Chapter Five
Shocks
As Jimmy's hand clenches her breast Abby's panic leaps from 'fight or flight' to 'kill or be killed'! She turns her head sharply and the sudden move breaks the kiss. As Palmer's head drops past from his force, she turns and bites his neck as hard as she can. He screams, pushes up off her and she punches blindly, feels impacts to his head.
She shoves him away, uses the table edge to support herself, raises her legs, gets her feet between their bodies and kicks wildly, not caring where she hits.
She gets in three good kicks before she can't connect any more.
Bolting from the table the instant her feet hit the floor, she runs for the familiar switch by the locked door and floods the room with light.
Jimmy's on the floor and he rolls over, turns to her, adjusts his glasses, shields his eyes from the glare and demands "What the hell did you do that for?"
Fury turns to shock. "What did I–? You were raping me!"
"Of course I was raping you! You said 'hard, fast and extra rough'! What'd you bite and kick me for?"
x
This Bizzaro world has driven her too far. She's shaking so hard she can barely stand, her heart slams about in her chest, she heaves great gulps of air and she's sure she's going to be sick. "WHEN did I ASK you to RAPE me?"
"You GAVE me all the signals!" he exclaims furiously, holding his wounded neck. She hopes she took a piece out. "Electric! You told me how much force you wanted - mega voltage - billions of volts! I wasn't really in the mood for rough today, I wanted us to take our time but I gave you exactly what you wanted and then you bit and kicked me!"
x
"Wait a minute!" She needs this minute. Actually, she needs several hours to absorb this and knows she'll never get them. "Does McGee - does Tim know?"
He stares at her like she's lost her mind and she's ready to agree. "Are you crazy? Tell your Ex what we're doing?"
"Oh my God!" The full implications hit her and it's worse than McGee's slaps. "You mean Bizarro Abby has a fuck buddy and it's YOU?"
He gets up, probably tired of craning his neck while laying on the floor. "Gail, what the hell are you talking about?"
x
She bites back a scream, has to chew it. "All right - listen - because I'm going to say this once so get it now or I'll kick your nuts into peanut butter. I'm not Gail Sciuto, I'm Abby Sciuto, NCIS' Forensic Scientist in the real world and this is my lab. I got here by an accident I think has something to do with that storm last night - never mind 'what storm?' - there was a ginormous storm last night, deal with it.
"I got hit by lightning - and I came to you for help, not to get raped! I still think you can help me, but if you so much as touch me, so much as brush past me, I'll kick your balls into pancakes and not even Michelle will be able to help you!"
"Who?"
The word nearly derails her, she fights it off. "Never mind. Will you help or do I make sure you can never rape even a blow up doll?"
Looking quite stunned, Jimmy tries to catch up. Fortunately, caught up or not, he doesn't take too long to decide that "I'll... help you."
x
"Good." After so much time reacting to the maelstrom of insanity around her, it feels good to be able to take positive action, even if she has to cow a rapist - who if truth be told she has to grant is innocent, in a perverted, sicko sort of way - to do it.
He and Gail Sciuto have a strange relationship, but she decides it's none of her business. If he keeps his hands to himself he can go back to it - whatever it is - perhaps until the day her husband - ex-husband - finds out about them. They're playing a fatal game, trying to put one over on an Investigator, and she doesn't give a damn as long as he finds out after she gets out of this Bizzarro world.
x
Jimmy's quiet for a long moment, hands clasped and tips of forefingers to lips and she lets him be quiet. Jimmy, her Jimmy, would have said a great deal by this time, not all of it useful, but as everyone else is different here, so might he be too. Contemplative Jimmy is a stranger, but Rapist Jimmy had been a stranger too, and if his contemplation will lead to useful answers she'll let him contemplate.
After more than a minute of her holding her breath his eyes shift to her and he lowers his hands.
"Well, for starters, if you did get here through a bolt of lightning, getting back will electrocute you."
"No freaking kidding. Tell me something I don't know."
"All right. Getting across a cross-dimensional plane by using undirected electricity is impossible."
"Come on. I'm here."
"According to the Einstein-Rosen experiments, transduction of matter across a hyper-dimensional barrier is impossible using only natural forces. You cannot slide between Earths using a bolt of lightning."
"Maybe you're right, but I'm here. All but my tats."
"Your tats." This he evidently was not expecting.
"My tattoos. Somehow they didn't make the trip with me."
"Tattoos plural?"
"I have a lot of them, spider web here," she touches her neck, "big cross on my back, a load more that've vanished."
x
Jimmy is quiet again, this time for a longer moment and she waits, finding herself encouraged by his arguments rather than the reverse. Her Jimmy isn't stupid - far from it - but she's coming to understand what he'd be like if all that Medical knowledge were replaced with Theoretical and Applied Science.
His head is bent, he's silent, and she wonders if he's going to come up with an inspired solution and get her home. "I have an idea," he says, looking up to her.
"What?"
He straightens and removes his glasses, and for an instant she's reminded of that moment when Superman, in the first Chris Reeve movie, after his flight with Lois, is about to reveal his secret to her.
'Lois,' he'd said in his Superman voice, 'I'm really...'
Abby holds her breath. Is he going to pull a blue / red costume from a drawer and fly her home through an inter-dimensional rift?
"Open your blouse."
x
Furious, she strides forward. "I'm going to kick your–"
"You want my help, you'll open your blouse." Abby freezes, incredulous at this outrageous demand coming from the mouth of Jimmy Palmer. "Come on, it's not like I haven't seen them a thousand times."
Abby stares, dumbfounded, into the eyes of this anti-Jimmy and she feels more madness crash down upon her.
Slowly, unable to believe she's submitting and doing this thing, she raises her hands to her blouse, unclips the black tie from her neck and drops it so it hangs over the brass clip, manipulates the buttons, all the while denying she's doing it, denying she's feeling it.
x
There was a time in the privacy of her lab when, in her own mind, she'd pictured this moment with the thrill of hot lust. She'd thought how Jimmy, sweet loving Jimmy, would stand there dumbfounded and staring, unable to believe his good fortune. Now she's cold and tries to divorce herself, to deny she's doing this.
Not daring to think, she opens one button, then the next and the next. Her fingers work automatically rather than allow her to risk feeling, to risk thinking that she's opening her blouse to the man who'd just tried to rape her.
She spreads her shirt but can't do more. The demi-bra, half cups within which rest her breasts, is all that protects her and this only to just above her nipples. She flinches as he reaches out, impatient, and pulls down the right cup.
She's shaking, embarrassed, profoundly humiliated, face heating by the second and she doesn't dare move because if she moves this will be real and this can't be real.
"I don't know who you are inside your head this time," he tells her, "but you're Gail Sciuto, not this 'Abby Sciuto'. But it'd've been a hot fantasy if you hadn't gone all berserk on me."
"What? I–"
"The mark."
x
Incredulous, feeling the world tip out from under her, she looks down and sees a pink star tattooed on the upper side of her nipple.
She doesn't want to imagine how much this one must have hurt going on. Tattooing hurts, but this must have been agony.
What is Jimmy to her that Gail would do this?
"I don't know what tattoos you were thinking of," he says as she covers herself again, buttons her shirt as quickly as she can, "but yours is still where it belongs."
"NO! I AM ABBY!" She gets the tie clipped in place at her throat.
"Suit yourself. Abby, Gail, Abigail, different sides of the same hot bitch. I just wish you'd've let me in on the game earlier."
x
Unable to endure any more, she grabs him by the lapels of his lab coat, shoves and slams him backward over the table as he'd had her, his coat and shirt clutched in her fists. It's so gratifying to see sudden fear in his eyes.
"Now you listen to me and you listen good! The real Jimmy isn't such a bastard but it's only for his sake that I'm not going to knock your head through a wall. I don't care what you think, I don't care about your ta–"
x
As quickly as the fury had flooded her, it washes out on a great tide and suddenly she can think clearly. She releases the frightened man and backs away.
"Of course! Of COURSE! It all makes sense now! Transposing five feet ten, a hundred never mind pounds of pure sexiness through a singularity is impossible. It'd take more power than any lightning can carry to move more than an atom!"
She advances on him again so quickly he rolls off the table to its other side, backs away out of her reach. "I didn't move, my consciousness did! This is Gail Sciuto's body, brutalized liver and all, but I'm stuck inside it!"