((This entire chapter was written by Darkened Shadows. Thanx so much for being my partner in crime here! Posted it seperate to give you all the kudos! Much Love!))

Amelia laid still, listening intently to the sounds around her. She winced slightly when the feet of the unborn child in her womb stretched into her ribcage, reminding her that she was not lucky enough to get sleep quite yet. Not that sleep had ever come easily to her before…

A soft whuffling snore followed by a muffled grumble ensured her that Gavin was deep asleep. With a soft, almost soundless sigh, Amelia shifted slowly until her feet touched the floor and padded out of their bedroom, pulling the door mostly closed behind her. Once she was in the living room, she turned on the lamp and stared at the object in her hand: her cell phone.

There was a spot of blood on the screen, causing her to smile wryly. She'd probably still had blood on her hands after she'd handed that kidnapper's ass to him on a platter. She couldn't even properly remember his name – either she hadn't been listening when Jethro told her or she had never been told to begin with. It hadn't been too difficult to get the upper hand in that situation, though she was sure she would be hearing some choice words from her obstetrician in the future.

That was not to say she hadn't heard some choice words recently.

Amelia had never been fond of being yelled at, though her own aversion wasn't nearly as intense as Lexi's. However, even worse than being accused of sabotaging their relationships was the glares they had been directing at her throughout her entire rant in the cabin. Everything she had said had needed to be known and if airing their dirty laundry was the way to do it, she was always the one strong enough to do it.

Raising her eyes to the mantle of the faux-fireplace that served as the centerpiece of their living room, she focused on one of the pictures in the center. It was of her, Lexi, and Piper and had been taken a couple weeks after the end of Lexi's last long-term relationship. Mitch had tagged along as their so-called "man company" to ward off potential suitors and was the one that had taken the picture. They had been wandering around on the waterfront being comfortingly non-relationship-like when she had finally succeeded in getting her best friend to smile in that exact moment. It was a classic Kodak moment.

Though the smile still graced her face, she could feel the familiar wetness mark her face. Tears. So stupid, she thought, not even bothering to wipe them away just yet. The waterworks were just beginning and it would be counterproductive to wipe them away. Even so, she could feel her hands lift to scrub at her cheeks, erasing the moisture that seemed so far out of her character.

Oh, how she hated to cry.

Squeezing her eyes closed to wring out the last layer of tears, Amelia stood up from the couch, leaving her cell phone behind. Grabbing the remote from the matching loveseat to turn on the television, she changed the channel to a jazz satellite radio station and tuned the volume low enough that it wouldn't disturb her husband's slumber. Her body swaying to the gentle rhythm of the music, she moved to the kitchen to retrieve a silver kettle from one of the lower cupboards.

Arching an eyebrow at the container as she filled it with water, she cast a glance at the hallway that led to the bedroom. Would the whistle be too loud? After a moment, she shook her head but didn't cap the kettle so that the whistle would be lower in volume. Either way, Gavin was down for the count. Worry did that to him, something Amelia felt a little guilty about. If only her need to get out of the cabin hadn't been so strong, if only Tony hadn't done the headlong agent-bullrush, if only everyone hadn't been such idiots to begin with…

Well, it wouldn't do to play the wishing game, she admitted to herself as she pulled down a box of chamomile teabags from an upper shelf. Opening the cupboard near her, she stared at the baking soda and cocoa powder, debating if she was likely to stay awake long enough to make a devil's food cake from scratch.

Just as she was reaching for the can of cocoa powder, she heard the surprisingly loud sound of her ring tone among the quiet she'd been trying to maintain. It wasn't the annoying ring tone she assigned to her mother or the funny ring tones she sometimes assigned her friends; it was her generic ring tone, which was always her favorite song for the time being: Die Young, by Ke$ha. Who in the world would be calling her at… she glanced at the nearest wall clock, four in the morning?

With quick strides, Amelia cut across the kitchen and leaned over the sofa to snatch her phone, frowning at the way the five-month baby bump impeded her. She looked at the number that blinked across the screen, only slightly appeased to know that it was a local number. After quickly weighing the options of wrong number versus prank caller, she slid her thumb across the screen and held the device to her ear. "Hello?" she answered, injecting a healthy dose of irritation into her tone.

"Amelia?" The man on the other end of the phone sounded slightly uncertain, almost as if he would be highly embarrassed if it was some other pregnant woman he was waking up.

"Oh, Jethro, hi." She sighed, some of the tension dropping from her shoulders. "Did I forget something on the statement? I thought I told you everything."

"You did," he assured her immediately. "At least everything that had to do with the kidnapping."

Hearing the low whistle of her now heated water, she moved back to the kitchen, moving the kettle to an unheated burner and pulling a mug from yet another cupboard. "You want to know about what happened at the cabin." For anyone else, it would have been a question but Amelia didn't need to ask. "What did they tell you?"

"There was some yelling, mostly on your side. I figured they were downplaying it some," he added after a brief moment.

"Well, I did yell. Quite a bit." Amelia paused, grinning in bemusement at the memory before the following memories intruded on her momentary good mood. "It wasn't that bad," she assured him, her tone going flat.

On the other end of the line, Gibbs sighed a long-suffering sigh. "You revoked Lexi's godmother rights, Amelia. That sounds pretty bad."

"You knew about that? About Lexi being the godmother?" she asked the former Marine, her voice hitching slightly at her friend's name.

"Yeah. Tim was vicariously happy about it before he started getting all unreasonable."

Amelia snickered, noting that the big bad Marine tended to talk like his favorite forensic scientist when he relaxed his guard just a little bit. "I told some of the things they'd been keeping quiet. I should have expected them to turn on me like they did. The hormones probably made it seem worse than it was," she admitted softly, fiddling with her teabag as she finally settled back on the couch.

"What did they say?"

Amelia laughed but the sound held no humor. "Lexi said I was sabotaging their relationships and Piper compared what I said to dropping a nuke on them."

"What about DiNozzo and McGee?"

"They didn't say anything." Gibbs sighed in relief and she continued before he could start to feel too proud of his protégés. "Just glared at me with the hate of a thousand suns." She sighed. "I understand that they don't get me. Hell, Lexi's known me for over ten years and she still doesn't always… God, I overreacted, didn't I?"

There was a brief moment of silence as Gibbs weighed what he knew of the situation. "If I was them, I'd say yes." Amelia sighed, nodding to herself. "But if I'd been in your place, I might have shot one of them." She scoffed at his candor, the sound turning into a muffled laugh.

Shaking her head, she took a sip of her tea. "I shouldn't have said the things I said. It was unfair."

Another silence met her words and Amelia knew exactly what he was thinking, for she had thought it enough when she was cursing her friends as she was held hostage in her own car by a guy that didn't seem to have a problem with shooting a pregnant woman in the head. All of them – Lexi, Piper, Tim, Tony – had been unfair to her situation, a pregnant military spouse that had taken it on herself to solve their problems for them. In fact, it had been Gibbs himself that had suggested that she leave them alone together without a way to leave instead of staying and helping them walk through this particular rough patch.

"You've forgiven them already, haven't you?"

Amelia released a short bark of laughter. "I'm being the bigger person, yeah."

"Why?"

"Because I know why they did it. They may not know me, Jethro, but I know them and I get it." Downing the dregs of her tea, she stood to serve herself another mugful. "This will pass and the pain will fade."

"How can you be so forgiving?" he asked, trying to wrap his mind around the subject.

Amelia chuckled, watching in distant interest as the cloud of chamomile spread through the hot water. "I saw this on the Internet once: I'm mature enough to forgive them but not dumb enough to trust them. Yet," she added as an afterthought. "I can't let one bad night erase all the good memories I have of them."

"Tell me about them, your good memories," Gibbs said, pitching his soft voice just shy of inquiry.

"You sure? You've got to have better things to do than listen to that."

He chuckled, seeing the wisdom in her words. "If Shannon was the standard for pregnant women, I have to assume you won't sleep anyway, not until you work all the bad feelings out."

"Wow, Jethro. That's surprisingly Zen of you."

"We all have our hidden facets." Amelia could almost hear the smirk in his words.

She nodded to herself then. "You know that I knew Lexi before her dad died, right?" Gibbs grunted softly, giving an affirmative to her question. "We met sophomore year of high school when our school shadowed a local vocational and/or technical school. Bonded over the pointlessness of it, I guess." She laughed softly. "Turned out, her dad knew my grandpa."

"He did? How?"

"My grandpa was Army Reserve and served in World War II and the Korean Conflict. He loved to recruit the young'uns when and wherever he could. Anyway, she was so happy back then and they were so close, too close maybe."

"What do you mean?" The older man's voice tilted toward hardened concern.

Amelia stared at the window over the sink, staring into the darkness on the other side of the glass but seeing instead the many memories of Lexi, both before and after her father's death. "His dying… it nearly broke her. She certainly didn't make the best choices after. Ever since…" She paused, sighing. "She's developed a guilt complex. But I have this memory of her big smile every time she baked something new for him. For a long time, I thought I'd never see that smile again."

"But you did?" he asked gently.

"Tim really is good for her," she replied, the statement seeming like a non sequitur but both knowing it wasn't, not really.

"What about Piper?" the master interrogator asked. "How did you meet her?"

Amelia finally turned away from the window, using a small teaspoon to stir the contents of her tea evenly. "It was a couple of years ago. The bakery had just broke even and I was telling Lexi ways to promote it, mainly so that it was more than me, her, and Mitch. She hired Piper, who I knew nothing about."

"I bet that didn't make you happy," he remarked.

"Oh, you," she growled playfully, the malice somewhat undercut by her laughter. "As soon as she walked in, I knew it was the photographer. She didn't have that hungry look people get when they walk into Lexi's shop, just calculating like she was already planning out the pictures in her head. I scared her a little when I told her I knew she wasn't there for cake. After that, we kind of clicked."

"Clicked?" Gibbs echoed skeptically.

"Okay, fine," Amelia muttered. "I ingratiated myself a little bit. Despite that big wall she likes to keep up, Piper's pretty easy to read. Little girl complex, inferiority complex, afraid to let anyone in, little bit of a bitch sometimes."

"God, you sound like a psychologist."

"You see the same stuff," she accused softly.

A brief moment of silence followed in which Amelia could feel the exhaustion sweep over her again, her eyelids drifting shut. "I've been wondering about something," he started.

"What?" she asked, muffling a yawn somewhat successfully.

"You've taken down two guys now with relatively little effort. Are you trained?"

"I guess you could say that." Amelia sat up straight, stretching her neck to the side. "After all that Derrick mess was over junior year of college, Lexi got the bright idea to start taking self-defense. What she didn't realize was that it was a real dojo. I stuck with it and she didn't. I'd gotten a brown belt in jiu jitsu before life got in the way. I never went back to the dojo but my body remembers how to fight." She frowned slightly when her phone beeped loudly in her ear. Pulling it away from her face, she looked at the new caller that was calling her at… A glance to the clock revealed it to be six o'clock. Camilla Jackson. Great. "Hey, Jethro, gotta go."

"Alright. Call if you need anything." Amelia smirked slightly to herself as she switched the call over. She was relatively sure he wouldn't make that offer to just anyone.

"Millie?"

"Mel, hey." Amelia hated the battalion commander's wife's nickname for her but she endured it all the same. "I heard you were kidnapped."

She arched an eyebrow. Millie always had the weirdest ways of starting a conversation. "I was. I'm back home now."

"Oh? I figured you'd be at a hospital. Trauma and all that, you know."

"Oh, no. Not a scratch. I'm fine."

"Okay. Well, Matt just called me." Oh, that couldn't be good. "He said they need Gavin back out there. Something about being without their Mr. Fix-It, I guess?"

"Oh. Okay. I'll wake him up. Tell Matt to give him a couple hours."

"I will." There was a slight pause and Amelia instinctively knew that she was about to ask something else. "So, brunch today?"

"Millie, I haven't slept since sometime early yesterday. I wouldn't be the best company."

"Tomorrow, then," she replied with certainty.

Amelia sighed, knowing that she would have to give in. Ever since she'd gotten pregnant, Millie had taken a keen interest in her. "Okay. We can try that bistro in the Navy Yard you've been talking about, okay?"

"Right, okay. Sleep well." Without another word, the connection ended but it didn't bother Amelia. Millie was much like her mother that way, never actually saying goodbye.

Cell phone in hand, Amelia began walking back to the bedroom, sighing slightly in irritation when the device buzzed. It was a text message. If it was Lexi or Piper… She didn't finish the thought, never knowing what her sleep-deprived pregnancy hormones had planned for her friends.

The number was unknown but local. When she looked at the message itself, she laughed, realizing it was from Jethro.

Chloe is nice. You've got a good eye… Matchmaker.