Author: super em
Rating: K+
Categories: Gen, angst, hurt/comfort, friendship
Disclaimer: NCIS does not belong to me. Unfortunately.
A/N: This turned out a lot angstier than I originally intended. It's mostly just an experiment with tense and emotion and stuff... turned into a 3-part story. Hope you enjoy, reviews are greatly appreciated :)
McGee calls him at the hospital, spluttering and stuttering and sounding more like a probie than ever. His message is short but it's enough to carve an empty hole in Tony, leaving him feeling number than the pain killers ever could. It was a clean shot, through-and-through. Not serious enough to require surgery or physiotherapy, but bad enough to earn him a bed for the night, morphine and an IV full of antibiotics.
He closes the phone with a click abruptly, leaving McGee with another example to add to his 'How Tony is Turning Into Gibbs' list. He glares at the needle digging into the skin of his hand, wishing he could just rip it out. He doesn't want pain relief. Doesn't need it. Doesn't deserve it.
They were too late. She's with Ducky now. And it's all his fault.
They won't let him leave, no matter how much he argues and annoys the nurses. Gibbs could bail him out, but he won't. He's busy with Ziva and McGee in the field, catching the guy who kidnapped and murdered an innocent eight-year-old. The guy he let slip away, back when they had him cornered. They guy who shot him, slipped away and killed a little girl.
It's his fault. He could have stopped the man. Could've shot first, immobilized the man and cuffed him all within a few seconds. Instead he paused; waited for his backup. And he ended up in hospital while the guy was still in the wind.
The nurses come and go and he lies there, staring up at the off-white ceiling. He wonders if it'd be better to go back to work and face Gibbs' wrath for the rest of his life, or to just cut his losses and move on. It won't be the first time he has. Several of the nurses are attractive and a few of the younger ones even try to flirt with him, but for the first time in his life, he has no interest.
The door opens once again and he can tell without looking that it's not one of the nurses in their clean, white, sensible shoes, or his doctor with the squeaky black lace-ups. The weight on the bed shifts and Abby sits down, dropping an oversized black handbag onto the chair next to the bed. She speaks to him, but nothing registers. He doesn't want to know about the case, about how Gibbs and co have a lead, but nothing concrete, about how she's still waiting for trace results from Major Mass Spec. He knows he has failed and, for the moment, that is all that matters.
A pause ensues. Then Abby speaks again. One word.
Tony.
Reluctantly, and for the first time in the half-hour she's been there, he meets her gaze. She is momentarily stunned, shocked, startled, whatever, by the pain and anguish she sees in his eyes. She feels his sadness bleed into her and soon she knows that her eyes reflect his.
Abby leans forward, cupping his face with her pale, warm hands. He tries but cannot look away from those sharp green eyes.
"It wasn't your fault." She tells him, wishing Gibbs was with her so Tony would stop looking like the puppy dog left out in the rain. He doesn't respond; his face remains emotionless and blank. She kisses him in the middle of forehead, clicks the button on the morphine drip and picks up her bag. The mass spectrometer beckons.
He doesn't look up as she leaves.
What he really needs, Abby muses as she watches Tony sign discharge papers haphazardly with his left hand the next day, is a good head slap from Gibbs. She wants her old Tony back, her joking, charming, smiling Tony. New Tony is a whole different person; subdued and sullen and miserable without a hint of a smile on his face. She snatches the freshly written prescriptions from his hand before he has a chance to scrunch them up, wraps her hand around his good arm and walks him out of the building.
They stop at the hospital pharmacy and she's secretly delighted when he protests, arguing that he doesn't need more pain medication or the antibiotics. She shakes her head and hands the paper to the man at the counter, hiding the grin blossoming on her face. It's the first sign of life she's seen in him all day.
Gibbs calls while they're on the road, her hearse swerving a little into the next lane as she fumbles in her handbag for the phone. The bossman wants results pronto, so she pulls to the side of the road and grabs her laptop from the backseat. She relays the scientific jargon, knowing McGee's listening to her on speaker on the other end of the line. He's perfectly capable of translating and Abby's never one to miss an opportunity to annoy Gibbs.
She tries to remain professional when he asks about Tony.
"Okay," she says, not wanting to disturb Tony. There's so much more she could say if he wasn't in the car. Gibbs responds by hanging up, but she knows he understands. She'll call him back as soon as she gets her passenger home and taken care of. Although that might take a while.
She leaves Tony on the couch with the television on, his right arm tightly strapped to his chest to keep him from damaging it further. He looks young and tired and alone and she doesn't want to leave him again, but she must. Bad guys to catch and justice to be served. Et cetera and so forth.
This time he just smiles sadly at her as she slips out the front door.
TBC