EPILOGUE
After two days in the hospital and another week of recovery (mandated by Ducky and watched over by both Tony and Gibbs), Jess went to Alaska long enough to pass on her notes and files to her replacement and to clean out the house she'd been renting. Her bosses at the NOAA lab were sad to see her go. Well … not really, but they said so at the time. They WERE sorry that she'd gone through such a harrowing experience, and did apologize for the snow effigy of her that they'd put on the back deck. They really thought that it would melt before she got back, but unseasonably cold temperatures were not working in their favor. Jess complimented them on the likeness they'd managed to achieve using only snow and broken generator parts, and was pleased that her penchant for practical jokes had rubbed off just a little bit.
Tony requested his left-over week of Y Pestis sick leave to go with her and help, since he'd be on desk duty until his knee healed. Besides, he'd never been to Alaska, and he'd always had this childhood fantasy of living in an igloo and dogsledding among the glaciers. He discovered that Alaska was, however, much more accommodating from the great room of the King Eider Inn in Barrow ("The Premier Hotel North of the Arctic Circle") than it was from the back of a dogsled, but at least he could check "live in an igloo" off his list of "Things To Do Before I Die" with relative certainty that he wasn't missing anything.
Gibbs had allowed Tony's leave, partly because he figured Tony and Jess could use a little bit of quality time together that wasn't related to a crazed parolee stalker, but mostly because Tony was really difficult to manage when he was on desk duty, and Gibbs figured that "a vacation for DiNozzo will be a vacation for us all."
Jess returned to the DC area and stayed with Tony while she waited for the results of her interviews at the Pentagon and looked for a place to live.
Ducky and Jess did attend the opera at Kennedy Center at the end of the month, along with Ducky's mother. The opera was outstanding, by all accounts, even if Jess did have to spend a good hour afterwards explaining to Mrs. Mallard that she was not a "young chippy gold-digger" out to steal Ducky's fortune and murder them all in their beds.
Jess and Gibbs were finally able to schedule their long-overdue dinner together. Unfortunately, work had been incredibly busy for her that day, and there were many errands that were left undone as she tried to make it to dinner on time. Always the good friend, Tony offered to take Jess' stuff to their shared safe deposit box the next morning on the way to work, in order to save her a trip and give her enough time to get ready.
Of course, the next morning was also the day that three armed militants decided to take over the very bank in which their safe deposit box was housed, in a quest for money, hostages and press coverage.
But … that's another story.