AN: I have committed fic. After many years of reading and noodling and having ideas...one has finally come to fruition.
So, I guess I'm going to try out this going public thing.
A note regarding style. This started out as an outline to a story, then as I started to convert bullet point ideas to complete sentences I realized that I pretty much think that Gibbs thinks in bullet points, even if he probably hates seeing them on slides in meetings. So if things seem choppy - that's why. It just seemed to fit the summative nature of Gibbs reviewing the state of things, because heaven knows the one thing Gibbs isn't is deeply and thoughtfully reflective.
Four months.
He'd been gone four months. Eleven weeks.
In that time he'd lost everything.
Again.
There probably should have been a rule. The rules were supposed to prevent this sort of thing. He supposed Rule 51 covered it, but maybe he should have had something more specific. Because really, this was a whole lot bigger than "Sometimes you're wrong" might cover. Or, maybe he just should have paid more attention to the rules he already had, or at least be more consistent and rigorous about applying them to himself rather than only to others. Too late now...
Evidence doesn't just go away, especially when it has been reviewed by numerous people with equally numerous agendas. Parsons himself may have been after Gibbs, and in theory the deal cut with Justice and the DOD should have made everything, including the lesser charges against various team members go away. But one of Parsons' minions, the one in charge of building the red herring case against Ziva, angry that he hadn't been told that his work was essentially busy work, had turned the files over to ICE and they had ended up in the hands of Julia Foster-Yates team members. Feeling they had never gotten satisfaction for their colleague's death at Rivkin's hand they went at it with a vengeance. For Ziva, it was all downhill from there.
Approval from the FISA court was swift, and a deep and thorough search of Ziva's phone, email, and internet communications was nothing if not revealing; beginning with the discovery of her falsified birthdate a damning and undeniable picture had emerged. She had been handling Israeli agents from the day she arrived. Lied on official reports, lied about connections on her citizenship application. Had continued to handle Israeli agents following her naturalization. Had sent, and continued to send, classified intel to Israel. She'd been given a choice of trial for treason and espionage with the possibility of the death penalty, or de-naturalization and deportation to Israel. After first attempting to "plod the fifth", she took the second option.
Tim was held less culpable in the whole Bodnar fiasco, but his hacking over the years hadn't been as footprint free as he thought and various agencies took advantage of the opportunity for payback. While the Israelis, not to mention the Italians and Germans, were none to happy with him, they couldn't touch him. The FBI and CIA on the other hand could, and the Navy was seriously peeved about the misappropriation of resources when they inventoried the apartment hidey-hole from which the searches originated. He didn't have a lot of time to serve and it would be in a minimum security facility, but he'd never sit in front of a computer unsupervised again.
Tony had fared the best when it came to records and reprimands. His history as a cop had drilled into him the importance of following proper procedures, or at least making it look like you did in a way that couldn't be disproven. But that was irrelevant, because Tony was dead. Macaluso. Turns out all that mythology about the mob having a long memory was true. Fifteen years wasn't long enough for the pieces of La Famigilia still in Philly to forget Tony DiNozzo, who they knew as Anton Vitteo (aka Tony TV, and damn Tony for using so much of himself in his covers) who had brought down the Capo and twelve others. Six weeks after Tony had given up the protection of his badge he'd disappeared while jogging. He'd reappeared two weeks later, sort of. Enough of him to confirm both identity and painful death, which Gibbs decided was better than not knowing, but only a little. Jackson told him that Senior was at the funeral, and that he had never seen a man more broken.
Tony's will was dated exactly a week after turning in his badge. Vance's children had a tidy nest egg that was also secured and protected from their father six ways from Sunday. There was now a scholarship in Jeanne Benoit's name at George Washington U Med School. And an endowed DiNozzo Chair in the Film Studies program at Georgetown.
Vance was a surprise, and yet not. In the process of investigating and prosecuting Ziva it was discovered that numerous deposits of just-under-investigation-triggering dollar amounts had been credited to multiple accounts belonging to inactive cover identities from Vance's days in the field. The largest of these happening the day Tony arrived in Tel Aviv following after the Rivkin "incident". Further investigation revealed that not all of those deposits originated in Israel but came from a wide variety of sister agencies internationally; distressingly there seemed to be a correlation with either failed or curtailed NCIS investigations, or KIA agents. Dismissed in disgrace, other consequences pending.
Abby had simply fallen apart. What began as quirky habits had become borderline ocd compulsions over the years, they all knew that. What they didn't know was that it had gone beyond that into Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder. As situations careened well beyond her control, and as each of them was removed from her circle of access Abby's spiral downward became inevitable and unstoppable. The week between the discovery of Tony's remains and his funeral had included Ducky committing Abby, involuntarily, to the psychiatric unit at Bethesda because she had become a threat to herself. The discovery of a handwritten plan to eliminate Parsons and his associates added "and others" to the phrase, even though the plan itself gave lie to her repeated assertions that she could complete it without leaving evidence.
Abby's hospitalization was Dr. Mallard's last official act before retiring as an employee of NCIS, although he remained in contact with her family as a local resource for them. He had wanted to hand the morgue over to Jimmy, but Jimmy had washed his hands of the agency. Thoroughly disillusioned by NCIS, and not trusting of any other the other federal agencies he had completed his studies and taken a job as an ME at Johns Hopkins Medical Center. He occasionally consulted for the Baltimore PD, as a tribute to Tony and a way to extend the service mindset embedded in him by Ducky.
Ducky, Fornell, Jackson, Admiral Chegwidden, and Stan Burley of all people had taken on his 'care and feeding' in some sort of rotating schedule that he couldn't quite figure out. Chegwidden had discovered him approaching near fatal alcohol poisoning out at the cabin three weeks after he came back from his "mission". He tried not to be there when they came by, but the found his deeply embedded frugal nature wouldn't allow the groceries and other supplies they left to go to waste. He eventually left his ATM card and PIN in an envelope stapled to the doorframe as he didn't want them supporting him either.
He continued to have dreams and occasional hallucinations of bodies in the pond, as well as conversations with Franks. He had, to some degree, figured out that Franks wasn't the mentor/guardian angel/voice of conscience he had originally thought, but rather the devil's advocate, and wasn't that a revelation. Tony showed up on occasion, horrifically tortured, bleeding, and utterly silent. The one time Shannon appeared she looked at him, looked at the bodies, turned around and walked away.
He finally read Moby Dick.