Chapter Six
After thirty minutes of listening to Abby tell her story to Tony, Gibbs decided that it was high time she headed back to the lab so that the others could contact her with any news and so that she was there should any more evidence need processing.
Abby protested when Gibbs told her to head back to NCIS HQ, but she knew that Gibbs needed to be there for Tony - alone, if necessary to protect him, to be there for him and to help him when he recovered. No negative thoughts for this forensic scientist.
“You’ll call me if anything changes? I mean, if he blinks or shows signs of coming back to us or anything, you’ll call?” Abby demanded, giving Gibbs a trademarked look of her own.
“I promise I will, Abby. Now, scoot.”
Abby reached over and hugged Gibbs. It was an awkward position with her standing and Gibbs sitting in the chair by Tony’s bed, but she managed to pull it off. “He’ll be okay, Gibbs. I can feel it,” she told him, softly. Gibbs reached up to put his hand on top of Abby’s and gave it a little squeeze, though saying nothing, Abby knew what he meant.
With a backward glance to Tony and a smile and a wave to Gibbs, Abby left the Tony’s ICU room with nothing but hope and fear in her heart.
~*~
Ziva and McGee started out at Tony’s apartment and then separated to retrace two of the possible routes the Tony would have taken on his run. They planned to keep in contact via their cells and so far neither one of them had found anything that resembled a crime scene.
It was McGee who found the alleyway that Tony had been attacked in, he taped off the area, before calling Ziva on her cell and letting her know that he had found it. She was with him in minutes, having run the whole way there.
“How do you know this is where Tony was attacked?” Ziva asked, slightly breathless from her run.
“There’s some fabric that looks like it was ripped and it matches the design and colour of Tony’s sweatpants, plus it looks like there was a struggle here recently. The bins have been up turned and there’s trash everywhere,” McGee explained.
Ziva raised an eyebrow. “I though it was Gibbs who always went by his gut.”
“Come on, we have a scene to process,” McGee told her, he could be wrong, this might not be the place, but something - a feeling he couldn’t quite place - told him that it was.
They gathered as much evidence as they could, including samples of what they guessed was semen and blood, which they knew Abby could match to the previous samples to tell them if they’d been in the right place.
Once they were sure they had everything, they made their way back to Tony’s apartment where they’d left the car and headed back to NCIS HQ.
When they got there, they headed straight to Abby’s lab to give her the evidence for processing. “How did he look?” McGee asked when he saw Abby was back in the lab, her computers still running the DNA search.
“Pretty bad, but Gibbs is with him and I know that Tony won’t disobey a direct order and die on him,” Abby replied.
“We found the crime scene, according to McGee’s gut that is,” Ziva said, taking in the news about Tony.
“Without Gibbs, McGee’s gut is the best we have right now. I’ll process all this and give you the results in a few hours, so leave me to do my thing and…oh…”
“What is it, Abby?” Ziva asked, looking at the screen Abby was now staring up.
“The DNA search is done; whoever attacked Tony isn’t in the system anywhere, no match. All I can do now is tell you if the blood matches him or Tony and if the semen is his. Without a suspect I can’t do anything more, but if you bring me someone I can tell you if they match the sample we have.” ’Dammit, Tony, why did you have to shower?’
“You do realise that Gibbs will kill us all if we tell him we have no leads on Tony’s attacker,” McGee said, sounding nervous.
“We will have to wait until Tony wakes up,” Ziva said, sounding confident. “When he does, he can give us a description of his attacker and we can start looking for him that way.
None of them had the bad taste to say “If”.
~*~
It have been twelve hours since Gibbs had found Tony lying unconscious in his bed, having taken an overdose and the doctors said that it had been six hours before that when Tony took his overdose. Eighteen hours and still Tony showed no signs of recovering from the ordeal.
Gibbs drank his third cup of coffee - this one from the hospital’s supply - that hour, still holding Tony’s hand and still watching him for any changes in his facial expression that may indicate he was close to waking up and so far there had been nothing. What he wouldn’t give to see those green eyes looking back at him when he met Tony’s face.
“I think I’m going to have to add another rule, Dinozzo, as well as getting rid of one. Just for you though, no more hospital visits. You seem to be the most unluckiest guy I’ve met - concussions, gun shots, being held hostage, opening an envelope containing plague, of all things - the amount of things that have happened for you to end up in hospital. And the rule, I’m throwing out? That would be rule twelve…” Gibbs hesitated. Was this really the best time to be doing this? He threw his thoughts out the metaphorical window and lean down to kiss Tony’s forehead. “I love you, Dinozzo, and I’ll be here when you decide to wake up, I promise.”
Gibbs sighed, part of him knew that not even that would elicit a response from the unconscious Tony, but another part of him had hoped that it would. He got up from the chair that had been placed at Tony’s side and made his way to the make shift cot. He needed to sleep, if only for a few hours and although he was scared that if he let go of Tony’s hand they would lose him, his gut told him that being only a few feet away was good enough. Close enough so that if Tony did wake up he’d see him and far enough away that if something happened the doctors could work on him without Gibbs being in the way.
He was asleep the moment his head hit the pillow and was out for a good two hours before the alarms monitoring Tony’s condition started to sound and woke him from his slumber.
Dr. Foster and a nurse were first into the room. “What’s going on?” he asked them.
“Keep back, Gibbs and let us work,” the nurse said, kindness is her eyes. Gibbs stood back by the cot, allowing them unrestricted access to Tony. He knew the doctor would explain everything when Tony’s life was no longer in danger.
He watched as Tony’s heart beat slowed and then came to a stop, another nurse and doctor appeared out of nowhere and one of the nurses started doing CPR on Tony, while the other took him off the ventilator and started to manual bag him.
Orders were called out for drugs, which were then pushed into Tony’s IV, he watched in horror as it all seemed to come apart in front of him. Tony was no longer breathing, his heart had stopped and it looked like the drugs were winning in the internal battle Tony was fighting.
After five minutes, the long drone of Tony’s heart monitor turned into an infrequent beep. “We’ve got him back, set the pacemaker up, capture and bring it up to a good sixty beats,” the doctor told the nurse. She carried out his orders and soon Tony was in a similar state to what he had been before the crisis had started.
Gibbs looked at Dr. Foster, who had joined him in the corner of Tony’s room. “That was a close one,” he said.
“Too close for my liking,” Gibbs admitted. “What happened?”
“His heart stopped and the pacemaker was unable to keep it beating. We have him back now and the pacemaker seems to be doing his job, but there are a few things you need to understand.”
“Like what?”
“There’s a chance that he’ll need a permanent pacemaker to keep his heart rate at an acceptable level, we’ll be able to determine that at a later stage during Tony’s recovery. The other problem is that his kidneys are showing signs of failing. I’ve arranged for them to start dialysis within the next few hours. Normally, we would move the patient to the dialysis clinic, but Tony is nowhere near stable enough for that so we’ll arrange for them to bring the dialysis unit to him. We’ll insert a tube into his neck to start the dialysis through. We’d normally do this when the patient is sedated because of the pain, but with Tony we don’t need to worry about that. He’ll have a two hour session today to clear his body of the toxins his kidneys are unable to deal with and then a longer session tomorrow once we’re sure his body can tolerate the dialysis. The plus part of this is that it will remove the Vicodin from his blood, meaning we should be able to see any permanent damage it has done without allowing it to do anymore.”
“So, then he’ll wake up?” Gibbs asked, trying not to sound too hopeful.
“To be totally honest with you, Gibbs, I don’t know. Part of the coma is caused by the Vicodin in his system, but the rest could be down to damage the Vicodin has done to his system. We won’t know for sure until he regains consciousness. This could happen tomorrow, the day after or it could be weeks or it could never happen. We just don’t know.”
“Thank you.” Dr. Foster left, leaving Gibbs alone with Tony once more - the nurses and other doctor having gone while Gibbs was talking. He couldn’t think about how badly Tony would have to pay for his mistake and he once again found himself wondering why Tony hadn’t called him for help. Was he really that unapproachable?
Author's Chapter Notes:
Who will catch DiNozzo when he falls?