Consequences of Love and War: Chapter 15

A/N: The last we saw of our favorite crime-fighting team, Gibbs found out the secret Tony and Ziva had been hiding for a year, that he was trying to get Vance to give him his own team so that they could relocate. Their first choice is the Bahrain field office, which is currently run by Special Agent Stan Burley, but Director Vance seems to think that DiNozzo would be a better fit at the Rota, Spain subordinate office, and it seems the only way to convince the director otherwise is to show him that DiNozzo knows his way around antiterrorism circles and can use that knowledge and those contacts to find Dr. Aachen. In this search, Tony and Ziva are now working with Special Agent Kim Tomblin to look into the detainees that Dr. Aachen had been treating in Afghanistan, while they're all still waiting for final approval to move forward to work with Mossad Officer Raanan Thal on freeing one of her operatives and seeing what intel he has. Peter Kirkan, Dr. Aachen's husband and one of Gibbs' former Marines, is looking into his past conversations with his wife to figure out if she had been leaving any clues that he had missed the first time around, and in efforts of being thorough in their investigation and looking into angles other than terrorism, Ducky is now doing 'psychologic autopsies' on Kirkan and Dr. Aachen.

When Peter Kirkan made his way blearily to the kitchen, he found Alyse already there, her eyes downcast as she concentrated on cutting a potato. "It's a watato, actually," she corrected with a grin, and he frowned, wondering how she had heard his thoughts and what the hell she was talking about.

"A watato?" he finally asked, deciding he hadn't had nearly enough sleep to try to figure out what the hell she talking about. Her grin widened.

"A watato," she repeated. "A Washington potato."

"I thought Idaho had potatoes," he asked, still trying to figure out where this conversation was going. "Washington has apples."

She pointed the knife at him, a mock scold on her face. "There is very little that you can't grow in Washington soil," she informed him before returning her attention to her potato. She picked up a small piece and popped it in her mouth, making him grimace slightly. Did she just seriously eat a piece of raw potato? "It's very climactically diverse, with a wide range of soil types. Potatoes, for example, grown around the Tri-Cities are an average of one inch longer than Idaho potatoes and weigh a couple of ounces more, due to extra water content. That's due to the differences in altitude, humidity, and temperature between the Columbia River valley and the largest potato-growing areas of Idaho."

"No, I can't tell your father is the Washington Farm Bureau president," he said dryly. She grinned again and popped another small piece of potato in her mouth. "Will you stop doing that? It's disgusting."

"No, it's not," she countered. "Doesn't really have a taste. Just a texture, and that's not too unlike an apple." She tossed the pieces of the potato into one of those Ziploc bag designed to steam food in the microwave, and grabbed a head of broccoli. "We used to take a short-cut through the field on our walk home," she said. "If the time of the year was right, we would dig up a potato, and Drew would cut it up with his pocketknife and we'd snack on it as we walked."

"I always knew there was something strange about your brother." She grinned at that. For the first time, he noticed how she was dressed—sports bra and running shorts, strands of hair from her ponytail stuck to her neck, looking flushed and sweaty and damned sexy. "Did you just get in from a run?" This time of year, she usually ran after work, instead of before. Of course, some of that depended on her rotation. He frowned, trying to remember what she was doing that month. For some reason, he kept thinking it had something to do with detainees, but that didn't make any sense. "And what are we having for breakfast?"

She made a face at him. "Yes, and I'm steaming a potato, broccoli, and cheese. I would have made a baked potato, but I'm too lazy to deal with the whole baking bit and burning my fingertips on the hot potato and everything. This tastes just the same, and it's so much easier."

"Odd breakfast, though."

"That's because it's dinner."

"But it's morning."

She laughed and shook her head slightly. "We're several time zones apart, remember?"

Realization suddenly dawned on him. "So this is a—"

"Dream," she confirmed. He frowned as the events of the last couple of days caught up with him at once.

"They're looking for you," he told her. She shrugged.

"Hope you're not expecting me to tell you where I am. It's your dream." She gave him a teasing look. "And I must say, I'm disappointed. Ellie gets to spend a year in the Philippines, and I don't even get a husband who can dream me into a tropical location." She grinned before her expression became decidedly suggestive. She took a step closer to him, their bodies close but not actually touching. She placed a hand on his chest and quirked an eyebrow playfully. "There better at least be sex in this dream. We have been apart for far too long, and, well," her voice dropped an octave or so, "I miss you."

---

Kirkan woke with a start, his body shooting upright in his desk chair, where he had fallen asleep watching the recordings of his conversations with Alyse until the early hours of the morning. He rubbed his eyes and glanced at his watch, grimacing when he realized that he had been asleep for two hours. In the back of his mind, he could hear Allie lecturing him about the effects of sleep deprivation, and wondered if that dream was a sign that he was becoming delirious.

He shook the thought away. It was a dream; that was all.

He turned his attention back to his computer screen, where the photo screensaver was running, a picture of Alyse on the screen, dressed in the digital camouflage uniform that would have appeared to belong to a Marine, if not for the 'US Navy' tape over her left chest. She was wearing a Kevlar helmet but no body armor, and from the buildings in the background, he knew she was just playing around outside the base armory, not actually preparing to go outside the wire. In her hands was an almost-comically large weapon, her Oakley sunglasses slipped down low enough to show her bright blue eyes, her expression an odd combination of amused and seductive. He had laughed when she had emailed him the picture shortly after she arrived in Afghanistan, and made some comment in return in about how doctors should just stick to their clinics and hospitals, because they didn't even seem to know how a weapon should be held.

At the time, he hadn't even thought about what it represented: the fact that she was in a place that required that she have someone around her who did know how to use those weapons to keep her and the rest of the base safe.

He angrily shoved the mouse away, ending the screen saver and bringing up the image of the video player, now just a black square in the middle of his computer screen after it had turned itself off sometime after he fell asleep in his chair. He had almost made it through another week worth of calls before that had happened, their condo filled with the sound of Alyse's voice as she told funny stories about the things her corpsmen had been doing.

Based on the light tone of most of her conversations, one would think that she was practicing medicine in some sleepy suburb, not in the middle of a warzone.

He shook his head quickly, abruptly standing. Sitting around in the chair, feeling sorry for himself as he thought about how well his wife hid the true nature of her work from him for months wasn't going to be doing any good to get her back. Despite the fact that he knew on an intellectual level that his presence wasn't going to help the investigation, and might actually hinder it, he rose from his chair and made his way toward the bathroom, to shower and get dressed to head back to NCIS.

---

Dr. Donald Mallard surveyed the pile of papers he had surrounded himself with and sighed, wondering, not for the first time, what business a medical examiner had doing psychological analyses—his so-call 'psychological autopsies'—on personnel files, newspaper articles, and novels.

His head was swimming with seemingly-unconnected facts: graduation dates, character profiles, officer evaluation reports, plotlines involving sergeants and female doctors and recent West Point graduates injured in battle and unexpectedly falling in love with beautiful women who doesn't care about his scars, an Honorable Discharge from the Marine Corps, nomination forms for medals, medical records—.

Medical records.

His mind stopped at those two words, and a slow smile appeared on his face. Of course. Medical records. He looked at the medical records of his patients every day; why should this one be any different, just because he didn't have a body in front of him?

He made his way to the computer and logged into the DoD's medical record system, typing in Lt. Alyse Aachen's social security number and easily finding her record. He skimmed through her past appointments quickly, finding nothing unexpected—routine medical examinations, a couple of visits to the orthopedic clinic for metatarsal fractures from running, her pre-deployment physical.

It was when he got to the medication list that things started to look…not right. His eyes widened as he realized the implications of what he was looking at, and he made his way quickly to the elevator.

"Jethro," Ducky called out as he stepped into the squad room. "I think I've found something you might want to see." He waved the printed piece of paper in his hand. "I believe our young Dr. Aachen was depressed and didn't want the Navy to know," he said. "Several years ago, she had multiple prescriptions for Provigil, a neuroleptic medication often used for narcolepsy or fatigue. She also has standing prescriptions for amitriptyline, an antidepressant, but no two prescriptions are ever written for by the same physician. In fact, this most recent prescription, for a fifteen-month supply of the medication prior to her deployment, was from an Army surgeon."

"She's not depressed." Ducky raised his eyebrows and turned to acknowledge Peter Kirkan's flat tone; in his haste to share this information with Gibbs, he hadn't noticed the writer's presence. "I doubt Alyse has been depressed for a single day of her life. They used the Provigil to stay alert while on-call during internship. She told me about that. The interns at Bethesda used to write it for each other until they were caught and told that they had to stop. She said it wasn't illegal—they were all doctors—but that their chief resident told them it was a bad idea, to write prescriptions without medical examinations. And the amitriptyline is for her headaches, not depression. She's been taking it every night since before we met, since she was in medical school. She says without it, the headaches are so intolerable she can barely move." He glanced over at Gibbs before returning his attention to the medical examiner. "It's a genetic thing, or something. Her brother has the same thing. That's why he was medically discharged from the Corps. You can't fly a billion dollar fighter jet when you get headaches so bad that your vision blurs if you turn your head. As far as having different people write the prescriptions, she just didn't see the point in going to see a doctor just to get a medication she's been taking since she was twenty-three, especially when all of her friends are doctors. That last prescription, the one before she was deployed, was probably written by Dr. Jayashri Ting after our last dinner at Olazzo before Alyse left for Afghanistan. Jess was heading back to work after dinner, so Allie asked her to put the prescription into the computer when she got there." He frowned. "If you thought Alyse arranged this whole thing because she was depressed or bored or suicidal, you couldn't be further from the truth. Don't pretend you know her because you know what drugs she takes and who prescribes them. Is that all you found, or do you have anything that will actually help us figure out who the hell is holding my wife?"

---

The man washed the petite physician with a worried expression on his face, seeing her curled up on the cot with her head in her hands. The vomiting had started only a few hours after they had brought her back to that room. She had glared at them and told them that it was because of her headaches, that she had medicine back in her hut that she needed to take; without it, the pain was so bad that even the slightest movement would leaving her throwing up.

Well, she hadn't been lying about that.

"She's really sick," he murmured as his friend stepped up next to him, both watching the doctor as she tried to lie as quietly as possible. "We have to do something."

"It's just a headache," his friend countered. "It's not going to kill her."

"I need fluids." They both startled at the sudden voice. Dr. Aachen hadn't moved, still curled up on the cot, but it was undeniably her voice. "And not just water. Intractable vomiting in the desert means I'm going to be dehydrated very quickly, with a hypochloremic metabolic alkalosis that can lead to changes in respiration, depression of central chemoreceptors, and loss of consciousness." There was a pause, followed by a low groan, before she continued. "I need IV fluids, preferably a several liter bolus of normal saline followed by maintenance fluids of D5 half-normal saline. Maintenance normal saline is the second best. If you can't get that… Gatorade is better than water. Please…something."

The two men looked at each other. "Did you understand any of that?" the second asked to the first. He shook his head.

"Not really."

"Me, either." They turned and left the room, leaving Dr. Aachen to the pain she knew she wouldn't find escape from.