A/N: My plan was to have a couple of chapters posted at this point but life intervened. The situation here in Oz is dire – we now have bushfires in every state and territory and scarily, due to drought, we are running out of water to fight the fires in some places. So many people have been affected by this terrifying conflagration, either directly by property loss or they know friends and/or family who have. Sydney University has estimated that 480 million animals have died so far (native animals and farm animals) and fear whole species of flora and fauna, many of them unique may have been wiped out. We've lost over 12 million acres of land thus far; people have died and whole towns have been left homeless and the fires are still burning. The only positive news was that while the historic town of Mogo on the south coast of NSW was destroyed, the well-known zoo, thanks to the efforts of the brave zookeepers managed to save every animal.

On NYE, fire came within a kilometre of my home on two fronts and I live in an area that I wouldn't have considered to be at risk. A southerly change arriving at 9.00 pm pushed the fire to the north and away from me, and so, for now, I have a reprieve. I'm lucky, I still have a home... at this point but Saturday is predicted to be worse than NYE and another seven-day state of emergency has been declared. A great way to welcome in the new year and decade! To my fellow Aussies, stay safe if possible.

Chapter 50

Ensa Jacques was not in a good frame of mind. After Senior made a foolhardy attempt to snatch his granddaughter during her session with her psychiatrist it totally blown up in his face and landed him in jail. Now he'd come up with another dwankie10 scheme. It seemed DiNozzo Senior had somehow managed to 'persuade' Junior that it was in everyone's best interests for the arranged marriage with the Saudi Royal family to go ahead.

How he'd managed to convince Cooper's father into relinquishing custody of her, he didn't know. Although, knowing Senior as well as he did, the possibility of him using extortion certainly wasn't out of the question. He certainly wasn't averse to the use of Mafia-style tactics, often commenting sarcastically that while they might be heavy-handed, they worked.

And part of him raged at his Boss or was DiNozzo his former boss? Whatever...why the fok11 hadn't he used this stick/carrot approach with Junior in the first place instead of instigating the whole harebrained kidnapping scheme? Anyone could see that it was always going to be a risky proposition. If he'd had just talked to Junior from the onset then it was highly likely the old man wouldn't be sitting on his arse in prison and, more importantly, Jacques wouldn't be between a rock and a hard place.

The mercenary shrugged, trying to aim for at some level of philosophical since the past couldn't be undone, unfortunately for Ensa. So, rather than wasting time focusing on the past, it was time to look to the future and Senior's right-hand man thought that the future looked pretty damned gloomy, all things considered.

The whole scenario with convincing the statuesque cop that Tia was better off in SA with the Prince's family was incredibly dicey since he doubted that Lawless would be any kind of a pushover. Even getting to her would not be easy - he'd shadowed her and Junior quite a few times when he'd been setting up the initial kidnapping, and he knew that she was very competent. She had excellent situational awareness, which you would expect from a law enforcement professional of her rank and experience.

It wouldn't be all that easy to catch her with her guard down. Particularly after the two kidnapping attempts, she was on her guard even more than normal. Probably because she was aware that even though Senior was in jail awaiting trial, at least some of the people who'd taken her from the park were still on the loose.

Thinking about what he was supposed to do, Ensa was reminded of an Afrikanerism that was apropos in this situation - praat 'n gat innie kop - which literally meant speaking a hole in someone's head, referring to someone trying to change another person's mind. Although the metaphor was meant to be taken figuratively, Ensa had always preferred a more literal application. The simplest way to 'persuade' the Lieutenant was a bullet between her eyes. That was pretty damned hard to argue with.

However, after following Lawless around for many weeks and seeing how close Junior and the cop were, Ensa was also quite sure if she was dead, Junior would react badly. Seeing the lengths Junior had been prepared to go to defend his daughter, the mercenary really didn't want to discover how badly he'd react if his lover was murdered.

His well-honed instincts told him that Junior and his choty goty [12] cared about each other. Their easy comradery when they were together and even with the little brat seemed to be genuine to him.

Not that he would consider himself an expert on affairs of the heart. He'd sworn off marriage after his wife slept with his brother while he was deployed. Still, the trio had looked happy together, although, after his own calamitous marriage, Jacques generally considered relationships and happiness to be an oxymoron.

However, even to his jaundiced eye, watching them and the brat together it was hard not to see them as a happy family.

So, he had to admit to feeling a bit suspicious about Junior's sudden interest in handing the kid over to Senior but to be fair, maybe she was too much for him to handle. He knew that after the abduction in the park she was under the care of a child psychiatrist who specialised in trauma. No doubt the shrink with the double-barrel surname, plus she was a double doctor didn't come cheap, especially on a navy cop's salary. Ensa had also overheard some snippets of conversation from Junior's teammates several months ago. The Mossad hottie and the sourpuss computer guy who for some reason always looked to Ensa like he'd swallowed a lemon, had been bitching and moaning to each other, and anyone else who'd listen about how the kid's PTSD. Apparently, it was preventing DiNozzo from being able to work and they had to pick up the slack and weren't at all happy about it.

Bottom line, Ensa didn't know why DiNozzo had caved and decided to hand over the girl, but he might think that having plenty of cash would get her top-notch medical treatment. You couldn't really fault him for that. It was what any decent father would do for their kid.

Nevertheless, Jacques' instincts were telling him loud and clear that irrespective of his motives, hurting even a hair on Lawless' head was a terrible idea. He certainly hadn't survived in this game all this time by ignoring his intuition and he wasn't about to start now. He especially didn't want to become the target of Junior's fury, particularly if he shared any of the DiNozzo genes.

Jacques took calculated risks in his job, but he surely didn't have a death wish. If he was dead, Jacques wouldn't get a chance to spend all that lovely money he had sitting in a number of offshore bank accounts and it wasn't like he had any family left to leave it to. He'd killed his brother after he discovered the SOB had been screwing his wife and he also had no intention of giving his ex-wife a red cent. She'd just use it to try to repair the knife wounds he'd carved into her face when he caught her in bed with his brother. That lying whore didn't deserve anything from him after the gross betrayal of her marriage vows.

Knowing the fury which engulfed him when he thought about her unpardonable betrayal of him, Jacques took a deep breath and ruthlessly pushed all thoughts of Annaliese aside. He focused instead on the female cop, well aware of the danger she posed to his future.

He didn't want any part of dealing with Lawless if he was honest with himself. Theoretically, he could come up with a plan to 'persuade' the cop that didn't involve bloodshed, but it didn't mean that it would go smoothly. After all, he'd meticulously planned out the abduction at the park so that no one got hurt and look how that had turned out. All because Junior had some sort of freakish sixth sense that Antonia was in danger and pulled his gun. Pulled his gun and was quite prepared to use it.

If anything went wrong and Lawless was harmed, Ensa figured they'd be right back where they started. Just like Senior's schoepit [13] plot to kidnap Tia from her psychiatrist's office, he thought it was extreme idiocy but this time instead of Senior butt, it would be his arse on the line. Just thinking about what could go wrong made him break out in a cold sweat!

Of course, he could refuse to get involved in this crazy plan of Senior's, but he wouldn't put it past the slimy bastard to rat him out to the authorities if he crossed him. Senior was essentially a con man and a businessman. Granted he was a truly crappy businessman, whose track record of destroying sound businesses through incompetence was massive, but he also had an utterly merciless streak that Ensa had seen on more than one occasion. The most recent example surfaced during the abortive kidnap attempt. Senior's callous indifference to the welfare of his own flesh and blood when he'd heard that Junior had been shot disrupting the plan to abduct the Cooper child by handcuffing himself to her had shocked even the cynical Ensa Jacques. Which he freely admitted wasn't all that easy to do.

Ensa had been plenty concerned about telling Senior that one of his men had shot DiNozzo Junior. The Fed was incredibly lucky his aorta wasn't sheared since Jacques' underling had fired a kill shot which missed, only because Junior had turned around at the last moment. Despite their estrangement, Jacques had expected Senior to go ballistic, especially since he'd been so insistent that the kidnapping had to go down without anyone getting hurt.

Therefore, he'd been pretty nervous about delivering the bad news to his boss that everything had gone to shit and they shot his kid. He'd mistakenly assumed that the whole 'blood is thicker than water' thing would come into play. Thought that Senior would hit the roof when he heard his son had been shot.

Boy was he wrong!

Oh, DiNozzo had been furious. Furious at Junior for derailing his ability to deliver Antonia to his Saudi buddy as promised but not at all worried that Junior had been shot.

Senior was frankly ropeable that his offspring had interfered in his business dealings, potentially costing him a fortune in financial backing and a serious loss of face, which meant everything to the professional grifter. He stated heartlessly that if Junior died, he wouldn't exactly be cut up about it - that he deserved to suffer for foiling the plan to acquire Antonia Cooper discreetly.

Then his boss had spat out a lot of vile invectives about how his son was a drama queen and a terrible disappointment. Jacques discovered that Junior's so-called unforgivable crime which had caused their estrangement had been that he'd made a scene when Senior left him in a hotel when he was twelve years old. Senior claimed that he'd forgotten about him in his eagerness to chase the next big business opportunity or investor (a.k.a. the next mark) and had flown home to NYC.

Apparently, Tony had dared to behave like a panicked 12-year-old kid, alerting the hotel staff that his father had left him behind. Naturally, the hotel concierge had notified the relevant authorities and Senior had to waste time and money bribing cops, judges and welfare workers to overlook his egregious neglect. Not that Senior saw his mistake as being a serious error, though, treating it as a minor inconvenience, furious with Junior for being a whiny brat about it. Jacques gathered that was why he'd sent Junior away to military school and tried to legally disown him.

Now two decades later, Junior had once again made a monkey out of Senior by turning what was supposed to be a simple snatch and grab into a massive firefight. Of course, that ensured every man and his dog who were at the park that day filmed the whole fiasco on their cell phones, unfortunately.

It had enraged his boss, particularly because he didn't want any publicity which might affect his relationship with Prince Al and his cheque book. Normally Anthony DiNozzo Senior loved the cameras and publicity – when it fed his monstrous sized ego – but this was the worst sort of PR – the sort that might end up costing him his money and his reputation. And Ensa knew that nothing was more important. His son's life wouldn't come close.

Of course, he did agree with Senior about the undesirability of having their foiled abduction bid of Senior's grandkid splashed across the internet and TV news for all to see. Life was certainly much less complicated and infinitely easier all round for people such as himself to go about their activities when every Tom, Dick and Harry wasn't trying to stick their noses into his business. However, as much as he raged about Junior's interfering in his meticulously executed abduction bid, there was a small part of Ensa which secretly admired him. After all, Junior was only protecting his kid - like any good father would do.

However, most good fathers weren't a match for himself and his team of hired guns – they weren't crack shots or capable of extricating themselves and their kid when they were being held captive and getting clean away. So, while that teeny-tiny part of him might admire Junior's paternal desire to protect his kid, Jacques' badass side did not appreciate Junior making a fool of him and ruining his plan.

Putting aside his own wrath at being so easily defeated by his boss' son, he had to be practical about the important decision he was facing. Revenge was not reason enough to rush in without proper plans in place. More than ever it as a time for cool heads to prevail.

Ensa was no angel, he was a former member of the South Africa Army special forces, turned highly paid mercenary after he earned a dishonourable discharge. Latterly, he'd become Senior's fix-it-guy - he did whatever it took to fix things for his boss. He also charged commensurate fees for his services and had an extremely comfortable lifestyle because of DiNozzo. But fok [11] his boss was not the nice guy he pretended to be. As far as Ensa was concerned, Anthony DiNozzo was a ruthless drol. [12]

After working for him for a number of years now, Jacques was pretty certain that if his boss felt like he was no longer of any value to him, DiNozzo wouldn't hesitate for even a second to sacrifice Jacques. Particularly if it became necessary to maximise his own survival. He was under no illusions that the conman would throw him under the bus in a heartbeat to get back at him for betraying him should Ensa refused to follow his orders. Equally, he'd no qualms about doing it if Senior thought he might get some advantage in terms of a plea bargain.

Anyone who could effectively wipe his son from his life because the poor little bastard had panicked over being left halfway across the country in a hotel room was a genuine son of a bitch. Jacques knew he was also not someone who'd think twice over ratting out his well-paid fix-it-guy.

As far as he could see, his South African arse was effectively between a rock and a hard place. Yes, he could still take off and leave the country but if Senior decided to rat him out for taking off instead of helping with his risky plan, Ensa's choice of destinations where he could lay low would be limited to places that didn't have an extradition agreement with the US. The only other option he had was he could spend the rest of his life on the run. Neither of those options appealed overly much to him – he obviously favoured being able to spend his days in luxurious environs, being able to enjoy the good life, not living in flea traps and looking over his shoulder constantly.

Which pretty much left him with one viable option, which was for him to do what the Boss wanted and somehow 'persuade' Lawless to drop her objections in a way that didn't piss off Junior too badly.

Just how to achieve that goal without landing himself in jail with his boss was the million-dollar question which is the fee he would demand if he pulled off this difficult feat. It was in all likelihood the last job he would take on since Ensa was pretty sure Senior was not going to talk his way out of the raft of charges he was facing.

While Senior had always paid well for Ensa's highly specialised services and unique talents, he was beginning to rue the day he started working for Anthony Senior. The man was a menace.

~oO0Oo~

Tony picked up his mug of tea and took a cautious sip, so he didn't burn the roof of his mouth. Smiling grimly, he recalled with embarrassment how last time he was the acting team leader (although he didn't know it was only interim) he'd tried to emulate the Boss and mainline coffee. In his defence though, the coffee was partly because he was exhausted from Shepard's undercover work on top of his supervising the team.

Anyway, he had no intention of trying to emulate anyone this time around. If TPTB wanted him to hang in there, then they were going to get the real Tony DiNozzo - warts and all.

Right now, his task was building a new major case response team out of the ashes of the former incarnation. It still wasn't clear at this juncture if they were looking to fill one, two, three or all places on the team because he hadn't made up his mind yet if he would stay on or jump ship to the FBI.

Step one was to get the team operational with a temporary team so they could handle cases again. Tony was using this period as an auditioning process – a sort of an on-the-job real-life interview of agents who expressed interest in joining the premier investigative unit in the DC office. He was also using some handpicked agents who'd volunteered their services to help out with investigations to aid him in working cases with them and at the same time assessing the candidates' skills and abilities. Although he felt perfectly capable of evaluating them, if Gibbs did requalify for field duties and resume leadership, he knew that Abbigail Borin, Fornell and Balboa's opinions would carry far more weight with Gibbs than Tony's thoughts would.

It was astonishing to him that agents from other alphabets had offered their services in a show of solidarity. As word spread, other highly experienced agents came out of the woodwork such as Dwayne Pride and G Callen expressing their willingness to help him out, too. While he wasn't sure if the agents (aside from Balboa) were volunteering because of their friendship with Gibbs, Tony had decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth. In his experience, you often copped a face full of halitosis if you did.

DiNozzo had always thought of himself as the kind of person when fate presented him with lemons, chose to make lemonade out of them. And that was why he'd chosen to make the most of the opportunity to work with such an amazing group of federal agents despite their motives. He recognised it was literally a once in a lifetime opportunity. Plus, Tony thought it might be insightful to see what different people focused on when evaluating prospective agents. He thought it would be a win-win situation for everyone.

Looking at the longer-term prospects, NCIS would be facing a major restructuring of the team when they knew what Gibbs' prognosis was and perhaps even more importantly, who as going to be sitting in the director's chair. Until then, everything was simply in a holding pattern and Tony wasn't the only one who felt that the agency was marking time. Leon Vance was back at work - he had been for several days now, but it was common knowledge to everyone in the building (except maybe Leon himself) that he was a dead man walking. Once Jerome Craig's funeral was over and the agency had observed a proper period of mourning, he was gone.

Hearing the elevator ding, Tony looked up to see Ric and his team tumbling out of its doors and striding into the bullpen. McGee was glaring daggers at him over the office divider. He sighed, feeling frustrated at being the target of Tim's passive-aggressive anger. DiNozzo knew that McGee thought this crisis was his best shot at getting back on the team and was angry that it hadn't happened.

During a crisis such as this, however, the agency could ill afford to have a still wet-behind-the-ears investigator (particularly one who thought his shit didn't stink) calling all of Tony's orders into question. And Tony knew that's exactly what would happen. Tim had done it before, and he had no reason to think that Tim would be any more likely to follow the chain-of-command this time around.

In fact, with more time served on Gibbs' team since the previous stint when Tony had led the team, he strongly suspected McGee would be even more overconfident and insubordinate if he had the opportunity. After all, his attitude right now at being rejected was fairly indicative of his level of maturity.

Long term, McGee might make it back on the MCRT but right now? Truthfully, the agency was in crisis mode. Looking at everything from an outsider's perspective, its future looked really grim. Now was not the time to be going soft on agents who thought they were above the law.

Tony mentally catalogued the recent disasters that had befallen the agency. It sounded melodramatic to say that it was teetering on the brink and in a catastrophic state, yet, sadly it was also the truth. Deputy Director Craig 's assassination by a Kidon operative on Eli David's orders had thrown the whole agency into complete disarray. Director Vance had also been injured in the same attack and adding salt to his wounds, he and Eli David had always had extremely close personal and professional ties. Well until Director David had tried to have him killed to further the extremist foreign policy he favoured.

And if that wasn't bad enough, there was the whole spy scandal with Eli David's daughter. Mossad Liaison Officer, Ziva David, had as of this moment, been charged with 52 separate counts of espionage against the USA. She'd been passing on classified information (obtained while working at NCIS) to her handler at Mossad, practically from day one of her joining the MCRT. While some of the intel. was low-level classified data, some of the information was explosive. Top Secret info that Ziva should never have been able to access, not in a month of Sundays, including the names of undercover agents working in the Middle East.

Plus, in addition to the horrific number of espionage charges she'd been indicted with so far, she'd just been charged with being an accessory after-the-fact to the murder of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent and impeding of a federal investigation. If found guilty of the espionage charges alone, she'd be damned lucky not to get the death penalty.

Then there was the whole issue of the Kidon assassin, Michael Rivkin who'd carried out Mossad sanctioned assassinations on US soil without the knowledge or permission of the government. After formally being told to leave the country, Rivkin had blatantly ignored the warning then spied on a top-secret inter-agency intelligence conference. During his ham-fisted surveillance attempt, he'd inadvertently killed an ICE agent who was on the protection detail of the high-ranking Intelligence directors. Then Rivkin had come close to killing Gibbs, in the process quite possibly ending Gibbs' career as a field agent, although Gibbs was defiant in the face of mounting bleak medical diagnoses.

The fallout from just one of these disasters would be massive. All of them combined was most definitely catastrophic.

Plenty of questions were also being asked in theirs and sister agencies including, would NCIS be able to recover from the fallout of inviting Mossad into the agency? If it did manage to survive, could it continue to exist in its current management structure? Opinions were divided, some agents were of the opinion that it was beyond salvaging – others felt that it could be saved but that they would need to start from scratch. That it needed to be taken out from under the umbrella of the Department of Defence and SecNav and placed under the jurisdiction of the Department of Justice.

It was a waiting game, at least until all the investigation and oversight had taken place. Just like only time would tell if Gibbs could return to field duties, although at his age the odds were stacked against him, even if he mulishly refused to admit that.

A further consequence of the Rivkin affair had resulted in Vance's rash decision to accompany Rivkin's remains back to Israel and play politics, dragging his deputy along on his sycophantic ride to kiss Eli David's ass. And what an unmitigated disaster that turned out to be. It also hadn't escaped Tony's notice that it could so easily have been Sacks, Gibbs or even himself returning in a pine box - except they'd all refused to go.

Even though Vance had survived his trip, it had cost him dearly. Scuttlebutt from Granger and DHS Deputy Director, Tom Morrow - himself a former director of NCIS - was that Leon's days were numbered and his political career was dead in the water, although, to be fair, Balboa with his sources had called it first.

The bottom line remained that thanks to the whole fiasco with Ziva, difficult questions were going to be asked of the agency. To wit, what the hell was a foreign national - an Israeli spy and assassin – doing as a liaison officer on an investigative team whose primary mandate was investigating domestic crimes involving US Navy and Marine personnel and their families? Also, why was Ziva, who was the handler of the rogue Mossad operative Ari Haswari (the one who'd killed one of their own agents) subsequently hired to replace the deceased Caitlin Todd? Especially when legally, that individual couldn't carry out many of the duties of a federal agent. For example, she couldn't lawfully arrest a suspect, handle evidence, serve a warrant or interview suspects.

Then there were some equally awkward questions that needed to be asked and answered about what had been allowed to happen. For example, what the hell had Directors Shepard and Vance been thinking, letting Ziva access classified data? Especially when Shepard had known that she'd prepared dossiers on everyone close to Gibbs, essentially to highlight all their vulnerabilities in order to manipulate them.

NCIS' own Director Shepard had even helped Ziva gather the Intel that led to the murder of Special Agent Todd by Ziva's half-brother. What sort of agent, what sort of director would betray her own agency and colleagues like that? Not to mention that the director had then assigned her as Todd's replacement on the MCRT with indecent haste after Todd's murder by Ari. Cate had barely been laid in her grave when the architect of her death sashayed in and took over her desk, proceeding to sow dissent on the MCRT from day dot.

Now, over the coming weeks, there would be oversight committees up the wazoo, looking over all NCIS' screw-ups and questioning even the tiniest detail of their modus operandi. In some ways, Tony couldn't blame them if they decided it was all too hard to fix their problems, pulled the plug on the entire agency and decided to start again from scratch.

So, with the impending grand inquisition from the bureaucrats plus all the crap he was going through with Senior, Tony point blank refused to put up with a meh junior agent. One who thought his five years as a Fed made him more qualified to be the acting SSA for the premier investigative team than Tony was. Never mind the fact that he'd been in law enforcement for the last 14 years.

If Tim were to return to the team now, based on his past performances, McGee would rudely question every little thing he did, and demand Tony justify every order he gave, even when they were out in the field. Quite frankly, DiNozzo would prefer to stab himself in the eye than go down that frustrating and self-destructive road a second time.

The long-term future of the team was up in the air and that wasn't just because of Gibbs' injury – Tony honestly didn't know whether he would be staying with the agency. A lot was riding on who was appointed to become the next director. If it was someone who put their own personal agenda before the safety and welfare of the agency and its agents, he was outta there. If it was someone who put the needs of the agency first and foremost, he might decide to remain, but it wasn't a given. He would have to wait and see what happened next.

Tony watched surreptitiously as Balboa started assigning duties to his team in an embezzlement case that they'd just landed at the Norfolk Naval Base. Tim continued scowling, alternating between directing his gaze at Tony and at his present team leader. Clearly McGee wasn't thrilled about the assignment or the case. He was constantly trying to coerce Tony to reverse his banishment but DiNozzo was acting dense, pretending not to notice the barrage of less than subtle hints he'd been dropping about how the MCRT couldn't function without his technical and computer expertise.

The MCRT's acting supervisory special agent snorted mentally. One thing he'd say about McGee, the guy had a healthy sized ego alright. Too bad his performance didn't live up to his hype.

Apart from everything else that made him reluctant to let Tim return, Tony was still awesomely angry that McGee had endangered Tia by hacking into the WITSEC database. As Tia's dad, he couldn't forgive him for being so stupid but even if he put aside his parental bias, the fact was that people who were in WITSEC needed protecting. Tim had blindly blundered into another agency's database when he couldn't even claim that it was part of an ongoing investigation.

Bottom line, Tony reminded himself, McGee had been transferred off the team as punishment for his illegal activities and if he allowed him to come back prematurely, it would reinforce his entitled belief that he could ignore the rules whenever he wanted to. It was, exactly that attitude - that people were above the law - which now threatened the agency's very existence, so McGee was not going to get a free pass from Tony.

He ignored McGee, focusing on his own admin tasks, making his way through his list, keeping busy. It didn't escape his attention that Ric as becoming increasingly frustrated and intolerant of Tim's attitude and Tony calculated that any time now, he'd be on the receiving end of the mother of all ass-kicking's. Balboa was pretty even-tempered but when pushed too far he pushed back – hard!

He almost felt sorry for Special Agent McGee.

~oO0Oo~

Rebecca Cooper had been here at the rehab wing of the hospital for almost three and a half weeks now but already the rules had changed. No longer was she a coma patient, now she was a former coma patient who had suffered a closed head injury. A polite way of saying she'd injured her brain when the vehicle which smashed into her family, killing her husband.

See I do remember what happened, Corrine. At least I do remember today!

Now as a rehab patient; her day was full to the brim with therapy. Physical therapy, speech therapy and occupational therapy, plus there was hydrotherapy which she looked forward to, having been into water sports for most of her life. Rebecca (or Mel) as she'd been back then had played water polo when she was in college and swum competitively. She' heard that the rehab facility had music and art therapy programs too, although she hadn't gone to those yet.

One of the other patients told her that aromatherapy and massage were also available every fortnight from visiting holistic therapists who attended, along with weekly visits from a hairdresser, beauty therapists and a manicurist. Rebecca had already put her name down for hair, beauty and manicure treatments plus a pedicure because, after months in a coma, she was a mess.

Her strawberry blonde locks badly needed trimming and her hair was dry it desperately needed a deep conditioning treatment. She might even have her long hair cut short to make it easier to manage but hadn't decided yet. She looked down at her legs and grimaced with disgust. She needed her legs waxed and her pits – she felt like a yeti. Plus, getting into a swimsuit for her hydrotherapy sessions was horribly embarrassing as she needed a bikini wax so bad. Although she wasn't usually obsessed with her appearance, Rebecca felt unattractive, particularly around the staff and Jess when she visited her.

Not that Jessica Lawless had ever fussed overmuch about her own appearance in the time Mel had known her. She didn't need to, Rebecca conceded. Jess was an absolute knockout and yet she seemed far more interested in playing basketball with the guys or cleaning her gun than reading a beauty article or putting on makeup. At least that's the way things had been when they'd shared an apartment together in Philadelphia before Tia was born.

Rebecca had secretly always felt a twinge of jealousy when she compared herself to her best friend because of her looks. Not that they were in competition or they were anything alike.

Jess was a tom-boy. She was tall, athletic and very practical. She could change a flat tyre or fix a leaking faucet, although she was a pretty fair to middling cook too. Her best friend got on well with all the guys and out of hours, hung around mostly with her cop buddies.

Rebecca, or Mel as she was called back then, was six inches shorter than her statuesque friend and she had a petite build. She was a strawberry blonde with rather nondescript greyish blue eyes, while Jess had chestnut brown hair and cornflower-blue eyes. Mel was a science geek and she was kind of a girly girl – had been since she was small. She loved having her nails done and going clothes shopping with girlfriends, something which her best friend hated with a passion.

Ninety-nine percent of the time her envy hadn't got in the way of their friendship and there were heaps of things she and Jess had in common. They loved going out clubbing and dancing. They always went to see all the blockbuster movies together and both loved cooking – and eating. Most importantly, they both shared an absolute belief in the justice system, preferred to drink vodka and both were mad about hockey and tried to go to every Philly Flyers home game they could when work didn't interfere in their plans.

She very much doubted that Jess was even aware of her feelings of jealousy, except on a few rare occasions after Jessie introduced Mel to her new police partner, Officer Tony DiNozzo. Mel was smitten by the young cop, even though he was five years her junior. Still, her green-eyed monster had settled right down after she'd started going out with the young rookie.

Sighing at the bittersweet memories, Rebecca thoughts returned to the present as she contemplated her new post-accident and coma normal. Things were very different now. Her day commenced quite early in the morning with the nursing staff helping to get patients up, showered and dressed.

Since most people required help with such formerly simple tasks, staff recommended patients wear suitable clothing, generally loose-fitting casual garments which had a minimum amount of zips and buttons. This mad it easier for people with casts due to fractured limbs and fingers that had difficulty with fine motor skills to facilitate ease of getting dressed without having to struggle with buttonholes and fastenings. Outfits also had to be accommodating in terms of physical therapy, hydrotherapy, and occupational therapy sessions obviously. Rebecca got it, but she couldn't help wishing that her attire made her feel a little more feminine and less like a lump of plasticine waiting to be moulded or like some raw recruit attending boot camp.

Meals in rehab were also a totally different kettle of fish – not the actual food - it was typical hospital fare. In a word – bad! But they expected her to eat her meals in the dining room with all the other patients, not delivered to individual rooms on a tray like when you were in a hospital. It was this previously taken-for-granted activity of eating a meal which brought home starkly to Rebecca just how much her life and the other people in the rehab ward had been turned upside down.

When she'd arrived initially, she had been permitted to take her meals in her room since she didn't have the muscle strength needed to sit up in her wheelchair for longer than a few minutes at a time. It had taken hours of therapy to build up her trunk strength to be able to sit up at a table to eat her meals. While it had been a cause of celebration for Rebecca and her team to achieve that milestone, it also made her realise what a huge task she faced in her recovery. Some days, the extent of what she faced depressed her so much, she didn't want to even try. She wanted to pull the bedcovers over her head and shut out the world, but her awesome and tireless team of allied health care professionals never gave up on her and made sure Rebecca didn't either. They cajoled, encouraged, bribed her and when all else failed, reminded her she was still Tia's mother and her daughter needed her to be the best mom she could be.

Today she would be there in the dining room again, as she was every day, ready to endure the process all over again. Rebecca couldn't help but marvel at how such simple tasks as sitting and eating a meal had morphed into a massive logistical campaign to be meticulously planned for and then borne with as much grace as she could muster. Which she freely admitted on her bad days was not a lot. She might be a strawberry blonde, but she had a temper that could put any fiery redhead to shame when she got riled up.

It was beyond frustrating, especially as on her good days she had such good insight into her situation. Although her memory still remained dodgy, having good, some not so good days and some extraordinarily bad days where she hardly remembered what day of the week it was, her ability to recognise what lay ahead hadn't been affected by her injury. Sometimes Mel kinda wished it had because maybe it might have been easier that way. Didn't they say ignorance was bliss?

As she looked around the dining room, Rebecca acknowledged that mealtimes weren't just a challenge for herself and she really needed to stop throwing a pity party for herself or as Tia would say, she needed to build a bridge and get over it. For every single person on the ward, eating had become one more challenge that they faced in order to get through each day. Looking at the way that food frequently ended up on the tablecloth, the floor or on their clothes, in addition to the actual food which actually found its way into mouths, it was a confronting reminder of how far they all had to go to recover from their injuries.

Notes:

dwankie– someone or something that is lame, stupid, uncool, or generally undesirable. Generally used as an insult or in a derogatory way.

fok– Afrikaans for "fuck", can be used in most ways it is used in English

choty goty– a beautiful girl

schoepit- pronounced "s-choo-pit", is the informal pronunciation of the word "stupid"

14. drol– lit. a turd (vulgar); also refers to an arsehole/idiot

Thanks to people who left comments and well wishes. I haven't had the opportunity to reply but I greatly appreciate them all.