'So, Jimmy, you like sleepovers?', Abby drawled in a mock-sexy voice, lying on her stomach in her sleeping bag, across from Palmer's. They were camped out on Autopsy's dull tile, looking up at the glittery drawers and tables.
Gibbs was in protect Abby mode, and he'd decided the best thing would be windowless, locked up autopsy. And not with Tony or McGee, damn Gibbs dirty mind.
So he'd deemed Palmer harmless enough and thrown him a sleeping bag in the bullpen, whispering menacingly, 'You can't say that the lacy argyle bra is a victim's personal effects, Palmer. And Abby doesn't get off on paint fumes. Be wise.', as he passed.
Those words were still echoing in his head as he puzzled out the response. 'Uh, um.....y'know Abby, uh-' He was interrupted by Bert the Hippo being hurled at his face. 'Hey!'
'Ugh. I don't mean like late-night, first-time-in-a-morgue-with-a-special-agent stuff. Hear me Gibbs!
I mean like, did you ever stay over at someone's house and hang out or sleep off some hangover after some crazy party. But of course you wouldn't have hangovers, I mean, for this shy nerdy guy, you're pretty good with liquor. Sorry, I mean intellectual guy, uh, so anyway I wouldn't even be talking to you about sleepovers if Gibbs! Wasn't making me like, I can take care of myself right? I'm an adult.'
Abby ended the rant when she saw the look on Jimmy's face. 'Heh. I'm guessing you didn't get too much of that.'
He holds up his hands. 'No, uh, actually, yeah, I did once.'
Mom had come all the way through the gates of the summer camp with him, read off his impressive allergy list to the head counselor in front of the other boys, forbade him from climbing any trees, and dumped slobbery kisses all over him at dinner in the main hall. Before the first four hours of camp had passed, he was a punch bag and a laughingstock. Add that to the starched mustard yellow abomination his mother called 'respectable clothes', and he was right at absolute zero.
'Hey you.', a rough voice above him, rubbing on gravel, said. Uh-oh. He wondered how much funerals might cost if you died out-of-town. 'Smarticle kid. Your brainwaves are blinding. Mind if I share the table?' Near frozen in fear, he nods. A beefy, round, boy whose chubby face is framed by a compass of spikes sits beside him and promptly jams a ham sandwich up his mouth.
Between bites the boy, whose name is Austin fills him in on his life in New York, he rides the subway (alone) to a red brick P.S 132, with a playground and a big wall with missing persons and the FBI's most wanted list plastered on it across the loud street overflowing with headlights. Austin is going to work for the NYPD crime lad, just like his dad, who mixes chemicals that come up with the mistakes in perfect crimes and whose friends slice up dead bodies and run vials through complicated machines. Austin's mother also works for the crime lab, and he says they told him it was a good steady job. Loads of people turn up dead and there are loads of break-ins and forgeries in New York.
This is news to him. His parents are a reclusive, brilliant philosopher who believes the world will cause it's own demise and a homemaker, he goes to a white washed private school, and his mother drops him off every day. He has never seen more than four cars on the same street, and loads of people turn up at tea parties where he comes from.
The other boys join he and Austin, trading stories and baseball cards, each snippet offered to the table assembling the puzzles of their lives. 'Hey, Nerdface, what about you? What, you dad hack binary code all day? Your mom never take her Star Trek costume off? You live in a bunker?' a tanned, muscular boy from Bel-Air, where he surfs every day, named Darien laughs.
He sighs. What do you say to people who live on cruise ships and in penthouses and lakeside cottages, whose brothers are brilliant doctors and whose mothers have run marathons? His brain is electric, trying to think of a way out. He has an IQ of 163. And here he is, stumped. Wait....Click.
'Okay. But you need to promise, nobody hears about this.' Darien scoffs, but he ignores it. 'They work for the Secret Service. I can't say where I live, because last time I did, they bombed it. My dad's an agent, and I'm not supposed to say because he's lying low. But-' he glances around the hall. 'I think I can trust you. My mom... is working a government deal, so they've put me here for the summer. Don't try looking in the counselor's folder either. That's all an fake. I can't attract any attention. Just by sitting here, you guys are risking. Your. Lives.'
The others stare at him, eyes wide. 'C-can you tell us more? I mean....the not top secret stuff....like what the CIA's toilets are like?' Darien finally asks, slightly paler.
They're blue and white, boring colors that don't attract attention. But that's just the main building. The others...he can't say. He was born in Autopsy. Aliens are real, but they better not say that or they'll send snipers after them. Next month, they're sending a mission to space, and yeah, he knows Jackie Chan.
He spins lies like a top, effortless and easy. It keeps on for a long time, until lights out is announced, and they are sent to the cabins.
It's about 3:30 when Darien wakes them up. 'Guys, follow me out the window, I got something to show you.' He doesn't want to go, because it just feels bad, but he swallows and follows the procession of over sized jackets out of a window that has had the screen cut out.
Darien waits for them to all be there, watching, before he removes a gun from his inside pocket. 'Okay. Every year, we prank the girls with something a lil' scary, y'know, get their hearts pumpin'. We're just gonna shoot in the sky, no harm done.' The others nod nervously, and he fights reason to follow.
'Agent Boy, you take first shot.' Darien offers him the gun, glistening in the moonlight and heavy as his thoughts. He wonders if it's just a play gun. Probably, he told himself, breathing as he calmed down. Just a play gun. Just a prank. Then he'll really be welcomed into their circle. He takes it, and even manages to grin.
BANG!
He's surprised by the force, and lies dazed on his back, before he realizes liquid is pooling in the grass sticky and sweet, reflecting his face and those of the others screaming around him, as darien wails on the grass. They're he's scared. Not about the cops or the camp. His mother would, will, kill him. He'll be forced to be chained to a traceable ball for the rest of his life. Whatever independence he might ever have would be scrapped. He'd be a punch bag and a laughing stock in jail. God will put him in hell for hitting Darien.
All.
Because.
He.
Made.
A.
Mistake.
He can never make mistakes again. Never make mistakes again. Never again. He's seen the worst one little lapse in judgment can do.
Abby's eyes are wide and she offers a hug to the teams Autopsy gremlin, letting him cry in the sterile silence of the morgue.
He realizes, Maybe Gibbs is like that too, just making sure he makes no mistakes, not even tiny little ones, because life is no game, you can't ever shake the board and start over or click escape when you've run out of choices. What's done is there, like a mark you can't erase, a permanent blemish that suddenly becomes the biggest thing on the map. You can't go over the old paths when your head figures out the maze.
And Abby thinks, if she lived her life like her friends, would she have saved herself from the bad decisions and the crappy boyfriends? Or would she just have locked herself into her own dark prison? She shivers at the thoughts, and cuddles closer to Jimmy, as if staying in Now will take away the scars of Before.