Oh My Gosh, this my dear friends is the penultimate chapter. Aren't you excited? =] Sorry its been a while, I'm really not on top of this at the moment, not that its that difficult to post a bit of text but I seem to have not been online much in the past few weeks. So yeah, sorry xxx

Chapter Twenty.

2009 suddenly became 2010 and the team barely noticed, since Tim McGee had passed every day had become slow and laborious. They had barely noticed what an impact he had on the team before he was gone. Abby had been given six weeks bereavement leave yet she had barely taken five days. Tony, Ziva, Gibbs , Jenny and Ducky were slowly becoming more concerned about her as she spent most of her days and several nights in her office, working on things even they did not know about.

It was not until the second Tuesday in January did the team realise that something had to be done. Tony had gone to visit the lab to deposit some evidence for Abby to process and he heard her talking he figured she was talking to her machines as usual and continued his way towards the door. As the door was just about to open did he hear a name he was not expecting? Timmy. He hadn't heard anybody say it in a long time; Abby was the only person he ever allowed to call him that.

When Tony walked in to the room and deposited the evidence box he glanced around looking to see if Abby had been talking to a photo of her late husband or …

A mop. She had converted mop Ziva in to a mop McGee. Tony blinked when he saw it and cleared his throat. Abby looked up at him and titled her head slightly to one side in a questioning manner.

"Abby, that's not healthy." Abby had returned to her work.

"What's not?" She asked as she wandered off to one of her many machines.

"The mop McGee."

"Oh. Well when you lose the love of your life, you tell me what's healthy." Abby's tone of voice was clearly screaming at Tony to vacate the room and he did so sharpish.

Abby waited until he was gone before letting out the breath she had been holding in. With it she let the tears shimmy down her face once more. She slid to the ground overcome with the loss of her husband, the one person she had felt able to get close to and love. The only person she would ever marry. The only person she had ever foreseen herself having a family with and now they had both lost that. Circumstance had removed all happiness from her life.

"It wasn't circumstance," she finally said out loud, "it was Vance." Abby spat with name with venom, realising all her frustration and anger out in that one word. She picked up a test tube and threw it across the room allowing it to shatter against the wall, leaving a pile of shattered glass underneath it. She threw another test tube, and then a beaker and she followed this off with a rather expensive microscope. She went to pick up the next thing that came to her hand only to find it was a box of latex gloves.

"Gloves? No pleasure comes from throwing gloves at a wall." She muttered as she placed the box on the table and extracted two gloves from the box. "Fate seems to want me to work."

"Not fate Abby. I want you to work." Gibbs had entered her lab; she had not heard the elevator or the doors opening and was rather startled to see him standing there.

"I don't have anything for you Gibbs, I was just …"

"Breaking NCIS property?" He mocked looking pointedly at the pile of shattered glass littering the skirting of the far wall. Abby followed his gaze and sighed.

"I'll clean it later." She shrugged it off. Abby walked around the bench and began siphoning off samples and placing them in small tubes to be placed in her mass spectrometer. Gibbs watched her for a while as she worked.

"What?" She asked a little harsher than necessary, Gibbs didn't retaliate instead he walked over to her stool and sat down, continuing to watch her. "I can't work if you are here Gibbs."

"Then don't work. You should have taken six weeks leave. You were back at work by the middle of November."

"Six weeks has gone. It's the 12th of January Gibbs. He died on the fourth of November. Over two months ago, so six weeks has long since gone."

"Doesn't matter, I'll make Vance give you the time off. You need to heal Abby, talking to a mop is not healing. You need to grieve and you can't do that here, when everything reminds you of him."

There was silence for a while as Abby took in deep breaths to attempt at calming herself. It was a while before she spoke again.

"Home reminds me of him more." She whispered, hoping Gibbs could understand her desire to avoid the place where she had been the most happy, in the home the two of them had bought three months before their wedding. Where they had spent but a few nights before Tim was called away on a mission, before he was gone from her life forever.

When Gibbs heard what she said he walked silently over to her and pulled her towards himself. He wrapped his arms around her back and held her tightly to him as she collapsed against him. She mumbled something in to his chest but he couldn't figure out what she said before he felt her body shake as she was overcome with more tears.

"I miss him Gibbs." She whispered after a few minutes of crying. He squeezed her and she clung on to the front of his jacket like a small baby. "I don't know what to do." She whimpered and every time he held her all the tighter.

"You start with not talking to a mop. Here," he separated himself from Abby and walked to her bench. He returned clutching a paper and a wad of paper. "Write down what you want to tell him." She looked up at him with a bemused expression on her face.

"I did it when I lost Shannon and Kelly."

"It helped?"

"I'm not sure; I was on pretty strong pain medication." Abby chuckled at this, knowing he had been in an explosion yet she was sure he had said it to make her laugh. His smile cemented this thought and she regressed to a sad sigh.

"I write him a letter? Then burn it? Bin it? Post it to a person I don't know?"

"Keep it. Words can trap the love our hearts feel." Abby raised her eyebrows at Gibbs sentimental comment. "Repeat that Abby, and I swear I will break your mass spectrometer." Gibbs smiled as she smiled back at him. He slowly retreated out of the lab leaving the grieving Goth alone with her thoughts.

'Write him a letter? Saying what?' she thought, 'feelings? I guess so, okay, lets start this.'

'Dear Timmy,
This is such a formal way to start a letter to a deceased person but I can't believe you are really gone. It feels like at any moment I could whip around and there you will be standing next to my desk. Or just getting out of the shower after a long hard day at work. Gibbs told me I should write things down instead of talking to a mop with your picture on. I think I prefer the mop.

You should have known all of this anyway, but Gibbs told me to write it and so I will. Timothy McGee you was, are and always will be the one and only love of my life. If you could feel how much I really do love you it would probably surprise you, it surprised me. Losing you was the most horrible pain I could ever imagine going through. I wish I had never lost you, I wish with every fibre of my being you were still here, standing besides me.

But your not and never will be. So perhaps Gibbs is right, perhaps Tony and Ziva are right. Perhaps Ducky is right. Perhaps I should learn to live again. It's bowling night tonight and I haven't been bowling since before the wedding. I do miss Sisters Agnes and Moira; I haven't been able to beat my high score.

Thank you Timmy, Gibbs was right as usual, writing a note does help. I love you with all my heart.

Abby McGee.'

Abby smiled to herself as she signed the note with her name. She had somehow put the pen to the paper and allowed herself to write whatever came to mind, and she had ended up coming up with an answer to the question she had been seeking. Should she be living her own life whilst Tim could no longer live his? She knew now how he had always gone out of his way to make sure she remained happy and content. He would have lain down his life for her and she knew it.

He would never want her to be sad he always enjoyed her company and loved her when she was happy and excited. Abby walked over to her desk, slipped on her coat while carefully locking the letter in her desk drawer she grabbed some change from her purse and headed out.

She arrived back in her lab in ten minutes carrying in one hand a half eaten muffin she had been chomping on as she walked back from the shop and in her other hand her favourite over-sized drink. She set the caf-pow on her work bench as she walked through her lab in to her office space. She continued to eat her muffin as she emptied the remaining change back in to her purse, before dropping it over the back of her chair behind her desk. She walked back out of her office discarding the empty muffin wrapper in the bin as she walked past it.

She grabbed her caf-pow and made her way towards the pile of evidence cluttering the table top in the middle of her lab. She took a quick swill and began rummaging through the evidence boxes to find something to plug in to her mass spec to work away on while she worked on something else in the mean time. She settled on a weird purple powder which looked interesting enough. Abby retrieved a small sample and switched her machine on before dropping in her sample. Once she had set the mass spectrometer to work she began sorting out hair and fibre samples from the tee-shirt Tony had left her.

Abby continued to work in silence humming gently to herself for several long minutes before she stopped to think.

"I can't think it's too quiet." She said to herself out loud. She glanced towards her stereo; she hadn't played any of her own music since Tim had died. Since Tim had left really she had taken to playing his music and it stuck with her for a long time afterwards. Now however she felt in the mood for some death metal music and so walked towards her stereo and switched the discs. She pressed play and felt rather than heard her traditional head splittingly loud music blaring out from the speakers.

Abby grinned as she turned away from her stereo she felt normal again. Not healed, she still hurt inside more than she could have ever imagined but the outside was getting there. She bobbed her head in time to the tunes as she went back towards her workbench pulling out another fibre and placing it carefully in a test tube. She continued in this manner for nearly an hour before Gibbs returned to see her.

"Anything Abs?" He barely contained his smile as she looked up at him.

"Yeah, got some hairs on this shirt Tony brought me match a Willow Turner. She is a twenty-seven year old prostitute working the red light district near the Norfolk Naval Base. She has a partner a Cindy something. Couldn't find a surname, sorry Gibbs."

"You did good Abs."

"There's more!" She stopped him as he walked out of the lab. "The purple stuff? It's quite weird it was cocaine but to try to conceal it its been mixed with Red Cedar root. Which is a type of tree and the root is used to make a natural dye, purple. It was obvious a method of disguising the drugs so he could get them to wherever he wanted them to be."

Abby turned around to find Gibbs had left, she wrinkled her nose up and headed back off towards her computer where she was busy trying to find Cindy's last name. She typed away for a few minutes before the phone rang in her office. It took a couple of rings before Abby heard it. She quickly ran off towards her office.

"Abby McGee - NCIS Forensic Specialist."

"Abby?"

Abby's eyes widened as she heard a voice that sounded oh so familiar. Before she could say another word she hit the floor of her office in a dead faint, the receiver of the phone dangling off the edge of the table by the cord. A male voice shouting Abby's name in to the silent room.