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ARCHIVING: Only with the permission of the author.
Call Waiting
By ncruuk
"It won't work Gibbs, I know you've come to bring me coffee...." Abby didn't need to look up from her screen to know that someone had entered her labs, nor to know who it was. There was only one person who could sneek up on her like that.
"No Abs, I've not..." The disembodied sound of Gibbs' voice coming over the speaker phone made Abby jump, for three reasons, and none of them had to do with the caffeine tablet she'd eaten earlier when the demand for the test results shifted from being needed 'yesterday' to being needed 'before the sucker shot her'.
"You didn't hang up?" asked Abby, forgetting for the moment about what had caused her discovery to instead taunt her boss over the phone.
"You didn't disconnect," countered Gibbs, reasonably, his voice echoing around the nearly deserted lab.
"It's a speaker phone console...it has an automatic shut off, unlike your cell..." began Abby, returning her focus to the screen, willing the results to complete those few seconds quicker, before suddenly exclaiming, "...you wanted to know I was ok?"
"No Abby...just when the results were done..."
"You care Gibbs..."
"Abs...." Before Gibbs could get any further, the computer made an interesting noise, that sounded a lot like Kermit the Frog.
"I reprogrammed the system alerts..." Abby could hear the perplexed frown Gibbs was now wearing, "...the pings and beeps it makes when it's done?"
"And?"
"And now it goes...wait, oh..." Grinning, Abby refocused her attention, scanning the screen, "...yeah, he did it....scumbag!"
"Abby..."
"Sorry Gibbs, yes, Petty Officer Conti's DNA is a match."
"Get some sleep Abs."
"Gibbs?" Greeted by silence, Abby studied the speakerphone, before declaring, "...he hung up on me!"
"Probably best you disconnect anyway," observed a woman's voice from behind Abby, prompting the lab genius to spin around, her pig tails flying, only to be met with an apparently empty lab.
"Kate?"
"You haven't disconnected yet," commented Agent Kate Todd, this time from a different direction, prompting Abby to spin around again, although this time she did manage to hit the 'off' button on the speaker console as she spun.
"You bring me coffee?" asked Abby, wondering why the former Secret Service Agent was coming down to the labs only to play hide and seek.
"No."
"Oh?" Abby was once more facing her computer, but no longer looking at it - test results were never as fascinating as the brunette standing in front of her.
"Gibbs sent me home."
"You're not going with him to find Conti?"
"He took Di Nozzo."
"And you're not mad?" Abby canted her head to one side as she considered how calm Kate seemed about this fact...it should make her at least a little bit mad.
"He hit Tony three times in five minutes."
"So you're heading out?"
"No, we're heading out."
"We?" Even as she questioned, Abby was shutting down her lab - there was something about the way Kate said it, the way she walked as she came around the table that reminded Abby what her lover's first career had been - this was the Kate the free spirited Abby didn't want to argue with.
"He wants you to sleep...you've been awake for three days," explained Kate, stuffing the end of the roll of caffeine tablets in her pocket, determined not to let Abby get at them.
"So have you."
"Which is why we're getting out early."
"Why not Tony?"
"He had a nap on Tuesday." The completely deadpan delivery brought an even bigger grin to Abby's face as she spotted the flaw in Kate's reasoning.
"You had a nap yesterday," she identified proudly, turning out the lights and following Kate towards the exit, beginning to recognise her wakefulness was purely a chemical response to adrenaline and caffeine.
"True...but Gibbs caught Tony, not me."
"Ah..." Satisfied, Abby followed Kate into the elevator, almost missing her lover's next comment,
"That, and Gibbs knows you sleep better in my bed."
"What happened?" asked Abby, intrigued. Whilst they hadn't discussed telling their Boss about their relationship, they hadn't discussed not telling him either.
"He blinked."
"No one said anything?"
"No..."
"Wow..."
"Yeah...why'd you think he hit Tony so many times?"
The End