What I
really meant to say
Is I'm dying here inside
And I miss you
more each day
There's not a night I haven't cried
And baby,
here's the truth
I'm still in love with you
-"What I Really Meant To Say," Cyndi Thompson
- - -
The day was surreal: the air was a little cold, and the skies were tinted gray with clouds in a bleak display of global apathy. The weather was not nice, but it was still a far cry from rain and sleet and hail and lightning.
It was the first time Tony had seen Gibbs in a week. He looked completely normal, except his eyes were fire engine red. Whether they were bloodshot from crying or from one too many bottles of Jack, Tony didn't know. It might well have been both.
In a hazy blur of memory, Tony thought of Kate's first day at NCIS. It was after lunch, but not yet time to go home. Kate, whom he had managed to annoy to no end, had dragged him aside. Eyes sparking, she had demanded- this was her first day on the job- to know why he was hitting on her.
"What?" was all he had said.
"You're hitting on me, I don't like it, and I want you to stop," she snapped. "I am not joking around."
It was amazing, really, how much he'd managed to change her over the next two years. But then, perhaps "change" wasn't quite the right word. "Desensitize" was more like it. She had gone from being offended to fighting back. And she fought dirty, too, like having Abby alter that leather chaps photo. Somewhere along the line she'd gone from threatening harassment suits every ten minutes to being sneaky. Fun, even.
He remembered in the hospital when she told him she was going to make his life hell.
Way to keep your promises, Katie.
Kate's family was here. Her mother and her three older brothers. Before the service started, Kate's mother approached him. She asked him his name and how he knew Caitlin. He quietly told her he'd worked with Kate.
"Were you... there?" she had asked in a quavering tone.
He nodded, and looked away quickly. It was too difficult to look at Kate's mother. The resemblance was almost sickening. But then, surprisingly, Kate's mother hugged him, the scent of her flowery perfume drifting on the breeze. She was crying. He clenched his teeth. He hadn't cried in front of anyone yet and he wasn't planning on that changing. He hugged her back, pretending for just a moment that it was Kate who was clinging to him and not her mother.
The preacher had started the service, but Tony wasn't listening. He was looking around at all the people there. All the team and everyone Kate knew from NCIS, her friends, her mother and three older brothers, Rachel with her coworker Primo, who looked unusually sober- hell, even the FBI agents they'd worked with occasionally were there in their rigid dark suits, mouths set in straight, hard lines. Kathy from reception caught his eye, but he just stared her down until she looked away. Kathy was queen of the gossip network at NCIS, and as a general rule you did not have a private conversation anywhere near her desk or everyone from the special agents on the top floor to the guards at the entrance to the mechanics in the evidence garage would know exactly what you said, who you said it to, and what it meant in Kathy's terms.
Of course, the current office whisper regarding the shooting was all about Gibbs. Kate Todd's dead, what's Gibbs gonna do now? No one gave Tony, the vain, egotistical womanizer, a second thought. No one was saying, Hey, what's going on with Tony DiNozzo, he and Kate Todd had some real chemistry and Trish heard that when she got shot her blood went all over his face, isn't that disgusting? I mean, really, there's gotta be something going on behind that pretty face of his. But maybe that was just him.
Eventually the sermon dwindled to an end, something that Tony was only made aware of when Abby put a hand on his arm, succeeding in making him jump about a foot into the air.
"You can go see her now," Abby said softly, without even a trace of her former bubbly personality.
Tony only nodded, and stepped forward to join the queue that had already formed. His mind wandered vaguely in a great emptiness, and he did what he used to do as a young boy to occupy his mind: he tried to think of nothing at all, even for just a second, and before he knew it he was standing next to the glassy mahogany coffin.
It took him a moment to look down at Kate, and as soon as he did he wished he hadn't. He felt alternately blazing hot and chill as ice and a burning nausea roiled in his stomach, because the woman laying there dead was not Kate. Didn't look anything like Kate. Had none of Kate's lively expression and sparkling aura. But the body looking like it wasn't Kate, it couldn't be Kate was not the worst of it.
The worst of it that it was Kate. That it had to be Kate.
He lowered his head and brushed his lips lightly against hers. But they were cool and almost waxy, and the sensation was nothing like kissing soft skin.
And it was only then that it seemed final. In a way, it was revoltingly appropriate.
Sealed with a kiss.
Tony turned, and began walking away, towards the parking lot, as fast as he could. He bumped into someone, and looked up. It was Primo, who had been wandering off aimlessly in Rachel's direction.
"Don't lose her, okay?" Tony told him forcefully.
"What?"
"Just don't lose her!" Tony continued on his swift retreat to his car, leaving behind a very confused Primo.
"Don't lose who?" he asked no one in particular.
It wasn't just the fact that Kate was dead now that bothered Tony. It was also the fact that the memory of it was beginning to gain the haze that times gone by tended to. That he could no longer remember with perfect precision the everything from the color of the sky to the way she had been smiling right before the shot rang out to how her blood spilled out on the concrete and his thought that it was so fast, it was all coming out and that she was gone before he could process that she'd been shot.
The whole weight of this was just hitting him, even as his shoes slapped hard against the concrete and he unlocked his car and jammed his keys into the ignition.
He stopped, slumped against the wheel and promptly began shaking. Sobbing. He just broke his promise to himself. The one about crying in public.
Ashes to ashes.
And in the end, it doesn't really matter.
Dust to dust.
THE END
