Chapter Four
Bizzaro World
The Navy Yard and the NCIS headquarters building are unchanged from 'yesterday', but the people within the imposing brown structure on Secard Street are exactly who they should be yet vastly distorted. As she enters the building and by-passes the Security Checkpoint, the faces, the bodies, are correct but Abby has never seen this many white and black uniforms anywhere.
And it isn't like she could imagine these are Navy uniforms. Despite the maritime connection, these uniforms are distinctly NCIS uniforms but for an NCIS that can't possibly exist - and within which she's trapped.
The majority of uniforms have only the ubiquitous flag and 4 color sigil on left and right arms, the sigil the flag shield under the brown winged eagle, but most uniforms are without rank chevrons or other emblems. Gold shields gleam on the left sides of shirts over closed pockets instead of being kept discreetly pocketed in cases and - unnecessary for she recognizes everyone - gold name plates gleam over right pockets.
The majority of the gold chevrons she sees on sleeves as she follows McGee from the main entrance to the elevator are single ones, quite a few less are the two such as she wears and a lesser number still are sets of triples such as adorn McGee's half-sleeves.
When they get on the elevator she tries to stay as far from him as the small space allows.
He hasn't said a word to her since that explosive command in the car and she keeps her own silence as he leads her off the elevator into a crowded Operations Division and toward the very familiar bullpen.
She can't wait to see Gibbs. He'll help her.
Still, it's hard for her to endure this madness. This is not NCIS. The McGee who escorts her is not the considerate gentleman who first attracted her attention - and her love - so many years ago. She can't imagine falling in love with this man, and he fits in so well to the atmosphere she breathes in the familiar Operations division.
When they enter the bullpen everything - and everyone - are where they belong; Ziva to her left, Tony right, McGee's desk beyond and another vacant desk beyond that - hers? She doesn't care about any of this - Tony's a Sergeant and Ziva's a Corporal - because at Gibbs' desk is
Lieutenant Jennifer Shepherd, gold bars gleaming on each lapel.
x
"Lieutenant," Tim steps before her desk, salutes her. Abby breaks her distress - where's Gibbs? - barely in time to attempt a salute.
Shepherd doesn't look up from the paper in her hand. "Finally decided to grace us with your presence, Corporal? Just in time for lunch."
"I'm sorry, dir - ma'am - Lieutenant."
"She'd been working last night on the Del–"
She looks up and it was better when she'd been reading. "I don't want to hear it from you, Sergeant."
"Yes, ma'am."
Shepherd turns her aim to Abby. "Well, Sciuto, you've been dealing with the Delmar case for -" her eyes flicker to the wall clock "26 and a half hours. What've you got?"
'A headache the size of Australia and the screaming heebie-jeebies.' "No, er, significant advances since my last report, ma'am." She prays 'Gail Sciuto' gave her boss some kind of report.
"I see." In her hard stare Abby can read the demanding question: Did you work last night or go home and open a bottle? "Well, I trust you'll have something more comprehensive to report in an hour."
"Yes, ma'am," they say in chorus.
"Dismissed," she has to say only once.
x
Abby and Tim return to their desks, Tim to his usual one and Abby to the one she's used to Michelle Palmer occupying. She's not that interested in Michelle's fate as she is, when she looks to the woman in the desk across the bullpen, with the white hot question 'Where's Gibbs?'
She tugs the leather holster off her uniform belt, pulls out the top right drawer of her desk and deposits the weapon there as she's seen agents do uncounted numbers of times. She hopes she can leave the detestable thing there.
A bigger question slams her harder than one of McGee's slaps: 'Where am I and how do I get out of here?'
x
But she does have a very good resource for answering these questions. Though she's been assigned to deal with some 'Delmar' case, she doesn't care about that. 'Let the other Abby - or 'Gail' - deal with that. Who the hell is she anyway, and why is everybody mad at her?'
x
Deciding that's her best starting point, she accesses NCIS' Personnel Files. Twenty seconds later her face - and not her face - stares out at her. Normally, from the front, her spider web tattoo on the left side of her neck is visible and she can't get used to not seeing it. The face, the long flowing hair that could make whips rather than pig tails and the white uniform shirt mean nothing to her, the text on the left side of the screen does.
'Abigail Sciuto, rank: Corporal, birth date: right, address: right, marital status: sing – DIVORCED?'
This is enough to rock her back in her seat, but she recovers quickly enough that no one notices. 'Divorced?' She sits forward. 'Divorced from who?'
She clicks on the word, it opens a supplemental file and Abby feelsher heart almost stop.
A fist clenches that organ in a painful grip, and when it lets go her heart races to make up for lost beats plus a thousand more.
x
It takes another moment, but her racing heart blasts such a rush of adrenaline through her arteries that she feels her metabolism kicked to warp nine. It hits her brain with such a rush she feels she's gulped a gallon of 'Caf-Pow!'. The room shakes and she feels sick, dizzy and–
'No wonder he just walked in on me when I was nearly naked! I don't have a thing he hasn't seen – fondled–' She turns to Tim at the next desk, wondering when the horrors are going to end. 'Oh - My - GOD!'
x
It finally makes sense - at least this much does. Very few things are capable of sparking such anger, such frustration, such deep, raw intensity of emotion as love; or in this case love gone wrong. There's a fine line between love and hate, and he's probably crossed back and forth over it many times.
'How long ago? Eleven months? And they work side-by-side? No wonder the wounds are still raw. What's with this NCIS? Who keeps a divorced couple working six feet from each other?'
The only place to find answers, for the moment, is inside these files.
x
'This Abby - I mean 'Gail' - started out like a house on fire. Been here seven year- she was a Sergeant? What the frack happened?
'She married McGee five years ago? Wow, wish I'd seen that! Oh oh. Three years ago she started getting in trouble. Verbal warnings. Written warnings? A suspension? Two suspensions? All for drinking?' She glances at Tim, tries to imagine those days.
She can't.
She can only continue reading this outrageous record. 'Social drinking became party drinking became secret drinking became... showing up for work UI - to drinking on the job?'
x
Appalled, Abby's not sure she wants to read more, but the horrible fascination… she can't stop.
'Two years ago they split up. Tim filed for divorce. God, this can't be happening - have happened. It did happen. Last year she let a suspect slip by her on a late night Stakeout. A Departmental Hearing found her guilty of being drunk on duty. Peter Drake slipped through her fingers. NCIS tracked him down, he took a hostage, killed him before being killed in a shootout...
'Gail Sciuto was fired?
'On appeal she got her job back - Tim said he went to bat for her - but she came back a Corporal with a 6 month Probation - five months ago.'
x
Abby can stand it no longer. She's cold and the room is spinning in an adrenaline-flooded miasma. This is shock setting in. If she doesn't stop it'll overwhelm her but she can't stop. Not now.
This can't be real - and yet it's on all the screens she's cross-referenced, black pixels on white plasma.
But horrific as this is - how could this Abby Sciuto throw away her life? - it doesn't help with the real issue:
'How the Hell do I get out of here?'
x
'My lab. If the answers can be found anywhere, it's there.' Getting up, she turns right and heads for the rear stairwell, hoping her departure is rapid and unexpected enough that no one can–
"Where are you going, Corporal?" Shepherd asks before she can reach the door.
Halting so sharply she hurts herself, she turns, crosses her fingers, toes and almost does so with her eyes. "I have to check on some forensic data in my - that is, in the lab."
"Are you finished with that report?"
'Why now do you have to be so Gibbs?' "Um, almost. I'll be right back."
She hopes Shepherd hasn't Gibbs' talent for reading lies, for she never wants to set foot in this bizzaro room again.
Taking lack of refusal for permission, a modified application of her best friend's Rule 18, she hurries out the door before another hundred things can go wrong.
xx
As she exits the staircase on the main floor rear she sees, crossing the corridor intersection far before her, a familiar petite figure, a flash of long - long? - pale blonde hair above deep blue scrubs. 'Thank God,' she thinks, realizing that if Jimmy Palmer is the Forensic Scientist in this Bizzaro-NCIS, Ducky has to have an Assistant, and whatever the cosmic coincidences that stretch credulity beyond the breaking point, he can't ask for a better choice. 'She'll be on my side!'
"Hey, Sammy!"
The young woman turns and sees her, but there's no welcoming grin. She turns about, walks away quickly, turns right and disappears beyond the intersection. Abby, at this point beyond surprise with this bizzaro universe, hurries after her, unable to imagine why her new best friend would snub her. They've been sharing her apartment for weeks, frustrating every pool on how long two hyper-elated people can live under one roof without mutually self-combusting.
Abby rounds the corner and the petite young woman is forty feet away. "Sammy!" As she hurries, the blue clad woman slows, reluctance to do so evident in every cell in her body, and as Abby reaches her she turns around.
Sammy looks so different and it's not just the mid-back-long pale blonde hair framing the utterly familiar face rather than the above the shoulder locks she'd had last night. Her eyes, her normally jubilant face, her posture all scream detestation spiced with hatred.
x
"What is it, Corporal?" The question is delivered in that careful, ultra formal tone every Serviceman learns within a week of being in uniform, but there's no friendliness in the pale blue eyes.
"Oh, Sammy, not you too." She'd so hoped her best friend would be–
"My name is Samantha," she says between clenched teeth.
"Not since you were fourteen. Oh, Sammy, what's gone wrong? Don't you … I can't … I hoped…."
Samantha Sky - the Samantha Sky she knows - had been Ducky's temporary Assistant during the three weeks while Jimmy and Michelle Palmer were on Honeymoon in Hawaii, but obviously….
"What do you want, Corporal? I'm busy."
The tone, the words, stab her heart. "Sammy, we – I need someone sane to talk to. We're friends." She hadn't realized until now how badly she needs a friend.
"Were friends. I still don't want to have anything to do with you. Ever!"
"But why?" She tries to keep the desperation from screaming in her voice. She needs her joyous, impish friend but that woman isn't in the person standing before her.
Samantha's look screams 'you know why' better than words ever could.
"Please, whatever happened I swear I don't know. Something's happened, I need help figuring it out and everywhere I go I run into people who hate me - even you - and I have no idea why."
"You don't know why?"
Where is the mirthful friend she knew last night? Where, in this hard and angry young woman, is the bubbly sprite she loves?
"I swear as God is my witness I don't. Last night everything was fine between us, now-"
"Last night? I haven't had to see your face in a week and I'm sorry I am now." Abby has never known these pale blue eyes to be glacial, but now a glacier would be warm. "You get hit in the head or something? You don't remember two months ago?"
Her face, her tone, turn hard as steel. "Well, it'll be my pleasure to remind you."
x
Abby's afraid to hear this. Where's the joyous imp who was so excited over the lightning? Where's her friend?
"I made the mistake of thinking you were my friend. I offered to help you."
"Help me how?"
"With the drinking, of course! I got help when I needed it so I offered to help you control it but you were in denial and I kept trying. I thought I could get through to you."
"Sammy, I swear to God that was not me!"
"Not you? Liar! When you came to Autopsy and I tried to help, you snatched a scalpel off the tray, swung at me and did this!" She yanks up the front of her scrubs, pulls the left cup of her bra down.
"Oh holy–!" Abby gasps. The white line isn't fully healed, the marks above and below it show the insertions and exits of stitches only recently removed. The six inch long horizontal scar runs well above her nipple but across Sammy's breast–
And she's to be the one who inflicted it.
x
Sammy replaces the cup, pulls down the blue top. "I jumped back in time, you only got an inch deep but you came that close to severing my breast! You did sever several milk ducts but Doctor Mallard saved me. He was stitching me up before the ambulance even got there but I'll have this scar forever! Since then I've had nothing to do with you. I've learned my lesson and I want you to stay the fuck away from me!"
Abby feels sick. This world is tilting her off. Nothing here makes sense and this is the worst. How could she do that to her best friend? That horrible scar–
"Sammy, I'm sorry! I swear on a stack of Bibles I'm sorry but it wasn't me. I mean it may seem like it's me but it's not. I'm not the–"
"Fuck off!" Samantha turns on her heel, walks rapidly down the corridor and out of her life.
xx
Abby clamps her hands over her mouth to trap the sob. It's too much. She's scared, devastated, trapped; her 'husband' hurt her; her best friend hates her and she's trapped in a nightmare from which there's no waking up.
x
Devastated, she turns back, retraces her steps to the closed rear door of her - of Palmer's - lab, but she stops in the corridor, unsure how much more she can take. She can barely hold back tears, must stand in the hallway until she can compose herself. If she must confront Forensic Scientist Palmer in her lab and beg for his help, she can't go in sobbing like a baby. She must go in as the Forensic Scientist of NCIS even if the world is insane.
She doesn't know how long she fights, only that it's not long enough. She makes that final turn and approaches her lab's rear door. She opens the door and has to hold herself up by her grip on the doorknob.
Something's finally as it's meant to be.
She tries to get control of her trembling legs as a tsunami of relief drenches her. Everything is exactly where it belongs - Major Mass Spec, Captain Centrifuge, General Gas Chromatascope, Jimmy Palmer in his white lab coat–
'Okay, not everything.'
x
The tall, thin man turns from the Infrared Spectroscope, a clipboard cradled in his left arm, either because he heard her or sensed her. With Jimmy she's never entirely sure, especially after he married a Witch - or did he? But at least when he looks at her there's more affection than aggravation in his eyes. That's an especially good thing because she has the feeling she's about to piss him off too. "Jimmy?"
"Gail?" His eyes x-ray her soul. He adjusts his round framed glasses and x-rays her again. "What's wrong? You seem tense."
Her laugh is half-hysterical. "You'll never know the half of it."
x
She steps into the lab, tries to get over his being in this room and she feeling like a visitor. She's supposed to be wearing that white coat - well, not that white coat; it has 'J. Palmer NCIS' stitched over the pocket and it would never close over her chest, but one like it. "You won't believe the hinky day I've had."
He frowns, his face doing a wonderful imitation of a puppy that's heard a strange new sound. "Hinky?"
"Not you too!"
"I'm sorry," he says, clearly having no idea what he's apologizing for.
He sets the clipboard on top of the FITR Spectroscopy Machine and she almost snaps at him not to put it on her equipment but bites the words back in time.
"Let's start over," he suggests. "Hi, Gail, what can I do for you?"
'You can get back down to Autopsy and let me work in peace.' She bites this back too, the growing series of unspoken words giving her a stomach ache. "I really need your help."
He's a good MD - where he belongs - in her world - but if he's NCIS' Scientist then maybe together they can...
"Sure. You know you only ever have to ask. What's up?"
x
'Thank God.' "I need to pick your brains. You know I'm not the Scientist," her stomach is getting fuller and queasier, "but I need your Science knowledge on - on a case. Yes, that's it, a case."
"Which one?"
"Drake. I - er - mean Delmar."
"I thought you solved that."
"No, I mean yes, I mean - oh never mind! Look, I've got - an electrical matter - a theory I have to test, maybe even an experiment."
"Electrical?" he asks, his eyes lighting with that boyish enthusiasm she knows so well. "An electrical experiment?"
"Yes." She's so relieved she thinks she could fall to the floor in a faint. "High voltage. Super high voltage."
If anything, his interest couples with delight and anticipation. "Super high? How high?"
"BEV."
"Billions of Electron Volts?" His grin is so wide she thinks she's given him a lifetime of Christmases in one minute.
She bites her cheek, apprehensive. Things can't suddenly be going her way. "Can you do it?" She searches the lab but finds nothing that could. His equipment is her equipment. Or is it? "Can you get up to the BEV level?"
He grins and heads for the rear lab. "Come see."
x
Not sure if he's got Frankenstein's monster lashed to a slab, Abby follows him into 'her' office and through to the smaller lab beyond, finding not all that much out of place - except for her pictures and her personal stuff. But a well appointed lab is a well appointed lab and from what she can see he's got a lot of good stuff.
She passes him to enter the inner room. Behind her the glass door between office and inner lab slides shut and Jimmy locks it. She turns back at the sound but the look he gives her is one of intense anticipation.
In this room there's little that's different from yesterday; a large central table, a multitude of machines of various design - but absolutely nothing capable of generating the HV power she needs if her theory is to be properly explored and tested.
Forensics goes black.
x
She's blind and unprepared to feel his hands on her shoulders. She cries out as she's spun around but her protest is smothered by his lips.
His arms hold her tightly pressed to him, but then his hands start groping her, one to cup her ass, pressing her groin against his while his other arm holds her securely against him, mashing her breasts into his chest. She can't see anything; blackness presses her eyes like his hands press her body. His face is right before her eyes in the passionate kiss and she can't see him.
She's bent backward, pressed back over the table and when her feet leave the floor she recovers enough to struggle. But she can't even break from his lips, let alone escape his questing hands.
She can barely manage muffled 'mmmmpphh's, but when he gets her over the table onto on her back, astonishment surrenders to full blown panic.
In the pitch blackness, his mouth clamped to hers muffles her scream. He yanks the left side of her shirt up out of her pants. His hand comes up under her shirt.
Gagged by his mouth, muffled by his tongue, she's blind and can barely hear her own screams.