Title: The Far End of the Line

Summary: Even when it's only one of them hurt, they all try to take care of each other.

Warnings: Whumpage. Essentially a teamfic, but you can read with whatever ship goggles you prefer. Nods to past McAbby and other incidents of early canon which I may have gotten wrong.

Disclaimer: I don't own them. I make no profit.

(This is for Mooncombo, for giving the kick in the pants that I needed.)

Part One of Two:

The phone rings slowly, enough space for her to take a breath between each shrill rattle. She lets it continue, knows there's no voicemail connected to her lab line, knows that each ring means the person on the other end hasn't hung up yet, hasn't given up.

Gibbs enters the lab, picks up the phone mid-ring, sighs an answer, and lets it fall back on the cradle. He comes to stand next to her, and she studies his hands. They're empty, and his hands are never empty when he visits her.

"Nothing today Abs," he says, when he sees her looking. His fingers flex once, twice, like he wishes he was holding something too. "C'mon, let's get your coat."

It's June outside, but she lets him help her into a coat left over from March, and in the elevator she winds a scarf around her neck that Tony brought home from Paris.

When they step out into morning sun and heavy humidity, she shivers.

Gibbs turns the air-conditioning to full blast as he drives, and she'll pretend that it's the cold that has made his hands so pale on the steering wheel, his knuckles so very bone-white. She watches him try to speak three times, tendon and cartilage bunching in his throat, but each time his mouth tightens down before speech escapes. The drive is short, and she can't tell if it's because he sped or because she wanted it to last forever.

They enter the sliding doors side by side and Gibbs paces the maze of linoleum with calm knowledge of direction. Tony's got his back to the door as they come in. His cell phone is pinned between his shoulder and his head, one finger plugs his ear against the minimal background noise, and one hand absently holds a cup of coffee. He gestures without care for the hot liquid sloshing inside, his shoulders a tense line in a crumpled dress shirt. His feet won't stand still.

Ziva leans on a wall across from him, arms folded, dark eyes tracking his restless movements. When Gibbs and Abby enter, her gaze slides past Tony to them and something like relief shifts across her face.

Tony catches the look, spins around, huffs a sigh at the sight of them. "Finally," he says, flipping his phone shut and hugging Abby hard, with his hands still full. She feels the momentary press of hot cardboard at her back, and it warms her.

"Any news?" Gibbs asks, in his efficient way, and Ziva shakes her head.

"Too soon," Tony adds as he releases Abby, and furtively checks the clock on the wall like he hopes he's mistaken.

"Did they say how long?" Gibbs prompts patiently.

"Only that it would be a while," Ziva says, frustration brimming on her face.

"They just swooped in, and—" Tony gestures vaguely. His arms, like Ziva's, are bare to the elbow, jackets discarded, sleeves rolled back, the skin from fingertips to the crook of the arm still faintly pink from vigorous scrubbing. When Ziva embraces Abby in turn, Abby smells the same disinfectant she uses on her lab tables.

"Find me someone to talk to," Gibbs orders, and Tony turns on his heel and marches off with purpose. Ziva stays next to Abby, hugging her around the waist with one arm like it's supposed to keep her standing. They watch as across the lobby Tony leans on the intake desk, trying for his usual charm and undermining his own efforts with the tense lines of his body, and the urgent edge in his voice. Finally someone flags down a blur in a white coat, long enough for Gibbs to join them.

It's a brief interview. Gibbs returns with the frown born of uncooperative witnesses.

Ziva squeezes Abby a little closer, and for a moment Abby lets herself sag against the other woman, reassured by the strength in Ziva's arm, the way she isn't afraid to look Gibbs and his frustration head on. He returns her gaze, boat-builder's eyes noting how they list to one side.

"Don't stand on my account," he says shortly, and settles in one of the yellow plastic chairs against the wall like he's planning on occupying it for a while.

"You don't need to get back?" Ziva asks, maneuvering Abby into the chair next to him.

"You planning on leaving any time soon?" Gibbs asks pointedly.

"I don't—" Ziva starts.

"No," Tony finishes, reappearing only to fling himself down into the chair next to Abby, and looking stubbornly over at his boss.

"Okay then," Gibbs says, and stretches his legs out as best he can with a coffee table in the way. Ziva looks at them warily, then takes the seat next to Tony.

"But if there's anything we can do from here boss…" Tony offers.

"Sure is," Gibbs says. He stands and disappears down the hall, returning a few minutes later with a stack of files Abby vaguely recognizes from his back seat.

Tony frowns. "I meant—"

"I know," Gibbs interrupts him.

"I'd really rather—"

"Four outstanding reports, DiNozzo," Gibbs says, overriding the rest of his protests by dropping the papers on the table in front of them with an emphatic smack. "No time like the present." He halves the pile and pushes a smaller stack further down in Ziva's direction. "David, you have three and yet another mandatory review on excessive force." Gibbs produces a handful of pens from his pocket, scatters them on the table and sits back down. Ziva picks up her stack and stretches her feet out on the table, busily uncapping a pen. Tony favors Gibbs with a heavily injured look, but angrily gathers up his just the same. He sighs and shifts like he's got detention on a spring afternoon, but he also stops looking at the clock every minute.

Gibbs finds Abby's hand, sweaty and cold, and squeezes it. "You should try to get some rest," he whispers in her ear. She appreciates that he only says try, acknowledging the overwhelming impossibility of that task. The clock on the wall is so slow she has time to take two deep breaths between every second, but she rests her head on Gibbs' shoulder just the same and tries.

It's meditation of sort, concentrating on making her body still like stone, only allowing her eyes to jerk and pause with the second hand, like that will force the minutes to pass faster. Gibbs' phone buzzes in his far pocket, and she hears the inaudible creak of fibers as he removes it, feels the tremor of his jaw moving when he answers. She closes her eyes against the clock and takes comfort in the faint British cadence on the far end of the line. Tony and Ziva's pens scratch across pages in counterbalance to each other, one moving unwillingly the other flowing in smooth script. Abby can tell Ziva's doing the excessive force review with her usual rote answers, and that Tony's struggling with a way to describe last Tuesday's debacle in a way that doesn't make him sound completely inept.

Gibbs bids Ducky goodbye, promising a full update when he has one.

Abby squeezes her eyes more tightly shut, until stars burst on the insides of her lids, and tries to disappear into the rhythms of her surroundings. The lobby's soundtrack is no different than any crime scene she's worked, elements isolating themselves in turn to paint a larger picture. The nurses at the desk direct people coming and going. There's the squeak and squeal of metal wheels. Somewhere a door swings opens and shut, releasing a snatch of Spanish in heated tones, which makes Ziva laugh shortly to herself, and Tony as well, after a delayed second of comprehension. The audio-pointillism begins to blur and fade after a while. She hears Tim's voice, raspy and tired and amused, like they're lying pressed together in her coffin, and she catches a fragment of Kate's laugh over the intercom, and that's when she knows she's dreaming.

She wakes up on Tony's shoulder. The clock's hands are at a different angle, but it somehow doesn't translate to a time. There are no shadows cast here. The sun could have risen and set a dozen times and she wouldn't know better.

She straightens up, pressing the heel of her hand into her spider web, working fingers into the knot of muscle beneath the ink. Gibbs is nowhere in sight, and Ziva's taken his seat. There's a neat pile of folders on the table in front of them, a handful of pens lined up precisely on top. Hospital corners, Abby thinks but doesn't say it.

"When?" she asks instead, and finds her throat dry and the question hoarse. "Soon?"

"Dunno," Tony answers, and checks his phone and the clock on the wall in a succession of movements now smoothed with repetition. "They said it would be a long time."

"No news is good," Ziva says reassuringly on her other side. "It just means that everything's going as expected."

"Nothing's going as expected," Abby says stubbornly, and tilts to lean against Ziva, who effortlessly shifts to accommodate the burden. Ziva is methodically reading a fashion magazine, a thick one with lots of ads and fold out photo spreads, which probably cost a small fortune in the overpriced gift shop. She turns each page with precision and studies each image with dutiful concentration, reading the names of new nail polish colors in margin ads, committing to memory the five essential tips for hair color preservation.

Abby's nerves hum with enough astonishment over falling asleep in the first place that she knows she can't hope to pull the same trick twice. She reads slantwise from Ziva's shoulder instead, concentrating on putting symmetrical kinks in her neck. Tony sits next to them, jiggling his foot and losing game after game of brick-breaker on his phone.

They're on page eighty-four and game thirty-five respectively when the bubble of silence that has grown around them is broken.

"Are you here for Timothy McGee?" a nurse asks. She's standing in front of them, but she's also flipping through a chart in her hand, and checking her pager and it takes them a moment to realize the question is addressed to them. "That's you guys right, for Mr. McGee?"

"Agent McGee," Tony corrects quickly, standing up so fast he almost overbalances. "I mean, uh, yeah. That's us."

"Everything's progressing as it should," she says blandly, still not looking at them. "It'll probably be at least another three hours." She retreats before they have time to question her further. Tony takes a step as if to follow, forgetting the coffee table in the way. His shins make a hollow sound when they collide with it. A few pens slide off the paper stack.

"Who put that there?" he grumbles looking down in annoyance, and falls back into his seat so hard that the plastic chair rattles. "What does progressing even mean?"

"You should let Gibbs know," Ziva says in lieu of an answer, and turns another page. "He wanted an update when we had one. And I think Abby could use something to eat." Abby shakes her head, cheek sliding on Ziva's shoulder, but Ziva ignores the small protest. "And go outside to use the phone this time," Ziva instructs her partner. "The nurses keep you giving you dirty looks."

"Can I freshen your drink while I'm up?" Tony asks sarcastically, stretching his back, and tossing his phone from hand to hand.

"Something to drink would be nice," Ziva replies absently, seemingly captivated by a feature on equestrian detailing.

"I'll see what I can do," Tony promises with a roll of his eyes. His footsteps aren't quiet like Gibbs' are. His shoes squeak angrily on the linoleum when he walks away.

Ziva's absorbed in a photo of a model perched carefully on a hay bale, spotless from her heeled boots to her navy blazer, her hair the color of palest straw and lit golden by the sun through the barn door. Ziva leans her head for a moment on top of Abby's, dark strands of their hair mingling, mahogany and inky black.

"Sometimes women are better at sitting still, no?" she asks in a murmur.

"Sometimes," Abby says, and folds her hands firmly in her lap.

Tony's gone for forty-five minutes and by the time he comes back they've made it all the way to the classified ads for model pageants and the fine print about where the clothes actually come from. His arms are laden with junk food and he drops to his knees just as he loses his grip on everything, scattering chip bags and soda cans across the small table. Abby drags the pile of completed paperwork out of the way just in time, and snags a bottle of water that tries to make a break for it.

"So I checked out the cafeteria," Tony reports, surveying his bounty and spreading it out a little for their perusal, "but it was just too gross. Looked like they were trying to pass off rejected donor organs as beef stroganoff. Decided we'd have to go the vending route, so I tracked down the widest variety this fine institution can offer." He stands a soda can upright, and looks at them sideways. "Was there any, um, news?"

"We've heard nothing," Ziva tells him.

Tony nods briefly, then jerks his head at the mass of hydrogenated oil and empty starches. "Dig in."

Ziva fiddles with a bag of chips. "It is past time to eat."

"Is it?" Abby echoes faintly.

Tony sags back on his heels. "No one's hungry huh?"

"Are you?" Ziva asks him.

He shakes his head. "God no." He climbs wearily to his feet, then reaches down as an afterthought to snag a packet of cookies and a bottle of water. He puts them gently in Abby's lap, and her fingers curl around the objects automatically to stop them from falling. "Eat something Abs," Tony urges. "Otherwise you're just going to be starving later and the only thing around will be McGee's dinner tray. And you know he feels he can't eat pudding unless he's sick or injured." Tony takes the water and twists off the top for her, plastic crunching and snapping loudly in his large hands. "Don't cheat McGee out of his pudding by making hungry eyes at it, that's all I'm saying."

Abby drinks half the water, eats three vile cookies that taste like sand and cherry cough syrup, and Tony doesn't protest when she throws the rest away. The remainder of the food sits untouched through another long hour. Ziva finishes her magazine, closing it reluctantly and skimming her fingers over the perfume ad on the back cover with something resembling reverence, then goes to track down more reading material. She returns bearing an equally weighty tome with an equally underweight actress on the cover, and three coffees. Tony accepts his with a hollow smile, and Abby with the shocked realization of just how cold she feels. Drinking without thought she scalds her mouth on a boiling first sip, but it makes her sit straighter in her hard plastic chair.

After another hour Abby tears herself away long enough to use the bathroom. Ziva points her in the right direction, and Abby slips carefully through the white halls. She feels wraithlike and fragile, and no one really meets her eyes. The lights in the bathroom are so bright she has to squint. It's all white tile and cleanser fumes and momentarily disoriented she finds herself in the path of someone exiting a stall. The woman has swollen eyes and handfuls of mascara streaked toilet paper, and in spite of herself Abby flinches, all of a sudden totally and unreasonably terrified, craving a mask or a hazmat suit, even though she knows logically that the things this woman carries are not contagious. Tragedy cannot be transmitted through touch, she tells herself, even as she pulls her hands back into her coat sleeves.

Shame rushes through her instantly, but even worse is the complete and utter understanding Abby sees in the stranger's tear-filled eyes. The woman carefully skirts around her, and Abby ducks into the nearest stall, latching the door and leaning against it. Her hands shake and shake, and when she washes up afterwards she splatters water all over the sink and her coat.

Back out in the hallway she can feel people giving her a wide berth in her black, and normally that's a cause for amusement but today she's only grateful. She hides her trembling hands in her pockets and lingers at the lobby entrance, concealing herself behind a pillar. Tony and Ziva are talking in low tones, and Abby watches his head make the familiar cant and angle as he checks the time, Ziva's eyes following his movements as usual. His face is lined and old and hers is carved from stone, and Abby's hands shake and shake and stutter to a stop.

Abby comes around the corner, and Tony looks up and smiles at her, all shiny teeth and crinkly eyes, face youthful and hopeful and only a little tired around the mouth. "Take a load off Abs," he says, patting the seat she's left empty. "My shoulder's getting jealous of Ziva's."

She complies.