I was reading the police textbook "Death Work" when I wrote this. Probably shows.

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7. Ghost

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"No bullet, no casing, no weapon, no fingerprints, tire tracks totally destroyed by the locals and emergency vehicles, witnesses were all running the other way when it happened, only guy who got the description right is the kid's father. DiNozzo handed him his son and told him to tell the LEOs to call NCIS."

Ziva and McGee looked at Gibbs, then at each other, then at Gibbs again.

"So Tony committed the perfect crime?" Ziva said, only half kidding.

McGee shook his head, "Would have been a lot better if no one had seen him. Also, they have his shoes. Could be very significant."

"Is this funny?" Gibbs sounded dangerous.

"No, boss."

"Nobody saw Abby, Tony will probably dump the car after he doubles back." Gibbs sank into his chair, brooding. "Whole thing only costs them a day or so as long as their getaway from Washington was clean in the first place."

McGee glanced between his co-workers, nervous that he was missing something again, "How do you know that's what he'll do, boss?"

The glare he received could have curdled milk and he ducked his head back behind his monitor. Sometimes it was better to just accept that an answer existed, even if you didn't know what it was. According to Tony, the most important thing to come to terms with on this job was that Gibbs would always know more than you did about everything and probably wasn't going to share.

"What did you tell the police?" Ziva seemed pretty relaxed, but her mood could swing so violently sometimes it was better to give her a wide berth.

"To close the case. Justified shooting by an undercover officer."

"Was he not out of his jurisdiction?" she pressed.

Gibbs rolled his eyes, "Aren't you supposed to be some kind of intelligence expert, Officer David? He was there, no one else was, that made it his jurisdiction. We're federal agents, not MPs."

She opened her mouth again and McGee made desperate neck-cutting motions. You do not poke a wounded bear with sharpened sticks, and he could not figure out why everyone but him had such a hard time understanding that.

,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,

She wasn't able to quietly pass out because Tony was driving at speeds in excess of five million miles per hour and she was being tossed around in the back seat like a ping pong ball. He got slight lift from the left side tires as he pulled a massive turn and starting going back the way they had come on a parallel street. He flew around another corner into a residential neighbourhood, slowed down to nothing and circled the blocks until he found a building with no windows to park behind. He disappeared for a minute and she remembered the stack of various license plates in the back. When he got back in he had changed his jacket, he was wearing a hat and the glasses, and they were off again.

"They teach evasive driving at FLETC?" she asked exanimately, trying to keep hold of her lunch.

He didn't react to her grey complexion or her robotic tone, his concentration total, "Yep."

She rolled over and planted her face into the seat, wondering why she couldn't cry.

She was used to corpses (even bits of corpses or corpses with their chest cavity flayed open), she was used to gory crime scene photographs, she was even used to seeing accident victims in the flesh (what cops called 'road pizza' because cops were all sick in the head as a rule of the subculture). None of it bothered her, she'd voluntarily watched a human dissection as a freshmen because she was eager to learn and she was eager to experience her own reaction. Her fascination with death and the macabre was news to no one. Her scientific curiosity extended as far as her job and lifestyle allowed it, which was pretty damn far considering she was a Goth forensic scientist with very interesting friends.

This was different.

Forget partial professional numbing and scientific detachment- it was pretty hard to dehumanise the guy into a piece of evidence when she'd been having a conversation with him a few seconds before that's what he became. Pretty hard when he locked eyes with her and she could see the failure to understand what was happening in them, could see the struggle, the fear, the please don't let me die.

No dead person had ever been so real to her, not even her friends, her family. Maybe because she hadn't seen them die. Maybe because she believed their souls were somewhere else by the time she saw their remains. Watching that man's blood pool around him as he fought to stay conscious, she had felt her own body cooling, her own heart slowing down, felt darkness descending on her world. She was not immortal.

It's a thing you think you know, that you're not going to live forever. But you don't really know it. You don't really believe it. Not until the truth of it assaults your senses and the knowledge hits you like four thousand tonnes of bricks.

She was a survivor now, she supposed, in a truer sense than she had been before. Sure, there had been previous danger, previous mortal combat raged over her head, previous dudes who thought that she could be used as a hostage or a victim or a torture device. But this was different again, because never before had someone died so that she might live. Never before had she seen someone killed in front of her. Never before had she seen someone she thought she knew as well as anyone in his life had ever known him- better- do something that was so difficult to reconcile with what she knew.

It wasn't like she was unaware of what their work could entail. She'd just been thinking about this the other day when she was reminded of how scary and pragmatic and business-like Serious Tony could be. She had been known to forget about that side of him because she didn't get to see it (even the other special agents didn't get to see it very often) and it was always so surprising when she did. Even when it wasn't full out, even just his calm where any normal person would be justifiably freaking could be jarring. Ari trying to snipe her came to mind. Not that she remembered that with her usual clarity.

Which was another reminder. She knew they killed people, it was impossible to believe they had not because she had to process the tech when they did. Gibbs was a sniper, for crying out loud. It was his job to kill people.

But it wasn't the same to know these things and to know these things, was what she was getting at. And all her brain could give her was that gunshot in slow motion and loud like a crack of thunder, the blood spraying at least twice as fast as she knew it should be- her mind was playing tricks on her. His death was in her nose, she was sure she could actually smell the blood, though she could smell nothing else. And she remembered staring down the barrel of Tony's pistol and trying not to be there in the moment, of running through how she would collect evidence from her captor, wishing she could just have a task to order her thoughts towards.

Something about agency and enactment, she wasn't super interested in psychology. It was too soft a science.

Her stomach rolled again and she wished she'd never gotten so close to the action. She wished she didn't have to know what they faced, that she could still romanticise and glamorise, and never think of the bad guys as scared, helpless human beings with mothers and problems and reasons.

She wished she could unrealise that she'd forced Tony to take a life and she still blamed him for it.

"How many people have you killed?" She kept her back turned, her head pillowed on her arm as she stared at the checked grey bench seat which filled her vision.

"Nine, including him."

Abby was silent a long moment, swallowing against bile, "Is that a lot?"

"Kind of."

"Kind of here having the meaning of yes."

"Yes."

"How'd that happen?" the tears were coming now and her voice wavered.

"I'm a really good shot."

"Tony, I need you to give me something here. I need something from you."

She felt the car stop and heard him release his seat belt and open the door. Then he was leaning over her, pushing her up by the shoulders. She avoided his eyes until he held her face between his hands and ducked to find her eye line, "It's never easy. It always stays with you. It takes a piece of you and you have to watch yourself losing too many and getting too hard- but I don't regret a single life I've taken. I've never killed anyone who wouldn't have killed me or someone else if I had hesitated a second too long. I'm right with my conscience, I did my job, and that's enough for me."

His eyes, so green with the sun hitting them, seemed to swim as she tried to read into them. Tried to see it from his shoes. "Why so many?"

"I did three tours undercover for the Philly PD: narcotics. The last one didn't exactly go off like in the script. A link in my cover background broke when a dealer realised one of the guys who vouched for me had been busted a few weeks before, there was nothing I could say to make up for it. He'd made up his mind I was playing for the other team."

Memories of various twenty question games with him when he was still fairly new and shiny jiggled free in her brain. "Your 'extenuating circumstances'?"

He nodded, "My partner ended up losing an arm, a good cop got killed, a bunch of pushers died in the fire fight along with some college kids they just recruited- hadn't done anything yet- and they gave me a medal. For bravery. I couldn't stay there any more."

"And that was how many?"

He looked edgy, but he answered, "Three."

"What about the rest?"

"I caught a lot of guys red-handed who didn't want to go to jail, I was under in the mob after I made Detective, I got shit tours because the veterans hated me, I can talk so they sent me to talk to the psychos until they could get a negotiator in, I'm reckless, I seem to attract danger, you want to hear about my Baltimore captain and how he figured I wanted to be a martyr?"

She mirrored the way his hands had been on her face with hers on his, "Do you?" Sometimes we wonder about you, hun. Sometimes we lie awake.

"I don't have a death wish," he said it fiercely, defensively, and she knew she was not the first person to ask.

"Do you have a life wish?"

He physically pulled away from her and she saw him so clearly it made her heart ache. Abby held out her arms to him, waiting patiently for him to notice the invitation. When he did, he just looked at her for a long moment- measuring her intent-, then he hugged her tight as a vice. She kissed him on the jaw near his ear- the only spot she could easily reach- and felt a little better.

"Tony, I'm going to see him for a long time, aren't I?"

"Probably always. More clearly than you ever would have thought."

"How do you deal with it?"

"Know it wasn't your fault, stay focussed, and keep on."

She hugged him even tighter for a moment, "I'm sorry."

"Believe me, I understand." he sighed and his breath tickled her neck.

"Thank you for saving my life."

"Any time, Abs."

,.,.,.,.,.,.,

They were in an almost empty bar across from the shop which was painting the former beige-mobile navy blue. Tony said he was originally going to trade it in for another used vehicle, but decided it was a bad idea. The one they had had been carefully erased from history and a new one had been written to match their cover story (a final appropriate license plate was set aside for this purpose), also it was modified to easily hide their spy stuff, which they would have had to find a way to move and hide in the new car and blah di blah: it just wasn't worth it. It was doubtful the shooting could be tied to the car in the first place. Even if it could have been, Gibbs would be on it.

She watched his long legs swing over the edge of the high bar stool and thought more about taking a life and dead bodies and how it was all so different than she thought it was.

"What's it like?"

He knew what she was asking by her tone, "You know, questions like that are considered a real faux pas on the force."

"Good thing I'm not a cop, isn't it?"

"I can't even tell you." He started to smile, but it faded as he got thinking about something, "Abby, I can't tell you... that, either. It's... There's really no way to describe it or come to terms with it. You're fine with it because you know it was the right thing, morally, professionally, grammatically and all. You're sad because a life is a life, but it's not personal. You can't make this stuff personal. When you do, you need your partner to pull you back."

She was digesting and that stopped her up. "Did Kate ever do that?"

There was a subtle flash of pain behind his eyes and she felt as guilty as if she'd hit him.

"Tony, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to... what did I do?"

He rubbed his eyes and looked like he'd rather be talking about anything else, "I just wasn't expecting you to mention her. It comes back to you sometimes in the weirdest ways. Shrink says he's seen guys lose it decades after. I plan to be building a boat by then, so I should be fine."

She put a hand on his knee, knowing she'd hit a trigger in spite of the gloss he was putting on it and not sure how to comfort him, "I miss her too."

"She was your best friend," he said, giving that the full respect it deserved, then shaking his head, "but she was my partner. You know?"

"Kind of." She had a better idea than most lay people, which was just enough to know that she'd never ever know.

"Yeah," he held her hand as he stood up and he blinked the shadows out of his eyes until you'd never know they were there, "Let's go check on old faithful's makeover. We need to get back on the road."