It was one of the longest days in the entire history of days, and McGee was not making it any shorter.
"Where are you going?" she asked irritably as he followed her. The closeness she'd desperately needed yesterday now grated on her nerves.
As usual, when they had days like this.
He had that annoying incredibly determined look on his face. "I'm going with you. As long as Cobb's still on the loose we're not taking any chances."
God, would this day never end? "No, McGee, shoo." She waved him off. Generally when she was horribly condescending, he would eventually go away in a huff. "I can take care of myself."
Her words did not appear to have much of an effect. "Abby, this is not just another random suspect. This guy is very bad news, and if something ever happened to you, I would –"
It wasn't his jealous face. It was, instead, something she wasn't entirely sure of.
"You'd what, McGee?"
He hesitated, then gave an odd miniscule half nod, half shrug. And there was something in his eyes she hadn't seen in a long time. Something she thought she'd lost forever.
She wanted to cry again, but she was too exhausted. So she just hugged him tight instead, her irritation fading.
#
There weren't any purple kittens or flying elephants in her dreams. Just McGee, lying in the hospital bed looking pale and drawn, with the doctors telling her that they couldn't promise anything, just where she'd seen Cade that morning. And then the dream shifted and he was on the autopsy table instead, where Franks and Levin had been, and his eyes wouldn't open, now matter how much she pleaded with him.
Abby jerked awake in her coffin, her breathing quick and sharp. She'd only gotten about an hour of sleep, but she needed to see him, to know that he was all right.
She padded out to the living room in the black tank top and skull-spattered shorts she'd been sleeping in, and stopped with a smile. McGee had apparently planned on working, since his laptop was sitting on her coffee table. But at some point he must have given up, and now he was fast asleep on her couch, with his feet propped beside his computer and his hand less than an inch from his gun, which he'd placed on the table next to him.
Her very own obviously exhausted, slightly wrinkled, fiercely protective knight in shining armor.
She ducked back into her room and grabbed her grandmother's quilt, which she'd wrapped herself up in to fall asleep, and tiptoed back out to the couch. Keeping a careful eye on his gun hand – his reflexes, while not quite at Ziva-level, were more than adequate, and she didn't want to startle him too much – she covered him with the quilt and then crept underneath it herself, curling up beside him.
It was his turn to jerk awake, and she saw his hand move towards the gun on the table before he registered that it was her. He relaxed back into the couch, shifting so that he could slide his arm around her waist. "You should still be sleeping," he mumbled.
Abby lay her head on his shoulder. "Bad dreams."
"S'okay," he told her. "I would never let anything happen to you. None of us would."
It wasn't herself she was worried about.
"McGee, do you know why I stayed at the hospital with Cade all night?"
There was a pause. "Because he's your 'friend,'" he said grudgingly.
"Partly," she admitted. "And he's a nice guy, and his family's far away, and he deserved to have someone there with him. But mostly it was because I felt guilty."
He twisted his head to look down at her. "What do you have to feel guilty about?" he asked.
She tightened the arm she'd wrapped across his stomach. "Because all I could think when I found out about him and Levin was how grateful I was it wasn't you. Not that he was still alive, but just that it wasn't you. Lying in that hospital, or down in Autopsy." She lifted her eyes to his. "Tim, if something ever happened –"
She didn't even make it as far into the sentence as he had. There was a lump in her throat that she couldn't talk past. So she put her head back down on his shoulder and snuggled in closer.
McGee rested his chin on top of her head. "Go back to sleep," he said after a moment of silence. "We still have a few hours before we have to head in."
#
Her couch was definitely not designed for sleeping, and they both woke stiff and cramped when it was time to go back to work.
It didn't seem to matter much.
FIN