(no subject)
A series of Lila vignettes. They don't really fit in to any timeline, so consider them stand-alone pieces, if you'll allow. I think the tense is a bit funny in the last one, so any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Things, as it turned out, were never easy. It wasn’t easy to say “No, you cannot have any soft drink” to a three year old. The obvious reason being that said three year old was less than likely to be impressed with being turned down, even for someone as sweet-tempered as Lila. The less obvious reason, and the one that troubled Abby greatly, was that it just felt hypocritical, because quite frankly, she wanted soft drink too. Caf!Pows had to be consumed at work.
It also wasn’t easy to say “Please don’t swing on the banister, Lila!” to a four year old because, heck, it did look like a lot of fun. Gibbs had never believed her when she’d told him rather innocently that it was Lila who’d made the crack in one of the wooden bars. That was ok though, because she never would have said so if she thought he was in any way likely to believe her.
----------------------------------------------
Abby was standing in the kitchen, questioning the ethical legitimacy of teaching Lila how to hide nasty food on her plate. Lila had just started using cutlery for herself the week before, small knives and forks with almost toy-like blunt blades and prongs. Deciding that the girl at least needed to be shown how to sneak peas into her mashed potato, a lengthy and well-planned series of lessons was planned. Abby put the cutlery out and Gibbs distributed the plates. He sat at the head of the table, and the girls sat next to each other on his side. Eventually, after about thirty minutes of them completely ignoring him, bent low over their food, heads conspiratorially close together, forks moving around in suspiciously deliberate movements, Gibbs cottoned on to what they were doing.
Later that night, after Lila had been put to bed, he brought it up.
“It’s a worthy skill!” she protested, but he only stared at her amusedly before dragging her to him by the belt of her pants.
The next night saw them standing in Ducky’s front yard for Tony’s birthday dinner, Gibbs explaining patiently that Lila could not play with her food when she was a guest at somebody’s house.
“You didn’t mind shoving pizza down your throat at work today!” Abby said without thinking. She was still learning what was ok to say in front of Lila, adjusting to the fact that she was supposed to be helping Gibbs, not siding with her daughter. Sometimes she wondered when the world had split in half; the world of children and the world of adults. Gibbs sighed and stared down at Lila, who was all wide eyed and in awe. Her hair, which was a lightish brown, was in low pigtails, the ends falling just below her shoulder blades. She’d wanted them like her mum’s.
“A whole pizza, daddy?”
“No, Lil. Not a whole pizza.”
She tugged on the material of his pants below his knee, her way of indicating that she hadn’t quite heard what he’d said.
Abby picked Lila up and hoisted her onto her hip.
“No, Lila. Not a whole pizza” he repeated, louder this time.
Abby smirked at him. “It wasn’t even yours!”
Lila poked her dad on the shoulder, enjoying being held up high in the air. “Dad, stealing is bad.”
“It was DiNozzo’s!” he said defensively.
“Oh.” Lila twitched her nose to the left and bit her bottom lip. Her gaze shifted, as it usually did when she was coming to a decision. “That’s ok.”
Abby scoffed. “And you say I teach her bad habits! Pretty soon she’s going to start smacking Tony on the back of the head!”
That night Lila hid her peas in her mashed potato, and Abby winked at her. Gibbs just rolled his eyes. She ate one pea to please her father.
--------------------------------------------
Gibbs walked slowly to his front door, Lila in tow. She had insisted on carrying his coffee, and after getting her sincerest assurances that she would not drink any, he wrapped a napkin around the tall Styrofoam cup and gave it to her. She looked at it as if it was a prized possession and took extra care getting out of the car. Walking slowly, she followed her father up the front path, but the sun was quickly fading and she was so focused on the drink that she wasn’t paying attention to the ground beneath her. She tripped over one of the cracks in the misshapen red bricks. Flinging her arms out in front of her, she fell to the ground, the coffee forgotten. It may not have been that far down, but it still hurt.
Hearing her squeak, Gibbs jogged back down the path and crouched down beside her. He stood her upright and gently reached for her wrists, bringing them up in front of him. She turned her hands over and together they inspected her scraped palms. She looked at them intently, curiously and he could see Abby in her so vibrantly. She looked up at him.
“Doesn’t hurt.” She said defiantly.
He raised an eyebrow at her.
“Well, does a bit.”
He gently brushed a few tiny rocks that had stuck to her sticky fingers off, and blew softly on the skin to clear the dirt away from the scrapes. She never wanted to admit she was in pain, something he supposed she got from the fact that her mum was tough as nails and her dad was a Marine.
“You alright Lil?”
She nodded, smiling, but then her gaze caught something and the smile fell from her face. She stepped back, and would have tripped over again if he hadn’t grabbed her shoulder to steady her. She wouldn’t look at him.
“What, Lila?”
She didn’t respond and still avoided his gaze.
He held his left hand up, palm up and fingers extended and placed the tip of his right index finger on the tip of his left, trailing it along the ends of each digit until he reached his little finger. He always signed slowly and deliberately with her, to teach her.
She sniffled. “Spilt your coffee.”
She looked like she was about to cry.
“Doesn’t matter.”
She buried her face in his shoulder. “You love coffee.”
“Not as much as you.” He wrapped his arm around her back and lifted her up effortlessly.
--------------------------------------------
“Gibbs, we have a serious problem.”
Abby entered the squad-room from the rear elevator, Lila bouncing along behind her crazily.
He looked away from the plasma, and McGee quickly minimized a grizzly image of Staff-Sergeant Jensen, whose death they were currently investigating. He sent his agent a nod of appreciation.
“What?”
He looked down at Lila, and although she was no longer jumping like a kangaroo, she was rocking back and forwards on the heels of her feet. He raised an eyebrow at her and she ran to him, throwing her arms around his leg, hugging his shin tightly.
“What’s wrong with her?” DiNozzo questioned from beside the filing cabinet. Usually Lila was calm, or as calm as one could be with Abby Sciuto as a mother.
Gibbs and Abby both glared at him. “Nothing’s wrong with her.”
Tony raised his hands in peace.
“We have to talk. Now. Lila, why don’t you hang out with McGee for a minute? Guys, we’ll only be a sec.”
Lila then flung herself onto McGee’s leg, who nearly tripped over from the shock before hesitantly picking her up.
Abby grabbed Gibbs’ arm and tugged him around to the alcove behind the stairs to MTAC.
“What happened?”
“She found one.” Abby said nervously.
“Found one what?”
“One…you know!”
He looked at her, perplexed. “No, I really don’t.”
“One…one, I don’t even want to say it around her.”
Realization dawned on him. “Abby, why the hell do you even have them here?”
“Hello? I have to keep them here. I can’t have them at home.”
“What?” He rubbed his forehead. “We were supposed to have this conversation with her when she was fifteen, not five!”
It was Abby’s turn to look perplexed, before she had her own moment of understanding. “Gibbs, no you idiot! Not condoms, Caf!Pows! She’s hooked!”
The situation took on a whole new level of seriousness.
“How?” he asked softly, dangerously.
“I asked her to get me a white container from a fridge in the lab. The one near my sliding door, there’s nothing dangerous in there.” The last part hastily added because of the look on his face.
A crash sounded from the squad-room, and loud short bursts of Hebrew could be heard. Gibbs and Abby stopped and listened for crying, but after a few seconds heard girlish laughter.
“Wasn’t evidence or anything, but I forgot that my spare one was in there. I guess she just couldn’t resist.”
With a lab tech for a mother, Lila had learnt from an early age not to put unknown substances into her mouth.
“The straw just must have been too much. If it hadn’t had a straw, she never would have touched it. Now she wants to go to the shop. Gibbs, trust me, I’ve been down this path. There is no escape. All these years, we’ve kept caffeine out of her system, and now she’s going to be crazy for the rest of her life. I’ve doomed her.”
She leant back against the wall, defeated.
“It’ll be alright.”
Another crash could be heard, and this time, Tony said some words that got him a smack on the back of the head.
----------------------------------
This last one here is a little more adult. Not adult adult, it just has a slightly darker subject matter. I mean, I'd show my nana and not blush, but I'm still getting to know some of you folks so I thought it better to be safe than sorry.
Lila had had her first day of school. She’d had a blast, and had begged to come to the Yard to tell Tony, Ziva, McGee and Ducky about it. Sitting on Tony’s lap, she’d detailed how she’d made friends with a girl called Tessa, who was blind in her left eye. She’d told the team, leaving them stupefied, that the two of them had decided to help each other. Lila would be Tessa’s eyes, and Tessa would be Lila’s ears. Abby didn’t think she’d ever felt more motherly, she was so happy. Lila could hear perfectly with her right ear, but the left was practically no help, hence her learning both speech and sigh language. Abby’s parents had told her stories about how they were teased as kids, so she was glad that Lila had made a friend.
Everything had been fine, until dinner. It’d been later than normal (a scheduled dinner time, now that had taken her some time to get used to) because Lila had been too excited to eat and Gibbs had been stuck in a conference call with Gitmo. They’d been about halfway through, with Lila excitedly rounding off her school story with a detailed description of packing one’s bag for home-time, when she’d gone quiet. She often did that when she was thinking something over. Eventually, she’d turned to her mum, and asked her why she dressed differently to all the other mum’s she’d seen that day.
It was true that Abby still dressed differently. She’d long ago abandoned heavy, pointy dog collars and bracelets, because she never quite knew when Lila would need hugging or picking up, but her jewelry and clothing were still eclectic and usually black, white or red. She’d told Lila that she felt comfortable in clothes that other people didn’t necessarily feel comfortable in. When Lila had asked what clothes she herself should wear, clothes like ‘yours mummy’ or clothes like the mums at school, Abby had told her that she should wear whatever she wanted. Lila had turned back to her meal and stared down at her plate in deep thought.
***
After chucking the dishes in the dishwasher and eventually getting Lila to bed, she’d taken to the shower. She stood there, letting the steaming hot water pound against her skin so hard it almost hurt. Her hair, black and shiny from the spray, was parted in the middle and was pressed flat against her back and shoulders coming to a stop just above the ink of her cross. The glass paneled door slid open and Gibbs leant against the frame, in jeans and a black Marines t-shirt. He crossed his arms and looked at her.
“You alright?”
Abby smiled and nodded, but she knew it didn’t quite reach her eyes. She reached absently for her neck, scratching at the spider-web there. Gibbs reached out, hand entering the spray, and grabbed her wrist. Inspecting her neck, he noticed it was red. He stepped forward, into the shower.
“Gibbs, you’ll get wet.”
He leant down (she was surprisingly shorter without shoes) and kissed her neck, hands on her waist. Open mouthed kisses, trailing along the web strands, before sticking his tongue out, licking the saliva away. He slowly turned her around, before dipping his head to press his lips to the stick figure angels above her shoulder blades. Continuing her circle, he pulled her to face him again and reached out to touch her arm, noticing the skin around her tattoo of beads in a figure eight was also a bit red. He traced along it with his thumb, before running his hand up her arm to her shoulder and then down her back. Coming to a stop, he flattened his palm on her skin, just underneath her cross. The lower part of her back was curved slightly inwards along the line of her spine from carrying Lila, a fact that had not impressed her for quite some time, until Gibbs had convinced her that he liked to kiss along it.
“Abs, why is the skin on your neck red?”
She looked down and stepped away, but his hand kept her close.
“I don’t know…I just started rubbing at it.”
“You know Lila didn’t mean anything by her question. She’s just curious, that’s all. She loves you.”
“I know. It’s just…I don’t want to cause trouble for her. She’s already got enough going on with her hearing. Do you…do you think I should just wear normal clothes? I could still wear black.”
He reached for the faucets and turned the water off. Dragging her out of the shower, he grabbed her towel and wrapped it around her as she shivered.
“You’d freak her out if you did that. She likes the way you look now. Abs, promise me you won’t ever do this to yourself again.”
“Do you, do you ever wish that I-“
He cut her off. “No.”
“But you’re so-“
He squeezed her arm. “No.”
***
The next morning, Gibbs roused Lila up for school.
She turned to him as he opened her wardrobe. “Dad, what would mummy wear?”
“Lil, you don’t have to dress like your mum.”
“I know. I thought maybe I could sort of dress like her, and sort of dress like the other mums. Mum says being different is fun.”
Gibbs chuckled and took her hand as they stared at the assortment of clothes. “Yeah, she would say that.”
“You like her, and you dress like the other people.”
“Yeah, I do.”
“I think I made her sad.” She dug her big toe into the carpet.
“Lila, you didn’t make her sad. She’s just worried that you’re going to get your feelings hurt because of her.”
Lila looked horrified. “Why?”
“Well, your mum kind of stands out in a crowd, and she doesn’t want anybody to give you a hard time.”
Lila stuck her nose up in the air. “I don’t care what they think.” With that, she tugged on the sleeve of a black and red striped jumper, indicating that she’d made her choice in clothing.