This may or may not be the last chapter, I am not 100% certain.

ghosts

She sees ghosts.

Ducky talks to dead people, but when Abby talks to them, they talk back.

They don't tell her what happened to them. She already knows. But they help her keep going when the pain seems unendurable.

The bullpen is almost silent when she walks through. Team Gibbs is officially on leave (no one wants to say 'probation'), pending further psych evaluations, and the other teams in the room seem to be in mourning not just for Tony, but for the team which has been torn in pieces by his death.

Not irreparably. She never allows herself to think this could be forever.

She makes her way down to the lab, and they're waiting for her. Kate still comes as a Gothic princess, and it still makes Abby wish she'd tried harder to Goth Kate up while she was alive.

Mike is just himself, leaning in the corner, dragging on a cigarette. She never thought she'd miss the smell of smoke until he died.

Tony hasn't really settled to one outfit. Maybe he never will. He always did like his clothing.

Today he's apparently James Bond, judging by the sharp suit. Abby's only surprised it didn't happen sooner.

"Hey guys."

Kate and Tony look up from discussing something, both of them smiling at her. Mike nods, and gives her a wink.

They keep her sane.

(She knows it's not really sanity. But it's a version of life she can deal with. Just because Team Gibbs is in tiny shards, life at NCIS hasn't stopped. She is still overworked and underpaid, but she does the work and does it well. They'd give her time off if she asked, draft someone else in, but she's not sure what she'd do with herself, how she'd survive without the sense of purpose it gives her. If they had any idea how she's keeping it together, they'd probably force her to take leave, too, which is why she's kept it to herself. Not even Ducky knows.)

She talks about nothing much, and they talk back. It keeps her mind off the fact she's never really going to see them ever again. It stops her from falling back down into the hole that grows deeper every time she loses someone she loves.

Others pop by occasionally, but Kate has always been her confidante. She's almost always around. People assume Abby's talking to herself, but half the time it's her babies she's cajoling into action, and the other half, she's talking to Kate.

Mike appears when she's worried about Gibbs.

Tony... she chokes back a sob and shakes her head. When she looks up, Tony's watching her with sad, apologetic eyes.

Tony should not be here.

Kate shouldn't, either, but Abby's had time to get used to that.

It's never stopped hurting, but she and the pain have a deal. She doesn't press on the bruise and the bruise doesn't make her collapse on the floor and weep.

Losing Tony is not just awful in itself, but has her terribly afraid, because she fears it might be the last snowflake before the avalanche, the domino that topples and falls and takes all the others with it.

She fears losing Tony could also mean losing Tim, Ziva, Gibbs. Losing Kate hurt the team, but it drew them together, made them stronger. They had a common enemy, someone to blame - blood to shed in vengeance.

Losing Tony seems to be breaking them and pushing them apart. They loved and needed him more than anyone knew. Maybe if Tony had been killed in the line, they could have avenged him and moved on, but in a death so senseless, there's no catharsis to be had.

Tim looks superficially okay when she sees him. He's eating well but not too much, hasn't significantly lost or gained weight, seems healthy, at least physically. He gives all the right responses to her questions. He's doing a really great impression of a man who's coping with his grief as best he can, in sane, sensible ways.

If Abby didn't know him so well, maybe she wouldn't spot the tells, but she does, and so when he looks at her and smiles a fake smile that reeks of despair, and she knows he's carrying on by sheer force of will, she feels her heart break a little more. He and Tony may have squabbled, but they were partners, best friends, practically brothers.

The gaping void in his life is painfully obvious.

Ziva eats only fresh vegetables, drinks only water, and spends most of her day, so far as Abby can tell, exercising, training, honing herself back into the killing machine she once was. Except scarier.

There's not an inch of extra flesh on her, her eyes are huge in her gaunt face. There are scars she won't explain on her arms and legs. She looks worse than she did when she returned from Somalia.

She rarely speaks. She never smiles. She's a blank mask.

Gibbs scares her the worst. Usually when Abby goes round there she finds him asleep on the ratty couch in his basement. Sometimes he mumbles in his dreams, and she can never seem to wake him up. The few times he's been awake, his face seems somehow sunken and collapsed, like he's aged decades. He smells, not of sawdust and man like he used to, but musty and stale, and his chin is covered in unkempt scruff she can't bring herself to call a beard.

She leaves meals and picks up dirty dishes, and tries not to worry how little of the food actually gets eaten.

The first time she went (after he roughed up a suspect a bit too hard, and things came to a head, with Vance intervening to make sure they all lost their clearances to work rather than their entire careers), she went around the house and emptied every bottle of scotch, whisky or bourbon she could find down the drain. She's pretty sure he never goes out, and she's yet to figure out whose responsibility it is he somehow still manages to have alcohol in the house whenever she drops by. At first she emptied those bottles, too. Eventually she gave up trying to stay ahead of it.

She's terrified to the point of near paralysis that one of them will crack under the strain, and there will be another funeral. There's a sad logic to how she makes sure to see Gibbs more days than not, even though she's not sure how much good she's doing. She wants him to know she'd be the one to find him, if he ate his gun. She's not sure it will slow his hand, but she has to hope it might.

Talking to her ghosts helps, helps her stay strong, helps her feel sane when the walls are crashing in and she can't hold them up and she's trying not to panic. She's used to being surrounded by strength, and it scares her to realise how much she took it for granted.

She shivers - she's always so cold these days - and hugs herself.

Unfortunately, one thing her ghosts can't do is hug her.

She glances at the clock and wonders how early is too early to call Ducky and say 'hello'. Ducky, who's been a rock for them all, whose continued strength staggers her. He'd give her a hug if she went down there, but her nightmares have come back.

She doesn't sleep much, because when she sleeps, she sees them laid out cold and pale on the metal tables, Gibbs, Ziva, Tim. She would rather stay here with her friends, however insubstantial they are, than go and face the possibilities haunting her dreams.

She talks to ghosts, and they talk back. And she holds on to her sanity by her fingertips.