Disclaimer: I own neither NCIS nor Dark Angel .

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Seeing Eyes

by marbleglove

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“Here’s everything.” Abby placed a CD on his desk. “They’re short but there’s a lot of them. I named them with the date and broadcast region. I haven’t had a chance to really look at them because I got distracted by something else.”

She hopped in place.

“Well, aren’t you going to ask me what the something else is?”

Gibbs gave her a look, but then prompted her, “What’s the something else?”

“I’m not sure if it’s a good something else or a bad something else but it’s odd.”

“What is?” He was beginning to get impatient.

“The eyes are definitely Tony’s. Irises don’t lie. But just in case, I also did a voice match. It’s definitely Tony. But here,” she reached around him to bring up the picture on his computer. “Look at the skin around the eyes. There are actually fewer wrinkles than there were ten years ago. It’s unusual but not unheard of, plenty of face creams say they can do that. But ten years is a long time and well, they’ve been a stressful ten years for most people. He’s either got a really good face cream or there’s something hinky going on.”

“Maybe he’s just cleaning up the image.”

“Possible, but look.” She reached around him again, and he gave up and just scooted his chair back, so she could have easier access. She enlarged the image so the entire computer screen was filled with a couple of square centimeters of skin. “Look at the pores.”

“Oh, I’m looking.” It was hard not to.

“Airbrushing smoothes over blemishes of all types and pores get included in that. To remove wrinkles but keep pores, especially at this magnification, that’s a lot of work. And a lot of time spent on it. And for what? If you were going to change something why not the eyes or voice? That’s what could be used for identification.”

“Vanity? This is Tony after all. Or maybe he got a facelift.”

“I thought of that. He could have had surgery, but that would leave small scars. They’d be real small and faint but I looked really carefully for them and they’re not there. Scars like that would be easier to airbrush out than wrinkles but it’s still time consuming. Of course, there would be a reason to hide that type of scar, because plastic surgery can be tracked. But if he’s trying to hide that, it would still be easier to just use a lower definition camera to records. There’s no reason to broadcast with this sort of definition if you’re going to have to modify the feed anyway.”

“Bottom line, Abby.”

“I don’t think the image is adjusted.”

“Well, then what do you think?”

“Um…”

“Spit it out.”

“The Pulse,” she blurted and then froze at the look on his face. He didn’t like to talk about the Pulse. She rushed on before he could say anything. “We know it was three attacks: missiles to five major cities, biological weapons in the atmosphere, and electromagnetic pulse in the stratosphere. But we stopped the first two. It was only the electromagnetic pulse that got away.”

“Only. Only the electromagnetic pulse?”

Abby winced but didn’t back down. She wasn’t suicidal enough to respond to that, though, so she just ploughed on. “Ziva stopped the missiles, Tony stopped the biological.” She stopped abruptly. It didn’t matter. Gibbs could hear her continue in his head. And you stayed with McGee, applying pressure to a mortal wound, helping him stay conscious long enough to talk DiNozzo and Ziva through stopping the final attack.

Abby took a deep breath. “We never figured out what exactly the biological aspect was. Both Tony and Ziva were exposed to it. Ziva died, Tony survived. The country had too many other problems to deal with to spend any time on a failed attack and me and Ducky were only able to confirm that it was a mutagen of some sort.”

“I know this, Abby.”

“I know you know, Gibbs. But you need to think about it more because it’s a mutagen and we don’t know what it does, but we do know that Tony’s skin is odd for his age. And I haven’t seen a picture of him in a really long time.”

Gibbs sat extremely still and thought of the man who he had worked with for so many years. Tony had been active and vibrant and beautiful and just as much an ass as Gibbs even if it was in a totally different way. What did he look like that he was now only showing his eyes?

“I’ll call Palmer.”

“Okay. And Gibbs,” Abby looked nervous again. “We really don’t know much about the mutagen. We know Ziva caught it. Since Tony never showed symptoms, we assumed he didn’t but now I think he might have gotten it. But here’s the thing, you were also there and you never showed symptoms either, so we assumed you didn’t get it.”

He didn’t let his response to that show. He just repeated himself. “I’ll call Palmer.”