PART ONE
Bad News
When the call came in, Gibbs was on a coffee run.
Kate, Tony and McGee were standing around the plasma screen and discussing their current case - they were about to crack it, and they knew it - when Kate’s phone rang. She ran for her desk. "That must be his CO returning my call," she predicted. It would be the confirmation they needed to give them the search warrant that should net them their evidence and their arrest.
Leaning over her desk, she activated the speaker phone. "Special Agent Todd," she greeted, her voice rich with anticipation.
"Caitlin Todd?" the woman’s voice on the other end asked, and Kate’s shoulders slumped with disappointment - the CO was a man. "This is Janet at Dr. Wheeler’s office."
McGee and Tony could not fail to notice the way Kate’s face went completely pale at those words, and she snatched up the telephone receiver, stretching the cord out almost straight as she moved as far away from them as possible to take her call. She turned her back to them, hunching her shoulders slightly in an obvious demand for privacy. "Yes," she said softly, "this is Caitlin Todd."
Tony and McGee exchanged glances at this unusual behavior. Tony was about to start sneaking forward behind Kate to try and eavesdrop when they saw her shaking hand come up to press against her mouth. "Are… are you sure?" they heard her say, and her voice was no longer rich - it was thin and desperate. "There’s no way it could…?"
There was another moment’s pause, and Kate’s back seemed to fold in on itself, no longer belonging to the strong special agent who worked with them, but somehow becoming a fragile and hopeless thing. "I… I understand," she said softly. "No, I can’t right now. I’m in the middle of something at work and I don’t know when it will be done. I’ll call you back in a couple of days, I guess. Yes. Thank you, Janet." She lowered the receiver from her ear and stood there for a few seconds, staring at it, before consciously forcing herself to straighten her back and her shoulders.
Tony watched with sharp eyes as she walked with deliberate, measured steps around her desk to replace the receiver and then stood there for a moment, staring at it blankly. She was startled out of her reverie when it rang again. She looked at it for a moment as though it might be a snake, and then lifted the receiver with a trembling hand. "Agent Todd," she announced.
She nodded, glancing at Tony and McGee briefly, and then said, "Thank you, Captain Williams. You’ve been a huge help." She hung up the phone and turned to her colleagues. "That was the CO. Get the search warrant." She paused, swallowed hard, and added, "I’ll be… I… Excuse me." She turned and headed for the ladies’ room at a trot, leaving her co-workers staring after her in consternation.
By the time Gibbs returned, Kate was back at her desk, pale and red-eyed but tight-lipped and refusing to answer any questions. She buried herself in files until the search authorization came through, and was the first one in the elevator when Gibbs shouted for McGee to get the car. Tony and McGee shared a glance as they parted, and Tony nodded once. "I’ll talk to Gibbs," he told the probie, hurrying to jump into the elevator before the doors closed.
The ride down in the elevator was silent and slightly tense as Tony watched Kate out of the corner of his eye, trying to figure out what might be wrong with her without being too obvious about it. Aside from her pale complexion, slightly worried expression, and a faint green tinge around her gills, there appeared to be nothing physically wrong with her. He filed her woes in the back of his mind and turned the bulk of his attention to Gibbs, answering his boss’s questions about their case.
They loaded into the car when McGee arrived in the front of the building, and they headed out to question (and hopefully arrest) their suspect. After confronting him with the lie of his false alibi, arresting him and charging him with murder, they returned to the office to fill out paperwork. Kate declined to participate in the usual bullpen banter, a change that Tony knew was noticed even by Gibbs. Over the last couple hours of the workday, he caught their boss giving Kate odd looks several times. Clearly Gibbs wasn’t as oblivious to his team’s moods as most people thought.
When 1700 rolled around, Kate was out of the office as though she’d been shot from a cannon, leaving her coat behind in her haste to be gone. All three men watched her go. As soon as the elevator closed behind her, Gibbs rounded on Tony. "What did you do?"
Tony gaped at Gibbs. "Nothing!" he exclaimed.
"It’s true, Boss," McGee stepped in immediately. "Tony didn’t do anything. She got a phone call from her doctor while you were getting coffee, and she’s been like that ever since."
"Her doctor?" Gibbs repeated. "What doctor?"
McGee and Tony looked at one another. "Uh…" Tony tried to recall.
"Wheeler!" McGee said, snapping his fingers. He accessed Google and looked up the doctor. He blinked. "Dr. Leanne Wheeler is an OB/GYN."
The three men looked at one another. "Well," Gibbs finally said, "I’m sure she’ll tell us when she’s ready." He stood, grabbing his coat. "Go home, you two."
Needing no further encouragement, Tony and McGee grabbed their things and barreled out the door. Gibbs waited until they were gone, then sat back down and pulled up Kate’s personnel file. He jotted down her address, stuck the note in his pocket, and collected Kate’s coat on his way out the door.
Forty-five minutes later, he parked in front of her apartment complex and entered the building, her coat over his arm. He took the elevator up to her floor and found her door with no trouble. He knocked firmly and listened as she shuffled toward the door. When she opened it, he was almost appalled at what he saw.
She was dressed in loose cotton pajama pants and an oversized tee shirt. Her face was scrubbed clean of makeup, her skin pale, her hair pulled back in a messy ponytail, and her eyes were rimmed with bright red where she’d obviously been crying. She blinked up at him. "Gibbs?"
He held out her coat. "Left this at the office."
Her eyes narrowed as she took the garment. "You live in metro, Gibbs. You didn’t drive all the way out to Alexandria just to bring me my coat."
"That’s very true," he agreed. He held up a plastic grocery bag. "I also brought you Chinese."
She blinked, and then stepped back from the door. "Well since you made the trip, you might as well come in."
"Thought you’d never ask." He entered her apartment, moving to set the food out on the table as she shut the door and moved into the kitchen to put up some coffee. He busied himself with the paper cartons and plastic utensils until she came back with plates, a cup of strong coffee and a glass of water, settling herself into a chair and pulling her legs up underneath her.
She smiled wanly at him. "You might as well spit it out," she said softly.
Sitting across from her, he raised an eyebrow. "What’s that?"
"Whatever it is you came here to find out, ask me about it." She studied him. "I am a trained profiler."
He focused instead on dishing the food out onto the plates, handing one to her and keeping one for himself. "Eat something," he said quietly. "You look like hell."
"You sure know how to charm a girl," Kate replied sarcastically before digging into her food.
Gibbs shrugged. "Wasn’t trying to charm you."
She finished the sweet and sour chicken on her plate and he pushed the box of lo mein toward her. She’d barely gotten the first paper flap opened before the smell assaulted her. She swallowed hard, trying to keep her gorge from rising: lo mein was her favorite, and he knew it, and if she declined it, he’d know something was very, very wrong. So she steeled her stomach and popped the box the rest of the way open. But she squeezed the box too hard, and the wet noodles within seemed to rise up inside the container for a moment before her grip relaxed and they settled back down again.
Like they were breathing.
Like they were alive.
She bolted for the bathroom and wasted a quarter of a box of particularly good sweet and sour chicken.
He followed behind her, held her hair back, and brought her a cold washcloth when the retching was done and she was sitting back on the bathroom floor, leaning hard against the wall. He closed the toilet lid, flushed, and sat on the lid, leaning over to wipe her face with the cloth, more gentleness in his hands than she could ever have imagined.
She looked up at him with miserable eyes, tears welling in them again, and he brushed the backs of his fingers against her forehead, pushing an errant tendril of hair back from her face. His voice was even gentler than his touch when he finally spoke again. "How far along are you?"
The tears spilled over, rolling down her face. "Four months," she whispered.
He helped her up, using the cloth to dry her tears, and led her back out to the living room. Once she was settled on the couch, he busied himself putting the uneaten food away in the refrigerator before carrying over her untouched glass of water and setting it on the coffee table. His own newly-refilled coffee mug in hand, he sat down across from her on the edge of her favorite chair. "You were sick four months ago," he said conversationally. "Missed three days of work."
She nodded, looking down at her own knees, which she was clutching like a lifeline. Her face burned.
"Were you on vacation?" he inquired in a deceptively soft voice.
She could hear the underlying dangerous question. Were you off somewhere with some man? Did you go on a long weekend to some cabin in the mountains and get careless? You said you were sick, and I believed you. Did you lie to me? Did you betray my trust in you? "No," she said flatly. "If you don’t believe me, you can check the records at Georgetown. I checked in under my own name."
He nodded. "I believe you." And he did, but he was watching her with investigator’s eyes. He took in her slumped posture, the tense grip on her knees, her rounded shoulders, and most importantly, the eyes that wouldn’t look at him. He thought back to her return to work four months ago, and he remembered how skittish she seemed around them for the first few days, how she tended to edge away from them in the elevator, and how she jumped every time he touched her until she suddenly seemed to get a grip on herself and settle back down. He had dismissed all these signs at the time, focused on catching a serial killer, but his mind was doing the math right now and the sum he was coming up with was not one that he liked.
He clamped down hard on his own emotions before speaking again. The answer to this question was going to determine whether someone lived or died, and she would know it. If what he now suspected was true, she would be extremely vulnerable right now, as well as emotionally unstable. He needed to make sure that he spoke carefully, or this could go very badly… and Gibbs wasn’t famous for being sensitive. He swallowed hard, took a sip of his coffee, and studied the mug in his hands when he spoke again in the gentlest tone Kate had ever heard him use. "Kate… were you raped?"
The air in the apartment grew thick when he asked, and Kate wondered for a moment if she was going to stop breathing. His voice ran wild in her head, that horrible question running around and around, echoing and mocking her in her mind. She couldn’t speak, but the tears that began to run down her face again were answer enough for him.
He approached her cautiously, leaving his mug on the table, unsure if she would allow him to touch her. He knew that many women could not bear even the most casual touch of a man after being raped, and he did not know if she would be able to accept comfort from him. He sat down gingerly on the edge of the couch next to her, laying a gentle hand on her shoulder.
She turned to him almost instinctively and he took a deep breath of relief that she was still able to trust him. He wrapped his arms around her as he had done once before in the bathroom on Air Force One, and held her close as she cried into his shirt, murmuring soothing nonsense into the top of her head. Once her storm of tears had passed, she sat up again and swiped at her face with her hands. "Sorry," she mumbled.
He reached out and put one finger under her chin, gently bringing her face up to his. "Do not apologize to me," he said softly but firmly. "Not for this. You have nothing to apologize for. Do you understand me? You. Have. Done. Nothing. Wrong."
She gave him a watery smile. "I know," she told him. "I meant for getting your shirt all wet."
He shook his head, pulling her into another hug. "Don’t apologize for that, either," he admonished her. "I’m not that much of a bastard." He was rewarded with a wet giggle, and he smiled as he rested his chin on the top of her head, one hand rubbing her back soothingly. "Decided what you’re going to do yet?"
"Not really," she said. "I’ve suspected for a couple of months, but I only just found out for sure today. I haven’t really thought about it yet." She paused. "I can’t have an abortion."
"I know."
"It’s a mortal sin."
"I know."
She put her head in her hands. "I don’t know what to do."
He took a deep breath. "Kate," he began, but she cut him off.
"No, Gibbs," she said softly, "I don’t know who he was."
He looked down at her. "How’d you know I was going to ask you that?"
"I haven’t worked with you for three years for nothing," she replied, looking up at him with a weak grin for having anticipated him. "I know how you think now."
He grinned back, hugging her tightly. "Guess so." Without letting her go, he fished in his pocket and pulled out his cell phone, dialing a number from memory.
Kate heard Abby’s voice answer. "Hey, Gibbs, what’s up?"
"I need you to come over to Kate’s apartment," he instructed her. "How soon can you be here?"
"As soon as I get my boots back on," she replied. "What’s going on?"
"Pack an overnight bag. I’ll explain when you get here," he answered, then hung up.
Kate looked up at him. "You didn’t need to -"
"I know," he interrupted her. "And yes, I do." He touched her nose gently with a finger. "Let me handle this my way, all right?"
She studied him. She knew what he was asking. Let me take care of this for you. Let me make up for my failure to protect you. I wasn’t there when you needed me; I couldn’t prevent this. Allow me the honor and privilege of seeking your vengeance. She nodded. "All right," she said softly.
Abby arrived fifteen minutes later, and Gibbs met her in the hallway. "She wants me to let her tell you what happened," he explained. "I need you to stay with her tonight."
"I’ve seen that look on your face before, Gibbs," Abby said softly.
He looked down at her, saw the fear in her eyes, and nodded once. "Yeah," he said hoarsely. "You have."
"Oh, no." Abby swallowed hard. "Just tonight? God, we haven’t even been out of work four hours."
"Four months ago," Gibbs replied.
Abby gasped. "Why didn’t she tell us?"
He laughed without humor. "She didn’t say. And I didn’t ask." He didn’t need to: he knew. Female law enforcement agents rarely reported sexual assault to their colleagues. Most of them, if questioned, would say that they were afraid the knowledge would make them look weak in the eyes of their fellows. He didn’t tell this to Abby; Kate might be able to articulate her own feelings to the forensics expert. He simply squeezed Abby’s shoulder. "Take care of her," he whispered and kissed her cheek before vanishing down the hall and into the elevator.
Abby squared her shoulders and entered Kate’s apartment.
Author's Chapter Notes:
When Kate is assaulted, she is forced to turn to her NCIS family for support, protection and vengeance.