Wow: I know I've been MIA and I'm sorry. My Lit professor thought it was attractive to slap us with two fifteen page papers—back to back. So, as you can imagine, I've had no life. Have no fear, though. I have some good news for you: my little brother damaged someone else's car yesterday—while driving mine. He's fine. My car? Not so much. Why is that good news for you? To keep from killing him I distracted myself by writing a few chapters.

Anyhow, thanks for reading/reviewing/subscribing. After my front bumper's funeral, seeing your kind words cheered me up. :)

So, here's one before I head off to class...


The Lightening Strike

Chapter Four: Faded Pictures, Distant Clocks


I've got this feeling that there's something that I missed.

Don't you breathe.

Something happened, that I never understood.

You can't leave.

Every second, dripping off my fingertips.

Wage your war.

Another soldier says he's not afraid to die.

Well I am scared.

In slow motion, the blast is beautiful.

Doors slam shut.

A clock is ticking, but it's hidden far away.

Safe and sound.

Somewhere A Clock Is Ticking, Snow Patrol, Final Straw


Benjamin Kyle was the man who couldn't remember.

On a hot August day in 2004, he was discovered badly beaten and discarded next to a Burger King. Paramedics reported that there were three depressions in his head, which could have indicated his injuries were created by a blunt object. When found, he had no memory of who he was. When he looked in the mirror, the blue eyes staring back at him belonged to a stranger.

Clive Wearing, an accomplished musicologist, contracted Herpes simplex encephalitis, a virus which normally only causes cold sores. The virus attacked Wearing's brain, destroying his ability to form lasting new memories. Still able to conduct a choir and play the piano, he can create and direct musical works. However once the music ends, the notes recede into the void of his non-existent long-term memory.

These men existed, in each moment, as if waking from a dream, with no awareness of where they were or even how they got there. No knowledge of the person they were underneath the surface, no knowledge of who was waiting for them in the next room. No childhood memories, nothing beyond snippets of the present.

Each time their eyes swept an object or a face, it had no more significance than a photograph in a stranger's album.

After hearing the doctor describe Tony's prognosis, Ziva couldn't help but wonder: is a life without memory a life without meaning?

The question lingered like a hangover as she pushed open the door and stole into Tony's room. The words throbbed against her skull and haunted her stomach, the ghosts of her earlier nausea still taunting her with their presence.

Twelve hours had passed since Tony made it out of surgery. Sixteen point seven six percent of his seventy-two hour recovery window had evaporated and there had been no change.

It had taken Ziva more than half a day to work up the nerve to visit him.

She'd grab her coat and throw it on only to return to her desk and numb herself with the anesthesia of work.

She couldn't avoid it forever. She couldn't avoid him forever. Eluding the cruelly capricious climate of Tony's new reality wasn't doing either of them any favors.

Even in the face of the uncertainty hovering over their relationship, he came through for her. She wasn't about to desert him now.

Gibbs wasn't in the room when she arrived, though the plastic seat at Tony's bedside was still warm. She pulled over another chair, feeling uncomfortable taking Gibbs' place, but having no qualms about creating her own.

Every sound seemed like an outbreak of pandemonium in Tony's room. The smallest of her movements caused her chair to whimper. She forced the saliva curdling in her mouth down. The sound of it slopping against the walls of her throat seemed to echo against the room's white walls. The ineluctable, ambient sounds of the hospital on the other side of the door—intercom announcements, the sound of rubber soles brushing against shiny tiled floors, the hushed conversations between doctors and families looking for answers—were just too loud.

Yet nothing Ziva could say, no uproar she could create would be loud enough to wake him.

She gritted her teeth and slammed her hand against the faux wood of Tony's nightstand.

She loathed helplessness.

She tightened her grip on Tony's hand, her eyes blinking to the rhythmic background music of the ventilator and machines. The green light of the monitors glowed, flashing the artificial life the machines supplied.

She suddenly decided to talk to him.

"Remember when we were watching the Bourne Identity? You see, I think Bourne's amnesia is a metaphor for relationships, showing us that despite efforts to forget or disconnect from certain transgressions in the past, certain things, people, relationships—whatever—may come back to bite us on the ass."

The machines beeped; the lights flashed. She sat there, watching him a moment.

Sighing, she ran her fingers through her hair. "Or it is just like Memento and that damn photograph. We see it finished, undeveloping, entering the camera, being taken—I wonder if we have the same luxury with that bullet. And it does not help that you are infamous for going beyond the bounds of the moral principles of others to get what you want. I wish we could see everything in black-and-white, like Memento, so we can figure out which of the sixty billion dirtbags you have slighted over the years it was that decided to put a bullet in your brain."

The monitors drummed forward, the hissing ventilator pumped air into his lungs.

"I have been hanging around you too long," she scoffed. "I am starting to use movies to analyze my life."

She knew Anthony DiNozzo knew this scene like the back of his hand. He'd seen the "repentant partner, injured partner" hospital scene a million times. He could cite a script worth of dialogue. He knew how the directors maneuvered their audiences' emotions and how the cameraman caught just the right tear splash at the perfect angle.

She wished for one of his movie quotes in that moment. She wished she could sift through them and find the right line, the perfect string of words that would stir up a miracle and open his eyes.

Her grief was deafening and raging, though she didn't make a sound.

She didn't hear the door open behind her, nor did she hear the perfectly executed footsteps. It took a while before her reflexes warned her about the hand on her shoulder. When they did, she threw herself out of the chair, ready to defend herself.

She squinted through the unshed tears until Gibbs came into focus.

He pulled her forward, her face pressed to against the fabric of the shirt wrinkling over his shoulder. He wrapped an arm around her shoulders, his eyes focused on the man in the bad.

Ziva rarely broke in front of him, in front of anybody, but his unrestrained strength was exactly what he needed.


It was no secret Timothy McGee loved all things technological.

As he sat at his desk, cross-referencing MOs and digging through various databases, he found himself comforted by the fact that technology was immune to human grief.

The enormous maze of circuitry that made up the databases and search engines never sagged under the weight of the many vices and crimes they held. The wires and CPUs treated the missing children, the murdered sailors, and the dying partners like numbers—each amounting to crumbs of data to be transported and saved and even forgotten.

Forgotten.

McGee's fingers froze on his keyboard.

He wondered if Tony would remember him.

He wondered if Tony would wake up at all.

McGee was a numbers man and the numbers were against Tony: nearly all patients with a severe head injury develop some degree of disability, while about two out of three patients with moderate brain injury suffer disability. Among patients discharged with a doctor's expectations of a "good recovery," at least ten percent to twenty percent suffer ongoing neuropsychological difficulties.

Then again, when had Tony ever done what he was supposed to do?

Besides, Gibbs hadn't even him permission to die and that counted for something.

Gibbs or science?

McGee groaned. He didn't know which hero to believe in.

"Timothy?" Ducky's voice drew the young agent from his musings.

McGee looked up and smiled into the medical examiner's kind face. With a groan, he ran his hand over the back of his head and slouched. "What can I do you for you, Ducky?"

"I was heading to the hospital to visit Anthony. I was wondering if you'd like to come along."

"I can't."

"You've been at this all day."

"And I haven't got a damn thing to show for it," he snapped. He swallowed and scrubbed his face with his hands. "Do you wanna know the last thing I said to him?" His laughter was soft and self-pitying, bitter even. "He was harassing me about my date the other night and I told him to 'stay out of my life'. Ha, sometimes people get what they wish for, huh?"

"Are you familiar with Mignon McLaughlin?"

McGee shook his head silently.

"Well, she was a brilliant American journalist and author. She was quite perceptive and she understood the pulchritude of the English language. She and my mother were contemporaries..."

"Ducky..."

"Anyway," he cleared his throat. "She wrote, 'Family quarrels have a total bitterness unmatched by others. Yet it sometimes happens that they also have a kind of tang, a pleasantness beneath the unpleasantness, based on the tacit understanding that this is not for keeps; that any limb you climb out on will still be there later for you to climb back.' "

With a swift nod of his head, he removed his coat from the back of his chair and followed Ducky in the direction of the elevator.

The list of crimes flashed on McGee's computer screen in his absence, pieces of the puzzle burrowed underneath countless names and dates.


"Eat."

Ziva looked up at the paper bag Gibbs shoved into her chest.

She instinctively peaked in: a turkey sandwich and an apple. She closed the bag and tossed it back to him. "I am not hungry," she replied vacantly from her chair.

He arched his brow and placed the bag back in her lap. "It won't taste a shade above crap, but you're no good half starved."

She sighed and ran her fingers up and down her arms. "He does not look good."

Gibbs remained silent.

"He does not look like somebody who is going to make it."

Gibbs shrugged. "He's got good doctors. He's young, healthy. Never take anything at face value, Ziva. You know better than that."

"Abby said you dropped the bullet off at the lab and came back here," she blocked.

"She's handling the ballistics."

She licked her lips. "I cannot help but think of all the 'what ifs'. What if the line at the café had been longer? What if there was a traffic jam? Why did I not see the infrared dot? Why did I not have the foresight to push him out of the way?"

Taking a swallow of coffee and setting the paper cup on his knee, Gibbs took in the closest thing he had to a son before grabbing a hold of Ziva's gaze. "You know, if you give him a license to die, he will."

"I was actually talking to him," she laughed humorlessly. "I do not expect him to hear me. Not that it would matter, anyway. I have not said anything of sustenance since I sat down."

"That's for him to decide."

She raked him with an incredulous stare, though it immediately dissolved into one of sadness. "He has always been intuitive, sometimes annoyingly so. I just...if I keep talking he will figured out—he will figure out I think he is dying." She said softly, but her words ricocheted off the room's walls and leaped back into her lap.

He tilted his head and studied her for a beat, then shrugged. "Then stop saying goodbye."


"Hey Dad, did you know time stands still?"

The young man watched the blue flame sputter out of his lighter as he lit his cigarette. He took a long drag, savoring the irresistible burn in his throat. Laughing, he washed down the mouthful of smoke with a swallow of beer before loosening his tie and unbuttoning the first few buttons on his collared shirt.

"Really?" he laughed again. His muscles groaned as they brought his evening cigarette to his lips and back to the ashtray his son made him in the second grade.

"Really," the boy affirmed, stuffing a chunk of burger in his mouth. Gulping down half his milk, he let out a satisfied burp before he continued. "We learned about this guy named Henry Molaison. His doctor took out chunks of his brain to help with this disorder called epilepsy. The doctor failed and because of it, Mr. Molaison couldn't make new memories. Like, this other doctor had been visiting him for more than twenty-five years and he couldn't even remember her if she left him for more than a few minutes. He remembered his childhood, even the small stuff, but he never knew where he was or the person he was currently talking to. Freaky, huh?"

The young man leaned back and allowed the cushions on the couch to swallow him.

Freaky was the least of it.

The young man couldn't help but wonder what it would be like to wake up with a clean emotional slate. To reduce his hate and pain to the past, a past that would be truly behind him. To experience terrible heartache and guilt and to just simply forget about it.

He wondered what it would be like to have no knowledge of his own mistakes.

His mind wandered to his rifle, tucked into its hiding place and he smiled.

Anthony DiNozzo had been taken care of.

He glanced at the clock on the cable box. Time was moving forward and so was he.