I don't have a solid reason for writing this story. The idea popped into my brain one day and started writing. It's about as much of a standard 'fictional character entering our world' story as it gets. My goal is for this to be an ongoing story for a long time. I have Season One complete, which is eighteen chapters long. It took me a long time to decide if I wanted to finish this after what happened with Gibbs at the beginning of this season (avoiding spoilers). For reference, this takes place between Sloane leaving the show and Gibbs's suspension. Please don't hesitate to leave feedback, and I hope you enjoy.
CHAPTER 1: COLLISION
Today was supposed to be a boring day. It was a Monday, it was one of the first warm days of the year, work was going to be slow. We weren't supposed to have any universal meltdowns today. I set several bags of pizza toppings on the makeline and went for containers to prep with. As I walked towards the dish area in the back of the store, the entire building rumbled as what felt like a massive shockwave rolled over the area. I looked around in confusion, making sure the store wasn't about to collapse on me. My opening driver was on a delivery, and I was the only one in the store.
I glanced towards the front window of the store and saw that the world still seemed to be turning. I figured I'd hear about whatever it was when my staff started coming in. I grabbed some prep containers from the dish racks and brought them up to the makeline. As I did so, the beeper for the front door went off, and I looked around. A man had just entered. He was older, in his mid sixties, and he looked very distressed. He was wide-eyed, breathing heavily and looking frantic.
I walked up to the front with concern, and as I got a good look at him, my eyes narrowed in confusion. I quickly straightened my expression, and as the man spotted me, he said, "Hey, excuse me. Can you help me? I'm…I don't…."
"Alright, yeah, man," I said to him, gesturing for him to come behind the counter. He seemed to gain a hint of relief from this as he walked towards me, and I led him into my back office. He sat down at the computer chair while I sat at the armchair next to him, watching him. He was wearing a thick, tan jacket and light jeans. He was looking around with wide eyes, seeming unsure of what he was seeing.
I stayed silent for a few seconds before finally saying, "So, what's going on?"
He then looked at me like he had forgotten I was there. He then broke into a wide, disbelieving smile and said, "Man, I don't even know how to explain it."
"What's your name?" I asked him
"Jethro," he answered. "Jethro Gibbs."
My eyes widened while my jaw slowly fell open. I wondered if he was just messing with me. Had he hit his head? But, no. As he stared at my office desk, trying to process the hurricane of information that was slamming into him, I could tell he was being completely genuine. I managed to even my expression before he noticed. "I'm Jack Fosse," I told him. Gibbs nodded, but I wasn't entirely sure he had heard me. "So, what happened, Jethro?" I asked him.
He shook his head. "If I tell ya, you're not gonna believe it."
"You'd be surprised," I assured him.
Gibbs chuckled, and he said, "Well, okay then." He made eye contact with me for the first time since he sat down, and he gave me a kind of half smile where only one corner of his mouth was curled upward. He looked at me in a way that made me wonder if he was starting to appreciate me a bit.
"I believe you're a man who appreciates honesty and when people give straight answers," I told him. He had a small smile on his face when he heard this. "I believe you demand the absolute best from those you lead, and even more from yourself." His smile started to fade, just slightly, to be replaced with a hint of suspicion. I didn't stop there. "I believe you were born in Stillwater, Pennsylvania, where you joined the Marines. You were in Desert Storm where you were wounded. After you were discharged, you met Mike Franks and joined NIS."
Gibbs's smile had shattered completely, and he was looking at me with his jaw hanging open, his eyes narrowed in incomprehension. My expression was even, and I was waiting for all of this to wash over him. He finally closed his jaw, and his eyes shifted from confusion to anger and defense. I reached into my pocket, and when he reached for his waist, I put a hand out to stop him. I pulled out my phone, and his posture seemed to ease, although his guard was still up.
I tapped several times on my smartphone, and I showed him a video. It was the NCIS intro. Gibbs watched the montage, seeing the characters and scenes flash across the screen. His eyes were wide, and his jaw was open again. He clearly could not process what he was looking at. After the intro montage had ended, I pocketed my smartphone and stared at him. He finally found it in him to look at me again, and I could tell he had no idea what to even say.
"Looks to me like you jumped across universes," I informed him.
Gibbs scoffed. He looked around him as though waiting for the Punk'd team to jump out. "Jumped across uni…man, that's nonsense, that's-that's fiction," he said to me with a disbelieving grin.
I shrugged. "Around these parts, you're the fiction."
He didn't seem able to come up with an argument to this. "Where am I?" he asked.
"Crawfordsville, Indiana," I answered. "Just outside of Indianapolis."
He looked at me incredulously. "I live in D.C., that's, what, five hundred miles away?" I stared at him silently. "Okay, so what the hell do I do now?" he asked.
As the makeline beeper went off to indicate a web order, I answered, "Help me make some pizzas."
Gibbs wasn't sure how he felt about this, but he got up nonetheless and took his jacket off. He had a red polo shirt underneath, and he hung his jacket on my chair and followed me to the makeline. I walked him through the process of making the dough for the pizza skin, and as I slapped it out and put it on a screen, he couldn't help but smile. I showed him how to sauce the skin and demonstrated topping and cheesing it. As I put the pizza in the oven, I motioned for him to make the second one. I watched him top the pizza, and to my surprise I didn't have to give him any advice. As he loaded the pizza and we washed our hands, I asked him, "You ever done this before?"
"No," he answered with a smile. "No, I haven't."
My driver returned from his delivery, and as he walked in, he glanced at Gibbs. He didn't say anything, but I could see the look of confusion as he checked in from his run. Gibbs helped me with pizzas for the rest of the day, and I taught him about my job as a General Manager and the admin work that needed to be done. He seemed genuinely interested in this, and it served as an adequate distraction to his current predicament. As dinner rush came around and the rest of my team started arriving, my Assistant GM spotted Gibbs and looked at him. I knew NCIS wasn't her thing, so her immediate skepticism was fortunately with the stranger in the building and not how a fictional character came to life.
It was going to be a slow dinner rush and we had plenty of staff to handle it. I walked up to my Assistant and said, "I gotta go."
She was still looking at Gibbs, and she nodded in understanding. I clocked out and grabbed my jacket, and I looked at Gibbs and said, "Let's go."
He nodded and followed me. We walked to my car, and I sat behind the wheel while he joined me in the passenger's seat. He was still looking around him like he couldn't quite handle what he was experiencing. I pulled my car out of the restaurant's parking lot and drove up the highway. "You live around here?" Gibbs asked me.
"Nah, a couple towns over in Veedersburg," I answered.
"How long you been running that place?" he asked.
"About a year," I answered.
He nodded, looking impressed. "That's pretty good for your age. What are you, twenty-one?"
"Twenty-five," I replied.
The drive consisted of mostly farmland interspersed with tiny towns. Gibbs watched all of the fields and towns pass by, and he had a slight, almost nostalgic grin on his face.
"So, what were you doing when you jumped?" I asked.
Gibbs laughed and said, "Warming up my truck." He seemed to be lost in thought for a moment before he looked at me. "You look like you're handling this pretty well. You guys get people from other universes around here often?" His tone was facetious, but he was looking at me incredulously.
"No," I answered matter-of-factly. "I just don't find that kind of thing all that hard to believe."
His jaw seemed to open a bit wider. "You ever hear the multiverse theory?" I asked him. The exasperated grin he gave me was a sufficient answer. "Look," I said, not feeling up to trying to search for a way to explain it to him so he could understand. "Just ask McGee about it next time you see him. The long and short of it is, this really isn't that crazy to me."
He looked at me for a moment until he finally nodded, seeming to grasp at least this much. "What happens now?" he asked.
"We look for a way to get you home," I answered. "Not sure on the who, how, why, or when, but we'll figure it out."
We pulled into Veedersburg. I navigated the streets to my house, and as we pulled into the garage, Gibbs chuckled a bit. "I take it I'm well portrayed on that show?" he asked me with a grin.
"Yeah," I answered. "Why?"
"Because we met four hours ago, and you're bringing me into your home," Gibbs answered.
"How long's it take to get to know someone?" I asked.
He nodded as if he couldn't argue, and as the garage door closed behind us and we got out, I led him to the door. I opened it to see my wife working on dinner. Twenty-eight years old, she was the most captivating thing I had ever seen. She was wearing a red hoodie over a black shirt with skin tight jeans. She had long, auburn hair that was pulled over her shoulder in a loose ponytail. I gave her a wide, guilty smile as I stood in the doorway.
"Hi," she said, looking at me with some concern.
"So, we kind of have a problem," I said to her.
"Okay," she replied forebodingly.
I stepped in and made room, and Gibbs stepped into the kitchen with a somewhat awkward smile. My wife's jaw tumbled open as she stared at me. While she wasn't as big a fan of the show as I was, she was still familiar with the characters.
"Honey," I addressed to her. "Sarah, I'd like to introduce you to Leroy Jethro Gibbs."
For a split second I thought she was going to grab a knife, although it was anybody's guess on who she planned to stick it in. She just continued staring at me, waiting for an explanation. I began the process of explaining to her what had happened, and Gibbs jumped in where necessary to fill in some of the gaps. After we finished, Sarah simply stood still, staring between the two of us with her jaw hanging half open. It took her several seconds to gather her thoughts and form a response.
"So, what's the plan?" she asked.
"Figure out how to get him home," I answered with a shrug.
"Well, that's gonna be fun, since I don't even know how I got here," Gibbs interjected.
Sarah glanced at him, suggesting her agreement with him.
"We'll figure it out," I assured him. "Doors open from both sides, rather they're to different rooms or different universes."
Gibbs nodded, but he did not appear assuaged. "I still don't even understand this whole universe B.S., or how you're so damn calm about the whole thing."
I looked meaningfully at Sarah, and she shrugged. I indicated for Gibbs to follow me, and he accompanied me into an office off from the living room. I sat at the laptop computer sitting on a wooden desk. I saw Gibbs's eyes glance over the wood while I turned on the computer. I pulled up a program entitled Infinity. The screen showed an image of the Earth from space.
"Earth, right?" I stated.
Gibbs nodded, quite unsure of where this was going. I moved the cursor and panned the screen around. "There's the Moon. Want to go see the Moon?" Gibbs shrugged silently, and I brought the screen perspective to a close-up of the Moon. Gibbs watched, and he seemed to be growing impatient. I panned the screen around to view the Sun, as well as the Milky Way Galaxy.
"Pick a star," I suggested.
Gibbs seemed quite confused now, but he humored me. He picked a particularly bright white dwarf. I moved the perspective to a close-up of the dwarf and demonstrated its system of six planets to Gibbs. As impatient as he was, his fascination with this seemed to be starting to win him over. I then moved the perspective through the stars, demonstrating the countless number of systems and planets. Gibbs's mouth had fallen open a bit, and his eyes were wide. I then panned to a view of the Milky Way Galaxy. I pulled up the information cache to show 200 billion star systems. I then panned around to show the massive field of galaxies.
As I moved through the galaxies, billions of them each with millions to trillions of stars, Gibbs was positively baffled. "Each of these galaxies with its own worlds, its own realities," I stated. "Now imagine these galaxies each as its own universe, with its own galaxies with its own solar systems and its own planets. Because that's what's out there," I told him. "A countless number of universes." As Gibbs watched the computer screen, I shrugged. "Not hard to imagine one of those universes is yours."
Gibbs processed this for a moment, and he finally nodded. I stared at him for a moment before asking, "Your brain short circuited yet?"
Gibbs and I walked back out to the living room, where Sarah was waiting for us. She glanced at Gibbs before looking at me as I sat down on the couch. Gibbs sat down on a lounge chair, and he looked supremely uncomfortable. "Look," Sarah said to the room at large. "We need to come up with some kind of plan, here. How did you get here?" she asked Gibbs.
Gibbs looked at her and scoffed, shaking his head. "I don't have any idea," he assured her. "All I know is I was clearing snow off my truck, there was this flash of white light, and next thing I knew I was on the sidewalk down the road from the pizza place."
Sarah nodded, and she didn't have anything else to offer. A knock at our front door grabbed our attention, and Gibbs looked between us both. Sarah looked at me in a mixture of confusion and fear, and I motioned for her to stay back while I approached the door. I looked out the window, seeing two men in plain suits standing there with their hands folded. They had already spotted me, but fortunately Gibbs was out of their line of sight. I looked back at him and tilted my head towards the nearby hallway, and he nodded before disappearing into a bedroom.
I opened the door to the two men and asked, "Can I help you?"
"Hello," one of the men said with a curt smile. He had dark, smoothly combed hair and a face that looked like it had been carved from marble. "We're with the Federal Bureau of Investigation." He and his companion both showed me IDs and badges. "We're tracking some suspicious activity in this area and was wondering if you could assist us by answering a few questions."
I managed to fake a smile and replied, "Yeah, sure. What's up?"
"Have you seen any strange people around here recently? Maybe someone who doesn't belong?"
Okay, so clearly these guys weren't intending on beating around the bush. It wasn't much to believe they picked up on the energy wave that had announced Gibbs's arrival here. It did seem strange to me that the FBI had tracked Gibbs twenty-five miles from Crawfordsville to my house.
The agent was waiting for me to answer, and I could tell the longer I took to respond, the more his suspicions grew. "No," I answered. "No, nothing like that here."
The man nodded. He and his partner exchanged glances before they seemed to steel themselves. "We need to take a look around," the lead agent informed me.
They stepped into the doorway, and I said, "Excuse me, on what grounds?"
They completely disregarded me, shoving their way past me into the living room. Sarah gasped as she stepped back. The agents rested their hands on the guns at their waists as they looked around the room. Gibbs stepped out into the open with a dry smile and said, "You know, I know a thing or two about how the FBI operates. They don't usually execute a search without a warrant, or interview witnesses and suspects without giving their names."
"Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs," the lead agent addressed. "You have breached universal boundaries and violated quite a few laws of regulation and spatial integrity."
"Yeah," Gibbs acknowledged, as though this occurred regularly in his everyday life. "What's it to you?"
Sarah and I exchanged looks, but neither of us offered our input.
The lead agent pulled out his sidearm and swiped his hand down across the top of the barrel. The gun morphed into something out of a sci-fi film. It was silver with a long, intricate barrel and a tube feeding from the magazine to the firing chamber. "We are Universal Keepers. All three of you are required to come with us, immediately."
"No," Gibbs replied simply.
The lead Universal Keeper's eyes narrowed, and he aimed his gun. Gibbs reached for his Colt, and he ducked down as the Universal Keeper fired a shot. His gun emitted several blasts of blue energy, and they flew over Gibbs and crashed into our wall, blasting holes into it that caused most of it to collapse. Sarah and I screamed, and I pulled her into the hallway as Gibbs moved towards cover. The Universal Keepers moved in on him, but he peered out from behind a wall and fired his gun. Several shots hit the lead Keeper, and while he stumbled back, he seemed fairly unharmed.
Gibbs's eyes narrowed in frustration, and he ducked back behind his wall as the Keepers returned fire on him. The Keepers moved towards him with guns raised, but as they approached his position, they found he had disappeared. Gibbs came around after having moved in a loop through the house, and he drove the blade of his pocket knife into the subordinate Keeper's back. The Keeper shuddered and groaned, and Gibbs put him between himself and the Lead Keeper. The Lead Keeper tried to line up a shot with his gun, but Gibbs fired his Colt several times, emptying the clip into the Lead Keeper.
The Keeper stumbled back before crashing into a wall, falling over as Gibbs quickly put another clip into his gun. The partner Keeper stumbled back but when he tried to aim his gun, Gibbs shot him in the head. The partner collapsed, and Gibbs aimed his weapon at the Lead Keeper. The Keeper was staring up at him, angry and grunting in pain. Gibbs stared at him silently, inviting him to make a move. The Keeper took a deep breath, and he pressed a button on his wristwatch. The air around him seemed to condense, and yet rip apart at the same time. Gibbs looked around with wide eyes, not lowering his weapon as he watched.
A portal, a swirling vortex of energy that seemed to suck the oxygen out of the air, appeared in the middle of the room. Gibbs backed off, and he watched as the Lead Keeper moved into the portal. The portal and the Keeper vanished, leaving Gibbs to lower his gun and stare around at the destroyed living room.
He was examining the burning holes in the wall from the Keeper's gun when he said, "It's safe. You can come out."
Sarah and I walked cautiously out into the living room, both of us looking around at the damage with wide eyes. Gibbs looked around at us, and it was clear that he felt some responsibility for what had happened. "Are you two okay?" he asked in a mellow voice.
We both nodded, and I examined the extent of the damage to our home while Sarah walked up to the body of the Keeper that Gibbs had killed. Gibbs watched her, and she bent down over him to examine him. She searched through his clothes for belongings, and Gibbs picked up the gun to look over it. This grabbed my attention, and as I walked over to them he asked, "You ever seen anything like this before?"
I shook my head, and as Sarah searched pockets, she pulled out another strange device. "What the hell is this?" she asked as she stared at it.
Gibbs and I looked down at her. She was holding what looked like a cross between a cellphone and a tablet, yet it had several buttons along the bottom and side. The display was showing a map of what looked like Veedersburg, with a bright red dot in the center. "That's where this house is," I observed. "That's exactly where we are."
"No," Gibbs corrected. "That's exactly where I am."
Sarah didn't comment, but I could tell she agreed with him. "So, this is how they tracked you so quickly," I devised.
Sarah offered the computer to me, and I took it and looked it over. Just as I was considering testing out the buttons on it, a beeping sound chirped from the device. We all looked at it, watching as a second red dot appeared. It was at the very edge of the screen, so I zoomed out to see that the new dot was located in Indianapolis. "Is that what I think it is?" Gibbs asked.
"Uh," was all I could manage. Sarah and I looked at each other, and I glanced at Gibbs before looking back down at the map.
Sarah was the one to finally voice the truth. "We need to get there."
I nodded and looked at Gibbs. "I gotta find out what's going on," he said to us. "I need to know how to get home." Sarah and I both nodded in agreement. "But I can't do it alone."
Sarah and I exchanged looks, just to make sure we had heard what we thought we did, and I looked at Gibbs to see he was smiling at me. The realization of what he was saying rolled over me. I couldn't help but smile as well, as we prepared to set out.