Warnings: None Disclaimer. I don't own the NCIS characters, I'm only borrowing them, and I promise to return them in minty fresh condition when I'm finished. Elizabeth is my own creation.
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Successor - part 03 (Abby's POV)
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I'll be honest; I hated Elizabeth on sight.
She was in M-Tac talking with Tony, no, make that laughing with Tony when I first saw her. And I just felt, how dare she be there trying to weasel her way into everybody's affections like that. Not that it was difficult to get DiNozzo's attention. Being female and not ugly was always a good start. But it made my blood boil to see her there looking as if she belonged.
I know now it wasn't her fault. She was just there doing her job trying to be part of the team she was assigned to, but back then, six months after Kate's death, I was still in the phase of grieving where I resented people for living when Kate was dead. Kate had been one of my closest friends and nobody could take her place, not as a friend, not as a co-worker.
Although Gibbs didn't know it, he had an ally in me when it came to scaring off potential replacements for Kate. Even though our motives were different, we shared a common goal. He didn't want anybody else to get hurt because of him. I just didn't want anybody to take Kate's place. So whenever a new recruit showed up in my lab I went into full creepy Goth mode to freak them out. Sometimes it worked.
Tony once asked me how do Goth's mourn. "I mean, you're already there with the whole gloom and doom and black clothes and stuff, so what happens when you're in mourning? Do you dress up in bright colors?" This was before Kate's death; DiNozzo may not always think before he speaks, but he wasn't that tactless. It had been in the hospital after they'd given him the all clear from the Y-Pestis. He'd been a little morbid at the time, wondering how people would have reacted had he not survived. I told him the truth; that we'd all have been devastated to lose him. Then he went on about how he hoped we'd have all turned out in our best clothes for his funeral. I teased him about his plan to wear only boxer shorts in his coffin, just to give the ladies a thrill during the wake. Little did either of us know that only a few weeks later we'd be talking about funerals for real.
Anyway, I don't know about other Goths, but I mourned Kate in my own way. For starters, I don't sleep in my casket anymore. The night after Kate's funeral I was getting ready for bed and it suddenly hit me that she was going to be in a casket for all eternity. I spent most of the night sobbing and in the morning I packed away my funeral gown and the casket in a corner of my apartment and went out and bought my first 'real' bed. I didn't get rid of the casket. Sort of figured that I'd need it eventually and waste not want not.
I'll admit that I was horrible to Elizabeth that first time. I barely acknowledged her when Tony introduced us. I remember he had a wary look in his eyes as if he felt guilty at being caught being friends with this...this usurper. At the time I was thinking that he was right to feel guilty or embarrassed. Kate had been a good friend to him. How dare he make friends with a replacement? But then, that's Tony all over. He just can't help turning on the charm. Murder suspects, witnesses, the lady who takes his order at the coffee shop, he just can't help himself. So I suppose I shouldn't have blamed him for doing the same thing with Elizabeth. The day DiNozzo doesn't flirt with a woman is the day we'll be putting him in his coffin, boxer shorts and all.
Tony caught up with me that day as I was heading for the elevators. I just want to say that I didn't storm out in a huff. I left my report on Gibbs desk and was heading back to my lab when Tony joined me in the elevator. He didn't read me the riot act or anything for being rude, that's not Tony's style. And he wasn't tactless enough to ask me why I'd been rude. He just said, "I miss Kate too, Abbs."
"It didn't look like it from where I was standing," I'm not usually that snappy, but it burned my blood the way he was behaving. How could he have moved on so quickly? It was only six months. "Kate's rotting in the ground right now and you're behaving like she never existed!"
"No I'm not. I wake up every morning wishing she wasn't dead," he snapped back at me, then he sighed heavily, "But wishing isn't gonna make it so, and neither is being mean to people just because they're not her."
"You've changed your tune," I told him. "What happened to the guy who was determined to keep it just Gibbs and him?"
"Maybe he realized that it's easier to watch Gibbs's back when somebody's watching his. Look Abby, I think Elizabeth is a keeper and I'm hoping Gibbs will think so too. I can't make you like her as well, but please, just give her a chance. For me."
He looked at me with those big puppy dog eyes of his, but I wasn't about to promise him anything, least of all that.
I knew why I was behaving the way I was. If I accepted a replacement for Kate onto the team then it'd be like accepting for good that she wasn't coming back. Or at least that's what I'd been told in an online chat room. But right or wrong, I wasn't ready to move on, no matter what anybody said. And boy, people had plenty to say to me. First Tony. Then Gibbs showed up with his usual bribe of Caff Pow. He didn't order me to like Elizabeth, he just told me that for as long as she was working on his team, then he wanted me to treat her as part of the team. "If she quits because of me riding her hard that's one thing," he told me. "But I don't want anybody else getting black marks on their files because they can't be civil to one another, okay?"
I just sat there numb, thinking that I was the only person left who cared about Kate.
If it hadn't been for Ducky, I'd have probably never given Elizabeth a chance. He can be very sneaky when he wants to be. I'd agreed to have lunch with him one day after much persuasion. Not that I didn't want to have lunch with him, but those days I just tended to eat at my desk while running and rerunning computer simulations relating to Kate's death. I'd done the usual simulations in those first few terrible days after Kate was shot. You know, figuring out exactly where the shooter had been. I'd examined all the evidence, read through Tony's and Gibbs statements, and figured out exactly where they'd all been when Kate had died. And then I reran the simulation a hundred times to see if maybe something could have altered the outcome. If the wind had been blowing from a different direction or at a different speed. If maybe it had taken Gibbs and Tony a fraction of a second longer to pick Kate up from the ground. If Ari had sneezed at the wrong time, would he have missed Kate altogether. So many variables and so many outcomes. In some of them he missed Kate by a whisker...in others he managed to not only hit Kate, but also Tony. In the absolute worst one of all, the bullet hit all three of them...I deleted that result immediately, but in the back of my mind I could see it as clearly as if I'd been there.
Ducky however wouldn't take no for an answer and insisted on dragging me off to this wonderful little coffee shop that he said he'd just discovered. I should have known something was up, but it wasn't until we got inside and I saw Elizabeth sitting at a table that I knew I'd been set up. By the look on her face, she hadn't been expecting me either, but she smiled quickly as Ducky sat down between the two of us saying "Ah, the only thing better than lunch with a beautiful woman, is lunch with two beautiful women."
I figured that at least I'd get a free lunch out of it so I sat down as well, thinking that at least with Ducky around then there wouldn't be any problem with making conversation. Of course Ducky had other ideas and no sooner than the waitress had taken our order than he got a convenient page and had to go back to NCIS. He insisted that we stay and finish our lunch. "And please ladies, no bloodshed. I really do want to be able to come back here again."
So we were there looking at each other in silence until the food came. And Elizabeth said, "Shall we eat first? I hate to fight on an empty stomach."
"Whatever." In the back of my mind I was thinking up all sorts of revenge scenarios for Ducky for putting me in this situation. Elizabeth was the last person I wanted to have to spend my lunch break with...no, make that the second last, although she barely ranked higher than Ari on that list.
It would be easy to say "Oh yes, we talked and we bonded and sorted out our differences and became friends and we all lived happily ever after" but life isn't usually that simple, and although Elizabeth was making the effort I still wasn't really ready.
Kate's death had hit me like somebody ripping out a piercing. And every time the skin was growing back, I'd see a new agent brought in as a replacement and it was like being ripped open all over again.
Don't ask me how it happened, but I found myself telling Elizabeth all this over our lunch. "Scars don't heal if you keep picking at them," she told me. "Sooner or later you have to let go." I was about to snap at her when she continued, "But nobody has the right to tell you when it's time for that to happen. Abby, I'm not trying to take her place; I'm just trying to do my job. And it'd be a lot easier if we could at least be...I'm not asking you to be my best friend or anything, but I'd like to be able to work with you as two professionals."
I wanted to keep on hating her. But I knew in my heart that if Kate were around then she'd be the first person telling me what an idiot I was being. Of course if she was still around then this whole situation would never have arisen.
So I gave Elizabeth her chance, guess I wasn't the only one willing to give her a chance because just over a year to the day after Kate's death, she was part of Gibbs team when they took Ari down and Ducky sent me a boxful of bullets that he'd extracted from the body. He'd marked down the one which he'd figured was the actual cause of death, and somehow I wasn't surprised to find that it matched to Elizabeth's gun.
Plus I got a cool new trajectory analysis out of it to use as my new screensaver. Something about watching all the bullets hit the Ari sim on my screen was nice and soothing. So yeah, I was pretty glad that Elizabeth had stuck around.
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To be continued