Pain Versus Agony by Rainne
Title: Pain Versus Agony
Characters: Gibbs, Kate, Tony
Prompt: 049 Alive
Word Count: 2082
Rating: Child
Summary: AU from the last fifteen minutes of ‘Twilight.’
Author's Notes: Angst, character death, hurt/comfort
---
For a time, pain is all she knows. It fills her body, shoulders its way into her mind, and overflows from her facial orifices. For a very, very long time, she exists in a white-hot world made of pure agony. And during that time, all she wants to do is scream and scream and scream.
There is a long period of time in which she is unaware. There is no pain, there is no lack of pain, there is simply nothing. During that time, if she were capable of rational thought, she would wonder if she were dead. She does not wonder. There is nothing to wonder about. She knows nothing. She is nothing. She’s not even sure that she is, at all.
There comes a time when awareness begins to seep back in. The first thing she knows is pain, but not the searing, blazing agony that is the last thing she remembers. This is more of a dull ache all over her body, manageable and clearly the result of some pretty heavy medication. She can’t open her eyes yet, but she can hear people talking. Some of them seem to be talking to her and others about her. She hears men speaking of surgery, of blood loss and brain damage due to oxygen deprivation; she hears other men who beg her to wake up, to return to them. She wants to tell them that she is trying; for some reason, she cannot. She sleeps.
She wakes - fully this time - when the pain seems to coalesce into a flaming ball somewhere in her midsection. She comes awake whimpering, and the man who was sitting across the room is at her side in an instant, doing something with a button that, after a few moments, makes the pain recede. He strokes her hair back from her face and smiles down at her with haunted eyes and a two-day stubble. “Hey,” he says softly. “Guess I don’t need to ask how you feel, huh?”
“Tony?” she says - or tries to say. She realizes suddenly that her mouth and throat are blocked, stuffed full of a plastic tube. She whimpers around it, one hand coming up to grab clumsily at her neck.
“Hold on,” Tony says. “I’ll get the nurse.” He vanishes from view and is back almost immediately, bringing not one but two nurses. One of them encourages her to cough while the other carefully pulls the tube out of her. She wants to throw up. She settles for coughing up some unnamed fluids into the towel they hold for her.
There are questions. What is her name, what is the year, who is the President, all questions designed to verify whether or not she is still in her right mind. She passes with flying colors, and she can tell by the relief on the faces of the nurses, who go away finally with promises that her doctor will be in to see her soon.
Her throat is raw from the violation of plastic, but she whispers his name again anyway, desperate for the smile that crosses his face when he knows that she knows him. “What happened?” she croaks.
“You’ve been shot,” he explains, and her world suddenly makes sense again. Shot. All right. This, she can handle. This is something she’s been trained to handle. Being shot is something she can deal with. She is an NCIS Special Agent, after all.
He holds her hand while he makes a call from the bedside telephone - no cell phones allowed in hospitals. She can hear a feminine voice on the other end of the line and reaches out for the phone with a hand that is heavy as lead and uncooperative as a wooden prosthesis. He bypasses her hand and puts the handset to her head instead, letting her croak into the mouthpiece. “Hey, Abby,” she says, and winces away from the half-scream of relief that her best friend gives up.
“Thank God, Kate!” Abby says when she is capable of making sense. “We’ve been so worried! I’m gonna go tell Ducky right now; we’ll be up to see you as soon as we can. The new director is a total bitch and made us start coming back to work even though you weren’t awake yet. I’m so glad you’re awake!”
Tony takes the phone back and makes some appropriately soothing noises into it; he hangs up a moment later and smiles down at her again. “You’ve missed a lot in the past two weeks,” he tells her, and she is shocked and appalled.
“Two weeks?” she whispers. “I’ve been… two weeks?”
Tony nods. “We’ve been pretty worried,” he tells her, and the shadows both under and in his eyes let her know that this is probably the understatement of the year. “We got a new director. Morrow went to Homeland Security the day after you got shot, and the new one, her name’s Shepard, she… well, you know how it is when a new boss comes in. They always have to throw their weight around and let you know what they will and won’t put up with. And we’re taking a lot of extra flack because just between you and me, there’s something there between her and Gibbs. And whatever it is, it’s not good. She made us all come back to work, so we’ve been kinda taking shifts here, because we knew you’d be awake soon and we wanted to, you know, warn you.”
She smiles slightly at his monologue, and wonders what he isn’t telling her. “Where’s Gibbs?” she asks.
“I’m not sure,” he confesses. “He went for coffee about four hours ago and I haven’t seen him since. He left his cell phone here, too, or I’d have called him. He’s been pretty messed up since you’ve been here. Blames himself.”
There’s another question on her mind. “Who shot me?”
Tony’s lips tighten, and the voice that answers her question is not his, and comes from the doorway. “It was Ari,” Gibbs says as he steps into the room. “He was aiming for your head but you moved at the last second and he missed.”
The air seems to go out of the room when he says the words. She is supposed to be dead, is what he did not say. The phenomenal amount of luck involved in her not currently occupying a grave is incalculable, is what he did not say.
Tony squeezes her hand. “I’m gonna go home,” he says quietly. “I need a shower and shave, and I need to get behind my desk before she comes looking for me.”
“Go,” Gibbs says quietly, moving to take the place that Tony is vacating, standing at her side, holding her hand. “If she asks, tell her. If she doesn’t, don’t volunteer.”
“Gotcha,” Tony says quietly. He squeezes her hand again, and then he is gone.
She looks up into the eyes of the man who, over the last two years, has somehow become a combination of father, brother, lover and God for her, and she sees in those eyes the desperate worry, the debilitating fear, that he has lived with for the past two weeks, wondering whether she was going to come out of it and, if she did, whether she was going to be the same person she was. Whatever the doctors told him scared him badly, and he doesn’t want to admit it, but she can see it.
She squeezes his hand as Tony squeezed hers. “Hey, Gibbs,” she says quietly, “what’s with the gloomy gus?”
He laughs slightly. “We’ve been worried, Kate,” he admits, and she feels her world tilt slightly, because Jethro Gibbs never admits things like that.
“Did you get him?” she asks softly.
“Yes,” he says simply. That is all that needs to be said. Kate will not have to look over her shoulder once she gets out of the hospital; there would be nothing to see. The man who held her hostage twice, the man who put a bullet through her midsection while attempting to put a bullet through her head, is dead.
She shudders softly, gripping Gibbs’s hand. “Good,” she says. It’s as easy as that. But there’s more, and she can see it in his face. “What?” she asks him softly, tugging at his hand. “What didn’t Tony tell me? What aren’t you telling me?”
“Don’t worry about it, Kate,” he says softly. “It’ll wait.”
“No,” she says, and winces as she struggles to sit up. He pushes her down easily, one hand on her shoulder, and puts the remote into her hand that adjusts her bed. She pushes the button that raises her into a sitting position and she stares into his eyes. “Tell me.”
He sighs, pulls a chair over, and sits down next to her. “He got McGee,” he admits. “While we were on the roof, about the time you took that bullet in the vest. McGee came out from under cover and Ari sniped him. He was trying to take out all four of us. None of us realized what he was doing until he shot you, and when you went down, DiNozzo and I went down with you, so he took off. But he got McGee.”
Kate breathes deeply, tries to fight the tears for McGee, and fails. Poor McGee, who had wanted so badly to be a field agent. Poor young Tim McGee, who would have been better off if he’d stayed behind a computer. Poor Tim. Unbidden, the image of his pathetically eager face fills her mind, and she feels the hot tears roll down her cheeks. Gibbs awkwardly hugs her, and when she asks to be taken to the funeral, informs her quietly that she’s missed it. She was in a coma at the time. He was buried with full honors, and posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His family was very proud. His parents wept, his little sister was stoically furious. When she asks to be taken to his grave, Gibbs promises to drive her there himself as soon as she is up to the trip.
The doctor comes, examines her, pronounces her the picture of health aside from the wounds in her abdomen. He asks Gibbs to step outside so that he can examine her incision; Gibbs squeezes Kate’s hand once and complies, shutting the door quietly behind him.
The doctor is a very nice woman, slightly older than Kate, with a thin face and warm hands. She pulls Kate’s gown up and examines the wound with clinical eyes. “You’re healing well,” she says when she is finished. “No signs of infection. I want to keep you under observation for a few more days and make sure you don’t have any lingering aftereffects from the coma, but I don’t see any reason why you can’t be out of here by the weekend.”
“There’s bad news, isn’t there?” Kate asks quietly. She did not look at the wound while the doctor was examining it; that way lies madness. But she knows where the wound is. And she knows what that probably means.
The doctor regretfully confirms. “The bullet went through cleanly,” she explains gently. “Fortunately for you, it didn’t hit your spine or your pelvic bone.”
“What did I lose?” Kate asks calmly.
“Two weeks of time, a couple feet of small intestine, an ovary, and your uterus.”
The words fall heavily despite the gentle sympathy with which they are spoken. “The whole thing?” she asks just to clarify.
“I’m sorry. Yes.”
Kate nods, and her face feels like granite. “Thank you, Doctor.”
The doctor, who knows a dismissal when she hears one, retreats with grace. Gibbs returns. Kate looks up at him. “Did they tell you?”
He nods. “I’m sorry, Kate,” he says softly, and her world tilts a little more. More words she never expected to hear from Gibbs. He sits down beside her again, clearly unsure what else to say.
She relaxes against the hospital bed, looking out the window at the sunshine. “At least I’m alive,” she says, trying the words on for size. They are cold comfort. She is alive. McGee is not. Neither is the tiny secret she had been carrying beneath her heart. Her eyes drop down to meet his, and she sees in his that he knew.
“I’m sorry,” he says again, and she thinks that she has never heard this voice from him before. He knew.
She swallows hard.
--end--
Characters: Gibbs, Kate, Tony
Prompt: 049 Alive
Word Count: 2082
Rating: Child
Summary: AU from the last fifteen minutes of ‘Twilight.’
Author's Notes: Angst, character death, hurt/comfort
---
For a time, pain is all she knows. It fills her body, shoulders its way into her mind, and overflows from her facial orifices. For a very, very long time, she exists in a white-hot world made of pure agony. And during that time, all she wants to do is scream and scream and scream.
There is a long period of time in which she is unaware. There is no pain, there is no lack of pain, there is simply nothing. During that time, if she were capable of rational thought, she would wonder if she were dead. She does not wonder. There is nothing to wonder about. She knows nothing. She is nothing. She’s not even sure that she is, at all.
There comes a time when awareness begins to seep back in. The first thing she knows is pain, but not the searing, blazing agony that is the last thing she remembers. This is more of a dull ache all over her body, manageable and clearly the result of some pretty heavy medication. She can’t open her eyes yet, but she can hear people talking. Some of them seem to be talking to her and others about her. She hears men speaking of surgery, of blood loss and brain damage due to oxygen deprivation; she hears other men who beg her to wake up, to return to them. She wants to tell them that she is trying; for some reason, she cannot. She sleeps.
She wakes - fully this time - when the pain seems to coalesce into a flaming ball somewhere in her midsection. She comes awake whimpering, and the man who was sitting across the room is at her side in an instant, doing something with a button that, after a few moments, makes the pain recede. He strokes her hair back from her face and smiles down at her with haunted eyes and a two-day stubble. “Hey,” he says softly. “Guess I don’t need to ask how you feel, huh?”
“Tony?” she says - or tries to say. She realizes suddenly that her mouth and throat are blocked, stuffed full of a plastic tube. She whimpers around it, one hand coming up to grab clumsily at her neck.
“Hold on,” Tony says. “I’ll get the nurse.” He vanishes from view and is back almost immediately, bringing not one but two nurses. One of them encourages her to cough while the other carefully pulls the tube out of her. She wants to throw up. She settles for coughing up some unnamed fluids into the towel they hold for her.
There are questions. What is her name, what is the year, who is the President, all questions designed to verify whether or not she is still in her right mind. She passes with flying colors, and she can tell by the relief on the faces of the nurses, who go away finally with promises that her doctor will be in to see her soon.
Her throat is raw from the violation of plastic, but she whispers his name again anyway, desperate for the smile that crosses his face when he knows that she knows him. “What happened?” she croaks.
“You’ve been shot,” he explains, and her world suddenly makes sense again. Shot. All right. This, she can handle. This is something she’s been trained to handle. Being shot is something she can deal with. She is an NCIS Special Agent, after all.
He holds her hand while he makes a call from the bedside telephone - no cell phones allowed in hospitals. She can hear a feminine voice on the other end of the line and reaches out for the phone with a hand that is heavy as lead and uncooperative as a wooden prosthesis. He bypasses her hand and puts the handset to her head instead, letting her croak into the mouthpiece. “Hey, Abby,” she says, and winces away from the half-scream of relief that her best friend gives up.
“Thank God, Kate!” Abby says when she is capable of making sense. “We’ve been so worried! I’m gonna go tell Ducky right now; we’ll be up to see you as soon as we can. The new director is a total bitch and made us start coming back to work even though you weren’t awake yet. I’m so glad you’re awake!”
Tony takes the phone back and makes some appropriately soothing noises into it; he hangs up a moment later and smiles down at her again. “You’ve missed a lot in the past two weeks,” he tells her, and she is shocked and appalled.
“Two weeks?” she whispers. “I’ve been… two weeks?”
Tony nods. “We’ve been pretty worried,” he tells her, and the shadows both under and in his eyes let her know that this is probably the understatement of the year. “We got a new director. Morrow went to Homeland Security the day after you got shot, and the new one, her name’s Shepard, she… well, you know how it is when a new boss comes in. They always have to throw their weight around and let you know what they will and won’t put up with. And we’re taking a lot of extra flack because just between you and me, there’s something there between her and Gibbs. And whatever it is, it’s not good. She made us all come back to work, so we’ve been kinda taking shifts here, because we knew you’d be awake soon and we wanted to, you know, warn you.”
She smiles slightly at his monologue, and wonders what he isn’t telling her. “Where’s Gibbs?” she asks.
“I’m not sure,” he confesses. “He went for coffee about four hours ago and I haven’t seen him since. He left his cell phone here, too, or I’d have called him. He’s been pretty messed up since you’ve been here. Blames himself.”
There’s another question on her mind. “Who shot me?”
Tony’s lips tighten, and the voice that answers her question is not his, and comes from the doorway. “It was Ari,” Gibbs says as he steps into the room. “He was aiming for your head but you moved at the last second and he missed.”
The air seems to go out of the room when he says the words. She is supposed to be dead, is what he did not say. The phenomenal amount of luck involved in her not currently occupying a grave is incalculable, is what he did not say.
Tony squeezes her hand. “I’m gonna go home,” he says quietly. “I need a shower and shave, and I need to get behind my desk before she comes looking for me.”
“Go,” Gibbs says quietly, moving to take the place that Tony is vacating, standing at her side, holding her hand. “If she asks, tell her. If she doesn’t, don’t volunteer.”
“Gotcha,” Tony says quietly. He squeezes her hand again, and then he is gone.
She looks up into the eyes of the man who, over the last two years, has somehow become a combination of father, brother, lover and God for her, and she sees in those eyes the desperate worry, the debilitating fear, that he has lived with for the past two weeks, wondering whether she was going to come out of it and, if she did, whether she was going to be the same person she was. Whatever the doctors told him scared him badly, and he doesn’t want to admit it, but she can see it.
She squeezes his hand as Tony squeezed hers. “Hey, Gibbs,” she says quietly, “what’s with the gloomy gus?”
He laughs slightly. “We’ve been worried, Kate,” he admits, and she feels her world tilt slightly, because Jethro Gibbs never admits things like that.
“Did you get him?” she asks softly.
“Yes,” he says simply. That is all that needs to be said. Kate will not have to look over her shoulder once she gets out of the hospital; there would be nothing to see. The man who held her hostage twice, the man who put a bullet through her midsection while attempting to put a bullet through her head, is dead.
She shudders softly, gripping Gibbs’s hand. “Good,” she says. It’s as easy as that. But there’s more, and she can see it in his face. “What?” she asks him softly, tugging at his hand. “What didn’t Tony tell me? What aren’t you telling me?”
“Don’t worry about it, Kate,” he says softly. “It’ll wait.”
“No,” she says, and winces as she struggles to sit up. He pushes her down easily, one hand on her shoulder, and puts the remote into her hand that adjusts her bed. She pushes the button that raises her into a sitting position and she stares into his eyes. “Tell me.”
He sighs, pulls a chair over, and sits down next to her. “He got McGee,” he admits. “While we were on the roof, about the time you took that bullet in the vest. McGee came out from under cover and Ari sniped him. He was trying to take out all four of us. None of us realized what he was doing until he shot you, and when you went down, DiNozzo and I went down with you, so he took off. But he got McGee.”
Kate breathes deeply, tries to fight the tears for McGee, and fails. Poor McGee, who had wanted so badly to be a field agent. Poor young Tim McGee, who would have been better off if he’d stayed behind a computer. Poor Tim. Unbidden, the image of his pathetically eager face fills her mind, and she feels the hot tears roll down her cheeks. Gibbs awkwardly hugs her, and when she asks to be taken to the funeral, informs her quietly that she’s missed it. She was in a coma at the time. He was buried with full honors, and posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His family was very proud. His parents wept, his little sister was stoically furious. When she asks to be taken to his grave, Gibbs promises to drive her there himself as soon as she is up to the trip.
The doctor comes, examines her, pronounces her the picture of health aside from the wounds in her abdomen. He asks Gibbs to step outside so that he can examine her incision; Gibbs squeezes Kate’s hand once and complies, shutting the door quietly behind him.
The doctor is a very nice woman, slightly older than Kate, with a thin face and warm hands. She pulls Kate’s gown up and examines the wound with clinical eyes. “You’re healing well,” she says when she is finished. “No signs of infection. I want to keep you under observation for a few more days and make sure you don’t have any lingering aftereffects from the coma, but I don’t see any reason why you can’t be out of here by the weekend.”
“There’s bad news, isn’t there?” Kate asks quietly. She did not look at the wound while the doctor was examining it; that way lies madness. But she knows where the wound is. And she knows what that probably means.
The doctor regretfully confirms. “The bullet went through cleanly,” she explains gently. “Fortunately for you, it didn’t hit your spine or your pelvic bone.”
“What did I lose?” Kate asks calmly.
“Two weeks of time, a couple feet of small intestine, an ovary, and your uterus.”
The words fall heavily despite the gentle sympathy with which they are spoken. “The whole thing?” she asks just to clarify.
“I’m sorry. Yes.”
Kate nods, and her face feels like granite. “Thank you, Doctor.”
The doctor, who knows a dismissal when she hears one, retreats with grace. Gibbs returns. Kate looks up at him. “Did they tell you?”
He nods. “I’m sorry, Kate,” he says softly, and her world tilts a little more. More words she never expected to hear from Gibbs. He sits down beside her again, clearly unsure what else to say.
She relaxes against the hospital bed, looking out the window at the sunshine. “At least I’m alive,” she says, trying the words on for size. They are cold comfort. She is alive. McGee is not. Neither is the tiny secret she had been carrying beneath her heart. Her eyes drop down to meet his, and she sees in his that he knew.
“I’m sorry,” he says again, and she thinks that she has never heard this voice from him before. He knew.
She swallows hard.
--end--