In a Disturbing Way

“Well, hey, there, little lady,” Tony said, watching Abby at work again. She was busy with some test or other, and that routine was familiar and comforting. He'd missed seeing her and her lab—seeing her in her lab—while he was sick.

“Tony, you’re back!” she cried as she turned around to run to him, leaping up to hug him. “I missed you!”

Full-frontal Abby hug. Kind of brutal after the plague and falling down a hill and an explosion. Not that he hadn't missed her, or that she didn't feel good in his arms, but... “Ow-ow-ow!”

“What’s wrong?” she asked, her voice full of concern as she looked him over. “Did I hurt you?”

“I’m fine,” he assured her, hating to see that look on her face. She hadn't damaged him. He was already broken, but he'd better make that clear, or she'd be blaming herself. Then Gibbs would get mad, Probie would get mad, Kate would get mad... No, he had to make that clear. “Just a little sore, you know, from the explosion and all.”

“I’m sorry,” Abby told him. “Do you want to sit down?”

“Well,” he began slowly, nodding as he walked with her. “I was kind of thinking about lying down next to your little refrigerator thingy over here.”

“Sure, sure,” she agreed, letting him settle. She went into her office for a second and came back out with a hippo he'd seen on-and-off over the years. She loved that thing, though he'd never really known why. It was a hippo, right? “Here, you can use Bert as a pillow.”

Bert. That's right. The hippo even had a name. And she talked to it. Abby was funny sometimes. He let her put the hippo under his head and closed his eyes, and then there was this noise. It sounded like a fart. Like a very familiar fart.

Oh, shit. Four years he'd known Abby, known about the hippo, and never quite put it all together. Gibbs would just shake his head, give Tony that look that said he was an unbelievable idiot, which, he was. Still, there were reasons. Tony had forgotten a lot what happened around Philadelphia, and even that murder they'd worked before he joined NCIS hadn't filled in all the holes. He hadn't let it. So... Right. The hippo. He'd given Abby that hippo. In New Orleans. She still had it. She still loved it.

Admittedly, that freaked him out a little. He'd been at NCIS longer than any of his other jobs, and he liked it here, but too long in one place... People got comfortable. Tony had gotten comfortable. Abby was a friend. She was...attached to him. That alone would have sent him running years ago. Maybe that was why he didn't make the connection. Because he didn't want to make the connection.

“He’s supposed to make that noise,” Abby explained, and Tony looked at her. She thought he was weirded out by the hippo. He was, but not for the reason she thought.

“You have a stuffed animal that farts?”

“Yeah,” she answered happily. “It’s cool, huh?”

“Yeah, in a disturbing way.”