#at some point I need to detail just how gentle georges engineers are with him when he’s focused on the race

[russilton]

*spraying them with the spray bottle* no praise kink at Seb’s arts n crafts for f1 drivers

[hopscotchandlemon]

Show Your Love

Also on Ao3

It was the hardest decision you’d ever made but as you closed the door on your motel room, you felt it had been the right one. That didn’t stop you feeling guilty. By now, Jethro would have read the ‘Dear John’ letter you’d left on his mantle piece. You wondered if he’d actually miss you, he’d barely seen you in the last month.

Dropping your case, you eased off your shoes and lay down on the starched bedding. Travelling had not been kind to your muscles and you tried to get them to relax. You’d been so wound up about how your relationship had ended, you doubted your body could remember what it was like not to be in a tense state. As various aches and pains wracked your spine, you sat up, reaching for your bag for your bottle of water and your painkillers. You took out the new phone you had purchased, your old one having been taken apart of dropped in a bin not far from Jethro’ home. You’d been careful when selecting somewhere to run to and made it as difficult as possible for the Special Agent to find you knowing he’d find you out of stubbornness rather than a desire to put right what had gone so terribly wrong. You didn’t even know where the problem lay. All you knew if that the man you’d thought you loved had become someone who at home swayed between anger and apathy. Sure, you knew he could be difficult, umcommunicative and you’d be the mistress to the much more demanding wife that was his job, but you also knew he could be considerate, warm and even gentle.

It was the fall when things had changed. You’d been living together for a year having met the previous fall when a case bought Special Agent Gibbs and Special Agent McGee to your workplace, George Washington University, where you were a professor in mechanical engineering. You’d been able to advise the agents on the type of technology that they’d recovered from the home of a known domestic terrorist. A week after they’d closed the case, Gibbs had returned to offer his thanks and to ask you out to dinner.

That last fall, you’d been finishing up after a day’s work when McGee had turned up at your office to tell you Jethro had been seriously injured in a high speed crash and to take you straight to the hospital. Indeed the doctors told you to expect the worst and you spent the next few days in limbo, surrounded by his team as you all hoped for a miracle. A week later that miracle happened, and he was taken off the ventilator. You’d joked that it was much less the sign of a miracle and more a indication of how stubborn the man was, refusing to conform to what everyone else had thought was his demise.

You got him home and while you never expected him to be a model patient, his mood swings and his detached persona made him near impossible to deal with. In time his body healed but his demeanour did not. You couldn’t quite believe it when he passed a psych evaluation to go back to work but he’d had years of practise at convincing everyone he was just fine. He deceived himself that he was fine to the point he was convincing. He seemed a different person at work while at home, the layers of untreated trauma made any kind of relationship near to impossible. Eventually he started to avoid you. At first you worried about him but then you didn’t have the anxiety of wondering what mood he was in. If he ever was in the house at the same time as you, he’d spend most of it in his basement.

That’s when you knew it was time to leave. You had to get away for a bit so you waited until spring break and booked this motel in New York state for a week. You used cash to get the train tickets and rented an apartment in DC so you had somewhere to go once your week was up.  If Gibbs wanted to find you after that you’d talk, but you needed the break and for him to have some time to reflect on what he wanted.

The week passed quietly. You’d enjoyed the space and had explored the state as much as you could. The journey back was arduous but once you were home, you were able to get yourself in to a new routine. As you finally got yourself back on the grid, you knew sooner or later Jethro would find you and that happened the Friday after you started back at work.

***********************

Everyone at NCIS was on the receiving end of Gibbs’ wrath. It was Spring Break so there was talk of holidays and plans among those lucky enough to snare the time off while those with kids discussed what the had planned. He turned up on the Monday morning and barked orders at everyone. There was no case to keep them all busy so they took it in turns to escape to Abby’s lab to discuss what had turned their team leader in to a bear with a sore head. McGee had some insight although he knew better to share it. Gibbs had asked him to ping (y/n)’s phone. Believing they had misplaced it, he told his boss that it’s last location was in fact his own house but the battery might have died as it hadn’t moved since Friday. This had not helped his mood and he’s asked McGee send him their credit card statements and if they’d booked any flights. When McGee came back with nothing of note, Gibbs mood darkened even more. The team were relieved when a case came up on Tuesday. It was bad news for the petty officer but a relief to the NCIS agents.

The following Monday, Gibbs mood was still  and no one in the bullpen dare speak. McGee did another search for (y/n) and to his relief they started to turn up in searches. A new tenancy agreement, a new phone. He wanted to tell Gibbs but he didn’t want his boss to think he was prying. So when Gibbs was called to Vance’s office just as they were about to go home, he printed of details of the tenancy agreement and left them in an envelope on Gibbs’ desk before leaving the building.

***********************************

Gibbs knew he had behaved badly but it was his way of coping with the aftermath of that car crash. He’d been so disorientated when he first came round. He saw Shannon and Kelly a great deal and that gave him some peace but when they disappeared to be replaced by tubes entering his body and machines bleeping , he felt he’d descended to hell and seeing his wife and child had been a cruel trick. The Friday he’d realised (Y/N) had gone, he’d decided to blot it all out with Bourbon. He did this all weekend putting him on a crash course with the week ahead. By Monday he wanted to find them and put things right. Obviously, they’d paid attention when he’d talked about tracking people and initial searches proved fruitless. Once a case came up, he threw himself in to solving that in a bid to think about something else. When Tim had left the copy of (y/N)’s new tenancy agreement on his desk, he saw it as a sign that maybe it was time to approach them.

**************************************

You’d got home just after 6pm and started to prepare something to eat. You always made far too much but you figured it would do you later in the week. Just as you were about to plate up your door intercom sounded. You knew it was Jethro before you even got to the speaker. You let him up and immediately started to plate him up some food too. If nothing it would break the ice on your first meeting since you ended it.

He was quiet, but then he always was a man of few words. He accepted the plate of food graciously and sat opposite you and tucked in. You even found him a beer to go with his meal. Once you were done eating you started to clear the plates away. The silence hung heavy in the air and you wondered who would be the first to break it. It wasn’t until you sat in the lounge that Gibbs broke it.

‘I know I’ve been a bastard to you these last few weeks. Will you let me make it up to you?’ he said, those steel-blue eyes pleading for the forgiveness his lips never could.

You sighed. You’d thought long and hard about this. Truth was you loved him deeply and while you felt he loved you, you knew he didn’t always show it. But there was no getting away from the last few month. It had fundamentally changed how you saw him. You knew that side of Gibbs existed, but you had hoped you wouldn’t witness it. Now you had, it was going to be hard to build up that trust again. You’d be hurt by the way he had shunned you.

‘That might be possible in the future but I think we need to take a step back for a while.’ You replied, watching him for a hint of a reaction. Even with his best poker face you could tell that wasn’t the answer he was wanting. You let the silence continue. He took a step closer to you, almost as if to rail against what you had just said.

‘I love you, (y/n). I don’t know how else to say it you,’ he pleaded.

‘Show me then,’ you challenged him.

He studied you, trying to read your mind. ‘How?’ he asked. His arms open and asking the same question.

You thought for a second. ‘I want you to go and talk to someone, someone who can help you work through all the stuff that’s happened to you. I know you don’t like shrinks Jethro but something has got to change.’ You pleaded, your eyes set on him.

You knew you’d asked him the earth. He’d rather go into a gunfight outnumbered 10 to 1 than talk to someone about what he was feeling.

‘It’s up to you. I understand either way,’ you said softly, your hand gently rubbing his arm

He nodded, stepped forward, kissed you gently on the cheek, and made his exit.

******************************

You sat patiently in the waiting room, pretending to read your magazine. You had checked your watch constantly over the last hour. Just when you were about to end out a search party, you spotted him walking towards you. He gave you half a smile. This was a milestone; he’d just completed his first therapy session and you were so unbelievably proud of him. You’d offered to be with him every step along the way. As he stood in front of you, there was clearly a lot going on in that stubborn head. Without saying a word, you took his hand and you walked out of the clinic together.

[jawnkeets]

just saw that you love rilke's letters to a young poet as well! it's one of my favorite reads when i need a pick-me-up or motivation. but i wonder whether you agree with him when he says "works of art are infinitely solitary and nothing is less likely to reach them than criticism. only love can grasp them and hold them and do them justice"? xx

it is beautiful!! 💕

funnily enough this has been driving me nuts this entire year to the point where it has become almost academically central, especially during term time when i’m writing weekly essays and reading loads of crit. this is just my two cents, and i’m only just beginning to attempt to put my thoughts in order, which will be obvious, so pls no one hold me to this lol. this is also specifically about literature, though i’d love to hear people’s thoughts concerning other arts!

anyway, this started when i was working on george herbert, whose poetry is just stunning, but it’s so easy to push his ideas until they fall apart or contradict each other, and many critics have done so. however erudite and academically interesting this work was, though, i couldn’t shake the idea that it was entirely missing the point, and i couldn’t get a quotation by monet out of my head: ‘everyone discusses my art as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love’.* critics try to unravel the thread of herbert’s poetry, herbert pulls at their critical thread in turn. i’d read secondary criticism when trying to work out what to say about him, then come back to herbert and realise i had nothing to say at all which truly added to his poetry, or to use rilke’s words, did it justice.

and so from then on i often felt like i was writing to say something that seemed clever, or being original for originality’s sake (because i didn’t want to fall into certain critical grooves), or saying what everyone else had already said (and if it was bang on why not just read the poetry itself?!), and returning to the poetry would always make me feel so silly, though in a gentle, humbling way. rilke says as much: ‘it [criticism] will either be partisan views, fossilised and made meaningless in its lifeless rigidity, or it will be neat wordplay, where one opinion will triumph one day and the opposite the next.’ this was partly, practically, because i didn’t have time to discover what i ‘truly thought’ - when you’re reading the primary stuff, secondary stuff, and writing the essay in two or three days you often have to pick an idea somewhat arbitrarily and run with it. but it’s also embarrassing to say what you actually feel about a work of literature, even if it is possible within a critical framework (which i’ll come back to); if a tutor didn’t like something i’d written when i didn’t care for the opinion myself, no big deal, back to the drawing board. if it had been what i really thought about an author i revered, it would be hideous. sharing love with someone else makes you vulnerable, as in any other area of life.

but, to use the rilke quote, how can you ‘do them justice’ if not by criticism, and by criticism truly meant, if there is such a thing? by writing creatively yourself? by reading, absorbing and sharing with other people? passion/ effusion rather than ‘rigid’ academic analysis (i.e. old-school romantic 'criticism’, like lamb’s thoughts on hogarth)? this is kind of the problem with english literature as a discipline. i’m no expert on its development, but when i’m in a cynical mood i think it’s because to study english literature (i.e. for it to be institutionalised and taken seriously as an academic discipline, for us to ‘do’ it at all as anything other than recreation) it needs to have grounds for legitimacy, by which i mean that it needs to have scholarly method, quantifiable elements, be teachable, etc. unlike classics which arguably the institutional study of english (or substitute any vernacular) literature rose out of in european education, there’s no immediately obvious linguistic rigour (as in, fluency in another language or languages isn’t a primary focus of the discipline**), so we also need, if not english language as a module or core part of the course, which some courses do have, a focus on language and its constituent parts, or close-reading (the verb does this, the parallel structure does that, etc). but, less cynically, i think it also emerged because we felt there’s something to say about vernacular literature, and we wanted to try and do that. but the paradox is that whatever that is can’t really be said. hence the increasingly complicated 20th century stuff culminating in deconstruction, and now in the 21st century what is often a focus on manageable specifics - pathways through texts (like ‘wind in shakespeare’), spotlighting something in the historical moment and reading it in conjunction with the text (the laryngoscope really helps us read george eliot because...), etc.*** i should say that i do find this stuff really interesting, i just struggle to reconcile it with the feeling i get when i read and am spellbound by what i read, and what is so fundamental to reading for me - the ambiguity, the innumerable elements comprising the text that cannot be separated or delineated without the magic fading,**** the wholeness or completeness, the feeling of comprehending many if not all elements of the text at once.

i do think, as well, that reading and practicing critical writing has helped me to appreciate literature more. partly because it’s helped me realise what i don’t think literature is ‘about’, if there is such a thing, but also in terms of positive definition as well as negative, because rigour, deep thinking, attention to detail, extended and focused meditation on a single text/ idea/ theme/ topic/ word, etc are skills which are enriching. it’s a strange thing where i feel like i’m moving closer at the same time as i’m moving further away.

so basically, as the year’s progressed, i’ve been impetuously trying to fight criticism through the medium of criticism, which has its obvious ironies and shortcomings. i wrote an essay, for example, arguing that keats’ poetry is anti-taxonomical, and that criticism, conversely, is taxonomical - it’s from κρίνειν, to judge or decide, so to be a critic is to choose/ select/ interpret/ delineate - criticism of keats, then, is best when it’s as unlike criticism as possible (and so bad criticism), because otherwise it’s deliberately misunderstanding keats. i’m being as honest as i can be, and at times as embarrassing and embarrassed as i can be, and it’s working much better. but i think after all this that the best criticism, to be as generous to other critics as they really deserve (as i have not been all year, to my discredit), is passionate, and that critics show this in different ways.***** one way around my crisis is to take the view that literature reconciles work and play, and criticism does or at least should do the same, thus running parallel with the text instead of converging (because in ‘playing’ it will naturally be somewhat divergent). i buy this to a degree. and also some people do study literature on the grounds for which i’ve criticised criticism above (they love specifics, or creative pathways through texts, etc), and i don’t want to set myself against them at all; i’ve realised that i am also partly one of these people - some hugely inspiring tutors have shown me that it is amazing to study in this way, and i’ve seen from the work of tutors and fellow students that love can be suffused through criticism like this, that it can be genuinely moving and inspiring. i also get that this perhaps doesn’t feel like a binary split in other places or for other people as it does for me; i think creative writing for example is way bigger in america as a subject, so it might not feel like ‘enjoy literature and write literature recreationally’ and ‘do literature academically/ in an academic setting’ are diametrically opposed, or that you can do both but that they have to be separate, or that there’s a disconnect between the way you do one and the way you do the other. so now i’m trying to be as honest as i can be when it comes to criticism, and pushing forward whilst trying not to cover or lose sight of the little spark reading generates - i think that if your criticism bears this in mind, it might not be able to grasp the poetry like simply loving it does, but it can perhaps reach out and gingerly touch it. whether that makes it worth it is up to you.

i hope this answers your question - i realise this got long. what an interesting ask, thanks very much for sending it!! 🌹

~

* speaking of - i recommend this poem!!

** though some courses, like the oxford one, teach old english, which is arguably another language.

*** i appreciate that what rilke means by criticism is not necessarily identical to what i mean by criticism, which obviously developed a lot after rilke, but even so.

**** granted, in engineering a car is and should be taken apart so we can see how it works, but the end goal is still the working car!!

***** some would disagree, saying that we should be ‘objective’ and/ or shouldn’t be ‘on a poet’s side’ (i.e. trying to do them justice) and i struggle with them a lot more, but after a bit of grumbling they still have my firm respect.