Author's Note: I'm a bit visually challenged, so for the sake of my eyes and of providing frequent updates, chapters will be short, and there will be many of them. This fic is, of course, primarily Ducky-centric, but will feature a couple of prominently placed original characters, and a few embellished representations of very minor characters from NCIS. If you're dead set against original characters, I think it'd be better for both of us if you didn't read.
Currently, this story takes place some time after season 7, although it is subject to having it's timeline slightly rearranged to accommodate any turns taken by the plot of the TV series.
Now that all that's out of the way, please enjoy!
All my best,
Vivian Bloodmark
Surfeit
By Vivian Bloodmark
Chapter One – La Traviata
A little less than a week after the death of his mother, Doctor Donald Mallard spent an evening at the Washington National Opera. The performance was of "La Traviata," the story, by composer Verdi, of a beautiful kept woman whose transformative romance is interrupted when she dies of consumption. The actress portraying the lead role spends the entire last scene of the opera attempting to sing beautifully and die dramatically at the same time, something that no realistic human would ever be able to do. Ducky was well used to the facts of life and the nature of realism, and perhaps for that reason was so ready to suspend his disbelief. Those individuals unwilling to retreat into fantasy did not belong, he thought, at the opera, where even gruesome death by lingering disease managed somehow to be beautiful. The heroine sang,
If some gentle maiden
In the springtime of her life
Should give to you her heart,
Let her be your wife, for such is my wish.
Give her this picture
And tell her it's the gift of one
Who from heaven, amongst the angels,
Prays always for her and for you.
The thing that he had the most trouble buying into was the idea of the swan song, the triumphant emotional expulsion of song right before the end. The opera's heroine managed to fit all of her sentiments of love and understanding, of hope for the future of her lover and her promises to protect him from the life beyond into one single, final lyrical benediction, despite her inability to stop coughing up blood. Having spent most of his life working with individuals who had already been dead for several hours, Ducky was unused to witnessing the final moments of a living person, even less so of living people who were awake and able to share last words or confessions with the ones they love. Most recently, he'd been there to watch his mother die, at the end of a wasting sickness and the slowly debilitating onset of dementia that had left her quite unable to have anything even remotely resembling a swan song. Her end had been nothing short of a relief for them both, without any triumph to speak of.
Perhaps that was the reason that Ducky felt so much more comfortable with the dead. The dead were unable to surprise you with any word or action, couldn't provide you with hope or apprehension, were unable to make you worry about any act performed upon them or any outcome of their own behavior. The dead could allow insight, but only by their silence, remaining in a refreshingly, relaxingly unchanged state which only the medical examiner had any opportunity to prevail upon. Dead men told no tales, as the old saying went; they could not lie, could not lead you astray if you knew your job properly and performed your tests accurately. Their state was static and would always remain so, and you never had obligations to them which you found yourself unable to satisfy.
As the actress on stage began to sing through her final aria, someone in the seat next to Ducky sniffed violently. Ducky glanced over to find a small, frumpy looking woman with brown hair streaked with gray, a generic "little black dress" covering her pear-shaped, flat-chested frame. She couldn't have been younger than 40, and yet her eyes, full of tears, were unexpectedly youthful and expressive. Ducky could see the woman's eyes brimming with the pathos of that tragic final aria, and reflected briefly on how hard his own heart had become, rendering him able to watch the end of this opera time and time again without shedding so much as a single tear. It must, he decided, have something to do with the amount of death he was used to encountering at his place of work…or perhaps it was only a testament to the fact that he'd nearly memorized "La Traviata" in it's entirety.
Reaching into his pocket, Ducky discreetly passed a clean handkerchief over to the over-emotional woman beside him, murmuring "Here, madam. I promise, I haven't sneezed in it."
The woman looked up, surprised, and, after accepting the handkerchief and blowing her nose into it, whispered "Thank you…goodness, a real handkerchief. I don't think I've ever met anyone who carries one of those before. I just stuff my pockets with tissues."
Ducky smiled. Inclining his head slightly, he replied, "Donald Mallard, operatic scholar and old-fashioned gentleman at your service." In an even lower, more rueful tone, he added, "I prefer the term 'old fashioned' to the ones my younger co-workers tend to use…such as 'dinosaur,' and 'fuddy-duddy.'"
As the heroine onstage began another dramatically pitched verse, Ducky's seat partner took the opportunity to blow her nose loudly a second time. "Molly," she said, holding out her free, clean hand to him. "Molly Barnes. Thanks for the-!"
The music swelled, and anything else that Molly said was lost on Ducky. They both turned back to refocus on the action, as the heroine began to beautifully and elegantly die.
***
A couple of days later, at noon on Monday, Ducky was crouched on the bike path in Fairfax, VA, pulling a rubber glove on to one hand while he used the other to probe at the prone body of a woman with a gunshot wound through her left temple.
"The cause of death," he murmured, "appears to be relatively obvious, but I'll have to wait until I've got her back on my table before I'm certain. Mr. Palmer, would you please-?"
"Already on it, Doctor," said Jimmy Palmer, cheerfully wheeling the gurney over next to the body.
As Ducky and Palmer pushed the gurney back over to the van, Ducky overheard Special Agent Gibbs giving a few details to his team. Tony and Ziva were listening attentively, while McGee seemed more preoccupied with worrying about whether or not he could effectively rub out with his fingers the dark stain that had mysteriously appeared on the side of one of his expensive shoes. Passing close by McGee, Ducky cleared his throat pointedly, attracting the agent's attention just in time for him to look up and see Gibbs glaring down at him with raised eyebrow.
As her face disappeared into the van, the doors closing around her, Ducky gazed down at the dead woman and wondered what she would say if she could. "If you had the opportunity," he murmured aloud to her, "would you sing?"