Chapter 5
With the man following her practically growling, Abby made her way to the elevator, unsure of what to say. She wanted to figure out what had gone wrong, to fix what she had messed up. But this was still Gibbs, still the man she leaned on for strength; the form and essence of the man still calling out to her. Almost out of habit, definitely out of necessity, Abby wanted to turn to him and feel his arms around her, feel him pull her into a hug, to let her know that everything would be all right, that he had the confidence that she would figure out how to fix it. Gibbs had always believed she could figure out anything.
The elevator doors slid open and Abby moved into the steel-walled car, pressing the button for her floor. Shuffling her feet, she kept her eyes trained on the seam of the closed doors, her insecurities overshadowing her voice and natural warm and friendly nature.
“What did I do to piss you off?” Jet asked, watching her body language and growing more concerned. He’d clearly stepped onto some landmine he didn’t know existed. “Are you with the other guy?” he asked and that really bothered him if she was.
“With him? Gibbs? No, I wasn’t his type. But he was special to me.” Looking over in her surprise, she wondered how much of the vulnerability she normally had around Gibbs she could share. Abby knew while around L.J., she would have to constantly remind herself that this wasn’t the same man.
“You didn’t piss me off. I just figured you were angry with me. Especially if my conclusions are right, and I am the one who pulled you from your world. I wanted to apologize.” She was rambling and there was nothing she could do to stop it. “I wanted to tell you that I was sorry, but I didn’t know if you would accept it or if it would just upset you more…” He was looking at her strangely, in a way she couldn’t guess, in a way Gibbs never " okay rarely " ever did.
“Yeah, I’m furious at you,” he admitted. “I don’t belong here.” But it wasn’t as if he really belonged home anyway. Yeah, he had a good relationship with his father and he and Jessica genuinely liked each other, but his company pretty much ran itself and he didn’t have many friends any more. They’d all drifted away when he was working crazy hours building his company. Maybe he didn’t belong anywhere after all, and that wasn’t a good feeling at all.
Furious. God, it hurt so much to hear him say that, with a voice that sounded so much like her Gibbs, who only last night told her he loved her. Hearing the condemnation in his voice made it feel like her heart was being ripped in two. But Abby knew she deserved his anger and so much worse. Who knew what Gibbs was going through right now? And what about the man with her…what life and family did she tear him away from?
Furious. He deserved to say a lot more horrible things to her than just that.
When the elevator came to a stop, Abby said, “I’ll find away to get you home. And when you’re ready for my apology, you just have to say so. No strings.” When the doors opened, she walked through, turning down the hall to head into her lab. She went right to her computer and pulled up her favorite picture of Gibbs, waiting for this younger Gibbs to see.
“Sorry doesn’t get me back home,” he retorted shortly. He stared at the picture on the computer screen. The guy’s hair was almost all silver, face more lined, maybe five years older than him. He stared in silence for a few minutes and then sighed. “Looks like he could be my brother. Older brother.”
Though she tried to hide it, Abby flinched visibly with his comment. A few more taps on her keyboard and she had a slideshow created. Pictures showing the Gibbs she knew: a photo she had taken with him working on his boat, one from her phone of him slapping Tony on the head, a picture Tony had taken, with Gibbs giving her a kiss on the cheek when she’d done a good job, working with the team in the squad room, patting Ducky on the shoulder. She had so many pictures of him. But the pictures just made the ache in her heart throb worse. Would she see ever him again?
“Your twin,” she offered.
“My what? No…he’s older than I am. He looks it anyway. Same eyes, though.” There were differences he could see that went beyond the hair and lines in the other man’s face, there was a deep wariness and sense of loss there.
“Same name and family.” Leaving him to the picture show, Abby started calling up her browser history, piecing together what had happened the night before.
“Different father. His doesn’t know me. Different wife, kids.” He missed his father and Jess a hell of a lot all of a sudden.
“If you… if you want to do a net search to find out what other differences there are, I have another computer if you want to use it.” True, Abby had told McGee that letting someone else handle her personal computer was worse than having a root canal but she didn’t know what else to do for him. Besides Gibbs from another world or no, Abby was having a hard time not trusting him implicitly as she did with the other.
“No, you…look up whatever. I don’t want to…” Know. He didn’t want to know that he’d ceased to exist, here, there and everywhere.
Suddenly defeated, he just stared at the floor.
“Jackson may not know you, but you’re still his son. He still loves you, no matter where you are.” Abby knew she was making things worse and all she wanted to do was hug him. Despite her fear of being rejected by him, she couldn’t fight the urge to comfort him anymore. Putting her hands on his shoulders, she pulled him in for a hug, not caring if he pushed her away. The hug lacked her normal exuberance, the normal passion she put behind that connection, but she knew better than to push too hard. “I’ll get you home to him.”
He shook his head, setting his jaw against the flare of pain. He needed his home, his family. When she hugged him, he stiffened. He was furious at her, he couldn’t just relax into her hug as if she hadn’t shattered his life and screwed up everything. But he found his body relaxing in spite of his best intentions, moving closer.
His reaction surprised her. Truthfully, she wouldn’t have been surprised if she found her butt on the floor in a knee-jerk reaction as he tried to get away from her contact. But when L.J. relaxed and pulled her closer, Abby felt a new sensation run through her body, a tingle that had never occurred when her Gibbs hugged her. Pulling her head back, her arms still wrapped around his upper body, Abby looked at him, her eyes wide in her confusion and vulnerability, in her almost desperate need to comfort and fix what she had done.
He looked into her eyes only a moment, shaking his head but not pushing away, not yet. In fact, his body pressed in tighter, drawn to her warmth and emotion. He coughed once, slightly awkward as he backed away and stared at the floor, trying to figure out why he was drawn to her.
His movement away from her deflated her normally bubbly personality even more. Why does it matter? He wasn’t Gibbs, but he was. And her body was getting her signals all confused. This man hated her, hated her because she’d torn him from his home, his family, his life.
Biting her lip again, she turned back to her computer and started typing, adding criteria to her searches. “I…do you want anything? Coffee? Caf-Pow!? Do you even have Caf-Pow! in your world?” she asked, almost to herself. “There’s another chair you can pull up here.”
“Got something stronger?” he asked, his voice the slightest bit brittle. He walked to the window, looking out at the little glimpse of ground. There had been just be a moment there where he was sure she wanted him, his body tingling slightly, senses on alert.
He shook his head, realizing that was a stupid notion. She was as freaked as he was about this whole damned mess. She’d been the one to create it.
“Can you fix it?” he asked, his voice roughened by his emotion.
Abby heard her breath catch in her throat at the jagged sound of his voice. Though the voice was slightly different, not as gruff or weathered, the sounds were the same as the Gibbs she knew. Only this new edge was sending tremors and tingles through her body.
“Yes. I don’t know how yet, but I can. I’m hoping to just have to recreate what I did last night. And of course, I need to research some more. Don’t want to send you somewhere you really don’t want to be. But I’m not going to stop until I find a way.”
She turned her attention back to her monitor, her fingers quick across the keys, the clicking the only sounds in her lab. She could feel her concentration starting to ebb, turning towards the man looking out the window. Abby couldn’t help as her ears tuned into his movements, his breaths.
“What if you send me someplace else? How do I know you know what the hell you’re doing? Why were you messing with this guy anyway?” He paused a second. “Tell me why.”
This attraction between them was something that pissed him off. He wasn’t looking for it, didn’t want or need yet another complication by a meddling tattooed witch. “Fix it.”
She’d hoped that their brief moment of connection would have given them an impasse. But apparently not, as he seemed to be going after her with renewed fervor. Hearing the badgering coming from Gibbs’ voice was wearing her down, and soon, if he didn’t stop, she’d probably break out in tears or crumple into a heap on the floor from the guilt.
“I don’t know, okay. I just don’t know. I don’t know what I did. I don’t even know how I did it. And I’m trying to fix it. But I was trying to fix something else last night, and look what happened?” She gestured out with her hands, her frustration with herself seeping out.
Suddenly the stress and the guilt became just a little too much of a burden for her to shoulder on her own. “You don’t need to know why. What do you care?” she bit out. “He was hurting. And he’s family. And I was desperate for him to have some happiness in his life. And you don’t know what it was like to see you…him walking around here like a ghost. And…you don’t care, so why do you need to know?”
“It’s my life. You’re damn right I need to know what the hell I walked into. Federal agency, probably everything on fucking videotape. My freedom could be on the line so suck it up and fix this. I don’t want to spend the next twenty in a cell somewhere because your friend was hurting!”
He was so furious at her; he wanted to tear strips off her skin verbally, even though he knew it wasn’t the right thing to do. “Fix it.”
Jumping off her chair, she walked up to him, poking him in the chest. “What do you think I’m doing? What else do you want me to do? What do you want me to say? There’s nothing I can say, nothing I can do to make this all right, other than what I’m trying to do right now. And there’s more than just you at stake. My friend is out there somewhere. Just as lost and alone as you are. Maybe even more so. How do I know that there are people on the other side willing to help him? But I can fix this. I have to.”
Turning from him, she stepped away before bowing her head, her shoulders slumping from the guilt. “Don’t you think I’m beating myself up enough without you assaulting me? I can’t do my job. I can’t figure this out if you’re going to keep going after me like this.”
“Don’t you think the fact that I’m in another world means more than your feelings? You feel bad. Great, you should. You obviously played with something you had no business screwing with and now I’m stuck here, could be forever. So excuse me if I don’t really care that you feel bad when you yanked my world out from under me.”
He was furious and even though her emotions stabbed at him, he wasn’t ready to let up on her. Not yet. Maybe when he calmed down he would. “Witch wannabe,” he growled, staring out at the street, still seeing red.
Abby wanted to say more, to argue, but she knew it wouldn’t do any good. This man, who’d trusted her before, hated her now. His name-calling hurt far worse than his anger. She’d been called names her whole life. And now the one man who had seen beyond her tattoos and clothes, who had seen the real her, was gone. In his place stood someone so similar it hurt, but far enough away to be a pale shadow of the original. Asshole, she signed as she moved away, back to her computer.
Oh, who am I kidding? He’s not a shadow, more like the same painting done in different colors. Turning on her music, she blared it as loudly as she could stand, hoping to drown out the accusations that bled off of the man.
He stalked over to the music and turned it off, wondering if she was provoking him. He didn’t know what the gesture she’d given him meant, but he could assume it was rude. And her nerve pissed him off right now. He was jumpy, nervous, almost borderline panicked, and that wasn’t the way he was normally. The whole situation was foreign to him and it confused and concerned him.
She had to expect that he’d strike out, he reasoned. He wasn’t who they all wanted here. This man"the other him"could even be her lover. They’d had a moment together and maybe the chemistry was similar. The more he thought about it, the more sense it made.
“Just fix it,” he said in the sudden silence, knowing he sounded plaintive and alone. “You can have him back then. Your boyfriend.”
When he shut the music off, the echo of the Gibbs she knew was so strong that Abby couldn’t stop a few tears from escaping down her cheeks. Sniffing, she murmured, “He’s not my boyfriend. He’s just my friend. Someone who cared about me, who protected me when people tried to kill me and who’s now lost with less of an idea of what is going on than you do.”
What if I can’t get him back? What if I screwed everything up so much that he’s stuck there and you’re stuck here? Abby tried to shake off those thoughts, but with her guest’s constant badgering, her confidence was wearing thin.
“You make it sound like where I live is hell. It’s not. I have some great friends. People who will help… him.” He sighed and shook his head, digging his hands through his hair. “Sure you don’t have anything to drink? With a bite? What if I can’t go home?” What if there isn’t a home for me to go back to? he added silently.
“No, I don’t mean it like that. I just… I don’t know what your home is like. And Gibbs is completely capable, a Marine sniper. He can handle himself.” When he asked about something to drink, Abby grimaced. “Well, I have something… it was going to be a present for Gibbs. But since he’s gone and technically you’re him…”
Going into the back room, she came out with a box wrapped in gold paper. Handing it to him, she waited for him to open it. “I’ll get you home, L.J.”
“Don’t want his stuff. Not right.” He handed it back to her, drifting toward the window again and staring out. “Don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. Stepkid is a teenager. Her mom remarried. But maybe I’ll never get to tell her I’m proud.” That pissed him off more than anything else.
Putting the gift down onto the evidence table in case he changed his mind later, she walked over to him. Opting for a less forward approach, she put her hand on his shoulder, squeezing. “You’ll see her again. I’ll find a way.”
“And if you can’t?” he asked quietly. “I’m not your friend. Retinal scans and hand prints and all that won’t work on me. My company doesn’t exist here. All of a sudden I’m here with no safety net, not even my wallet. No home, friends…”
“If I can’t…” Abby hesitated, having a difficult time thinking that she’d fail in this. “If I can’t, we’ll figure something out, if you want my help. I know I screwed this all up. But you’re not alone. For what it’s worth, you have me. I’ve already screwed your life up enough as it is. I won’t abandon you. We’ll figure something out.”
He nodded, not trusting himself to say any more right now.
~*~
Tony left the conference room and walked past the cluster of people in the squad room, jerking his head toward the elevator, hoping and somehow knowing the team would follow. As soon as they were all inside, he pressed the down button and then flicked the emergency stop switch, not sure how to begin, it was all so crazy.
They all followed Tony pretty quickly into the elevator, though none of them wanted to break the stunned silence. Ziva stared straight ahead, the questions bubbling up inside. Finally, Ziva couldn’t take it any more.
“Can someone please explain to me what just happened? And why a Gibbs, younger than our boss, just pulled a gun on me?”
“He isn’t the Gibbs we know,” Tony began, still struggling for words. It didn’t help that McGee and even Ducky were so quiet. “Abby did some sort of…ritual. And this guy thinks he’s Gibbs, he looks like Gibbs, but he calls himself L.J. and doesn’t work here.” Tony didn’t know how to explain it otherwise.
“My word,” Ducky broke in. “Are you saying Abby had something to do with this, that she somehow…switched our Gibbs with another? Why, I’ve heard the stories, but I always believed they were idle fancy and not actual reality. My dear boy…” He trailed off, looking to Timothy. The young man read so much science fiction and fantasy, he surely would know the concept.
“I have…no clue, Ducky,” McGee replied to his unasked question. “What did he say, Tony? When you were alone with him and Abby? Did he sound crazy? Or do you think he really has the life he’s describing?” Sure, Tim read a lot, but the theory of inter-dimensional travel was way out of his league.
“He sounded angry but perfectly reasonable. Upset, but his eyes were sharp. No evidence of drugs. And he looks like Gibbs but not identical. Younger, hair styled differently, face less lined. Not all of that can be changed overnight. You all saw it. Unless Gibbs dyed his hair and had a little work done last night by one hell of a plastic surgeon. I didn’t go over there…but I drove by and he was moving around in the basement about twenty-three hundred.” Tony shrugged.
“Look, he’s down in Abby’s lab. We can quiz him without freaking him out and there are enough of us to observe real strongly. I know it doesn’t make sense but whatever this is, we have to keep it away from Vance. Are ya with me?”
“No, that was not Gibbs. His eyes… they were different. Yes, Tony. We are all with you.” When Tim didn’t answer right away, Ziva elbowed him lightly in the ribs to get his attention.
“Yes, with you, Tony.” Tim let out an “ooof” when Ziva’s elbow came in contact with his ribs. She didn’t hurt him, just surprised him.
“And me as well, of course. We’ll do whatever we must to get to the bottom of this and discover where our Jethro is.” Ducky wanted to say more but he only sighed, nodding.
“Okay, don’t be combative but don’t be afraid to ask questions either,” Tony said. “He’s angry, but I don’t think anything will happen, not like what happened before. Speaking of which, McGee, need you to help Abby erase the tapes unless we can spin it.”
Tim considered Tony’s request and figured he could pull it off. “Yeah, that shouldn’t be a problem. But what about all those people in the squad room who saw our display? Won’t they be asking questions about why Gibbs was attacking Ziva and pulling a gun on us? I think it’d be less suspicious if the tapes are left as they are, no alterations.”
Tony sighed, nodding, “Yeah, we should spin it. Get our story right now. How is this? We were doing reactive drills. Expect the unexpected. So secret that Gibbs didn’t even discuss with Vance. We have to find a way to deal with Vance, too. Don’t want to go back afloat,” Tony muttered.
The thought of Vance finding out was not something Ziva wanted to entertain either. “But how will we keep Vance from running into this new Gibbs? What do we do to ensure that this is not found out?”
“We train this guy the best we can. We give him a crash course in becoming our Gibbs.” It was the only way that made sense and Tony knew it. “What, you guys have a better idea?” Tony snapped as Ducky stared at him.
“No, Tony, It does however presume that he wants to help. What does he have to gain from cooperation?”
“He’s Gibbs,” Tony retorted, though he knew that didn’t exactly tip the scales in their favor.
“Ah, so you think some of Jethro’s spirit remains, even though his body is…well, for lack of a better term, some place else?”
“Don’t know,” Tony admitted. The whole stuation was more bizarre than the craziest movies and he had to figure out a way to deal, to lead this team.
“He really does not have much of a choice,” Ziva explained, bluntly. “Either he helps us cover his arrival and aids us in the search for answers to get him home, or he will be stuck here forever. This is the best possible solution for all parties involved.” Though Tony’s plan wasn’t infallible, he was correct as to its validity. Besides, for all intents and purposes, he was the team leader now. She would stand behind him and support him, though not blindly. It would not be her way, nor would Tony expect that of her.
“I guess…” Tim grumbled, not completely convinced.
“She’s right,” Tony said firmly. The only way this could work is if they interacted with him as Gibbs. “You guys ready for this?”
After making sure that Tim nodded in agreement, Ziva added, “Will you be taking the lead on this, Tony? To convince this Gibbs to go along with our plan?”
“I’m team leader with Gibbs gone, Ziva,” Tony replied. “Yes.” It was his position and what he’d do.
“I know, Tony. But are you willing to take Gibbs on? He may be a different person than the one we know, but he is still Gibbs. And I imagine he will be the same as the other, with his own plans and his own ways of doing things. Even, in fact, his beliefs on how others should do them. I will stand behind you, stand firm with you. We all will.” She looked around for confirmation, getting nods in the affirmative.
“He isn’t Gibbs, Ziva. He’s someone else, nothing to us. And he’ll listen, he has to. We’re the best allies he has here.” Tony appreciated Ziva’s words and nodded. They had to pull this off. It was the only chance they had of discovering what happened to their Gibbs.
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