Well, hello there. Be warned, this isn't a very happy story.
Her eyes are dark and still, a deep contrast to the milky white of her skin. There are scars of humiliation on her back, her lips are dry and broken, and there's blood on her arm. She cannot speak for there are no words. She lies in the hospital bed and tries to find herself, tries to locate the whereabouts of her soul, but she cannot find it. The world she grew up in is not the same; the landscape has changed into something she cannot identify. The rules have changed, she knows they have, because what she has gone through simply cannot fit into the innocence and naiveté of her previous life. Her new, scarred life begins in this hospital bed.
"Kate," comes a voice from somewhere to her right and her eyes quickly focus on him. The room is dark and he's sitting on a chair by the window, looking at her. She doesn't say anything, doesn't dare open her mouth, because she knows that the moment she does, she will start screaming. Her eyes focus on his facial features and try to read him. Is he angry? Sad? She sighs. She doesn't know him anymore. This new person that she suddenly has become doesn't know him the way the old Kate would and maybe that's the biggest sign of them all that she should just die now. She closes her eyes.
Someone spits on her naked back but she doesn't react. Someone grabs her hair and pulls hard but she doesn't scream out in pain. Someone chains her to something, and she lets them.
"Look at me." he says softly with an undertone of authority, but it doesn't affect her the way it used to. She does look up at him, but not because he ordered her to; she figures there's nothing else to do. Their eyes lock, ice against darkness. Footsteps echo through the hall outside the room and she can smell the smell of hospital all around her. As she focuses on the smells and sounds around her, her eyes stray away from his and search the room. Except for the chair he's currently sitting on, the room is pale and empty. She can feel his eyes on her, trying to reach her, get her attention, but it feels weird to be seen and she shies away from him. After days of loneliness and silence and... Other things, this is too unfamiliar. Right in this moment, he is looking at her with love, and the former her would have looked back and smiled at this rare display of affection, but the new and broken her doesn't know what love is.
"Stop looking at me." she says through clenched teeth and she doesn't recognize her own voice.
He doesn't do as she says and it doesn't surprise her. Firstly, he is her boss. Secondly, it isn't in his nature to obey people. She sighs and looks down at her hands, trying to ignore his stare. There are marks of struggle on her slender fingers and the manicure she got last week is nowhere in sight. She wonders how long it's been. Two weeks? Three weeks? She suddenly remembers that she forgot to turn off the TV that morning and curses out loud at the thought of how much it is going to cost her.
"What day is it?" she asks him and decides to look him in the eye. He might choose to ignore her if she doesn't. Her eyes meet his and she almost shivers at how much they shine.
"Thursday." he deadpans without breaking the intense stare. She attempts to count how many days she was trapped but her brain won't cooperate and she frowns.
"A week." he tells her, reading her expression and her face falls.A week? Her mind screams inside her aching head. It had felt like two months. She feels like crying and running and hiding from him and the rest of this new reality that she's going to have to face, and attempts to get out of the bed, to somehow show him that she's strong and not this weak little woman she must look like.
She limps across the room in search for some kind of bathroom and quickly finds a door with the words WC written on it. She opens the door and hurries inside without looking at him. She wonders what her reflection will look like, wonders if she looks like a monster now. She wonders if the beauty that some of her previous boyfriends lovingly claimed she carries in her is gone, if all that is left is a bitter glint in the depths of her dark eyes. She wants to turn around in the small bathroom and look into the mirror but she's too afraid of what she might find; she's too afraid of what Gibbs might have seen. She washes her hands, eyes focused on her broken and dry nails. She feels dirty, she realizes, as she starts cleaning the dried blood from underneath her nails, one of the few spots that the nurses must have missed. The feeling of impurity increases and, panicking, she accidentally looks away from her hands and into the mirror. She actually screams at the sight of the woman staring back at her, but the sound that leaves her lips only sounds like a disturbingly weak echo of her former self, and she quickly turns around, feeling the panic pressing on her lungs. She needs to get out of these clothes now. Now. She quickly unties the knot of the white and thin hospital robe, and it soundlessly falls to the cold floor. Next off is the white shirt, then the way too big pants and lastly the socks. Soon she's in the nude, but she barely reflects on it, barely registers the fact that her boss is about five meters away, the only thing stopping him from seeing her being the thin and not so sound-proof wall. He must have heard her accidental scream, she realizes. But her emotional health is way too damaged to actually understand that she should be embarrassed. She stares at herself in the mirror, examines the scars and bruises with trained and professional eyes, managing to identify each mark with each hit, managing to identify the age of the marks, the pressure, the objects with which she was hit. She trails her fingers down her legs, the feeling of hair only increasing this feeling of dirt and disgust, and soon she is in the shower, the hot water burning her skin, leaving it red and irritated albeit clean. She sighs and turns up the temperature, needing the pain of the almost boiling water, aching for something to take away the much deeper and profound ache that is beginning to fill up her lungs, her heart, and her mind. She closes her eyes and reaches for the soap that she somehow and apparently must have noticed while entering the shower, even in this messy state. As the smell of the soap reaches her nose it doesn't bother her when she realizes that it must be the soap of one Leroy Jethro Gibbs and she's too tired to understand or question how the rich and spicy musk of him made its way into the flask in her hospital bathroom.