February 1, 2007

My sleep schedule is severely messed up. Now I'm fully aware that this piece of information isn't exactly "We now interrupt tonight's episode of America's Next Top Model…" newsworthy but still.

I haven't slept well in a very long time, but I did get myself into a sort of pattern that worked for me. In med school you never get to sleep so that taught me that if I pushed myself to a certain point I COULD and WOULD fall asleep pretty much anywhere and stay asleep for at least 2 hours.

In the past year or so that I've been here I've found that staying out ridiculously late at night and coming home a little after the sun comes up means that I can drop off to sleep while it's light out which always seems easier for me. It's not as vampiric as it sounds. I think I just dream less during the day and dreams, or more specifically, nightmares are my enemy. I don't know if it has to do with the light/dark thing because I have to keep my room completely devoid of any hint of light in order to sleep, but somewhere in my conscious I think just being aware that it is light outside my room helps.

When I started seeing SAM he kept a pretty regular schedule and so in order to see one another we both had to adjust our routines a little, meaning each of us got a little less sleep on either end.

Once we realized though that if we could sleep in the same bed we both slept a little easier things started to level out and I know from my perspective I started getting the best sleep of my life.

Then he caught this case and everything got all sent to hell again. I never know when he's going to be home, and when he is he's usually trying to catch a little sleep. I mentioned how well that goes in my last entry. Poor baby.

When he called me at 4:00 yesterday afternoon and asked if I could swing by his place I was happy; hoping we might actually get a little awake time together. I took the car and got to his place by 4:25 (driving around DC between 4 and 7pm is an experience that cannot be described to the uninitiated so you should be highly impressed with my speed).

I found him sitting in the one comfortable chair in the place (strangely it's in his bedroom, right next to his bed. I haven't thought to ask yet why that is). He still had his coat on and was staring at the wall looking shell shocked. My stomach did a slow, miserable flip as I asked him what was wrong.

At first he didn't want to talk about it. He just wanted to pull me onto his lap and sit with his arms around me, his cheek (which was red hot) pressed against my hair. The shadows changed and the light from the window grew dimmer as the minutes ticked by and neither of us said a word. When I felt his tears dampen my head, I slipped my fingers through his and encouraged him to speak.

"Abby's in the hospital."

I had to wait for the lump in his throat to allow him to speak further. His face was wet with tears and his lip was bloody from where he'd bitten it through trying to hold them back. When he was finally able to speak he told me the gist of it: Abby was stabbed. The wound was a bad enough to keep her in for observation overnight but she was expected to be released tomorrow.

The thing was SAM felt responsible. Apparently there were cookies that needed to be analyzed (don't ask me, I didn't ask and he wasn't about to tell me) and Gibbs sent SAM to the bakery to buy some for comparison. SAM was chasing a phone lead and getting close to what he needed so Abby apparently offered to run what should have been the simple errand for him. At the moment they weren't sure whether the stabbing was related or linked to the case but it didn't matter, Abby was hurt and SAM was, in his mind anyway, to blame.

He was on his way to the hospital to check on her when Gibbs told him emphatically to go home.

The thing is that Abby may be an ex, but she's clearly always going to have a special place in my guy's heart. It's killing him that he let her down but on top of that is the fact that Gibbs is pissed at him and blames him.

SAM has a mild case of the hero worship when it comes to his boss. Letting him down is a double blow.

It was less than an hour before SAM became like a caged animal, pacing the room. He wanted to go out and find whoever did this to Abby. I don't think arresting the guy ever entered his mind. He tried calling the hospital for an update on her condition but because he wasn't family they couldn't give out information over the phone. Finally he called Tony's cell and thankfully Tony was at the hospital with Abby. Speaking to her seemed to set him at ease at least a little. When he hung up the phone he looked less crazed and more exhausted.

We decided to forgo eating and just climb into bed to try and put this day behind us. Wrapped up together in bed he sighed heavily and I tried to comfort him by reminding him that there was no way he could have known that Abby was heading into a dangerous situation but the dark clouds could not be cleared away.

"I always wanted to be the hero." He murmured it quietly into my hair, his voice sounding desolate. I wanted to reassure him but instead let him talk it out. When he became an agent he had fantasies of rescuing damsels in distress (nevermind that he works for the Navy and is much more likely to be doing just about anything else). He wanted to be the man that everyone knew they could count on to do the right thing and that made the women he cared about feel safe. (From Deep Six and many comments from SAM I get the feeling this is what he thinks of Gibbs, thus the hero worship thing I mentioned before). Instead he feels like he's always letting everyone down.

Especially women, and even especially Abby.

He recounted for me the story of meeting a woman who was a witness that no one believed. The two of them connected quickly and were flirting on the phone when the person who committed the original crime she witnessed broke into her apartment and murdered her.

That's tough to take. He was nearby and thought he should have been closer. He still blames himself for her death.

He told me about one of the agents he worked with when he first joined NCIS, a woman named Kate whom he liked very much. She was a mentor and a friend when he needed one, someone to help him survive the fear he had of Gibbs and the constant hazing of Tony. She was killed on duty, he was close by, but not with the rest of his team. He plays the scene over and over in his mind trying to decipher where he could have been, what he could have done to change the outcome of the day.

The room was fully dark and silent except for the occasional whoosh of the heat.

He began to tell me the ways in which he's let Abby down. Things that weren't at all his fault but somehow he's convinced that if he were a better agent, a better man, he would have handled them differently.

He pulled me closer to him when he'd finished telling me about Abby's brushes with scary men and situations and then whispered, "And now you, and Sarah."

Until that moment I'd been lulled into a cozy warmth of hearing the things that haunted the soul of the man I was falling in love with, things that weren't pretty but were so deeply personal that they bound us together just in the act of sharing them. My name and Sarah's being added to the list made me cold with fear, and I asked him to explain.

He is concerned. He has concocted in his troubled mind that the men Sarah and I had been leery of are related to the man who stabbed Abby and that all of this is tied up in his current case. I reminded him that both Sarah and I were fine, and for the record, when we felt like 'damsel's in distress' he was the first person we ran to. He was our hero.

That earned me a smile and a kiss.

We laid quietly for awhile, each lost in our own thoughts and then he asked, "Who's Danny?"