Chapter Twenty One
Wind Beneath My Wings
Michelle Palmer sits across from Jimmy at the fourth floor Café table, so tense that she fears if she moves she'll shatter. She and Jimmy hadn't made lunch because of Gibbs' driving the team for answers, and after the debacle in the Ladies' Room she's been dreading this moment.
"I was hoping you wouldn't still be mad," he finally says. Their trays are untouched before them and the silence since boarding the elevator had been unendurable.
"I'm not mad," she says too hard and forcibly reins it in. She'd been furious at his anxieties but not at him.
"I looked for you earlier, couldn't find you so I took a walk."
"Why didn't you call? I'd've told you I was interviewing a witness - Mrs. Hudson."
"You mean Michelle Lee Hudson?"
"Jimmy, please don't." That coincidence had instigated all today's tension.
"No, I won't."
"Didn't you believe I'd never div–?"
"Honey, I'm sorry," he says quickly. "I shouldn't have done it."
"I shouldn't have done it." She reaches out, wants his hands about hers. She'd been light years beyond rude in the ladies' room, all the DiNozzo-inspired aggravation adding fuel to her fire. "This is tearing me apart." They've been dealing with these traumas, guilt, nightmares and worse for months, with no resolution in sight.
"I know, honey. I wish I knew what to say, what to do."
"Talk to me. That's all I ever wanted you to do."
x
"It's just so hard. When I think of things, all that's happened since I murdered... I feel like my life is shattering. I lash out at you because I'm so afraid."
"Of what?"
"Of losing you."
"You're not going to lose me."
"Last night I did." He sees her anger spark but raises his hand to cut her off. He doesn't want to talk about dreams of her dying in a crossfire of machine guns as Sonny Corleone did in 'the Godfather', he needs her to know that "Every day you go out, every morning you take that shield and Sig, I'm afraid."
"Of what?"
"You're so far away from me. You're in danger every day and I'm too far away. Agent McGee, agent Gibbs, agent DiNozzo, they're near you. When you almost suffocated in that house, when you were in that warehouse, when you were trapped in that sauna–"
"When you were shot! I thought you were going to die."
"I thought you died."
"No."
"Honey, I'm so afraid. Every day I'm afraid."
x
She can barely believe these words, can barely stand the cold rush they bring her blood. "You never told me." They'd discussed so many other fears, he always held this back.
"I couldn't. I was too afraid. And then I dream I'm autopsying you…."
"Oh, honey." She tightens her grip.
"Ziva told me before we got married, when you were just back to the field, that we'd go through this, that I'd want you to quit, to go back to Legal–"
"Is that what you want?" She feels a cold hand grip her heart. She doesn't want any fights with him, but this would be a super contention.
"No. No, she also told me you'd hate me if I made you give up your ambitions."
She can't help but grin, relieved to avert this battle, yet he keeps her hands just as tightly in his. "Well, not hate you, but I'd be pretty pissed."
"I know. You want to be an Agent, you have it in you to be a great agent. I'm the one who can't deal with it."
x
"Jimmy," she pulls her right hand free so she can grip his hand as tightly as he does hers, "I have as much chance of stepping in front of a cab as I do being gunned down by a terrorist - have you seen the cabbies in this city? - but when the Goddess' time for me comes–"
"I want to be there to save you!"
"I know you do. And I wish you could. But we both know that when it comes time for me to go to the Summerland I'm going. But that might not be for decades. You'll probably be sick of me long before then."
"Impossible."
"Honey, I want to make the time – the decades – we have together mean everything they can. I want to grow old with you, give you children who'll give us both gray hair – though you'll probably go white,"
"Probably."
"but I can't do that unless you open up to me. I'm your wife, you're my husband, and I want us to be husband and wife for a long time to come. Please let's do that. Let's make a pact."
"A blood pact?"
"Don't be an ass. Let's always be completely honest with each other. No more holding back, no more protecting each other because we don't think the other can take what's happening to us on these jobs. You're going to be an ME who'll outshine Ducky and I'm going to take over Gibbs' job but we're not going to do it together if we're not together, and we won't be together unless we're together."
He puzzles over that for a moment. "I think that makes sense."
"Trust me, I'm a witch."
"I'm most afraid of that."
x
She feels her face fall. He did not just say that. "You're scared of that?"
"YES!"
"Why?" It's a year, sort of, since she'd opened up to him but he'd always seemed fine with her faith. She'd always known he used to be uncomfortable with her faith in Wicca, she'd often described herself as an Episcopalian Witch where he's Roman Catholic, but while they haven't reconciled their choice of faith or even which church they'll finally settle upon, she'd thought they'd left his discomforts with her practice of Witchcraft in the past.
x
"All those things you can do, and I can't understand any of it. Ducky and Abby take it in stride but I can't."
Is this how it felt to Gibbs when Karen Wetzel slapped him? "You never–"
"Come on, honey; spells and incantations I can't believe in but they work? Cures I can't find in any medical book but they work? You saved my life. I should be dead but your power... sustained me and to this day I can't find any medical reason why I'm alive."
She pulls her hands back to pull the athame from her heart. "I thought you'd be grateful."
He snatches her hands tightly. "I AM! I'm alive because you love me."
"I do love you."
"And I love you."
"You knew I was a witch when you married me. I held nothing back - from anyone, not even Mother McGee. I knew you didn't... I thought you kept your distance from my faith and practice because you know it's private to me, not because you're–"
"Afraid." She nods sharply, convulsively. "It confuses me. I'm a doctor, I know there's nothing evil–"
She leaps from her chair. "EVIL!" She never imagined HE would use the E-word!
"NO!" He clutches her hands tightly, looks about at the growing dinnertime crowd and quietly coaxes her back down. "No, that's not what I meant. I've met some people from your Coven, I know your High Priestess. Heck, she helped save Sammy Sky. But I'm saying that sometimes I'm confused... And scared."
x
She grins, relieved that she can grin. "Well, you're certainly not scared of me, are you hon?"
"...Sometimes." She feels her other cheek slapped. "You have... a bit of a temper."
"Everyone has a temper!"
"Remember when those men were making nude fake Internet pictures of you and the others?"
"Yes."
"I really thought you were going to... I don't know what to them."
"You stopped me." And far too dramatically too. It'd shaken her to her soul, forced her to reevaluate the comfortable assurance that she has herself under control.
"Remember my dream, the one that I beat you up?"
She'll never forget, didn't want to be reminded. "You came into the bathroom while I was showering, begged me not to blast you to dust or transport your heart to Outer Mongolia. Ewww again."
"I really believed you'd do it."
x
Her breath seizes, her heart is ripped in half and each half crushed; her breath returns in spasmodic gasps and tears flood her eyes. "OH... MY... GODDESS!"
"Honey?"
She clings to his hands as tightly as she can, can't stop the tears that wash her cheeks. "I can't... do that! It's imp- imp- imp- possible! Honey, you've GOT TO BELIEVE ME!"
"I believe you."
"No you DON'T!" She yanks her hands back, covers her face and weeps. Jimmy looks around. No one is looking, even the agents who face them over their meals ignore them yet he feels that everyone's watching in that way agents use. "I would never!" she sobs. "I WOULD NEVER!"
"Darling, please... Stop crying. Please."
x
He gets up, gathers her to himself. She clings to him, shattered, inconsolable as he guides her between the tables and outside the cafeteria, she clinging to him and not even trying to stop sobbing. Outside the door he guides her to a corner, can go no further. He hugs her but she clings to him, face buried to his chest as the violence increases.
Men and women pass in each direction, those going into the Café hesitate, thinking to offer comfort but Jimmy's eye contact steers them away.
His shirt grows wetter, soaked with her violent tears and it's many long, brutal minutes more before the storm subsides; not, he senses, because of regained control but because she's exhausted herself. She rests slumped against him, held on her feet only by the strength of his hug until finally she's limp against him.
x
"Honey?"
"Whaaa-at?" she asks in weak but unalloyed misery.
"How do you feel?"
The absolute absurdity of the question rips a bark of near hysterical laughter from her.
"Bleck," she can finally say. Her arms fall limp to her sides, dead weights, and only his grip keeps her upright. "Did I just make a spectacle of myself in front of a hundred agents?"
"Alpha shift dinner, Beta shift breakfast, more like two hundred."
"I wanna go home."
"Okay."
Her arms go about him again. He's glad to feel her strength returning. "Jimmy, wait. About that pact?"
"Anything, just don't start crying again."
It's a near thing, she won't take any chances. "From now on, we don't go to sleep at night without talking."
He thinks this over, evidently reluctant. They will talk now – a lot, and about things he hadn't ever been able to raise, but "Do we have to just talk?"
She pulls back from him, rubs stinging tears from her eyes. "James, you are an idiot."
"But that's why you love me."
She rests her head against his chest, feels the wet spot on her forehead. "That's why I love you."
xxx
Fort McNair, where the new Colonel in charge of the Criminal Investigation Division for the mid-East Coast will have her headquarters, is abuzz with its usual activity and yet the room chosen for the Ceremony is a Staff Meeting Room, barely 40 by 50, an intimate chamber where the US and Army flags flank a projection screen before forty chairs. By tradition this is not a parade-ground ceremony. Hundreds of troops do not stand at Attention, not even all the seats will be filled with family and close friends; yet the intensity of those who come to witness this occasion will more than make up for the small numbers.
There's a period of socialization, everyone wants to get a minute with the star of the evening. Gibbs is glad they'd spent last night together for there are more well-wishers than minutes before Thomas Ward, Commanding General, calls attention by escorting Lieutenant Colonel Hollis Mann to a position before the white screen, flanked by the colorful flags. He then directs everyone to stop where they are and calls upon an Army Chaplain for the Invocation.
x
"If you'll all take your seats, we'll get started," Ward says, his informal tones, setting that for the evening, serious but not dreadfully solemn.
"First off, I'd like to thank Hollis for picking me to administer the Oath of Office today, and on her behalf I welcome you to Fort McNair on this most suspicious occasion.
"I've known Norma Jean -ap, I mean Hollis Jean," slight chuckles, for she resembles Marilyn Monroe no more in personality than in appearance, "since she was a pup of a Corporal, but I always knew that if anyone could make a mark in this man's army," other chuckles from certain of those in-the-know, "it would be Hollis. So this evening I'm proud to come before this special assemblage of family and good friends as we do this for a most special offi- no, I'll say it, for a most special lady.
"I believe we have ..." consults a small card, "Hollis' brother William and nephew William Junior."
"Will couldn't come," William Senior announces as he approaches his sister's side. "He has Engineering Finals today at the University of Hawaii." It's early afternoon there.
"I've asked Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs of NCIS to substitute," Hollis says.
"Special Agent Gibbs," Ward calls as he rises, steps forward, "think you can represent the young man?"
"I'll do my best, sir," he says as he takes his place on Hollis' left side and as the trio face the audience he gives her hand, low at their sides, a brief, discreet squeeze.
x
"Attention to Orders," Ward commands sharply and Mann comes to hard attention, eyes front as the General announces "The President of the United States has reposed special trust and confidence in the patriotism, valor, fidelity and abilities of Hollis Jean Mann. In view of these qualities and her demonstrated potential for increased responsibility, she is therefore this date promoted in the United States Army to the grade of Colonel."
At this declaration Jethro and William remove the gold leaves from her uniform shoulders and replace them with gleaming silver spread wing Eagles.
"Eagles," Ward explains as the men work, "have been popular symbols in our and other Military Services at least as far back as the Romans. Colonels started wearing spread Eagles as rank insignia in 1829 when they transferred the gold or gild eagles that decorated their hat cockades to their collars. After 1831, most of the Colonels wore silver eagles on the gold epaulets or gold bordered shoulder straps."
The men finish, each exchange brief kisses with the new Colonel - hers and Gibbs' discreet but a second longer - and resume their places facing front. Ward then presents "Ladies and gentlemen, the newest Colonel in the United States Army, Hollis Jean Mann, her brother and nephew-proxy. Photo Op."
When he's sure that everyone who wants pictures has ended the cosmic storm, and Gibbs and William Mann return to their seats, Ward steps closer, draws a card from his jacket pocket. "I'll use the card to make sure I get this right. Colonel, if you'll face me, raise your right hand and repeat the oath."
She repeats each phrase after the General. "I, Hollis Jean Mann, having been appointed a Colonel in the United States Army, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same, that I take this Obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office which I am about to enter, so help me God."
x
The base commander's Exec presents her with the framed Commission, another Photo Op, then Ward says
"The floor, madam, is yours."
"Thank you, General. Thank you to everyone for coming and sharing this day with me. I've never cared for speeches, for hearing them and especially making them, and I see no reason to break with tradition now. There's a big reception in the Officers' Club - with food - so we can socialize there. So I'll ask you to stand and call upon Chaplain Thomason..."
xxx
The dinner party / welcome home from the war gala is going full blast. Navy Lieutenant John Galert's wife Peggy had little time to plan so large a gathering of friends, the news of the return of the Reagan is only a week old, but she'd managed invitations, catering and most especially a welcome that'll keep him warm over the next couple of months at sea.
John doesn't count the number of people who fill every room other than the kitchen - Peggy's no entry zone - he doesn't want to. Good friends all, he just wants to enjoy their company before he must return to the ship by 0700.
The door bell rings, someone close to the front opens it. John can't see, from his angle near the living room television, who's coming in now until a delivery boy wearing a Sparrow's Deli uniform steps in, a four foot long sandwich box in his arms.
"Mister Galert," he asks Jerry Sachter uncertainly.
"Here." John takes a step forward, hand in his pocket to get his wallet, when the young man turns to him and puts his hand through the right side of the box.
Thunder precedes lightning this time as the end of the box is obliterated and hundreds of fists pummel John from neck to groin. Shrill screams are cut by another thunder blast. Hundreds more fists slam him and then John can't feel anything more. He's not even aware of darkness or silence.
x
The kitchen door bursts inward as the young man runs past revelers too stunned or terrified to realize they can safely stop him. Peggy Galert sees her husband supine on the floor, blood sprayed throughout the room, his mulched organs in his blasted chest.
Even those deafened by the shotgun can hear her screech his name.
x
'They're probably flooding 911,' Lewis Craeford thinks from the far corner of the room as he reaches for the Galert's own phone, but it rings an instant before he picks it up.
/Lieutenant John Galert?/
"Uhhh" is all Craeford can answer.
/Lieutenant, Captain's Orders: All Leaves canceled; report aboard immediately./