've talked to them." There's disdain in his voice on 'them' as if he's speaking of some sort of subhuman creature that disgusts him.

"That's not an answer."

"I refuse to dignify those accusations with an answer. The case is over. The men who assaulted your brother are in prison and will stay there because they have all pleaded guilty."

She's watching him over the screen, staring at his face, he's tired, he's angry, he's… not lying because he hasn't made any claims, but, he's not being forthcoming either.

"He's your son. How could you… And even if you hate Tim for being Tim, he's my brother and Penny's grandson, and he's a dad and a husband and… How could you do it? You don't give a fuck about him, fine, but how could you put Penny and Mom and I through this?"

His eyes narrow. She can read the annoyance on his face. "I have not put you, your mother, or grandmother through anything."

She spends a quiet moment just looking, and then says back, "Everything that happens under your command is on you. How many times did you chew out Tim because I misbehaved while he was in charge? How many times did we hear that line?"

"I have thousands of men under my command. Your brother was in charge of making sure a seven-year-old cleaned her room. They are not analogous situations."

"I know Mane set the attack. And he is not 'thousands of men.' He was your man. I know he was in love with you. I know you were fucking him. And I know he wouldn't have done it if he thought it would have made you angry, because he spent his whole life tiptoeing around you the same way Mom did, trying to make sure everything was just perfect for you so you were happy. So… quit the shit and be honest for me for a moment, why? Why do that to him?"

Sarah's never actually seen her father go apoplectic before. She's heard it, but that sort of thing was always kept behind closed doors, and kept to a muffled roar when she was supposed to be 'asleep.'

His face has gone red, his eye is twitching, and she knows she's hit every button he has and is absolutely pounding them.

"You shut your bleeding cunt mouth about that, you ignorant whore. And you don't say another word until your brain is thinking again and not that gutter filth spewing out your mouth. You do not know a single fucking thing about anything involving Lt. Mane and I, and you never have. And if you think anything like that you're the dumbest bitch to ever walk this earth. I'm not a fag and neither was he, and don't you ever go disrespecting his memory again. Mane was a good man, and a good sailor, and… and if you were young enough I'd get off this damn ship and teach you some manners for even suggesting that such a thing could possibly happen!"

"You're more angry about the idea of Mane being gay than the fact he tried to have Tim killed."

"He was doing his job! Protecting me!"

"From what? A test? Ordered by the SecNav? What the hell did Tim do that required his death to avenge?"

John doesn't answer. She can see his pulling his brain back online, can see the controlled part coming back into play, he knows there's no good answer to that question, knows how much he revealed with the 'doing his job' bit. His eyes slowly close, and then open again.

"We're done. I'm not talking to you when you're hysterical."

"We are not done. You are going to listen to me or you are going to pay the consequences and you will not like them." She can see him reaching for the off button as she says, "The statute of limitations for child abuse is twenty years. That puts Tim out of play, but not me."

His hand stops, and he looks concerned. "I never touched you!"

"I will lie. I write fiction. I make shit up ten hours a day, and I'm damn good at it, and right now, I'm less than twenty feet away from a cop who's dying to go after you and a forensic scientist who will make me evidence to frame you if I ask her to. On top of that, I don't care if everyone on earth ends up knowing I was lying. Hell, lying to hurt a child abuser means I'm going to sell a shit ton more books, so it's all good for me. And it's all pain for you because everything you've ever done to Tim will come out in that trial, too, and maybe you can't be convicted of anything, but right now I don't care about that, all I want is pain. As much pain as I can lay on you. So that's that. You're going to resign, give up the Navy, lose everything you've ever loved, or I will go to the cop who is standing less than twenty feet away from me and file formal charges against you."

"Sarah—"

"No. SecNav, or the President, on your phone, right now, three way Skype, I am watching you resign, or trust me, I will file the report and my 500,000 Twitter followers will very shorty know that I filed the report and every news agency and scandal sheet on Earth will be waiting for you at Pearl when you land."

He's silent, and she can see him touch his phone several times. A few seconds later she hears ringing, followed by who she assumes is the Secretary of the Navy, looking very surprised to see her father (and her likely) on his Skype.

"As of 04:47 this morning, I am resigning my commission," John bites out.

The SecNav smiles, but his eyes are cold, and that one glance tells Sarah everything she needs to know about what happened with Tim. "The President will be pleased to hear it. When you reach Pearl formal papers will be drawn up and we'll take care of the particulars. Your country thanks you for your service and your excellent timing in regards to your well-deserved retirement."

John nods curtly and hangs up on SecNav. "Satisfied?" he asks Sarah.

"Enough. Don't call me. Don't look me up. Don't drop by to visit again. We are done. You cannot do that to my brother and expect to keep me in your life." And then without another word she hangs up.
She can feel herself shaking, part mad, part nervous, part just… everything.

Then she gets out of the car, tucks her phone into her pocket, and sees Gibbs, Abby, Ducky, and Penny staring at her.

"As of a minute ago, Dad resigned his commission."

"What did you do?" Penny asks.

"I told him I'd bring formal charges against him for child abuse. Told him the statute of limitations is twenty years, but… Hell, I don't know if it is or not, but… I told him Tim might be out of the game for that, but I wasn't, and that I had no problem whatsoever lying about it to smear him. Told him he'd have every press service on Earth waiting for him in Pearl if he didn't do it while I was on the phone."
She can see them all staring at her, not sure if that's shock, or doubt that she could do it, or what, so she goes a bit further. "In the old media days, the main job of a publishing company was to make books. Books are easy now. Hell, I could teach Gibbs to make one in less than fifteen minutes. These days it's about drumming up publicity to sell books. Tim hires his publicity out. I make my own. I've got hundreds of thousands of fans, their families, friends, writers, and publishers all following me on Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook. Even if it came out I was lying to get payback for my brother, who actually was abused, I'm still gonna be a hero. So, a threat where I'd ruin him and make myself even more popular, a crusade where there's no downside for me, and all downside for him… It made him fold. He called SecNav, and he's done."

Abby, Gibbs, Penny, and Ducky stand there, remembering why it is you do not piss a McGee woman off.

Next

Friday, September 26, 2014

Shards To A Whole: Miles To Go

McGee-centric character study/romance. Want to start at the beginning? Click here.

Chapter 393: Miles To Go

"Okay Mr. McGee, let's see about getting you out of this!" The orthopedic surgeon says.

"Please." In that he's attached to his right arm, he hasn't been able to escape noticing that it's swaddled in a huge mass of bandages, casts, various support structures and the like.

He's seen buildings covered in scaffolding that had less crap on them than his right arm does now.

He's also approving the small and light looking tray the Doc's brought in as well. The thing on it kind of looks like what would happen if Spiderman built Buckey Barnes' prosthetic arm, with a few extra electronics tossed in for… he doesn't know, shits and giggles maybe.

It's a rigid web a plastic, that from the looks of it, is going from his pectoral muscle to his fingertips.
It's not what he thinks of as being a 'cast' though.

"That's new," Tim says as the nurses are very gently detaching the weights from the cords that are attached to his fingers and keeping his wrist in the right place.

"Yeah, it is. Those two," The Doc looks at Jimmy and Abby, "said you wouldn't mind being a test case."

Cutting edge medical tech. That appeals to Tim. "No. Don't mind at all."

The doc holds it up. "We're really excited about these. Once we got your arm back together, we took scans of it, and fed them into the computer, and got this printed out."

Very Cool, Read More
"3D printed casts, made for me?"

"Yep, strong, light, because of the web-like structure you can get it wet with no problems. Plenty of ventilation for your skin, so it won't start to smell funky and don't have to worry about accidentally tearing up your skin to scratch an itch. It's thin enough it should fit under most of your clothing without a problem." The Doc picks up the electronics. "These are the really cool part. They make tiny sonic vibrations, that encourage your bones to heal faster. With the number of breaks you've got it's going to take a while, but twenty minutes a day, pop the vibration head into the right hole in the web." The Doc holds up the vibration head, and the cast, and Tim does notice that some of the holes… Shit, ten of them… are white while the rest of the cast is black. "Let it do its thing, then onto the next one for another twenty minutes, and, assuming it works the way it's supposed to, we should have you down to a sling and braces for your wrist and fingers in only six weeks."

Tim nods. Only six weeks was actually longer than he was hoping for, but judging by how excited the orthopedic specialist is, and the way Jimmy's grinning at him, only six weeks is apparently a major improvement over whatever the normal length of time someone with as many breaks as he's got would have spent in a cast.

"We've got one for your foot, as well. Probably only need that one for a month."

That sounds a bit better.

"We'd offer for your ribs or nose, but it's not tested, at all, for any sort of break near a vital organ, and we wouldn't cast them anyway. If you mess around with it, write down what happens, okay."

"Uh… okay." He's thinking 'not tested for any sort of break near a vital organ' means he's happy to just leave it alone, but maybe if he gets frustrated enough on slowly healing up he'll do some research and mess around with it.

By now the nurse has his arm out of the previous bandages and casts and he's getting a chance to look at it for the first time since… God, his shower Friday morning.

"Is it… Tuesday?"

Abby nods.

He sighs. His arm is still covered in blue, purple, green, yellow bruises, swollen more or less from top to bottom, and there's a long incision down his bicep and forearm.

"Cuts?"

"We had to use screws to put your humerus and radius back together. Can't do that without opening your arm up."

"Oh." On the upside, they didn't have to cut through his tattoo. He thinks it'll still look right when everything heals up.

"Good to see no infection." The Doc cracks open the cast. "It's got hinges on this side, and fastens together here. Antibiotic ointment on the incision sites for the next few days."

"All right." Abby says. "Bandages?"

Doc shakes his head. "You need to be in this cast as much as you can. In a week or so, it's going to start to seem too big, because the swelling will go down and you won't be moving your arm, so you'll head to your orthopedic surgeon back home, and he'll hook you up with a new cast that'll fit better. And probably once more before you're out of this all together, but except for when he's popping your arm out of the one and putting it into the next, you stay in the cast."

"I can do that."

"Good. I run into too many kids who look at one of these things, notice they can open them, and then decide that since they're feeling mostly better it's time to get out of it. The only thing I like better about plaster casts is that most people couldn't get out of one on their own without letting me know they'd done it."

"I'll keep it on."

"Very good." The Doc very gently places Tim's arm in the new cast. Even very gently, it hurts. And he gently closes it up and snaps the web into place. That hurts, too. And then it's done, and Tim can at least see his arm, and he's not tied to little weights that were pulling his wrist into the right place.
That's progress. After a minute he's done the same thing for Tim's foot.

"Okay, technically, if you want to try to use a crutch, you can. On your left side. But you've also got three broken ribs on the left, so you might want to just stay with a wheelchair for at least a week or so. I'll let you play that by ear. Just remember, this cast is strong, but it is not a walking cast. You put your full weight on this, and it will break. So, don't try to just hobble around on it like it's a walking cast. You want to get up, grab a crutch or cane or something to put your weight on."

Tim nods at that. Idea of actually getting up is both something he's eager for and terrified of. Just shifting the non-broken leg around hurt, attempting to put weight on it might be a very bad idea.

But very bad idea or not, he is sure as hell going to try because he's sick of being in this damn bed, and the idea of actually getting a shower sounds like heaven.

Once he's got the casts in place and the instructions for dealing with them, (And more importantly, Abby has those instructions, because right now he's doing well if he can keep a constant thought in his head for half an hour) everyone other than Abby heads out to let the nurses get him completely unhooked.

So, he can understand, rationally, why you'd tape the catheter tube to the leg of the person who's wearing it, but in that he's been strapped to the damn bed (so it's not like he was going to go anywhere) and they didn't bother to remove any of his leg hair first, peeling the tape off hurt like a bastard, and set him up with a perfectly rectangular patch of brand new bruise on what was one of the few places he didn't have any bruises.

As for removing the tube… Okay, honestly, not that bad, more an issue in his head than his dick, still having a strange woman grab his penis is really off-putting, and he's very glad he was unconscious when they put it in.

Saying goodbye to the IV meant more bruises on top of skin that's already bruised. He's got no idea what the hell adhesive they used on the tape but apparently it's designed to create unbreakable bonds with human skin. He feels like the back of his hand and wrist got peeled off along with the tape.

Last bit was the bandages binding his chest. More tight taping, fortunately this wasn't adhesive side against his skin. He's got to sit up for that, which takes a bit of help, and Abby's hands on his shoulders to help keep him steady, but after a minute he's free of the bandages. Tim tries inhaling deeply, and decides that feels like being stabbed in the chest in about six places, and maybe he doesn't need to do that again anytime soon.

But finally, he's free of the various bonds of the hospital, and though the nurses offered to stay and help, Abby shooed them out. So he's unhooked, and alone with his wife.

He's sitting up, on his own, without the support of the mattress behind his back and eyeballing the bathroom where rumor has it there's a shower.

Abby smiles at him. "Twelve feet to the door, and four more to the shower. Let's go."

Tim nods. And then blinks. Might as well be two miles away. He starts to shift the one leg over, and it eventually complies, sore, achy, bruised, sprained, hasn't really moved in days, but eventually it meanders over to the side of the bed in an attempt to get him facing the doorway to the bathroom.

His left leg eventually, more slowly, follows suit, and after some shifting around on his hips he manages to get facing the edge of the bed.

Abby heads to his left side, wrapping his arm over her shoulders. "Okay, easing down slowly on your right foot."

He nods, and slowly, gently slides the four inches from the edge of the bed to the floor. He whimpers slightly as he makes contact with the ground. His bruised up foot isn't much liking it, and the broken ribs on his left are complaining about Abby supporting him on that side, while the ones on his right are even less happy about her hand resting on them.

"Can you keep your weight on your right foot?"

He bites out a brief, "Yeah."

She lets go of his chest and re-adjusts her grasp to his hips. "Okay, lean into me."

He does, and she makes sure she's got him secure. "Better?"

"Yeah."

"Okay, off we go."

They're two steps into the journey when he says, "Probably a good thing I'm already naked. Can you imagine how long this would take if you had to get me undressed at the end of this."

She smiles at him. "Find that out tomorrow. Got some very soft pajamas waiting for you."

He nods, soft clothing sounds really great right about now. He never thought that days of naked would be an issue, but right now, looking at another night on hospital sheets, soft flannel jammy pants and a t-shirt sound great.

"Got something else, too."

"What?"

"It's a surprise. Once you're all cleaned up and dressed again."

Two more steps and they're in the bathroom. Where there's a mirror. A horrified and pained whimper slips out of him as he sees his face. Four days means that a lot of the swelling is down, and they did put his nose back into the right place, but his face is still black and blue, his lips and eyebrow and the bridge of his nose are all cut and split.

"Oh God."

Abby pets him gently.

He whimpers again, looking at the rest of himself. He could see some of the damage before, mostly his left arm. He had a blanket over most of him, and bandages on his right arm and chest for almost all of the last four days, so this is really the first unobstructed view of all of himself and the fact that this is how he's looking four days after the attack makes him want to throw up.

Abby very gently strokes his back as he stares at the bruises and the cuts and all the swollen, strained bits. He feels like it's not really his body. He can feel all of it, and then some. Seeing it makes everything he wasn't noticing all go jumping to the front of his mind, and he starts to cry. Half physical pain, half emotional distress at seeing himself.

"Okay, come on, let's sit down." There's a little seat in the shower, and Abby gets him on it. Not enough room for two people to sit on it, so she kneels in front of him, holding his legs, kissing the unbruised bits of his knees, very, very gently stroking her hands over his skin.

She figures this is probably like seeing herself after having Kelly that first time and feeling like her body was completely destroyed. And she knows the last thing she wanted to hear was some sort of happy, feel good bullshit, so she just holds on and lets him cry.

And when he stops, she stands up, fiddling with the shower controls, turning the water on so it's coming out of the shower head that's attached to the hose, and letting it pour down the drain right now, warming up.

She kisses the top of his head. "Back in a few seconds, gotta get your stuff."

Tim nods at her and starts to shift a bit, so he's facing into the shower. He thinks about reaching for the shower hose, but it's on the wrong side of him, and bending down to grab it sounds like it'll hurt, so he just sits there, feeling devastated.

He thought he'd gotten through and dealt with and all that other shit you do when your Dad's a complete fucking asshole and you've got to live with it. He thought he was done. But he's looking at his body, beaten to a pulp, and dealing with that fact that John didn't just let it happen, he made it happen. He wanted this, and more than this, and it's hitting Tim in waves of revulsion how deep that hate has to go, how sick you've got to be that this would be okay. He's breathing deep (as much as he can without hurting) and steady, because he doesn't want to throw up, and even though the toilet and sink are only a few feet away, he doesn't think he can make it on his own, and given how much breathing hurts, puking's going to kill him, so, deep, steadying breaths.

Abby comes in, sees the way he's breathing, and drops the clothing and toiletries. She's kneeling in front of him again, holding his left hand carefully, stroking the back of his neck.

"He let them do this to me."

She nods.

"He wanted this." The crying ramps back up again. "Wanted worse than this." Tim's shaking with fear and anger in addition to crying, and she's holding onto him as best as she can, cuddling and wrapping him in as much love as touch can convey.

Several minutes later, they both hear a tentative knock on the door along with Jimmy saying, "Need an extra hand?"

Tim shakes his head, so Abby calls out. "We're good."

"Okay. Holler if you need help."

Tim wipes his eyes, forcing fear and anger back, some, can't spend all day in here. He sniffs. "Let's get this done."

Abby strokes his face. "We can take as long as you need."

"I know. Just… want to be done. Want to get home and back to normal as soon as I can."

"Okay. Let's get you washed off and dressed."

Warm water feels good. Gently being washed is nice. Abby naked in the shower with him is something he approves of, but mostly in a this is pleasant and comforting and intimate sort of way. The sex part of his brain isn't online right now. Getting his hair washed felt really good, apparently his scalp isn't too badly bruised up.

"Want me to shave you?" Abby asks once she's got his hair rinsed out.

"Nah. Unless you want to."

"Don't need to. I think we're done." She turns the water off and begins to gently dry him off. That's good, too. When she's done, she eyeballs the toilet. "Want some alone time?"

"I'm good on that for right now." He can see his clothing sitting on the sink, and knows that since he's sitting on a wet seat in the shower that not all of him is dried off. "I need to stand up, don't I?"

"Probably make finishing this up easier."

He eyes the hand rails along the walls of the shower. They, like everything else in the universe, are built for righties. Once he's standing, he can grab them easily. But, if the idea is to hold on to help get himself standing, they're on the wrong side.

Abby sees what he's doing. "Okay, let's get you up, then you grab, and I'll get you all dry."

Plan in play, they get to it, and in a few seconds he's dried off, and sitting on the toilet while Abby gets his jammy pants over the cast on his foot. Up again for a few seconds to get them pulled up over his hips, and for the first time in days he's actually dressed.

Tim's eyeballing his deodorant when it hits him that he can't put it on. Can't use his left arm to put it on the left side, (He guesses that maybe he could, normally, but the idea of trying to get his arm into position for that makes him want to break into a cold sweat.) and the cast covers his right from just about his nipple to fingertips.

Abby sees the way he's looking at it. "You want me to do the one side or just skip it?"

He closes his eyes, hating how helpless he is, and lifts his left arm as high as it will go, just a bit above shoulder level.

He winces a little as she does it.

"Hurts?"

"Tickles."

"Sorry." Abby puts the deodorant down after a swipe in each direction. "Is that enough?"

He nods.

"How do you even do that with armpit hair? Are you even getting it on your skin?"

He laughs, slightly, at that. "I've never thought about it. You just do it, and it works."

"Okay. Shirt next."

Given the instruction to 'bring clothing for Tim' Abby had grabbed the softest, most comfortable, laying around the house clothes he owned. It didn't occur to her, until right now, that a button down or two would have been a really good plan. The cast is keeping his hand and wrist in neutral position, his elbow bent at ninety degrees, and his shoulder joint extended about an inch forward, with his arm turned in across his stomach.

She's looking at his arm, thinking her way through how to deal with that, when Tim says, "You feed the arm through the sleeve first, then over the head, then the other arm."

"That's right, you've done this, well something like it, before."

"Yeah." More times than he's wanted. At least this time it's his right arm. All those years ago it was his left, and that made for a hellish two months.

"Or would you rather just wait and let me go get you a few button downs?"

"T-shirt. I don't want to see how bad this looks."

"Okay." She carefully scrunches up the shirt and threads his arm through, then lets him take care of his head and other arm. While he's getting into the shirt, Abby gets toothpaste on his brush.

He looks at that, and almost cracks a smile.

"Feeling a little more like yourself?"

"Little." He takes the brush from her and gets to it while she gets dried off and dressed. While he's brushing he checks out both his teeth (Upper jaw, second front one on the right appears to the be the one that ended up with the cap. At least, it's not the same color the other ones were.) and his face.
It looks a little better than before the shower. Apparently some of what he thought were bad cuts was actually dried blood. So, he's a little less beat up looking. But only a little.

One of the cuts goes straight through his left eyebrow. "They think that'll heal?"

"No one's said anything about it in specific. If it scars, two seconds with an eyebrow pencil will cover it."

He nods at that.

"Plus, if it scars, and you like it, having a bisected eyebrow's pretty cool."

Bisected eyebrow. 
He looks at her wryly, finishing up with his teeth, and then says, "I know you love James Marsters, but…" and then shakes his head.

She grins at him. "It'd look awesome! Okay, you look done, back to bed? Sofa?"

He sighs. "Bed." He'd like to be somewhere else, but he's hurting, and tired, and his internal clock's telling him pain meds are coming soon, and as soon as they're in his system, he'll be asleep again.

"Okay, back to bed. Get a good nap. Dinner. More sleeping, and then tomorrow, bright and early, on the plane and home we go."

"That sounds good."

Someone changed out the sheets while he was getting washed off, and Tim appreciates that. And, with his arm no longer in traction, he doesn't have to be on his back, reclining, or smack dab in the middle of the bed. Which he also appreciates.

Once he's out of the bathroom, Jimmy hops up and takes over from Abby on giving him a hand getting to the bed. Stronger, a bit steadier, and slightly taller makes that easier. Once he's on his bed, Jimmy grabs the sling that goes with his new cast, and gets it situated and strapped on, and while the cast is large and rigid enough to hold his arm in place, the sling has some padding and straps to help keep his arm secure against his stomach, which is nice because that means the top part, that's resting against his pec, armpit, scapula, and deltoid isn't digging into him every time he moves.

Tim gingerly rolls onto his left side (he usually sleeps on his right) but it doesn't hurt any worse than his back did, and Abby can tell, by the way he's only a few inches from the edge of the bed, that he's looking for some cuddling. So she carefully gets on the bed, too, and snuggles against his back, arm under the hollow of his neck.

His left hand finds hers, and holding it reminds her of her surprise.

"Jimmy?"

"Yeah?"

"Can you get the present?"

He smiles at that. "Sure." He digs around in her purse before pulling it out, back still toward them, hiding it from Tim's (sleepy) view. Then he turns around, taking a step closer, holding a plain, black, embossed with a Celtic dragon, leather wrist cuff, out. Sort of a hybrid of the knot on his bicep and the dragon on his leg.

"It's not the same…" While Gibbs and Abbi had been on duty, they'd gone looking for one. His old one was not only in evidence, but in an effort to make sure that any prints that might have been on the snaps remained in pristine shape, they'd cut it off Tim. "But it's as close as we could find," Abby says.

Jimmy's about to hand it to Abby to put it on, but she quickly shakes her head. She's in a bad position for it, and moving around's just going to hurt more, so Jimmy slips it over Tim's wrist, snapping it into place.

"Good?" Jimmy asks.

Tim nods, eyes tearing up. He knows they mean well, and he knows, because this new one is on his wrist, that the old one has to be destroyed, but he wants the old one back.

Abby kisses the back of his neck.

Jimmy's still holding his wrist. "Want me to take it off?"

Tim shakes his head, not trusting his voice.

"It's okay if you don't like it." Abby says.

He squeezes her hand a little tighter, before closing his eyes, and curling in on himself.

She can read that as a pretty definitive I've dealt with everything and anything I can deal with today, time to check out gesture.

She kisses the back of his neck again. "Okay."



It's an hour later, when Jimmy is absolutely sure that Tim is completely asleep when he quietly says, "Well that went over like a lead balloon."

"Bad timing, too much, too soon. Tomorrow we'll get home, and that'll help."

Jimmy nods. "Lots of healing to do."

"Yeah. What happened to him really hit when he saw himself."

Jimmy closes his eyes and swallows, gritting his teeth. Then he looks back at Abby, who's cuddling Tim, gently stroking her thumb over the back of his hand. "I hate that deal. Hate waiting. Hate that it won't be me. I want to rip John up myself."

Tim shifts, moans a bit, and seems to settle in to deeper sleep.

Abby kisses him, then speaks a little more softly, "I know. Me, too. Want revenge so bad I can taste it. Keep fantasizing about ways to do it. Get back to my lab, and start mixing up cocktails…"

Jimmy shakes his head. "Not for at least nine months."

She gives him the stink eye for raining on her fantasy.

"And he'd be dead by then." If he's going to rain on her parade, he may as well pour.

"Gibbs," she says, a very good idea of how it'd go.

"Me!" Jimmy says, fire in his eyes. Abby looks curious at that, wondering what Jimmy's plan would have been. "I asked him to teach me how to take the shot. That way he could be somewhere public, with an alibi, like, say, with Penny, and I could do it."

Abby sighs, quietly. "God, Penny… And Sarah…"

"Figured what they didn't know wouldn't hurt them. Figured they'd never really look further than Gibbs."

Abby nods. "You talk to them?"

"Ducky. She's holding on, but taking it hard. Wouldn't you?"

"Lord." Abby goes quiet, praying for peace and calm and… and hoping that there's comfort somewhere.



Dinner comes and goes.

Tim eats, but he's quiet.

Night comes and he's sleeping, but fitful. Another shift in his pain meds means they aren't doing quite the job of knocking him out that they had been. Instead of falling asleep within seconds of closing his eyes, he's got this sort of strange half-awake half-asleep sensation where he's aware but his body doesn't want to do anything for long stretches.

So he sleeps, and dreams, nothing bad or disturbing, waking up and not being home with Abby and Kelly and all healed up is the disturbing part, and lays there, feeling Abby against his back, the soft puffs of her breath on his neck. He can hear Jimmy's quiet, steady breathing, and the little night sounds people make, shifting around, bits of vocalizations, getting up to hit the head, stuff like that.

Cuff. 
He wants to touch the new wrist cuff, run his fingers over it, really see and feel the new pattern. He's sulking about the old one being gone, because he wants the old one, not that there's anything wrong or bad about this one. The love that inspired the first cuff was involved in getting this one, and as he thinks about it, Jimmy helped get this one, too, so this is a gift from two of the most important people in his life.

Two of his loves trying to make him feel better. Trying to help him to getting back to who he is. So he gets it, understands the gesture, and eventually, he'll love this one, too.

But he was robbed of the old one, and that stings.



Morning comes and with it a huge stack of paperwork encompassing all of Tim's release documentation, prescriptions, what he needs to be taking when, appointments made with the one orthopedic specialist in the DC area who works with the kind of casts he's got, and all the rest of it.

But, eventually, Abby's wheeling him out of the hospital, and they're heading toward the jet, and from there, home.

They're on the plane, quiet, resting mostly, heading back east. Gibbs notices that Tim's completely sacked out again, so he shifts over a bit, next to Jimmy and says, "Saturday morning, at the house, with me."

Jimmy's eyebrows raise. "Uh…"

"You believe a politician's promise after he keeps it. This time next year, if John McGee's still walking around, we'll be ready to do something about it."

Jimmy thinks about that for a moment and then nods, "Okay."



Tim's awfully tired by the time they get home. Tired and aching. Plane travel followed by car travel with as many broken bones as he has is pretty much torture.

The original plan was everyone was going to be there to say 'Hi' see he was all in one piece offer welcome, but by the time they were on the runway, heading toward Abby's car, that plan had been scrapped. Jethro and Abbi are heading back to Jethro's. Breena and the girls are going to meet them at the McGees, and then that's it.

Visitors tomorrow, if he's feeling up for it.

So, as Jimmy's helping him get up the stairs on their front porch, and Abby's running ahead to get the door open, Tim wants to sack out, take about fifty pain pills, and more or less just die.

But he can't, not yet. There's something very, very important he needs to do first.

Abby's giving him help because between the arm and the ribs he can't get a very good hold on her, but more than anything else right now, he wants to cuddle his baby girl, and he is. (Jimmy's similarly wrapped in a pile of hugging girls.)

"Happy Birthday, Kelly." He kisses her, holding her close, crying some. "Told you I'd be back for today."

"Dadadadada!" She's in his arms, and squirmy, and laying big, wet, (ouchy) kisses all over his face, and right this second Tim couldn't be happier or more relieved.

A minute later, he gets a gentle hug from Breena, and a not so gentle hug from Molly, who's fascinated by his casts and bruises, and wants to touch and poke him all over, which means it's time for the Palmer branch of the family to head off before she decides any really tender bits of Uncle Tim need to get poked.

He's fading pretty fast by that point. Weary, really not all there, so he's guessing this was mostly for Abby's benefit, or maybe it was just important enough that waiting didn't make any more sense. But as Jimmy and Breena are getting ready to go, he gets his usual (albeit very gentle) hug from Breena, and then she pulls back a little, arms still around him, looks at Abby, looks back to him, and says, "Life's too damn short to let fear win."

Then Breena kisses him, very soft, very gentle, and he's appreciating the kiss, at least it's got enough of his attention that all of the pain in his body fades to a sort of dull ache, and much too soon she stands up, takes a step over to Abby, kisses her too, which Tim would have to admit he enjoyed watching, though he would have enjoyed it even more if he'd been feeling anything approaching good, and then she took one more step and kissed Jimmy, which was also nice to watch, too.

Her voice is steady as she speaks, but it's clear that the what-ifs and very close call of this last week have hit her, hard. "I love all three of you, and I don't know where this is going, but one day, soon, when you're off the pain meds," Tim gets a gentle stroke on his hand, "we're all sitting down, together, and talking this out, because life is short and we are not letting this slip away. Okay?"

Tim nods, and Abby and Jimmy say, "Okay."

Breena smiles, and Tim and Abby both get quick pecks on the forehead. "Good. Okay, I'm going to get the girls in the car. Abby, you need Jimmy's help getting Tim upstairs?"

Abby nods. "Unless you want to stay down here?"

"No. Upstairs, bed, lying down, sleeping."

Jimmy steps over to Tim, helping him getting standing up. "Up we go."

They're halfway up the steps when Tim asks, "Did you know she was going to do that?"

Jimmy nods. "Talked about it last night. Abby did, too."

"Oh."

"It okay?"

"Yeah… Just wasn't expecting it."

Two more steps, four to go. "Yeah, well, almost dying puts things into perspective. And being on a shit ton of pain meds takes them out of perspective, so when you're not hurting from your eyelashes to your toenails, we'll talk some more. About a lot of things, like us, and your dad, and the deal with Jarvis, and just, lots of things."

Tim gets his right foot onto the next stair and slowly lifts himself up. "Good plan."

After another minute, Jimmy gets Tim to his room, and sitting on his bed. "Don't flop back, yet."

Tim stares at him, slumping, all I want to do is sleep on his face.

"Look, I'm here, I can move you around fairly easy, you need to hit the head? Want a change of clothing? Something like that?"

"Just want to lie down."

"Okay." Jimmy helps him get lying back on the bed. "Pillows good?"

"I'm home. Everything's good."

"Okay." Jimmy gives him a quick hug, and then stands up. "See you soon."

"Thanks, Jimmy."

He smiles at Tim, and heads off.

He's almost asleep when he hears the sound of a car door shutting, followed by tires on his gravel driveway, a minute after that Abby's next to him, Kelly between them, and he's drifting off to sleep, in his own bed, his girls by his side.

Next