Title: Learning To Live Again
Author: Special Agent Meg
Rating: PG (Contains violence)
Classification: Supernatural/Drama, Crossover
Spoilers: Kill Ari II, Enigma, Honor Code, Under Covers, and Hiatus
Disclaimers: If I owned them, Twice In A Lifetime wouldn't have gone whacked the way it did the second season and Gibbs would be back at NCIS where he belongs.
Summary: Challenge #18 and a crossover with Twice In A Lifetime. When a hostage situation goes horribly wrong, an NCIS agent is offered a second chance. But will he take it?
A/N: First of all – we know that Gibbs will be coming back to NCIS – so I'm dispensing with that nonsense and setting this story in Spring, 2007. Secondly, on the series Twice In A Lifetimethe younger and older versions of the person were played by different actors. Since I can't do that, I will refer to present-day time-travelling Gibbs as Gibbs, and his 1991 self as Gunny.
"I saw something like that on TV last week."
The speaker's partner flashed an automatic in his direction. "For the last time, I'm warning you. SHUT UP!"
Gibbs watched the exchange uneasily from his seat on the floor across the room. The second gunman's agitation was growing. It was only a matter of time before he pulled the trigger. Only a matter of time before an eight-year-old girl would be forced into a world of nightmares and counselling and a loss of what childhood was supposed to be. For the fortieth time in the last hour, Gibbs sent up a silent, desperate prayer.
He was pretty sure his team was out in the parking lot with the negotiators. Until the radio on the counter had been shot, the newscaster had been eager to babble about the two gunmen and the six people they were holding hostage at the medical facility on the Naval Base. The fifty-year-old Corpsman Gibbs had come to see as part of the follow-up on a case he was about to close. The man's secretary, a female midshipman barely out of high school. A dark-haired man in his late twenties, dressed in a Petty Officer's uniform. A JAG lawyer in her thirties, bringing her eight-year-old daughter in for a check-up. And a 46-year-old, recently un-retired NCIS agent.
Gibbs had tried to start up a dialogue with the men twice. Both attempts had ended with him lying semi-conscious on the floor, his head throbbing from the blows from the gun barrel. The sight had effectively discouraged the other hostages from making a similar effort.
Then it happened. The ring of the telephone jarred through the silence. All six hostages flinched, as did the finger on the trigger. A second later, the gunman's partner slid lifelessly to the ground.
Screams erupted from the wall of hostages. The eight-year-old child made a terrified run for the door. The gun swung around.
"NO!" Gibbs dove forward, catching the child around the waist and taking her to the floor as a second gunshot echoed behind him.
A second later, another shot ripped through the glass, taking the surviving gunman to the ground. Then the doors burst open and men with federal acronyms on their jackets rushed in. a brown-haired man in an NCIS jacket rushed over to where Gibbs lay motionless on the floor.
"Boss!" He turned him over, his knee resting in the middle of the pool of blood. Gibbs' blue eyes stared unseeingly up at the ceiling. "No, Boss," the younger man whispered. "Don't do this."
"What's done is done," the young man in the petty-officer's uniform said softly. "That's why I'm here."
TBC…
