Chapter Seven – Undertaker

Abby slammed the door behind her as soon as she was out on the front step. Although still seething inside, she was already beginning to feel a little stupid about how suddenly she'd torn out of the house, and the frankly childish way she'd thrown her last words in Gibbs' face. As she paused in front of the house, wondering where to go from there, she heard the door creak open again behind her, and turned to find Gibbs striding out to meet her, a harassed expression on his face. "Abby," he began.

He didn't get any farther. From somewhere behind her, in the direction of the street, there came the crack of a gunshot. The next moment, blood was spurting from somewhere, soaking the white cuffs of Abby's sweater with red. Beside her, Gibbs grunted harshly, and then crumpled to the ground with a bleeding hole in his chest. Abby screamed.

Her scream was interrupted by four more gunshots in rapid succession, not from the street, but from the house. Panic blurred her vision, and as she tried to regain control of her focus, a desperate, menacing silence came over the scene. Gibbs was still on the pavement, gushing blood. Ziva was at his side, pressing something that looked like a piece of her shirt against the angry-looking gunshot wound. Tony, still in the doorway, was speaking frantically into his cell phone.

Mike Franks, gun in hand, walked slowly forward towards the bodies of four men, all of whom were lying prone in the street, their weapons at their feet, where they'd clattered to the ground after Franks had shot them. As Abby watched, frozen, Franks stepped around their bodies, and carefully put a bullet into each man's brain. Then, gathering up their guns, he walked back to Gibb's sickeningly still body.

"He's breathing," said Ziva, her shirt still wadded up against his wound. "Tony, the-!"

"The ambulance is on its way." Tony ran down to kneel beside Gibbs, resting one hand against a forearm that Gibbs had apparently thrown out to protect himself before he'd lost consciousness. "Hang in there, boss. Paramedics are coming. You're gonna be all right." He sounded like he was trying to convince himself, more so than the unresponsive Gibbs, who seemed to be lost, for the moment, to any of their encouraging remarks.

Abby stood still and quiet, staring down at the fallen form of her recent lover. She felt Tony and Ziva's eyes on her, knew that everyone was watching, waiting for her to say or do something, but she didn't move. It wasn't the blood. She was used to blood, and not just blood, but gore, guts, disembowelment, and every other kind of nasty, disturbing thing that could happen to a person. She'd seen crime scenes that would make the world's greatest detective writers want to blow chunks. She was staring at the red mark on Gibbs' chest only because it was his chest, because the blood had belonged to him, and the hands that had run through her hair and over her body the night before also belonged to him. In the back of her mind, she knew that he would have been shot the moment he left the house, whether or not she'd been there, but she was there. She was there, and for all her protestations of being a woman who could handle herself, she hadn't been able to do anything about this. She wasn't trained for this kind of assignment, and it had taken a bullet wound in the man who'd spent the last two days trying to tell her that to finally convince her.

"Abby." Tony was by her side, reaching for her arm. "Hey, Abby."

She looked up at him, and something in her face made him back up quickly.

It wasn't much longer before the ambulance arrived.

***

Doctor Donald Mallard rushed the through the doors of the hospital waiting room, looking around until he identified Mike Franks, seated alone in a chair by the far wall. As Ducky hurried over to him, Franks looked up.

"How is he?" asked Ducky.

Franks shook his head. "Not so good, not so bad. Got a punctured lung and a lot of lost blood, they're takin' him into surgery right now. Nobody's talkin', I don't know much. That nurse keeps givin' me the evil eye." He gestured over at a desk, behind which a severe looking woman was running an eye over a file that another waiting room occupant had just handed her. "Guess she can tell I'm not gonna wait out here much longer. They keep tryin' to keep me in the dark, I'm gonna go in there and see him for myself. Wanna figure out what they're doing to him in there."

Ducky patted Franks arm with one hand, before taking the vacant seat next to him. "Yes, well," he murmured, "let's not do anything foolish that might interrupt the surgical procedure. I sympathize with your desire to be privy to the recovery process, but I assure you, these people know what they're doing. Where's your daughter?"

Franks grunted. "Leyla and Amira are back at the house, Ziva and DiNozzo are watchin' them. I came here in the ambulance with my boy, I figure I got enough of those suckers to send them a message. They won't be messing with me and mine any time real soon."

"And…where is Abby?" Ducky took a quick look around the waiting room. "She didn't come with you?"

"No, she didn't," said Franks, shaking his head. "That girl looked like hell, she wasn't in any condition…told her to go home. Didn't want her to be here to see..." he swallowed, working on getting the words out. "Didn't want her to be here if things go bad."

"Yes." Ducky thought about all the things that could, as Franks so eloquently put it "go bad." Losing Gibbs had always been a very real possibility, something that Ducky had been dealing with long before he and Gibbs had even encountered the rest of the team for the first time. Waiting for a diagnosis of the living was not similar, he reflected, to waiting for a diagnosis of the dead. Operations on living patients held considerably higher stakes and for all of his medical training and his time in the field, Ducky would never get used to the possibility of a loss that could be prevented. All of his patients, by the time they reached him, were already gone. He could only hope that Gibbs wasn't.

"It's something of a war," he murmured, more to himself than to Franks. "A different kind of a war than the one you and Jethro are used to fighting. It's fighting a war against death, a war against yourself and the desire to let go. Perhaps that's why I have always felt so deeply akin to the men who fight for us overseas. As a medical man, I understand the nature of warfare."

"Yeah?" Franks wasn't really listening. Instead, he was keeping an eye on the door that led to the emergency rooms into which Gibbs had been taken.

"Do you know," continued Ducky, now lost on his own train of thought, "what the ancient Spartan women used to say to their warriors, when they sent them off to battle in foreign fields? They told them, 'come back with your shield, or on it.' Something of an odd send-off, but perhaps one that would appeal to warriors and fighters such as yourself. They were never to surrender, never to let down their defenses, even in the face of torture and death.

"So you're sayin' Probie's gonna suffer for letting down his shield for that girl," growled Franks.

Ducky eyed him severely, but not unsympathetically. "It's not her fault, you know," he said.

"Yeah." Franks sighed, leaned back, frustrated and fidgety, crossing and then uncrossing his legs in the uncomfortable chair. "Yeah, I know."

***

Abby was alone. She'd thrown her bloodstained sweater and skirt behind the dresser, where she wouldn't be able to see or retrieve them without help.

Sitting on the edge of her coffin in a dark bedroom, she put her arms around herself, closed her eyes, and rocked back and forth, trying not to cry. As she rocked, she sang shakily,

"Hush little baby, don't say a word. Daddy's gonna buy you a mockingbird…"

Author's Note: Someday, this story arc will end, and I will go back to focusing on my real world job. That day is not today. I am starting to think that this is going to be a very long series indeed...I hope your patience hasn't given out on you, and that you're still reading and enjoying! Stay tuned for the next fic in this series, coming soon!