I know this is kind of unrealistic and nobody would go into water that was so cold you'd pass out and stuff, but otherwise it wouldn't work so let's just pretend, ok?
Disclaimer - not mine.
Tony blinked, staring at the cool lake water lapping against the bank, and pulled the woolen blanket tighter around him. It was cold in the lake, but it wasn't that cold, surely? Not cold enough for Kate to pass out?
He hadn't even noticed. He was swimming ahead of her, while Gibbs shouted directions from the edge, and she had been struggling for breath. She asked him to slow down but he wouldn't, and she said she was cold, and he said 'swim faster'. He wasn't cold. Not really. Not enough to whinge and moan about it like she was.
Well, normally, he would have. But he wanted to look big and strong and manly, so he pretended he couldn't feel the sting of the icy water all around him. And if he could deal with it, she could. She was tough, everyone knew that, and she was competitive. Her complaining was getting on his nerves, so he thought that maybe pretending he wasn't affected by the temperature would make her try to pretend she wasn't either.
Then she had stopped calling him, and he'd turned around to check she wasn't lagging behind and she was just… gone. Disappeared. He'd waited for her to come up for breath, sneak up behind him and laugh at him, maybe hit him for ignoring her or splash water in his face to get back at him for going too fast, but she didn't. He'd looked for the tell-tale ripples on the surface that would tell him she was just about to appear, but the only ripples on the flat lake surface were from his own movements. He'd called her, thinking maybe she might have stopped to look at something, found some new evidence. She didn't break the surface, her hair wet and tangled, and she didn't call back to him. There were no cries of 'I'm coming' or 'slow down' or 'I'm cold'. It was like she'd vanished.
He'd dived under the surface, the icy water surrounding his head, forcing his eyes to stay open against it. He stared through the dark, shadowy lake and finally found Kate a little way back. She looked like she was hovering, and for a moment he thought that perhaps she was looking at some fish or something, but as he got closer he saw she wasn't hovering at all. She wasn't holding herself up, she wasn't treading water or swimming. She was sinking, slowly and heavily, her own body weight dragging herself further from the surface and closer to the bottom of the lake.
She was all pale and ghostly under the water, her hair swirling around her in a cloud; she looked like she didn't even have a head – just a body and a swirl of dark smoke that twirled around her, clearing in the small waves his swimming created and revealing her face . Her lips were purpley-blue, the colour of the bruises Tony ended up with when he pissed her off too often, and her eyes were closed. Her head was lolling backwards, flopping in the movement of the water, and her t-shirt and shorts floated loosely around her skin.
He had hauled her to the surface, coughing and spluttering as his body fought for air. It would have been more sensible to come up and breathe before diving back down and bringing her to the surface, but he wasn't about to leave her any longer. Not like that, not when he wasn't sure he could find her again.
He'd thumped her back desperately, trying to make her breathe, but she didn't. She just lay slumped across his shoulder, unconscious, while he hammered away at her pale spine. He could see the bruises he was leaving already forming on her skin, but he wasn't going to stop.
Bruised was better than dead.
He'd swam back to the edge of the lake, struggling to keep her head above the water while her dead weight kept threatening to slip back into the depths. Once Gibbs had dragged Kate out of his arms and lay her unceremoniously on the grass, McGee had helped him out of the water. Normally he would protest that he didn't need McGee's help to get out of a lake, but his arms and legs were so weak from carrying Kate's weight back as well as his own that he couldn't do anything but nod gratefully and take McGee's hand, letting himself be pulled out of the water.
The ambulances had arrived a few minutes later, with their sirens screaming and their lights flashing blue and red. It made the whole thing seem more real. It made it more obvious that Ducky kneeling over Kate, holding her nose and breathing into her mouth, wasn't enough to make her better, nor was Gibbs shaking her roughly and threatening her with all kinds of punishments if she didn't 'knock it off right now and wake up'.
Tony turned away from the lake and forced himself to look at Kate, surrounded by paramedics. She had blankets tucked round her and people in hospital-branded jackets rubbing her hands and feet to bring back the circulation, and an IV in her right arm while a man with blonde hair in a ponytail gave her CPR.
They don't give IVs to dead people, he told himself, that was a good sign.
But they don't give CPR to people who are breathing, either.
He shivered, and realized he was freezing. So was Kate, though, and her lips were blue and her eyes were closed and her chest wasn't moving. So complaining he was cold seemed kind of wrong, especially when, if he had listened to Kate in the first place and sent her back to land, or slowed down and let her set the pace, or turned back and told Gibbs they couldn't go in without wetsuits, she would be standing beside him right now with a blanket and a cup of coffee while Gibbs said they were namby-pamby hopeless little children who couldn't handle a bit of cold water.
The line between 'alive' and 'dead' would be a lot clearer, if he'd listened. She'd be safely on the 'alive' side, warm and dry and laughing.
She wouldn't be in an ambulance, limp like a little rag doll, with needles dripping glucose into her veins and pumps forcing oxygen into her lungs because her body wasn't doing it itself.
If he would have just listened to her when she said slow down, if he hadn't sped ahead, he could have caught her before she went under. Before she breathed in water not air, and started to drown. Started to die.
He had dreamt about this happening before. Not this particular incident, but this sort of thing. Kate lying dead with stab wounds in her side. Kate lying dead with a bullet through her chest. Kate lying dead with strangulation marks around her throat.
They were horrible, terrifying dreams that made him wake up with tears running down his face. They sent him across town in his car to Kate's place, where he'd wait for hours until she woke up and he could see her silhouette moving in her apartment, just to make sure she was still there.
But they were just dreams. He knew one of them could die one day, most likely one of them would. It was part of the job. He had prepared himself for Kate to be shot, or stabbed, or kidnapped. He had a game-plan for those situations – he knew how he'd deal with it, he knew what he'd do to cope if one day she walked into the elevator and she never came back.
It wouldn't be easy, but he was prepared. He had to be. He was prepared for any one of the team to get killed by a cornered suspect, or a terrorist, or a serial killer.
He wasn't prepared for Kate to drown helping him collect evidence from a lake, because he hadn't listened to her when she said she was cold. He wasn't prepared for it to be his fault. His plan of 'dealing with it' was going to involve him tracking down whoever killed her, accidental or not, and torturing him. For a long, long time. Then killing him. He didn't have a plan for if he killed her himself. Gibbs wouldn't let him kill himself – he needed a team, and McGee wasn't enough. Two new agents would probably drive Gibbs over the edge.
There was coughing and gasping from the ambulance, and Tony dropped his blanket and coffee onto the floor, splashing Gibbs' shoes with hot brown liquid. Normally, he'd duck and stutter an apology and hide out under a rock until Gibbs calmed down or got madder with someone else than he was with Tony. Now, though, he didn't even notice that he'd ruined Gibbs shoes and stained the hems of his trousers. Even if he had noticed, he wouldn't have cared. The only thing he cared about was getting the ten metres to the ambulance quicker than anyone else.
Kate was lying on her side, her head hanging over the edge of the stretcher, throwing up and shaking. He pulled her into his arms and squeezed her tightly, until she struggled and moaned that he was hurting her back.
He carefully put her down again, staring at her with a huge grin on his face, and she frowned at him.
"What?" she snapped.
She was okay, Tony thought. He didn't care that she was mad at him, he didn't care about anything. Just that she was breathing and warm and alive. He had puke in his hair from where he had grabbed her when she was being sick, and he had scratches on his arm from where she had struggled against him. But it didn't matter, because she was going to be alright. Sure, she was bruised all over her back from his efforts in the lake, and her lips were still more blue than pink, and she was going to be throwing up lake water for days. But she wasn't going to die. She would come to work tomorrow or the day after, depending how sympathetic Gibbs was feeling, and she'd elbow him and shout at him like all the other days. The days that, without her getting mad with him or laughing at him or pretending to ignore him, would be completely pointless.
"Why are you staring at me?" Kate asked him, shivering in the breeze.
Tony leaned forward carefully and kissed her lips gently.
"What the hell are you doing?" she yelled, pulling away and glaring at him. "What is wrong with you? Why did you do that?"
"Your lips are blue," he said. "You're cold, I'm trying to warm you up."
One day he'd tell her the truth. He'd tell her what he'd realized, while he wasn't sure if she'd live or die. That he cared more about her than he did about anyone else on the team – anyone else full stop. He would gladly trade in his own life, the rest of the team's – hell, the rest of the world – if it meant Kate's would last one more day.
One day he would tell her that he loved her more than anyone else he'd ever laid eyes on.
Kate stared at him like he had grown another head, and finally blinked, shaking her head slightly.
"Insane," she muttered to herself, as the paramedics checked her over. "Absolutely insane."
But when they were dry and changed back into their trousers and shirts and Ducky made Kate go home, she only got as far as her car before turning back and running over to Tony. She stood on tiptoe with her head tilted back and quickly pressed her lips against his before breaking away and smiling at him.
"I'm still kind of cold," she said coyly, looking at the floor.
Tony dug around in his pockets, finding his keys. He took his door key off the key ring, squeezing her hand as her fingers closed around it.
"You'd better let me in," he grinned. "That's the only key I have."
"I promise," Kate beamed back, making her way over to her car again.