A/N: This just wrote itself a couple of nights ago, and I'm not quite sure where to put it in terms of timeline. Probably sometime during season four, but you'll have to figure out yourselves where it fits in. They're still making us wait for anything beyond Hiatus 2 over here. Speaking of Hiatus: Spoilers for both parts, with regards to Gibbs' background.
Now enjoy, and be so kind as to leave me a review!
Disclaimer: I don't own the characters or the events referred to. Not even those fish.Which I don't mind as much as not owning Gibbs.
Laughing Fish
"When was the last time you laughed?"
He looks at her funnily, his head inclined to one side. "Just now", he says, as if nothing in the world was more obvious. "Two minutes ago, when you were telling me that rubbish about … what was it again?"
She smiles. "Fish."
"Yeah. The fish that live in that toxic water."
"Mhm." She pauses and studies him through narrowed eyelids. "I didn't mean that. I meant when was the last time you really laughed? So you could feel it. The kind … when you don't think you'll ever be sad again." She shrugs lightly. "I think it probably is a kind of happiness."
He contemplates her question for a while, then he purses his lips. "That's been a while."
She watches him and wonders How long? Define 'a while'.
"Was that before the two of them died?"
"Mhm." He sounds tired. Funny how an incoherent sound like that one can even transport something as complex as his tiredness: it's like a cobweb, and each fragile thread stands for something that made him so tired. The long day – the long week. The last fifteen years. The case, which was a trying one. The tension that builds under the pressure of having to find the missing link, and find it now, because later's too late. The numbers on the clock screaming two a.m. into the room, and you didn't sleep last night or the one before, and hell you need sleep. The way people try to mess with you just about everywhere. The unbelievable inaccessibility some people display even when asked to help solve a monstrous crime.
A whole damn lot of silvery, hair-thin threads, all interwoven skilfully, so skilfully, in fact, that you couldn't hope to undo the knots and sort the strings apart even if you had a needle and a magnifying glass.
"Certainly." It sounds like that was a perfectly undeniable fact that must be clear to anyone.
"That's been so long", she remarks, careful to speak gently. "You know, you can-"
"No, I can't", he replies with such determination, it leaves no doubt in her that he knew exactly what she wanted to say.
He looks at her and smiles, as if she had somehow retained some kind innocence through all the years of her grown up life. "You want to tell me you only live once, and it's a shame wasting so much time not laughing."
She looks down at her hands, creamy golden skin in the dim light. "Isn't it?"
"Sure. And you'd say it's just a matter of strength whether you waste your time or not."
She laughs and meets his gaze again. "Fine, there's the error in my argumentation." She pauses, her soft expression changing to solemnity. "You're strong."
"No, it just doesn't work that way. Something impossible happened the day they died, and since then everything that happened has been impossible. A mother who kills her two little children is as impossible as getting up in morning or falling asleep at night or not doing it. There's no difference anymore." He puts two fingertips to his temple, as if he wants to massage away a headache, but then he doesn't do anything of the sort.
"I know it's silly", he goes on. "Things happen. I should know. But I still can't believe they're dead. And it's been a long time.
It was beyond my power, and the way it changed my life is beyond my power, too. Not because something went the way it did and something else didn't go differently from otherwise. It's a fact. Causality. Shannon and Kelly died. This is the only possible consequence. It's why I'm here. Everything I am is the truth that they're dead."
"What's got to happen to change that, then? Causality backwards?"
He looks at her with amusement dancing in his ice-blue eyes. "I don't know."
She inclines her head and interlaces her slender fingers, then disentangles them again.
"Aren't you afraid at all?", she asks.
"Of what?"
She shrugs. "Dying. A bullet, a bomb, a knife. Poison." Her voice drops. "A car crash. Pick one." She catches his gaze, like someone with a net catches a butterfly, straight out of the air. "Aren't you afraid?" And has that got something to do with their death? Have you somehow forgotten how it feels to love your life because there's something you don't want to leave?
He only stares back at her, and she only sees a reflection of her own face in his eyes, so if she would read the ability to be afraid there, it would be her own and her relief would be fake.
"Sometimes I think you don't care at all", she finally says, when he doesn't answer her. "You don't give a damn about your life." She pulls her shoulder up a bit as though she were freezing. "I only know you that way. Maybe that's why you're so good. Maybe that's why you always catch them and make them talk, why you can intimidate people like that. Maybe it's why your team respect you so, 'cause you don't give a damn about your life but you'd do everything to protect theirs." She trails, and is surprised to still find gentle eyes looking back at her. "You don't take good care of yourself."
She rests her chin in her palm. From time to time she find herself wondering if he changed at all. Then she has to smile because, yes, of course he has. His hair was black and there are a few lines on his face that weren't there ten year ago, and he was a different person.
Why does she wonder, then?
"How do that passion that you put into everything here, and that utter indifference fit together? How can they exist next to each other?"
He shrugs. "My life's got nothing to do with our work. Two disconnected things, passion and indifference."
Somewhere, a siren goes off. Neither of them reacts.
Maybe something terrible happened, but if it concerns them they'll learn from a phone call and get other people out of their beds, and if it doesn't they'll learn from the news and the papers tomorrow, and if it's not terrible enough to attract real attention, they won't learn it at all, like most other people in this city. Who cares about another personal tragedy? There are so many, the world would have long since run out of tears if it lamented them all.
But every now and then, someone cares about someone else, and conversations like this one happen.
"It went fast. The last fifteen years. Sometimes I'm not sure if I didn't skip a few. It all went so fast. There were marriages and divorces, murderers, 9/11, changing teams, changing cities, the Marines, the NIS, NCIS, you." Her green eyes flick up, reflecting golden dots. He leans back in his chair and laughs. "I feel older", and the laughter fades. "But sometimes that's all I feel. As if nothing else left a trace. As if nothing could cause a sensation anymore after what I felt when I lost my family." She tires to imagine the feeling, but she knows it's in vain. She would only thing of the saddest thing in her life, and it probably wouldn't be enough. "Somehow, that was something final."
Then, his thoughts trail and he thinks about the week's case. He is glad it is over. It was ugly, and it got to him.
"Sometimes I wonder how my team bear with me." He smiles and looks at her questioningly. "How do they do it?"
She chuckles and slowly answers: "They know you. Like we knew you, after a while." She lifts her index finger. "Where you see only one thing", she stretches two fingers, "they see two. You're lucky that they do, but they do." He frowns, asking her to explain. "You see the way you treat them. But they…"
Her fingers curl back into a lose fist like a turtle withdrawing its head, and she rests her arm on the table, leaning forward a bit. With the movement, a variety of shadows and fragments of light, minutely different shades, pass over her face, and the alternation of illumination and shadow rearrange her expression, like a very swift magician on a stage.
Her eyes are intent, with a distant, somewhat detached concern way back, her mouth is gentle and there's something infinitely familiar in every line of her face.
"Sometimes", she begins, "you get so tense … with all those things people do, that get to you." She makes a movement with on hand to indicate something back in the past. "That child molester, Ari, that mother who drowned her girls." She cradles her fists against her chest. "You get so tense, I'm afraid to touch you because I fear you might shatter. It's like you're made of glass. You get obsessed and everything in you is replaced by tension."
The index finger again, pointing at an imaginary office. "You don't talk much then, you withhold a lot. Facts and guesses likewise, and feelings anyway. And that's not easy for them. They only know it'll rain, and won't stop again so soon. They know it'll get colder, and no idea when it'll be over."
She reaches out and takes his hand, something she hasn't done in a long time. "I wish you would talk sometimes. To me, to Ducky, to – anyone. Anyone you trust. Just so you won't shatter from a touch one day."
She lets go and leans back, and slowly her eyes narrow again around her green eyes. She slips off her shoes and pulls her knees up to her chest, arms crossed atop.
"Do you actually trust someone?"
He sighs and looks away. A hard question. People trust for the funniest reasons, for the wrongest and the most foolish, for the best that prove to be best or worst. Trust is a delicate work of art. Glass again, but very thin. Easy to misplace and even easier to misuse, and all of that is all the worse because it has so much to do with innocence.
He looks back at her and sways his head gently from one side to the other, as if undecided. "It takes only one person", he replies, "to tell a thousand lies."
"And a million and a billion", she nods. "And the answer to my question?"
He laughs. How could he ever think he would get away with an evasive reply?
The cheerfulness subsides, he answers earnestly: "I trust my team."
She nods again. "Good." Then her eyes drop to her hands, one holding on to a knee, the other to a wrist, as if they had to save each other from falling. "You don't trust me." It's a statement, not a suspicion, and though neither of them ever pronounced it before, it's been there so long between them, it sounds all worn out and tattered, nine years old and regrettable.
She looks up again, thoughtful. So long. Silly. She should have acted differently. It's not like she was frozen. She just didn't do anything.
"You're not typically unforgiving."
"Well, I'm not angry with you."
"But you still don't trust me, either", she points out with quiet insistence, and he smiles.
"I trust you with my life", he tells her, "just not with –"
"Your heart", she finishes. He chuckles and looks away, and that's as close to a Maybe that's true, perhaps, as she'll ever get out of him.
So she doesn't try to get more, instead she says: "Sometimes you're giving the people around you a hard time."
"I know." He meets her eyes with grin tugging at the corner of his mouth. "Sometimes it's on purpose." He shakes his head as though displeased with himself. "Sometimes it's because things get to me. Sometimes I'm just glad I've got Abby."
She smiles and studies him carefully. "What is it with you and her?", she asks, genuine curiosity speaking from her voice.
"She finds me when I get lost", he replies softly. "There's times when I'm sure she knows the way out of every maze." He pauses to run a hand through his silver hair. She likes it this way, a little longer, no Marine cut, but gentler, handsome. "It may sound strange, but she's a steady calmness. She slows me down when I want to control things that can't be controlled. She refocuses me when everyone else gets four times more frantic than me just because I get frantic at all." He smiles and draws a couple of quick circles in the air. "The team's a whirlwind. Abby's in the eye."
She returns his smile, and they are silent for a few minutes. His eyes sweep over to the windows that don't show much now. They're a blackboard with the impressionist painting of a dark river, dark banks and a few light on buildings on it. Nothing moves much, few cars and passers-by in a federal district at this time of night.
To her eyes, the darkness and stillness outside somehow intensifies the sense of weariness about him. After a while, she points at the couch and says: "You're tired. Lie down."
He laughs. "This is an office."
She shrugs dismissively. "It's only as much of an office as its inhabitants let it be." She indicates the desk with computer, files, pens, PDA. "This makes it half an office. Two agents off duty make it just some room. You weren't intending to go home tonight, were you?"
"Three hours are hardly worth the drive."
"Mhm. Get some sleep." She puts a hand on his forearm, as if she were checking something. She smiles, obviously satisfied. "That was an ugly case you closed today. I want you to relax."
It reminds her a lot of undercover assignments. Years ago, miles away. Different countries on a different continent, foreign languages she had studied, but had to get used to first. Rain that seemed to taste all differently, the sand between her fingers, different traditions, really old houses. When they had time to sleep there was too much to take in and to become familiar with, that was important too, so they slept in between this and that, when there was no real place to.
She began to prefer his shoulder to pillows. She still likes it now.
She blinks up at the dark, vague ceiling.
"Are you still in love with me from time to time?"
He is silent for a while, then he presses a kiss to her brow and rests his head on top of her head.
"Jenny?"
"Hm?"
"What about those fish?"
FIN