My Life in Pictures
by channel D
written for the NFA Skills Challenge: Plot Twist
rating K+
characters Tim, Abby
genre drama, friendship, shocker
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Disclaimer: I still own nothing of NCIS.
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"This is one of my favorite pictures," Tim said, pointing at the image on his laptop's monitor. "I was about 9, see, and Sarah was a toddler. Our family was on a picnic. Sarah had just learned the concept of putting things inside something. She was doing that a lot outside, like stuffing clumps of dirt down my shirt when I was sitting down. She thought it was hilarious. Then I did the same to her. You can see her bawling her eyes out. And I was the one laughing. Until Mom caught me."
"Who took the picture?" Abby asked, after blowing her nose.
"My dad. He was laughing, too. Until Mom came and he had to look stern." Click. On to the next picture.
"In this one, my grandma—my mom's mom—was trying to teach me to row a boat. I think I was 8. She rowed out to the middle of a lake and told me to take over.."
"Did you learn?"
"I was pretty busy being seasick. But I proved being good at rowing in a tight circle. Unintentionally. The circles were so tight that Grandma got seasick, and she never does. So I had to row us all the way back. And it started raining. And then thundering. And then a sea monster rose up, and—"
"Next picture?"
He laughed. "Who's telling this, anyway? Okay. In this one, which my mom took, I was in the junior high school production of Mary Poppins. I was one of the dancing chimneysweeps. Second from the left."
"Nice. You're…uh, appropriately sooty..?"
"Of course! That was the best part of it! We had permission to be dirty," he grinned. "I wasn't great at singing and dancing—I'm still not—but our teacher thought it was more important to have fun than to be letter-perfect. Bless her." He sighed, and was silent for a moment. "Thank you, Abby, for listening to me reminisce. Not everyone would be willing to hear about my past. These pictures are important to me, but I would have thought only to me."
"I like hearing about you and your family. What's next?" Abby said gently. There must have been some pain behind the last memory. "You have the slide order memorized; can we skip ahead to one from high school?"
"Okay. That's three up." Click. Click. Click. "Here's one of me setting up my science fair project. I was 13, and I knew more about quantum mechanics than the judge did. Do you see the look on his face? He was so flustered." Tim chortled. "Mom took that. She was so proud of me. She told me that she loved confounding the science fair judges when she was my age."
"I'd like to meet your parents someday."Ooops. Maybe too eager.
"Would you? Hey, that'd be great!" He spoke before realizing that he sounded too enthusiastic. "That is, if you really want to."
"Well…yeah, if it works out. Sometime. If it's okay with them. Uh, what's the next picture?"
Click. "I went to my first dance when I was 15. I was so nervous. This is my date, Deedee. She was so cute; I had a thing about blondes then, and, uh..."
He could almost feel the steam rising from Abby. "Um, she wasn't that cute...she had a lousy personality, you know? We didn't go out again. Next pic, my high school graduation—"
"Your high school graduation? I like the robe colors."
"Yeah. Dark green. Nice and soothing. It was a happy and sad time, both, for me. I was almost 16, and now officially two years ahead of the class I'd started kindergarten with. I knew almost no one in the senior class. In the fall, I'd be heading to MIT. I loved my family, and was both excited and terrified about leaving home…I'm so glad I have these pictures; when things are going badly, I can go back to them, and remember how, when past times looked bleak, I got through them somehow. I don't know what I'd do without these pictures." Click.
Abby didn't hear what he said about the next picture, which looked to her just as all the others had: a blank screen. She gazed softly at him, lying in the hospital bed, the laptop on his stomach. How will Tim cope, she wondered, when the bandages over his eyes come off and he learns that his pictures were gone; the computer having been damaged in the same explosion that had hurt his eyes?
She would volunteer nothing. If he never regained his sight, he could believe he still had the pictures, which he could still "show" to others, and keep his memories.
His parents were flying in in the morning. Maybe they still had duplicates of the pictures.
- END-