Five Times I Could Not Stop For Death, and Once He Kindly Stopped For Me
Written for the Stalked By Death and Five Times Challenges
Warnings: Canon character death, with a twist.
Number Three
You belong to me, now.
Five little words that changed my life forever, although I had no idea how much at the time. Five words that signified my official place on Gibbs' team, and gave me a whole new familiarity with the dark specter of Death, this time as it visited other people.
During my first few months on the MCRT, I saw the actions of Death in a variety of forms: the pitiful mummified remains of a woman dressed as a bride, who had been held captive and left to slowly perish when her captor had no more use for her; the brutalized body of a "Jane Doe" whose demise had been brought about and covered up by a woman I had once considered a friend; the commingled remains of three people, a 'meat puzzle' requiring reassembling in order to solve a most gruesome crime, the extension of which almost cost us one of our most valued team members.
When not dealing with these visits from the Grim Reaper, I had plenty more with which I had to deal. I experienced the anxiety of protecting a family from terrorists, the worry for a lost teammate who was in the company of a brutal murderer, the shock of watching a man gunned down by the government on which he had believed would cover for him, no matter what transgressions he himself had committed. I felt the painful loss of someone I had stared to care for, and the incoherent rage towards the one who had taken her from me. I nearly took his life, and in the moment I realized that something had indeed died within me as well.
Life on the MCRT was never boring, and often accompanied by moments of shear terror, sometimes caused by Gibbs himself. There were plenty of times when I felt I would finally experience my own demise: from embarrassment, such as when I caught a horrible case of poison ivy and had to be examined by our medical examiner (and inadvertently showed off more than I ever wanted to his assistant) or when I mistakenly sent my very demanding boss to a sorority slumber party; from fright, when I, under specific orders, told the Deputy Secretary of State to "stick it"; or perhaps from frustration, when, time and time again, I was instructed to perform an impossible search in an unreasonable amount of time.
The pressure to measure up was much greater after I became an official member of the team. Before I had been a temporary nuisance, and later someone who could provide Gibbs with the key he needed to satisfy a vendetta. When I joined the MCRT, however, I found out how demanding he truly was, but the demands were almost comforting: I had grown up with such high expectations from my father, and now these expectations were coming from a new source, one I equally admired. It was an ironic situation, especially considering that the gain of one led to the loss of another.
I lost quite a bit during that first year: my innocence, some of my privacy, and quite a bit of my dignity; but nothing hurt as much as the loss of the relationship with my father, and my transfer to Gibbs' team marked the last time I spoke with him for a very long time.
I didn't come close to really losing my life again, however, until I had been on the team for nearly a year. The first possible brush with death came in the form of a letter, one that, if I had been the one to open, could very well have spelled the end of me. As it was, it almost was the death of one of my teammates. Tony took the envelope from me, and thus very likely saved me from the pain and damage he experienced from a man-made variant of a Dark Age menace.
The second brush came from a terrorist's bomb, wired to the trunk of a car I almost opened. Once again, Tony came between me and a most painful demise, and once again I escaped. It was at that point I remembered that bad things come in threes and I wondered what else fate had in store for me.
When the team went to Norfolk in order to stop a terrorist attack, I knew something terrible was going to happen as soon as we stepped out of the sedan. That wrongness that I had felt in my car before the crash was back, stronger than it had been. I could barely concentrate on my task of jamming the signals of the rocket headed for the crowds on the pier, but I told myself I could do it, and ignored the familiar sensation of something dark and terrifying watching over my shoulder. I could hear the sounds of gunfire, and instinctively I flinched. Suddenly I realized that those bullets were flying at me and I ducked down, only to feel something whiz by my head. In that instant I could have sworn I heard a scream of frustration and rage. At the time, I thought it was one of the people shooting at me and it was only after the shooting had stopped that I realized it couldn't have been. The sound had originated close by, too close to have been one of the shooters. While crouched behind the sedan, out of the line of fire, I saw that my controller had been shot. When I told Gibbs what had happened, I experienced the strangest sensation: the presence that I had felt since arriving at the warehouse grew stronger and suddenly vanished, almost as if it had flown off. I heard more gunfire, which soon ended, and I was almost ready to break cover when I heard one final shot. Somehow I knew that shot had been the reason why the presence had left: it had another target. I waited, my heart pounding in my chest, wondering who it had been, and praying it wasn't one of my teammates. That prayer went unanswered.
Later, when we examined the sedan and I saw the bullet hole right where my head had been only seconds before, I realized just how close I had come to dying. When Tony told me I owed that terrorist who had fired at me a thank you, I barely managed to avoid breaking down right then and there. I was alive, again, and I shouldn't be. I couldn't help but wonder if Kate had died because Death had once again missed his opportunity to take me.
When I finally worked up the courage to go see Kate, I was fighting the grip of another fear. I almost expected Death to be waiting for me down in the morgue, ready to take me for real, as it had been trying to do since I was just a kid. The morgue was empty, however, save for the body of my lost friend. The guilt I felt was crushing when I looked down at Kate's pale, still form, and I wondered: would the team be better off if it had been me lying on that cold metal slab? Tony tried, in his own strange way, to comfort me, but my admission that I was a little afraid was an understatement. I had so much to fear now, and I couldn't share the real reason for my terror with anyone.
Things come in threes and I had escaped the clutches of the Grim Reaper for the third time. I wondered if next time I encountered that dark presence, my luck would finally run out.
TBC…
