Lethal Fractures: Chapter 15

A/N: I feel the need to pre-emptively apologize for this chapter. It just doesn't work, and I can't figure out why--if I could, I would fix it. I guess I'm just not good at writing Gibbs. Please, let me know if you have any suggestions for how I can make it better.

Retired Lt. Colonel Hollis Mann pulled into the familiar driveway and smiled slightly at the sight of the familiar car already parked there. Four years, and he's still incapable of change, she thought with equal amounts of amusement and sadness. She should have figured as much; that was one of the reasons why she left in the first place. The yellow muscle car was different, though; she couldn't quite figure that one out.

The brainstorming session had gone reasonably well, at least as well as could be expected, considering Gibbs' obvious lack of interest in being there and Wang's obsession with the white board and astonishing ability to talk in circles. Mann had the feeling that they would still be there if not for the fact that Gibbs had gotten a call—probably from DiNozzo and David, who were likely told to call and get him out at a pre-arranged time—and abruptly stated that he was needed back at NCIS. She had tried to get a hold of him a few hours later, but he wasn't answering either his cell phone or his office phone. She had finally called DiNozzo, who admitted that his boss hadn't been in the office since he had gotten a call around three and left without explanation. DiNozzo seemed to be in wonder about that fact; it was probably the earliest Gibbs had ever left the building.

Which is what brought her here, to Gibbs' house. She hadn't really expected him to be home in the middle of the afternoon, but figured that even if he weren't, she knew how to get in—she doubted he had started locking the door in the last few years. The only thing she hadn't quite figured out was how to avoid getting shot when she surprised him in his home when he arrived.

But there was no need to worry about that, since he was home. Figuring that his doorbell was still broken, she tried knocking, but go no response. No big surprise there, either—he was probably in the basement, working on another damned boat. So she let herself in—the door was still unlocked, as she suspected—and made her way toward the door that would lead to the basement stairs.

"Still leaving your front door unlocked, I see," she said as she began to descend the stops, then stopped abruptly. There was Gibbs at his workbench, as expected. What she hadn't expected to see was a boy around seven or eight with dark blue eyes and buzzed dark hair, his hands stopped in place on the sanding block that was working on one of the exposed beams of the boat. Nor had she expected to see a slightly older girl, maybe ten, with long black hair and startling blue eyes sitting off to the side with an open book and notebook on her lap. "Oh," she finally said, not sure of what to think.

"They're not mine," Gibbs said dryly. For some reason, that made the little boy laugh. "Their nanny forgot to pick them up from school and their mother is at work, and they called me."

"Mom did say she was a flake," the girl chimed in. "She was kinda mean, too. But Mom'll probably fire her now."

Gibbs smiled slightly before continuing the introductions. "This is Maddie and Nate Gracy, and this my friend, former Lt. Colonel Mann. She used to work at CID."

"Hello," Mann said, giving them an uncertain smile. The boy, Nate, smiled back, but the girl just gave her an appraising glance. Mann wasn't sure how she felt about being sized up by a ten-year-old.

"My mom used to work at CID, too," she finally said.

"Oh?" Mann replied. "What's her name?"

"Major Sonja Gracy." The name sounded familiar, but Mann couldn't quite place it. For some reason, she was fairly sure it wasn't as a CID agent.

And then it came to her as she remembered one of Wang's first comments in the meeting that morning. "The medical examiner?"

Maddie nodded. "She's a forensic pathologist," she said with authority. Mann guessed that she had recently learned the term and liked the exotic way it sounded. "She decided she liked that better than being a CID agent, so she went back after she and Gibbs caught the guy who killed my dad."

Mann must have looked surprised at that statement, because Gibbs said, "You had to have heard about it, Holly. It was all over CID, and that was before you left. Major Scott Gracy, Intelligence officer, killed in Iraq and brought back to the States by the insurgents." She did remember, now that he had mentioned it. She also remembered that the wife, an Army pathologist, had been forced to the do the autopsy at gunpoint. No, not at gunpoint. She gaped slightly at turned back to the dark-haired girl, whose attention was again fixed on the textbook on her lap. It had been Gracy's five-year-old daughter who was held at gunpoint. That must have been Maddie.

If the child had noticed Mann's astonished reaction, she didn't make a big deal of it as she continued to do her homework. "There's a bonus question on equilateral triangles," she said to Gibbs. "Equilateral triangles are the same length on all three sides, so all three angles must be the same, right?"

Instead of simply answering the question, Gibbs handed over three unsharpened carpenter's pencils. "These are all the same length," he replied. "Make a triangle and see."

She nodded as she accepted the pencils and arranged them on the floor before stepping back and studying the triangle critically. "They're the same," she finally declared. "So if all the angles are the same, and all the angles in a triangle add up to 180, then each angle is 180 divided by three which is," she took a second to think about it before declaring, "sixty."

"You're pretty good at math," Mann commented. Maddie nodded slightly as she recorded her answer in her notebook.

"I like math," she said. "We had timed tests on the first day of school, to see how many multiplication problems we could get in five minutes, and I finished all of them in a minute and a half. And I got them all right."

"Multiplication is easy," her younger brother scoffed from his position the boat.

"What do you know?" Maddie shot back. "You're only in second grade. You can only do multiplication with numbers less than ten."

"I can do eleven, too!" he protested.

"Then what's eleven times eleven?" He had to think about that for a moment before admitting that he didn't know. Maddie just gloated for a minute before putting her math book away and pulling out another book to replace it. Mann thought that seemed like a lot of homework for someone her age.

"Maybe I should come back later," she finally said. Gibbs looked mildly surprised at the statement.

"Gracy'll be here soon to pick up the kids," he informed her. That would be interesting. He wondered why this kind of thing kept happening to him; first it was Stephanie, Jen, and Holly. Now it was Holly and Gracy. What would be next, Fornell calling him to tell him that Diane wanted to have a word?

Sure enough, less than five minutes had gone by before they heard the front door opening again. "Hey, Gibbs," Major Sonja Gracy greeted as she descended the stairs, clad in khakis and a tank top, her auburn hair in a single French braid down her back. "I got your message, obviously. Sorry about that."

"I just hope it doesn't happen again."

"It won't," Gracy replied. "I've already informed Mariana that she has until Saturday evening to clean out her stuff. I'll have to check with the au pair agency tonight to find a suitable replacement. Maybe a German-speaking Israeli."

"Oh! What about Officer David? She speaks German."

"Officer David has a job already, Maddie, and it's a lot more exciting than driving you to swim practice."

"Israeli?" Gibbs asked, not quite following her line of thinking.

"Compulsory military service. She'd know how to take orders from a major," Gracy said simply. She didn't add that the military service would also mean that the nanny would be able to defend the children in case of any danger. The kids' safety was her top priority; considering what Maddie had already been through, she would hire a Secret Service agent as a nanny if she could.

Gibbs nodded at the explanation, then frowned as he suddenly registered her attire. "I thought you were at work."

"I was. I had an autopsy of an OIF soldier who died suddenly during MEDEVAC. Turned out to be an undiagnosed epidural hematoma. He had probably loosened the straps of his kevlar to let it breathe a bit, and it must have slipped when they came under attack." She looked confused at the question, but then realized what he was referring to. "I wear scrubs most of the time at work. I don't wear my uniform most days." She belatedly realized that there was another adult in the basement. "Colonel Mann, right?"

"That's right," Mann replied with a slight smile. Now that she was face-to-face with the pathologist, she could remember getting lost in the corridors of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology until she was finally directed to an autopsy suite, where a slightly haggard-looking Captain Sonja Gracy had put her autopsy on hold in order to answer a question about some bruising she had found around Lt. Hamilton's neck. That seemed like a lifetime ago; it had been almost six years. "You must be Major Gracy."

Gracy nodded once. "Sorry about Maddie and Nate. I'm sure the last thing you needed was pair of kids underfoot when you needed to talk to Gibbs. Come on, guys. Let's go."

"Can we stay longer?" Nate asked in a whine. "We're already late for practice."

"By the time we get there, it'll be over," Maddie agreed. "Please, Mom? I haven't even gotten to work on the boat yet."

"Up," Gracy replied, shaking her head. "And since you missed practice, we'll just have to go to the pool on base during lap swim hours. I'll be your coach tonight."

"You?" Nate asked in disbelief.

"Hey!" she protested as she herded them up the stairs. "I was an NCAA Division I national champion. I think I can handle coaching a six-year-old and nine-year-old."

"I'm almost seven!" Nate protested. "Oh! Mom! Can we go sailing with Agent Gibbs on Saturday? Please?"

Gracy looked surprised at the request and turned to Gibbs questioningly. "It's up to Agent Gibbs," she said slowly.

"It was his idea. He said it's up to you," Nate replied. Gracy finally shrugged.

"Then I don't see why not." She smiled slightly as she turned back to Gibbs. "You bring the boat, I'll bring lunch."

He nodded. "I'll give you a call with the details." She gave a quick nod in return and turned her attention back to getting the kids out the door. Mann could hear the children arguing in what sounded like German as their voices faded away.

And suddenly, the picture was very clear, and she wondered why she hadn't seen it from the first moment Gibbs said anything: the widow with a terrible tragedy, the children, even the reddish tint to Gracy's hair—it had Gibbs' involvement written all over it. "Oh," she said with the realization. "You're sleeping with her."

Gibbs looked surprised at the question, but simply said, "I don't see how that's your business."

He was right, of course. It wasn't really her business. She was the one who had left—left him, left DC, left the continent—and she certainly hadn't expected him to pine after her forever, if at all. That was the reason why she left, in fact. He didn't seem to be able to form any lasting emotional attachments. Well, that wasn't true—he did have lasting emotional attachments, but they were to a long-dead wife and daughter, and she had known there was no way to compete with that. But to be faced with the realization that she had been replaced—and replaced by someone who possibly could break through that wall he had built around him after Shannon's and Kelly's deaths, on account of her own tragic loss—was a lot for her to handle at once, and so she lashed out with probably the most illogical thing she could have said. "She's practically a teenager!" It was a silly comment to make; they were obviously both consenting adults. Besides, Gracy couldn't have been that much younger than Mann. She did the math quickly in her head and realized that the pathologist could have been almost a decade younger than her. So maybe she could be that much younger.

He looked amused at the statement. "I didn't think they were giving teenagers medical degrees and promoting them to major," he said dryly. "Her daughter's a hell of a lot closer to being a teenager than she is."

She barely resisted the first comeback that came to mind: and how old would your daughter be? It would probably be the meanest thing she could have said, and would have been counterproductive; Gibbs would have clammed up and never said another word to her.

Gibbs seemed to have sensed that she had something to say to him—it couldn't have been too hard, she had shown up at his house unannounced—and asked, "Did you need something, Holly, or did you just come to question me about my dating habits?"

As soon as he asked the question, she realized that she didn't know the answer. She wasn't quite sure why it was that she came. She hadn't driven through the beginnings of DC rush hour traffic to sand a boat for old time's sake, that was for sure. "I wanted to see you," she finally said. "Away from the case, away from DiNozzo's jokes, and away from Wang and his damned white board."

He smiled at that last one and softened visibly. "What happened, Holly...that wasn't you. That was me. It was all my damned fault." She had a feeling that with his track record, he had probably said those words a lot, and meant them each time.

She nodded and found that she had to look away. "Is it different now, Jethro? With Major Gracy?"

He seemed to be weighing his words for a moment before he spoke again. "I'm not sleeping with Gracy," he finally said. "The nanny forgot to pick the kids up from school and Maddie called me when she couldn't get a hold of her mother." He paused to measure a beam before speaking again. "She didn't want to be a pathologist anymore after her husband died and she transferred to CID. She was assigned to my team as a liaison two and a half years ago. On her first big case with the team, we found out that one of her closest friends had orchestrated her husband's death, and we put him and the bastard who tortured and killed Scott Gracy behind bars for good. And then she went back to the medical corps and was transferred to Tripler. I ran into her more than a year ago on a case in Baghdad, and that was the last time we spoke to each other until she showed up at NCIS to the autopsy for this case a week ago. I didn't even know they were back in DC until Gracy got called in."

She was sure he was telling the truth; Leroy Jethro Gibbs was nothing if not honest. For as much as he said, though--probably the longest speech she had ever heard from him--she just doubted that there wasn't more to the story. "She likes you," she said matter-of-factly. She knew it went both ways, but Gibbs scoffed at the words.

"Do you find it so hard to believe that a woman would be attracted to me?" he asked dryly. She smiled thinly at his words, even as she realized that Sonja Gracy was probably the only woman she knew who could hurt Gibbs as much as, if not more, than he could hurt her.

She stood abruptly from the step she had been using as a chair. "I should probably go. I'm sure I'll see you tomorrow when Wang decides to hold another one of his damned meetings."

He nodded, either at what she had said or what she hadn't. "Good night, Holly."

"Good night, Jethro." When she turned back to glance at him at the top of the steps, she found him leaning over the bare beams of his boat, sanding away.