A/N: And another one without a plot ;) Enjoy!
Meg, loz and Trumpet Lover: thank you so much for all your reviews!! I hope you stay with me!
Girl's night in
The knocking at her door is persistent.
After five minutes, Kate can't help but draw the conclusion that whoever's being so relentless, probably doesn't interpret her lack of reaction as absence. What? she thinks, decidedly annoyed. It's too late for Happy New Year, and I won't buy anything.
Knock, knock. With a sigh, she gets up from the couch and pads over to her apartment door.
"Yes?" she calls, unable to keep her irritation out of her voice.
"Kate? It's me!" comes Abby's answer from the other side. "You 'kay in there?"
Kate closes her eyes and groans. She should have known.
Couldn't it have been the washing machine salesman? Or the old crone from next door, who keeps muttering about how Kate often comes home late (or, which is far worse, not at all), and why she thinks that is? Shooing her away wouldn't have given Kate a bad conscience.
Abby's a whole different matter.
"I'm fine," she calls back through the door. There is a pause, then: "Let me in?"
For a moment, Kate considers saying she's got a bad flu or something, but then she sighs and unlocks her door. She can't very well leave her friend standing on her porch just because she doesn't feel like company.
She opens and manages a smile. "Sure, sorry."
"No problem," Abby says as Kate lets her in, but she sounds a bit confused all the same.
Kate closes her door and leads the way into the living room. "Can I get you something to drink?"
"Nah, thanks", Abby answers, and before Kate can go on with the small talk, she asks: "Hey, what's up?"
Kate just shrugs as she gestures for Abby to take a seat. "Nothing. What makes you think something's up?"
Abby chews on her dark crimson bottom lip, almost as though she's not quite certain whether she should answer that question. "You haven't been in the hospital for three days now."
Kate frowns and looks at her with a strange expression on her face. "Well, I wasn't aware that was a problem," she shoots back, sounding a lot more defiant than she intended to.
"Woah!" Abby raises her hands in a placating gesture. "I didn't mean it that way, Kate. It just … I mean, you were there all the while when you had the time until now, but you didn't show up all weekend so we were worried that maybe you were ill or something."
Kate closes her eyes and takes a breath. She sits down on the armrest of her sofa, feeling foolish and sorry for snapping at Abby. "I'm fine. Sorry, I overreacted."
Abby shrugs. "That's alright. If you tell me what's wrong, that is."
She receives a somewhat tortured glance in return, one that seems to say Do you have to ask? Can't we just drop it? Abby gets the meaning well enough, but she didn't come to be fobbed off on I'm fine.
She pins Kate down with a rather stubborn glance, and cocks an eyebrow at her.
Eventually, Kate sighs in defeat. "What about I make us a cup of tea?"
Ten minutes later, the two of them are sitting at Kate's kitchen table, both a steaming mug in their hands.
"How is Gibbs?"
Abby laughs quietly. It's a strange question, really.
Not that that was the first time someone asked it. It's just a pretty pointless question, really. The answer always is the same, and if there was something else to say this time, then Abby wouldn't be sitting there all calm, drinking tea. She would either be crying or jumping for joy. And Kate would already know, of course.
"No changes," she replies softly. Standard answer.
Kate doesn't really seem to hear it, though. She's staring blankly into her cup, and after a while she shifts uncomfortably, frowning.
"I just couldn't go to the hospital, Abby," she suddenly says. "After Friday I just …" She breaks off and shakes her head.
Her friend watches her, puzzled. Silence, laced with some stupid song from the radio, stretches out, until Kate looks up and goes on: "We got him. The guy that shot Gibbs."
Abby smiles, a smile that could be both wistful and bitter. "Yeah," she says, "you got him."
"We did", the other woman repeats softly, but the comment sounds distant, as if she's already thinking about something else.
Abby drops her head, trying to peer into Kate's face. "You don't seem too overjoyed."
" 'Course I am," Kate replies, but it sounds like pure platitude.
"But?"
Kate meets her gaze, but she doesn't answer for a long while. She just sits there with her chin propped up on one hand and stares at Abby as if the But stood written in her green eyes.
At last, she shrugs and massages her temple as though she has a headache. "We worked so damn hard to track him down," she says. "We worked the days through, every day, Monday to Sunday, and then we spent most of the nights in the hospital. It's a wonder no one's fallen asleep on the spot yet. Or has gone crazy, for that matter. I would never have worked that much for any other case. God, not even Gibbs would have demanded that. But I didn't mind because I was so dead certain that once we got him, this nightmare would be over and –", she breaks off abruptly and averts her gaze.
Abby smiles. "And the spell would be broken and Gibbs would wake up?" she finishes for her friend.
Kate nods timidly. "I know it's stupid. Things just don't work like that. And I know I'm behaving stupidly when I stay away just because I didn't get my fairy-tale ending."
She makes and odd gesture with her hand, dismissive and disapproving at the same time.
"I wasn't aware just how much I apparently believed in that. How much strength I put into working that case because I thought I was putting into making Gibbs wake up." She shrugs, and suddenly looks very vulnerable, small and helpless. "We caught him and Gibbs is still sleeping. Now I've suddenly got the feeling he'll never wake up. And I don't know what to do anymore." She rubs her temple weary. "I'm tired as hell", she whispers, and Abby can guess she's not just saying she didn't sleep well last night.
"You know", Kate continues after a while, "till now we could pretend that nothing's really changed.
We had Shepard's cases on the side, but all the while we kept working to find that bastard who causes all this shit. We worked with the tapes of Gibbs' interrogations, we worked with the evidence he'd given you, we worked with – his things. There won't be any of that from now on. It'll be as though … he's really gone." She pauses and starts tracing circles around the rim of her mug. "When the Director assigns us to our next case, or we just get the next call about some body and we accept, it won't as Gibbs' team anymore."
Abby looks down at her own cup and swallows hard. "I know", she says quietly after some time. "I've been having pretty much the same thoughts, Kate." She lifts her head again and her gaze starts wandering around in the small kitchen aimlessly. The clear green of her eyes has gone a little blurry, and suddenly Kate has to smile.
Abby has been crying a lot lately. There often have been a tear or two slipping down her cheeks when she remembered something that made her sad, or she missed Gibbs a little bit too much.
They've all been feeling pretty much the same way, to tell the truth. But Abby's the only one of them who is never afraid to let it show. The others tell themselves they can't afford being emotional, they need to be professional. That's rubbish, of course. Being a federal agent does not make you less human. But it's an excuse that comes in very handy and they all make use of it.
So Abby has to provide the endorphin for the entire team.
"But we can't change that unless we all quit", the Goth says, bringing Kate back out of her contemplation.
Abby smiles vaguely and shrugs. "And since we won't be doing that, hopefully, we'll have to get used to it." She grimaces. "I've tired telling myself that nothing's gonna change much, 'cause we've been going without Gibbs all the time already, anyway, but that didn't prove to be a particularly encouraging method."
Kate can't help laughing at that. After a few moments, however, she grows solemn again and shakes her head. "We're talking as if he were dead."
"I know", Abby mutters, slumping a bit in her chair, as if they were trying to solve a problem and just discovered their approach has been all wrong. "It's difficult do decide how to talk about him, don't you think?" She pauses and pokes her cup with her fingernail thoughtfully. "I mean, it was easy at first: good old denial. Just pretend he'll be back tomorrow. But you can't keep your doubts out of your words in the long run, I suppose. I tired to take care of what I said for a while, but now I just keep babbling away." She gives her friend a half-grin. "Like always."
"It's not like the way we talk will change anything", she adds after a while.
"Don't you believe in such things?"
Abby shrugs. "Don't know anymore."
They both fall silent after that, both trying to just concentrate on their tea and the radio that's currently forecasting the weather for the next couple of days. Rain and fog sum it up pretty well. Nothing new there. The girls don't waste words on small talk.
Halfway into the next song, Kate releases a deep sigh and shakes her head in what looks like a mixture of disbelief and some melancholic kind of amusement.
"If I'd known this before", she states, "I'd have stayed with the Secret Service."
Abby glances up to study her, taking a moment to sort apart her friend's comment and her own thoughts she's just been dwelling on.
Then, she just asks: "Really?" and Kate promptly answers: "No." She briefly closes her eyes and laughs quietly. "Forget that, that was nonsense."
She seems to have set something in motion in Abby's head, though. A frown creases the Goth's brow and she stares at the fume hood blankly for some moments before asking: "Did you actually consider a situation like this when you decided you'd become an agent, Kate?"
Kate inclines her head to one side and seems to contemplate the question.
"I guess so", she answers then. "But I think it was more about the possibility of getting hurt myself or losing a principal than – a friend." She smiles. "I can't say I was expecting something like this.
What about you?"
Abby actually chuckles. "I applied for a post as lab tech", she replies, as if that would settle the matter. "What d'you think?" At first it seems as if she wanted to leave it at that, but then she sobers up and shakes her head. "I'd have been stupid not to know I might get close with someone and then they might get hurt. We're not just pretending to chase the bad guys, after all. It's just –", she trails, searching for words. Eventually, she shrugs and says, in an almost off-hand voice: "It's always the same: theory and reality. No divergence like between those two."
Kate nods slowly. "And then you end up wondering whether you wish you'd never have applied, or never have accepted the offer, or never have allowed yourself to get so close with your colleagues."
"And in the end you always realize you wouldn't want to have missed any of it, and taking the job was the best thing you could do, and you'd never want to not know those people. And you really only wish that son of a bitch with a gun had never been born", Abby quietly concludes.
She stubbornly swallows down new tears and musters a grin. "Always wanting what we can't have, huh?"
Kate smiles. "Looks like it." She takes a deep breath and decides that Abby's right, and they've been gloomy for long enough now. "Like with that DVD I so badly wanted."
"Which one?"
"The Postman only rings twice. They don't sell it anywhere."
"Maybe it's not out on DVD. Ask Tony, he'll know."
"Yeah, will do that." Kate tucks her hair behind her ears and runs a hand over her eyes, as if trying to wipe her heavy mood away. "Anyway, I bought Dance of the Vampires instead. Care for a girls' night in? I've got wine and chocolate."
Abby grins widely. "I love vampires!"
TBC
Hope you liked it! I know I'm kind of writing the same stuff all the time, but the stuff also kind of writes itself, so I post it ;)
Reviews still appreciated, even if you wanna tell me you're getting bored!