Leaving the Past in the Past

Summary: This is set in the future--no, not sci fi and space men, think more along the lines of season 12 or so of NCIS. Not that I think NCIS will last 12 seasons--that would be nice, but I'm more of a realist than that--but that's the general timeline. So if anything is referred to that you don't remember happening, it's probably because it didn't. Remember, it's the future.

Spoilers: Internal Affairs

This was pretty much inspired by my medical work in Papua New Guinea, which made me think of a fictional doctor who had done a similar thing. Yeah, that's right, I'm comparing myself to Dr. Jeanne Benoit. I've never dated an NCIS agent--or a film professor, for that matter--my father isn't an international arms dealer, and I wouldn't be caught dead in pink scrubs, but other than that, we're practically the same person. But I digress... back to the summary. This is a one-shot. It's got Jeanne in it, but it's not a Tony/Jeanne story. It's pretty much just Jeanne, with some Tivaness at the end. I hope you enjoy.

It took Dr. Jeanne Benoit a minute to realize why the bellhop was still standing in her hotel room before she quickly fumbled for her purse. She gave a small frown at the bills she found there—a fifty seemed impossibly small, a twenty more so, before she remembered that she was back in the States, and a loaf of bread didn't cost a thousand dollars. She tried to make the calculation between American dollars and Communaute Financiere Africaine franc, but gave up when it didn't immediately come to mind. She figured by the slight widening of the bellhop's eyes that she had tipped too much, but was too tired from her countless hours of travel to care.

She closed and locked the door behind the young man before turning and appraising her surroundings. It was a nice hotel, she knew that, but found herself wondering in the back of her mind if she would have considered it so nice if she had been in that room eight, or even five, years before. She doubted it. Growing accustomed to African accommodations had changed her perceptions of luxury quite a bit.

After a minute of standing there, somewhat dazed, she forced herself back into the moment. There was too much to be done in the next few days to waste time comparing a hotel room in New Orleans to a one-bedroom house attached to a busy rural hospital in Cote d'Ivoire. She had started a list on the airplane, and turned to it now, needing a moment to interpret her own busy scrawling notes. HIV test, TB skin test, CXR?, meet with realtor, meet with department chief, form syllabus. She frowned before picking up her pen and drawing a line through "CXR". She could wait to get a chest x-ray until after her TB skin test came back. There was no use getting one if her skin test was negative. Of course, considering the number of TB patients she had been treating lately, there was very little chance it would be negative.

First things first, though. She headed for the shower, stripping off items of clothing on the way, grimacing slightly at the smell of recirculated air and crowded airport lounges on her skin. Here, she reveled in the luxury, turning the water hot enough to pink her already tanned skin and standing under the pelting drops for what would have been an ungodly amount of time back in the country she had started thinking of as "home". America really is a wasteful country, she mused. She had never considered it so until she had seen how other people live.

Once out of the shower, she toweled herself off before pulling on a familiar pair of scrub pants, frowning at the bagginess of the garment as she pulled the drawstring tight. It looked like she had lost more weight, weight she hadn't really had to lose in the first place. She walked back over to her list and rewrote "CXR". They used to call tuberculosis 'consumption' for a reason.

Without even thinking about it, she brushed her hair back and pulled it into a long braid, as she always did after washing it. As she did so, she remembered the days when her hair was cut in a stylish bob, when getting it presentable had required special shampoos and conditioners and mousse and blow dryers and round brushes, and had to smile at the memory. It was much longer now, because styling hair in the African heat was never an option: her choices had been to cut it short or grow it long enough to pull into a braid or bun. Maintaining long hair was easier than short, so that made that decision easy.

Only then did she allow herself to think about the events that had taken her to that hotel room, to that city, getting ready to begin her new life as an Assistant Professor of Tropical Medicine at Tulane University School of Medicine and Public Health. Quite impressive for someone who finished her residency in grass huts, she thought with a smile.

She had left Washington, DC years before angry and heartbroken and looking for something to fill her damaged life, and found starving orphans in Gabon. She couldn't think of a more dramatic change for the pampered daughter of an physician and "French businessman". Life had been hard at first, and she hated it, remembering her apartment and her residency program, having electricity twenty-four hours a day, air conditioning, water that was consistent and didn't make her sick, hospitals that could run whatever tests and x-rays they wanted. She hated making medical decisions based on nothing but suspicion of disease, and letting the supplies of donated—and expired—medicines dictate how she treated her patients. She hated delivering babies in the dark, knowing that there was no option for a c-section if things began to go bad. But she stayed, unwilling to accept defeat, determined to wait it out as if were some sort of punishment for her life before, for the luxury she had always known. She remembered one day, about a month after she arrived. She had been sick for over a week, her body rejecting the local food and drink in angry bouts of diarrhea. Beginning to get dehydrated and finding her packets of powdered Gatorade missing, she was faced with two choices: take some of the precious oral rehydration fluid given to dehydrated children, or fix herself up with a IV and pump the even-more-precious IV fluids directly into her veins. Well, there was a third choice, but she refused to take herself out of the rotation as she recovered, not wanting to give the other doctor—a dour, self-aggrandizing forty-something French communist named Claude-Pierre—the satisfaction of being right when he predicted that she would be too weak for a life of providing medical care to the world's sickest and neediest. So she had sat there in her room in the middle of the day—the heat was too oppressive to do any work in the time between lunch and when the air began to cool around 4 pm, and the wards were manned only by two nurses, who knew what was an emergency requiring the doctors—sitting on her bed under the mosquito net and trying to catch the faintest of breeze through the open windows as she sipped that rehydration fluid, a few milliliters at a time, as they instructed the mothers to give to their children. She studied the piles of dirt on her rough-hewn floor as she wondered how she got there. How had her world fallen so completely apart? Six weeks before, she was flipping through real estate magazines and dreaming of buying a house with her boyfriend, and now she was living in a room just off the hospital and she didn't even own a broom. Her father, the man who had taken her on exciting trips to Paris and bought her crepes from the tiny bakeries that dotted the streets, was dead, and it was Tony DiNardo—DiNozzo, he had said his name was—who was to blame. In her mind's eye, she could see the events on her father's yacht so clearly that she began to believe that she really had seen them, and every bit of her that had loved him began to hate him.

And then they had found her father's body, and she had been called back to DC, where she told Agent Gibbs what she seen—at least, what she had convinced herself that she had seen, after all the countless hours of replaying those fictional events in her mind. I wish I had never met you. She had said those words to Agent DiNozzo, and she had meant every one of them. She got back on a plane and headed back to her hospital in Gabon still meaning them.

And that's when things began to clear in her mind. Her father wasn't that innocent French businessman she had grown up believing him to be, and Tony had just been doing his job. She had gotten hurt in the process, that was true, but she believed him when he said he hadn't meant for that to happen. It was her father, that man she had idolized so much, who was to blame. It was because of him that someone almost blew up Tony's car when she had been in it. It was because of him that he had died. Nobody had pulled the trigger but himself.

Once she finally realized that, she felt herself move forward, and began to see things clearly. Her friends from her residency program were asking her when she was going to be coming back, but that wasn't her life anymore. That was the life of a woman with nothing to prove to anyone, not even herself. Faced with the realities of her father's life, she began to feel a certain guilt, a need to make up for the things that he had done. There was a French medical school that offered residency programs in developing countries, a chance to train with some of the best guidance in the world, but while doing some of the most good in the world as well, and they were more than eager to receive her application. With a new specialty in mind—she had seen on more occasions than she could count the need for good obstetricians in Africa—she began her training anew. A good deal of her time was spent in France, but even more was spent in Gabon and Uganda and Haiti and Zaire and Cote d'Ivoire. It hadn't been easy; most of the third-world hospitals she had visited had no ultrasound, no Doppler machines for hearing babies heartbeats, no electricity to power lights in case a woman went into labor at night, but as she had done in Uganda in the beginning, she persevered. She learned how to hear a baby's heart using an instrument that looked like a plastic funnel, she learned to tell how a baby was lying in the womb using only her hands on the abdomen, she even learned how to do surgery in her bare feet, as they were usually cleaner than the sandals she walked around in the rest of the time. But maybe the hardest thing at all for her, a girl of privilege and breeding, who prided herself in speaking proper English and French without an accent, was to get used to dropping all pretext of proper grammar and speech to communicate with patients and staff in the broken French of those foreign hospitals.

It was in Cote d'Ivoire, in her last rotation before completing her training, that she had falling in love with the area and the people, and used some of that money from her father, money that had been earned selling weapons to the most despotic of all rulers, to buy the hospital that would become her home. Even more money went into fixing it up, to bring the TB ward up to standards that, while not equal to those found in Europe or the States, would likely treat more infection than it spread. She had designed and helped build, which the hands that had never done an honest day's labor until she moved to Africa, the labor and delivery rooms, as well as the operating room where she could do c-sections and tubal ligations and remove ectopic pregnancies, wondering as she did so how many Africans had died from the weapons that her father had sold to their leaders to pay for that hospital.

And so her hospital had begun, and it hadn't taken long for her reputation to build, for people to realize that women and babies with even the most horrible complications could still live. She financed HIV education programs, for nurses to go out in the villages and teach about HIV and AIDS, so that pregnant women could be tested, and if positive, get medications that they could take while pregnant and breastfeeding to keep their babies from being infected as well. As her reputation grew, her hospital grew, and she found herself hiring more nurses and eventually, another doctor to handle everything but the obstetrics and gynecology, which had started that hospital and was still the primary reason patients came. It had taken her more years than she wanted to contemplate, but she had become a success, and she began to feel like some good and come from what her father had done. Eventually, news of her hospital and work had found its way back to the States. When Tulane made its offer—a professorship, in exchange for spending seven months a year in the States teaching others the things she had to experience first-hand to learn and allowing her the remaining five at her hospital, she found herself ready to make the move.

But there was still something she had to do first, something that didn't involve blood tests or finding a place to live for seven months out of the year, before she could truly say that she had put the past behind her. With uncertain fingers, she reached for the phone and dialed a number she had stared at for so long while on the plane that she couldn't help but have it memorized.

There was a laugh on the other end as soon as the phone was picked up, followed by an accented female voice saying, "NCIS, Special Agent DiNozzo's desk." Jeanne was surprised at the unexpected voice and wondered if it was Tony's partner. It had been a number of years since she had seen her, and that had only been a brief glance, of a woman with dark hair and dark eyes and an expression akin to pity on her face.

"Uh, yes," Jeanne finally said. "Is Special Agent DiNozzo there?"

"Just a moment," the woman replied. Jeanne could hear her in the background: Tony, it is for you.

And then she heard it, that voice from all those years ago. Of course it's for me, Sweetcheeks. It's my phone. He sounded annoyed. "Special Agent DiNozzo." So taken aback, Jeanne found herself unable to form words, and he said, "Hello? Is anyone there?"

"Tony?"

There was another pause, this time on his end. "Jeanne?" he finally asked. She could sense, rather than hear, the sudden silence that surrounded his workspace several hundred miles away. She could picture it from her memory, the desks close together, his coworkers leaning forward in interest. "Uh, how are you?"

She found herself smiling at his awkwardness, so different than the always confident man he had been while they were dating. "I'm doing well," she replied.

"That's good." There was another pause, and then an uncomfortable chuckle. "I wasn't expecting your call."

"I know," she said. "I... I feel like I should apologize. For what I said. And for accusing you of murdering my father."

There was more silence. "I never meant for you to get hurt."

"I know. Well, I know that now, but it wasn't you, Tony. It wasn't all you, anyway." She tried to collect her thoughts. She had this planned out, but somehow, hearing his voice had changed that. "I had just discovered that my father wasn't who I thought he was, and I blamed you for that, just like I blamed you for his death. I know now that neither of those is your fault. I'm sorry either of us got mixed up in it."

"So am I." She could hear relief in his voice, and realized that she felt it in herself. She had been holding on to too much from him for too long. The love that she had for him, and the hatred, had faded away long ago, but knowing that he didn't blame her for anything, and knowing that he knew that she didn't blame him, lifted a weight she hadn't realized she had been carrying. "So, are you still healing starving children in Africa?" The voice behind it was light, but she knew he wasn't making fun of her work. She remembered that tone from years before.

"Delivering babies, mostly," she said with a small laugh of her own. "I bought a hospital in the Ivory Coast and turned it into one of the most successful obstetrics centers in Western Africa. But I'm now going to be living in New Orleans part-time. I just accepted a professorship in tropical medicine."

"Wow," he said, and she could tell he was genuinely impressed. "That's, well, that's pretty damned impressive. You have a lot to be proud of."

"Yeah," she said. "It's amazing what a few million dollars of dirty money from arms dealing can do." They were both silent at that before she quickly spoke again. "But I didn't call to brag. I, well, I just wanted you to know that I don't hold anything against you anymore."

"I'm glad."

"So am I. I, um," she didn't know why she was telling him this, but the words came spilling out before she could stop them. "I hired another doctor for the hospital a little more than a year ago, someone to handle the dehydrated kids and patients with TB and HIV while I delivered babies, a general practitioner from France, and we're getting married in six months." Lucas knew everything—about her father, about Tony, even about the fiancee before she met Tony and how he had slept with her best friend. He was good for her. They were good for each other. It was him who really encouraged her to take the position at Tulane, excited about the idea of living in America—even a fairly French city in America—even though it was only part-time. It would be a sacrifice, for both of them, but she had a feeling they would work it out.

There was another pause. "Wow, Jeanne, that's great. Really. I'm happy for you. I'm glad things have worked out for you."

"Thanks," she replied. She wondered if he could hear her smile over the phone. "What about you, Tony? Are you...happy?"

"Yeah," he replied. "I am. I may not be as successful at my job as you are at yours," he said the words lightly, and she chuckled with him, "but I love it. We got a new director a year or so ago, and she really reorganized everything. I have an office in the Pentagon now. I'm in charge of drug-related crimes." That mental image of his office disappeared, and she had nothing in her mind to replace it with. "I'm thinking of starting a TV show about my life and calling it Navy Vice, but my wife, in her kind and sensitive manner, has informed me that nobody would watch it." Wife? He was married? The man who seemed to think 'commitment' was a fatal disease? "And my wife—actually, she's my former partner, Ziva, I don't know if you remember her—" that must be the exotic dark-haired woman she briefly saw, the one who answered his phone. "She heads a multinational anti-terrorism task force through Interpol and Homeland Security now. And, well, we're expecting our first kid in about five months."

"Congratulations, Tony. That's very... Well, congratulations." They both chuckled lightly before lapsing into an uncomfortable silence, the silence of two people who no longer had anything in common. "Well, I didn't really have anything else to say," Jeanne finally said. "I guess I'll let you get back to work. I just wanted to call to let you know that everything that happened...I know it wasn't you."

"I'm glad you did," he replied. "And it doesn't have to be so many years until we talk again. Feel free to call anytime."

"I just might," she said. They both knew she wouldn't, and they both knew he wouldn't call her, either; they no longer had anything to talk about. Everything that they had had between them, the good parts and the bad, were based on a lie that had ended years before and could now be finally put to rest. "Be well, Tony."

"You too, Jeanne." And with one final resounding click, it was all truly over.