Author's Note: Just one more chapter left after this! This isn't brilliant, and I might be drawing the ending out too much, but after two weeks in captivity I didn't want to just make Abby instantly fine and happy again. Thanks to everyone who's still with this one – it means a lot!
Abby's family arrive a couple of hours later, and her friends leave them to their tearful reunion. Gloria stops Gibbs on his way out the door, enveloping him in a fierce, tearful hug and signing to him that she's sorry for how harshly she treated him when he told her of her daughter's disappearance.
He drives his team back to the Navy Yard, where Tony, Ziva and McGee all collect their respective vehicles and head home in high spirits. Though it's getting on for one a.m., Gibbs opts to stay in the building a little longer, compiling his statement on events and his role in Mawher's death. He leaves it in Jenny's office and then takes the rear elevator down to the morgue, where Ducky and Palmer are concluding the autopsy.
"Hey, Duck."
"Ah, Jethro. How is young Abby?" Ducky asks, stripping off his bloodied latex gloves. Palmer looks up from suturing shut the Y-incision, eager for news.
"She's good. They're keeping her in for observation; her family are with her." Gibbs stares down at Mawher. His pallid face is washed clean of the eyeliner he was never seen without in life, and with his features free of the nervous energy he always seemed to display, he appears almost serene. "How was the autopsy?"
"As expected. No abnormal findings – not that I expected anything would contradict your story, of course." He fixes Gibbs with a concerned gaze. "I really think you should go home and get some rest, Jethro. These past two weeks have been hard on all of us, but you seem to have had a more difficult time than most."
He's grown used to functioning on the last dregs of his energy, but Gibbs has to admit that on this occasion, Ducky's right. Acknowledging his old friend's hand on his shoulder with a brief nod, he turns and leaves the morgue.
Gibbs drives home slowly, fighting weariness. Once he gets there, he falls asleep almost instantly, his mind reaching for his psychic connection to Abby out of habit. Nothing happens, and his sleep is dreamless and uninterrupted.
He's woken at midday by the phone ringing, and when he answers, Abby's voice pulls him into full awareness. "How'd you sleep?"
Gibbs glances at the clock. "A little too well. You?"
"Good." Something in the timbre of her voice tells him that's not strictly true, but he doesn't push her for now. "I think we lost our psychic superpowers, Gibbs. I tried to reach you last night, but I didn't get anywhere."
"Me either." Truth be told, it doesn't bother him too much, but he knows she'll be disappointed. Ever the scientist, she had probably been planning to run tests to see if she could figure out the hows and whys of their mind-link. All Gibbs can imagine is that it had something to do with the mutual stress they were under, but he doesn't want to think about it now that he doesn't have to. Psychic abilities undermine his view of the world a little too much for comfort.
"There goes my scientific breakthrough," she says, a little dejectedly. "I was gonna see if Ducky could get me some time with an EEG, maybe do some brain scans…"
There's a voice in the background, and Gibbs recognises it as belonging to Josh, Abby's younger brother. She listens to him for a moment, and then says, "I called to see if you could pick me up from my mom's later tonight. And if the answer's yes, she's insisting that you stay for dinner."
He's had dinner with the Sciuto family a couple of times before, had spent the previous Christmas with them at Abby's behest. She introduced him to her parents years ago, after learning that he knew how to sign, and he gets on well with them both. "Sure."
The day passes quickly, and before he knows it Abby's greeting him at the door of her parents' place with a hug that almost knocks him to the ground. "I missed you!"
Mealtimes with Abby's family are all but silent, but no less boisterous for it. Gloria and Daniel communicate in sign language, but are able to lip-read. Abby once told him that they get along okay in the hearing community, but Gibbs chooses to sign rather than speak to them, explaining that he enjoys the chance to practice.
Abby and her brother, of course, are fluent in ASL, and the entire Sciuto family love to talk as much as Abby does. At times it's a challenge interpreting the rapid hand movements from four other people, but Gibbs catches ninety-five per cent of what's said.
Even with his brain working overtime, certain things are not lost on him. Abby still seems fatigued, her smile a little slow to appear. She strives not to show it, bickering affectionately with Josh and keeping up her usual cheerful exterior, but Gibbs knows she'll need time before she truly feels herself again.
It's around eleven at night when Abby promises to get in touch with her parents the following day, and slides into the passenger seat of Gibbs' car. They're understandably reluctant to see her leave, but Abby tells them she wants to get back to some semblance of normality as soon as possible, and they accept her wishes without a fight.
As Gibbs turns onto the high street, Abby rests her head on his shoulder. "Thanks, Gibbs."
He kisses the top of her head, keeping his eyes on the road. "You should sleep."
"Later." She begins to play around with the radio, hopping from a weather report through several songs that she discounts with a sigh.
Gibbs reaches over and pulls a CD out of the glove box, handing it to her. She studies it and grins, recognising it as the Plastic Death disc she directed him to at her apartment, during their first mind-link. "You're a closet fan, aren't you?"
He kept the CD close throughout his search for her, turning it over and over in his hands as he tried in vain to figure out a way to locate her. Over the days since he found it, it became a talisman, a symbol of his failure, a memento to remind him not to give up. Now he's glad to return it to her.
Abby slots it into the CD player he never uses. "I didn't have any of my music at my parents' place. I haven't heard anything I actually like since…" She doesn't bother to finish the sentence, instead hitting the play button and adjusting the volume to a level a little below ear-splitting.
As the first track starts, indistinguishable to Gibbs' ears from any of the other stuff she plays, she leans back in her seat, her eyes closed, just listening. One hand taps out a rhythm in time to the beat against her thigh, but she's otherwise motionless.
Gibbs drives without speaking, letting her soak up the sounds she's missed so much. By the time the last track concludes, he's making the turning onto Abby's street, and she opens her eyes to gaze up at the building he knows she was afraid she'd never see again.
"You're home," he tells her, and she gives that slow smile again, the light in her eyes a little brighter than it had been just an hour before. And then she speaks the words that give him hope that she's beginning to pull herself back from the darkness.
"If Tony's been through my underwear drawer, I will kill him."