Keryl Raist's Blog, page 11

Shards To A Whole: Chapter 313

McGee-centric character study/romance. Want to start at the beginning? Click here.

Book Four: The Boss

Chapter 313: The Boss


Tim gets into the office, sees that he's, like usual, in after Gibbs but before Tony and Ziva. He's not sure if Draga's in yet or not. There is a RedBull on his desk, but there's usually a RedBull on his desk. Could be fresh, could be yesterday's. He's not poking around to find out.

So, paperwork.

He sits down and fires up his computers.

Like always he hits his email first. Checks to see what's new or interesting or updated. As he's scanning through the list of new letters, he finds himself thinking of talking with Jimmy, and then later, over dinner, with Abby, (wasn't the most romantic meal ever, but probably something they needed to talk about. After dinner made up for it.) and hits the compose button.

It's quick, just a few words:

Hey Mom,

Kelly's christening is on Sunday. There'll be a big family party after. I know it's last minute, but if you and Ben want to come up for it, we'd like you to.

If you're free, dinner's at our place on Saturday, 5:30.

Hope to see you then,

Tim.

And he hit the send button before he could think about it again.

He's filling out paperwork when his phone rings. That startles him. Yes, he has a phone on his desk, but it's probably been three years since he's given that number to anyone. If you want to get a hold of him, you call his cell phone.

That's even the number on his card now.

But the phone on his desk is ringing, and for a second there's a tinge of dread in his heart. Is his Mom calling him? Does she want to actually, physically talk?

But it's still ringing and the rest of his team is staring at it, so… "McGee."

"Agent McGee…" He identifies the voice of Vance's secretary and feels a wash of relief. "Director Vance would like to see you."

Oh. That sends a spark of flushed happy through him, only one thing Vance is likely to want to have a one on one chat with him in person about. "Okay. I'll be up in a few seconds."

He hangs up and feels all four of his teammates looking at him. He points up, and everyone nods, understanding what's about to happen.

Fifteen seconds later, he's standing in front of Valerie, and she tells him, "Go on in," so he does.

"You wanted to see me, sir?"

"Yes." Vance looks up from his computer, stepping out from behind his desk. "Twenty minutes ago Jenner gave me his letter of resignation. Sixty days' notice." He offers Tim his hand, and Tim, smile breaking across his face, shakes. "Congratulations McGee, as of January 4, you'll be the newest NCIS Department Head."

There's a smile on Leon's face, too, but Leon's smile has some bite to it. "My understanding is that the techs down in Cybercrime are aware of Jenner's resignation. So, while it is true that you are not taking over for two more months, letting them know that you're their new Boss is entirely on your shoulders."

"Ah." Yes, there is that, and especially sitting down with Manner to have a chat with him about how he's not the guy taking over Cybercrime. "Then I guess I should be making an appointment to have a talk with Jenner soon."

"I'd think that would be an excellent idea."

He knows exactly what is going to happen if he heads right down to the bullpen. He'll have all four of them congratulating them, and in a matter of minutes Abby, Jimmy, and Ducky will be up for a little impromptu party.

Which would be great. Which he's intending to enjoy. But not right this second, because the guys in Cybercrime don't know about it yet, and he doesn't want them finding out via scuttlebutt. He especially does not want Manner finding out by having someone say to him, "Hey, did you know there's that guy up in the MCRT celebrating getting your job?"

So he flashes a quick text to all seven of them: 1/4/16 first day as Head of Cybercrime! Cybercrime doesn't know that yet. Need to talk to Jenner and Manner.

As he's heading down the steps, his phone buzzes, another text from Abby to everyone, along with Breena and Penny: If there's no hot case, we're cutting out early. 5:30. Dinner and drinks on us, at the diner.

Three quarters of the way down the steps, he's hunting through the NCIS employee directory, finding Jenner's number. He sends a quick text. Can we talk?

Once he's back at his desk, supposedly working, watching everyone smiling at him, smiling back at them, not really paying attention to his paperwork, feeling really happy, he gets back. Kind of busy. Does it have to be today?

Be nice if it was, but no, it doesn't.

Two more minutes go by. Got a few minutes at 2:00. That do it?

Probably. See you then.

"Agent McGee."

"Jenner."

They stare at each other. He worked with Jenner briefly back when he was down here. He's changed. Jenner hasn't. Still that same tightly wound, pale, nervous personality. The kind of guy who's physical appearance is so bland he blends into the background while you're looking at him, but his mood is so nervous he puts everyone else on edge. "What can I do for you, McGee? We're kind of busy down here, big changes coming soon, and I didn't expect a request for time from the MCRT golden boy. Finally run into a puzzle so big you can't handle it on your own?"

Tim looks at Jenner strangely. There's a lot of bite in those words, and okay, yeah, he'd been spying on his team, and making sure Vance knows how inefficient Jenner's managerial style is, but he also didn't think Jenner knew that. And, also, he's thinking that it should be fairly obvious why he's down there. A senior tech guy shows up at your desk half an hour after you give notice, putting two and two together shouldn't be difficult. But he's not getting any sense that Jenner knows this call is about anything other than a case.

"It's about those changes. Vance tells me your last day is December 31st."

He sees the recognition light on Jenner's face, and felt his mood go from curt and slightly annoyed to absolutely frosty. "And your first day is January 4th."

Tim nods, smiling, trying to... He's not sure… Trying to not piss this guy off just by existing? Screw that. He stops smiling.

"So, why are you down here?" Jenner asks.

"I wanted to talk to you, get up to date on all the cases you're working, let your team know that I'll be taking over, transition stuff."

"Before I leave, I'll have briefs written up for all active investigations. Obviously we won't be working on the same things then as we are now."

"Nope. From now until then, when I'm not actively investigating or in court, I'd like to be down here, getting to see how you work, how your team functions, getting to know the players."

Jenner shrugs. "You can do that, but I don't think it'd be very informative. No one does their best with someone breathing down their necks."

"All right. Then I'll see how they do when they're at less than their best. When do you want to tell them I'll be taking over?"

Never is clear on his face. "Doesn't matter."

"Then today will work fine. I understand you were grooming Stephen Manner to be your replacement?"

He nods, terse, and Tim gets the sense that Jenner genuinely likes Manner and is pissed that he's not getting this job.

"Steve's been my right hand man for six years now."

He gets another layer of this. "And you told him he'd take over for you?"

Jenner nods. "He deserves to run this department. He's put the years in, done the job, and done it well."

Tim has his own opinions about that, but in that Manner is one of the only two techs who passed all of his tests, he deserves at least basic respect.

"Obviously Vance thinks I'll do a better job of it."

"With all due respect, Agent McGee, Vance has no idea what happens down here. He wouldn't know a worm from a phishing attack."

"But I do. And he knows that when he needs the impossible done yesterday, he calls me, not you. And he knows that when NCIS needed to up its Cyber security, you guys built a system. That system got hacked in three weeks. So, he had me build a wall around us that's never been breached. A wall so well-designed that people have had an easier time breaking into the building to use our computers than getting through by hacking. So, do you mind if I pull Manner off of his station for an hour or so and have a private chat with him?"

"Have at it, Agent McGee. I assume you know who Manner is?"

"Yes."

Manner's sitting at his desk, earbuds in, some sort of pop music blasting away, fingers flying over his keyboard. Tim doesn't interrupt. He hates it when someone breaks his flow, so he's not going to do it to someone else. Sooner or later Manner'll notice him standing there.

The correct answer is a hell of a lot later than Tim expected. For ten full minutes he stands there, watching Manner at work. By the end of the third minute, he's thinking Manner may be intentionally ignoring him, but since his eyes haven't flicked off his screen, and this is the guy who coded straight through his font attack, it's entirely possible he's really that into it.

It's a good long time to study the man. Since he's trying to get Manner to notice him without interrupting, he's facing him, so he can't see what he's doing on the computer. That leaves his physical person.

Tim's pale. He always has been, always will be. Can't be Irish back to the dawn of time and not be pale. Manner's ghostly: porcelain skin, white blonde hair, light blue eyes. Tim's debating if he's some sort of albino or whatever that tribe in Northern Europe the girl from Frozen was based on is. Either way, working in a dimly lit basement is not helping at all.

But, eventually, his fingers slow down, and Manner looks up, sees Tim, leaning against the edge of his cubicle, and jerks with surprise.

"Can I help you?"

"Yes. Hi." He holds out his hand. "I'm Tim McGee. I was wondering if you'd be willing to get a cup of coffee with me?"

Manner squints at him, seems to be figuring out who he is, does not shake his hand, and looks annoyed. "I've got work to do. Don't need to be flirting with you."

Tim stands up a bit straighter, tucking his hands into his pockets. "Let's try this again." He smiles, but it's not warm. "Hi. I'm Tim McGee, in two months I'll be your boss. I thought, since Manner kept telling you that in two months you'd be the boss, that it'd be a lot easier to get the news that wasn't going to happen in private, and that we could talk about what happens next without your eleven co-workers all listening in. So, want to get a cup of coffee with me?"

Tim waits, patiently, as what little color he has drains from Manner's face when it hits him that he's not going to be filling the office he'd been designing in his head for however many months now, then he waits through the homicidal rage phase, which lasts a bit longer than he was expecting, and he waits a few more minutes for the what-the-fuck-am-I-going-to-do-now phase to pass into the find-out-more phase.

So, all in all, he stands there for almost twenty minutes before Manner says, "Let me get my jacket."

"It wasn't supposed to be you."

Tim shrugs. It's not raining anymore and warmed up a bit, so they're sitting on one of the benches outside the Navy Yard. For all he's been thinking about this moment, because he's known for months that job one was going to be telling Manner he didn't get the job, he never felt like he'd gotten to a good way to deal with this. If Manner can play with the team, Tim wants him to play. Manner's probably about a good third of the talent NCIS Cybercrime has on staff, and losing him would hurt.

But if he can't play, or won't accept Tim as his boss, Tim's not interested in dealing with that headache.

So, somehow, he's got to get through this, making sure that Manner knows he's the better man for the job, but not alienating him so much that he decides to stick around and be a pain in his ass.

"I disagree, and Vance does, too."

Manner shakes his head. Like Jenner, he doesn't seem to hold much respect for Vance when it comes to what they do. "How did you…"

"I went up there and asked for it. I gave him a plan for where I wanted Cybercrime to go. I gave him a tactical assessment of your strengths and weaknesses. And then I showed Vance why I'd do it better than Jenner is, and honestly, better than you would, too."

Manner isn't buying that. Scorn's radiating off of him as he sips his coffee. "You really think you're good enough at this to be my boss?"

"I know I am."

Another snort. "Yeah, I know your reputation. You're the one everyone calls in when they're stuck. But it's not just hacking down there. You've got to run the team, run the ops, run the paperwork. So you're slick with a computer, fantastic for you, you've got to be a bureaucrat, too."

"I need to do it, you're right. But you don't, and Ngyn doesn't, and Hammon and Brent and Jiff and the rest of them don't. Right now, bureaucracy is the biggest problem you guys have down there. We're cops. What I need to be is a team leader. What you guys need to be is a team. You've been sitting down there thinking you're some sort of hall monitors and keeping all your paperwork tidy. You've got the cleanest record of any government agency on the east coast, lowest cracked case ratio, but your paperwork is perfect because you spend more time dotting I's and crossing Ts than you do catching bad guys. No more. We catch bad guys. We stop them from hurting people. That's our number one priority. We do it with computers instead of guns, but we work together and we do it. Are you in any way surprised that Leon found that to be a compelling vision for NCIS Cybercrime?"

"Are we being honest with each other?"

Tim holds up his hands. "Why not?"

"I don't think Leon cares one way or another what happens down in Cybercrime. I don't think he has a clue as to what we do down there. I think he's got a pet who's handy with a computer who asked for a new assignment. If the rumors I hear about you are true, it's in Leon's best interest to keep you happy, because otherwise you'd be a nightmare of a whistleblower. And, now, instead of running a smoothly functioning operation, I'm stuck with having to manage a cowboy who wouldn't know a rule if it jumped up and bit him in the ass."

Manner looks sincerely taken aback when Tim bursts out laughing at that.

Tim shakes his head. "The rule thing. You have no idea. And if you'd ever seen me near a horse, you'd know why I'm laughing at the cowboy image."

"Rumor has it you've hacked the CIA, FBI, DOD, Justice, Mossad, Coast Guard, MI5 and 6, more private companies than anyone can list, more individuals than anyone can count, couldn't care less about legal or warrants, and you think you're good on rules?"

Tim smiles, still amused, but he can see this is pissing Manner off. "The thing about rumors, most of them aren't true. But the thing I find really interesting here is this, you seem significantly more interested in following the rules than catching the bad guys."

"If we don't follow the rules, we are the bad guys."

"Justice and Law aren't synonyms."

"Said every villain ever."

"I'll remember not to send you in on the wet work missions."

Manner's eyes went wide.

Tim holds up his hands again. "I'm kidding. The real question is, do you want to stick around? I can guarantee you Cybercrime under me will not look like Cybercrime under Jenner. If you don't like that, I won't hold you leaving against you. Jenner'll give you a great review, and I will, too. If you aren't interested in working for a 'villain,' now might be a very good time to spruce up your resume.

"But, you are one of the two techs who passed every test I ran. And while I don't like what you did with that, I don't want half of my best talent running off as soon as I show up."

"Don't like… Tests…?" Manners is looking very confused by this.

"Like I said, I did a tactical assessment for Leon of your strengths and weaknesses. Think it's a coincidence you've been hacked several times since summer? You and Ngyn were the only ones who noticed I was doing it. She actually figured out it was me. Vance had to tell you because you missed my breadcrumb trail. Neither of you thought it was worth pulling your team into action, or letting Jenner know what was up.

"My first goal for this team is that it will be a team. One of you gets hacked, it'll be an all hands on deck until we're secure again. I sat there and watched as all twelve of you had your screens go bonkers, and most of you did nothing. You coded straight through it, and didn't even make a move until after you'd finished your work.

"And if you think that maybe you deserve Cybercrime more than I do, that you'd do a better job of it, that I'm getting this department because I'm being paid off to keep me happy and silent, then you need to ask yourself why you didn't rally your team, fix the breech, and find who caused it? Because I can absolutely guarantee I would have, and Vance knows that."

"I didn't 'rally the team' as you put it, because I knew the attack was coming from the inside. It didn't do anything important, so there was no reason to go full bore on it. Vance said it was a test, so there was no reason to go any further."

"The attack looked like it was coming from the inside. It wasn't."

"Yeah, well no one is suggesting you don't know your way around a computer."

"I'm flat out saying that you're the second best person in Cybercrime and you fell asleep at the switch. And, not to put too fine a point on it, but ever since I built the wall we've got protecting NCIS, all attacks have come from the inside. No one's gotten through from the outside, which also should have been a huge neon sign for who was hacking you. So, if you're staying with us, I want the words, 'coming from the inside' to vanish from your vocabulary. I know for a fact we've had people break in to screw with us, because it's easier to get into the building than it is to get into the computers."
Manner is not looking thrilled with this assessment.

"So, you sticking around?"

He shakes his head. "I don't know."

"Fair enough."

He heads back into Cybercrime with Manner, who goes straight back to his cubical. From there he stops by Jenner. "You've told them you were resigning, right?"

"Yeah. Told 'em Stephen was their new Boss, too."

Tim mentally winces. "Wonderful." He thinks for another moment. "Was 'busy' code for getting the congratulations party in order?"

"It was."

"You mind if I get them together to tell them I'm taking over in January?"

"Go for it."

"Thanks." Tim turns away from Jenner and quickly notices there's no good workflow here. He can't just gather them together or call campfire. His eyes flick over the basement, straight rows of cubicles, huge bank of filing cabinets, at the far end there's a counter, a coffee pot, a soda machine, and a snack vending machine.

Closest thing they've got to a meeting place.

He takes a minute to set the text then sent it to all of his team. Meet at the coffee pot. 15:05.

And in five minutes he had twelve techs, all standing, pretty awkwardly, in front of the coffee pot, most of them looking around curiously.

"I'm Tim McGee. I work upstairs with the MCRT." They kind of nod along with that. From the way they're looking at him, they're expecting him to hand them a problem to solve. "Jenner told you today that he's resigning at the end of December. Come the beginning of January, I'll be taking over as Head of Cybercrime." Eleven sets of eyes all turn toward Manner. He rolls his eyes, shrugs a bit, and gives them a life sucks gesture. "Right now, I'm still a field agent, so as often as I need to be in the field, I'll be out there, but when I'm not investigating, I'll be down here, talking to you guys, seeing what you're doing, getting a feel for how you do it. Come January 4th, I want to be able to hit the ground running, up to date on your cases." They all sort of nod at that.

"I guess what you really want to know is what is going to happen when I take over. Is everything going to be change? Yes. It is. Part of what I'll be doing is figuring out what you do and how to do it better. Any ideas you've got, plans you'd like to see put in place, stuff that just bugs the hell out of you, all of it, make notes, talk to me. I haven't worked down here since '08, and I was only here for four months, so I've got no attachment to any ways or traditions. You can't step on my toes by telling me you don't like how things are done. Can't win points by liking how things are either.

"Total blank slate time. We're going to rebuild from the grown up. So, from now until January, keep thinking about how you want this job to be. Think about what tools, what practices you need to be able to do your job as well as you possibly can."

They all stare at him. He hands out a stack of his cards. "Anything you want, need, want to talk about, drop me an email. I'm in court tomorrow and the next day, so I won't be down then, but if a case doesn't go hot, I hope to be down here on Thursday, just getting a sense of how this works."

There's some mumbling along the lines of, "Okay, yeah, we'll think about it," but he knows that they really just want him to head the hell off so they can commiserate with Manner and gossip with each other about him without him listening in.

"Okay. See you Thursday!"

He was in the elevator when he got the text from Tony. Dead body. Meet us at the car. So much for celebrating.

It's well past two in the morning when he gets home. Like anytime they get a dead body call, he heads straight for the washing machine to deposit his clothing, and sitting on top of the washer, where Abby knew he'd be, was one of the tirimisu cupcakes he loves.

Next to it is a piece of paper with a little heart on it.

He smiles, takes a bite, and heads to his office to decompress for a few minutes before going to bed.

Next

Shards To A Whole: Chapter 312

McGee-centric character study/romance. Want to start at the beginning? Click here.

Chapter 312: Terri


For as lovely as November 1st, 2014 was, November 1st 2015 was determined to be ugly. Lead gray clouds, a mixture of cold rain, light sleet, and mist (Abby calls it freezing ick.) was drifting sulkily from sky to ground.

The theoretical plan for the evening was dinner out. Short dinner out. Abby still nurses three times a day, and two of them are seven and ten, so they can't go out for too long, but a decent meal and some good conversation is certainly a possibility.

If all goes according to plan, and the weather stays the current 35ish degrees, Gibbs'll be there around seven, Kelly will eat, they'll go out on their first baby-free date since June.

"What are you doing?" Jimmy's voice on the other end of the phone.

"Nothing much. Just fed Kelly," Tim says.

"Good. I'm already on my way to your place. We're taking the girls to the mall."

Tim just stares at his phone for a second, wondering what the hell was going on with Jimmy. In that, among other things, he last saw Jimmy a hour ago when they were all leaving Ed and Jeannie's, he wasn't expecting to lay eyes on him again until tomorrow. "All right. And we have a burning need to go to the mall with the girls, why?"

"Because it's 36 degrees out and raining, Molly's climbing the walls, Breena wants a nap, and Abby wants you out of the house so she can get ready for tonight. Hence, we're going to the mall."

That seems like a fine reason to Tim. "Okay. I'll get Kelly suited up."

In general, Tim is not a fan of malls. At this point in his life, he'd say he's spent, maybe, but this could be an overestimate, four hours at a mall in the last ten years, not counting when he's had to be in one for a case or when he's eaten in a restaurant attached to one.

He's just not a mall guy. He wants something, and unless he needs it right now, he buys it online.

In general, Jimmy's not much of a mall guy, either. Though, between a significantly more extroverted personality, and the fact that just about every tenth store in a mall sells shoes, Jimmy does tend to have a better time in them than Tim does.

But, Jimmy is, in addition to not being much of a mall guy, a bit further along on the Dad curve than Tim is, and he has realized (namely because Breena told him) that at the Mall they have several areas covered in soft foam rubber designed for small people to run around on.

And he's in possession of a seriously rammy small person. A small person who, when not tearing around their house like a wild woman, is whining and fussing. A small person in desperate need of space to play hard and fast without driving her very pregnant, very uncomfortable, and very tired mama insane.

In that it is, as Jimmy previously noted, cold and raining, the park and his backyard is out.

So he's driving, Tim's in the passenger seat, the girls are in their car seats, and they are en route to the mall.

They're the only married men there. Okay, not the only married men, there have to be some other guys with wives somewhere in the mall, but the little area where the toddlers are running around shrieking, all the other guys are at least ten (and three of them look more than fifteen) years younger and none of them are wearing wedding bands.

It occurs to Tim that his demographic does not appear to hang out at malls.

But Molly's having a blast. Kelly's sitting on his lap, watching the other kids play. He and Jimmy were chatting about something, he doesn't remember what, when one of the grandmas (lots of them around) commented on how pretty their girls were, asked how old they were, standard questions.

And they know how this works, so they ask which one of the kids are hers, and about three minutes of polite conversation ensues.

Jimmy checks his watch. "This time last year, I was getting suited up for the wedding."

Tim nods. "Was already at the church."

"Hard to believe it's been a year."

"Yeah. Fast year." Tim smiles, looks at Kelly, kisses the top of her head. "Good year." Jimmy nods at that, his smile not nearly as bright, because for him it's been a much rougher year, and Tim nudges him with his shoulder. "Next year'll be even better."

That got a real smile out of Jimmy. "Yeah, it will."

"Excuse me," The Grandma asks, "I know this is… I was wondering, how did you find a surrogate? My son and his partner would like to be fathers and are thinking about it and…" She can see from the stunned look on Tim and Jimmy's face that they may have been talking about a wedding, it clearly wasn't a wedding to each other, and she starts backtracking fast. "Oh, God. I'm sorry. I heard you mention the wedding and… you've got one stroller and… and your girls look just like you, so you couldn't have adopted and… I'm so sorry."

Jimmy recovers first. "No problem. It's his anniversary. Mine's in May. My wife is eight months pregnant, so we already have the two baby stroller, so with it wet and cold out it was just easier to use the one stroller."

"Oh. I'm so sorry." She's cringing and looking horribly embarrassed.

"Really, not a problem," Tim says, wondering exactly what the protocol for something like this is, because, yeah, he'd prefer that people didn't think he was married to Jimmy. But at the same time, having a fit about it is just really uncomfortably homophobic, and the woman already indicated she had a gay son so… "Just, don't know anything about surrogacy. We both… um… did it the old fashioned way."

She nods, still looking embarrassed. "No. I guess not. Happy anniversary."

He nods back, a really everything's all right smile on his face. "Thanks."

She looks away, watching her grandsons toddle about.

They are heading back to the car an hour later, after Molly had tired herself out and was ready for nap time, when Jimmy says, "That was a first."

"No one ever thought you were gay before?"

"I don't think so. Never got hit on by a guy before, if that's what you mean. Just… When did we get to the point where two married guys out with kids at the mall are assumed to be with each other?"

Tim shrugs.

"It's not like our rings are even close to matching." In that his is white gold and Tim's is mostly black titanium, not matching is something of an understatement.

"Did you notice we were the only married guys with kids there?" Tim asks.

"Yeah. That's weird, too. I mean… It's not like I'm one of those you've-got-to-be-married-to-have-kids-guys. Don't have any problems with Draga. But… I mean… none of those guys were married to their kids' mom."

"Maybe the young ones don't wear rings?" Tim says with a shrug, fairly sure he's wrong. All the baby Sailors and Marines they run into with wives wear the ring.

"Maybe." Jimmy looks back at their girls. "I'd kind of like to know my grandkids' dad is going to stick around."

Tim looks at his ring and shrugs. "Ring's not magic. Can't make anyone stick around."

Jimmy catches that and realizes Tim's thinking of his dad. "Yeah. I know. But…"

"No. I get what you're saying. I never would have even noticed it before Kelly, and it's my anniversary so it's on my mind, but, yeah, I did check the other guys, and it did feel weird to see that none of them had a ring."

"That little voice, in the back of your head, sounds a lot like Gibbs, and you didn't even notice it was in there until you saw the guy with the two kids and the pregnant girlfriend, and it's yelling, 'Man up, you pussy, go marry that woman!'"

Tim laughs a little at that. "Wasn't quite those words, but yeah, something like that."



They were a few miles down the road when Jimmy says, "So, Jeannie was trying to gently pump me for information about your parents."

Tim nods at that. "She's been pretty gung ho about this whole have to have a christening party for Kelly thing, and week before last she asked for my parents' address so she could invite them and…" And Tim had been pretty startled by that, didn't have an immediate answer ready.

"And… She said you said your dad was out of the picture, and you clammed up pretty fast on your mom, and she didn't want to press because she could tell it was sensitive and you didn't want to talk."

"Yeah. She asked, my face must have gone white or something. I did say my dad was out of it, and she back-tracked pretty fast. Told me would press and she'd do me proud on welcoming Kelly into the family."

Jimmy's nodding on that. "Oh, she will. If you think Sunday dinner is impressive, any sort of party Jeannie's in charge of'll blow your mind."

"Okay."

"Seriously, if you think Breena gets into the birthday parties and stuff, she's about twenty levels down from Jeanie."

Tim shrugs, with the exception of the weddings, his crew just doesn't really do parties. "I guess that makes sense, I mean… she basically plans parties for a living."

Jimmy thinks about that. "I guess. Sad parties."

"Food, music, flowers, booze. Sad parties."

"Well, she's good at it. Anyway, just, remember to write thank you notes. They will all bring presents and if they don't get little notes about them later the nagging begins."

Tim shakes his head at that. The idea of christenings being this sort of big deal is very foreign to him. Jimmy nudges him off of pondering what sort of present one buys for a four-month-old, by asking, "So, how are things going with your mom?"

He shrugs. "I don't know. I've talked to her twice in the last month and it was… Okay. Really tentative and nervous, but maybe better than nothing. After Jeannie asked, I've been talking with Abby about maybe inviting her and Ben to the christening."

Jimmy looks pretty surprised by that. But he knows Tim hasn't been talking about his mom, so he hadn't been poking, other than checking in with Abby and Gibbs to see if everything was okay. "What's Abby think?"

"That if we do it, they shouldn't stay with us."

Jimmy nods emphatically at that. "I'll second that."

"She's also kind of nervous about how the rest of the family, and Gibbs in specific, would deal with her."

"Ohhh…" Jimmy winces like he's staring at a train wreck. The idea of Gibbs and Tim's mom in one room hadn't occurred to him, but now that it has, he's not seeing how that could be anything but trouble.

"Yeah. That makes things… complicated."

"I mean, if you tell him it matters to you, and you're trying to patch things up, I'm sure he'll support you…" Though Jimmy doesn't sound very certain about that. And as he's thinking of that, it's occurring to him that he's not sure he can be polite to Tim's mom, either.

"I know. In a he won't actually shoot her in the head or do anything out and out that he thinks would bug me, but it won't be warm or easy or…"

"Yeah." Jimmy nods. Gibbs isn't the poster child for warm or friendly when he's at his best. At his worst… defending one of his cubs… No… Jimmy doesn't think that'll be pleasant on any level.

They drive another mile.

"So… you going to do it?"

"I don't know." Tim sighs. "Part of me wants to see her. And she's never seen Kelly. And if she's going to be part of our lives, then the whole forgiveness thing would be part of that, right?"

"Probably."

"Everyone says forgiving people is part of the whole not being mad all the time thing. Forgiving them or fully cutting ties. That this… in between, ignoring it until I can't anymore, blowing up at it, and then ignoring it again thing isn't good."

Jimmy stares at him, remembering the cuts all over him from his last blow up in the lab with the glassware, and how, to him at least, that doesn't look like a natural or easy progression to forgiveness and a functional relationship, and then says the thing you're not supposed to say. "Might be easier to cut ties…"

Tim shakes his head, staring at the traffic whizzing past. "I know." He smiles, very sad. "But she's my mom."

Jimmy squeezes his hand. "Whatever you're gonna do, I'm here." And seeing that, he means it, too. Even if it does mean swallowing his own anger and treating Terri kindly.

"Thanks."

They drive a few more minutes, ending up in Tim's driveway. He looks back and sees both girls asleep. "You want to put her down with Kelly? Stick around, give Breena more quiet time?"

"Sure."

It takes a few minutes, but they get both girls settled in the nursery. Tim pokes his head into his bedroom and sees Abby getting a nap as well. He smiles at that, thinking it bodes well for staying up late tonight.

He heads down to the kitchen and grabs himself a cider. "You want something?"

Jimmy pokes around his fridge a bit, and grabs another one for himself. "This is good." They both settle on Tim's sofa, and Jimmy asks, "So, say she does come for the christening? What are you hoping to get out of it?"

Tim snorts. "Not crying?"

"That hurdle's so low it's in danger of melting from the heat of the Earth's core."

"And yet it's not even remotely close to guaranteed."

Oh, God, Tim, and the sorrow that goes with it is clear on Jimmy's face. "What do you want? Really?"

Tim shakes his head, exhaling lightly, dismissing his words with his body language before he says them. "Something I can't have. The one thing I want most, being able to consider my Dad a monster who acted alone, I can't do anymore."

"Nope. Tim…" Jimmy's not sure how to ask this. "Does she know how hurt you are?"

"I don't know. I haven't really been able to get into it, and I don't know what Penny's done."

"Maybe telling her about it, how you understood it, is a good step? Maybe you need to really yell at her?"
Tim shrugs at that, too. "I don't know if I can. I tried, wrote it down, but I couldn't send it to her." He looks away from Jimmy as he says that.

"Why not?"

"Still being a good boy? Taking it quietly? Dealing with it by myself and not making a fuss? Decades of this is how our relationship works and I can't make myself break it? Take your pick."

"Tim, make a fuss. It'll probably be good for you."

He shrugs again. "At some point, I need to sit down with Sarah and Penny and talk to them, too. Because it's not just me."

"No, it's not. How are you guys handling your dad?" He means as a family, and Tim gets that.

"You know my part: completely out of my life. He visits Sarah when he's in town."

"She still has contact with him?"

"I'm not going to ask her to rip her dad, who didn't pull any shit on her, out of her life, because he was an ass to me."

"He was more than an ass to you. Not like he was just impolite."

"I know. But…" Tim rubs his forehead. "He's still her dad. Maybe he started overcompensating or something after they divorced, but she's got happy memories of learning how to ride a bike, and sailing, and fishing, and getting to go onto his ship and meet the sailors and…"

"Okay. I get it. Maybe after he lost you he decided it wasn't going to happen again?"

"Yeah, well, he could have tried not treating me like shit." Tim says with a self-depreciating smile. "That might have worked wonders. 'God, sorry I was a flaming asshole, Tim.' That would have gone a long way."

"Really?" Jimmy doesn't look like he's asking so much for himself, as to get Tim to think about that more.

Tim shrugs, probably not. That would have been a band aid on an amputation. "Would have been better than what actually happened."

"I guess."

"I called him, a year ago…" Jimmy's really surprised by that. "Didn't like my vows… That's not true, I didn't love them. They were so bound up in… in not being him. In having seen, lived this train wreck that was their marriage and knowing who and what I didn't want to be, I called, asked what he thought he was doing. I mean, how did it go that wrong? I needed a piece of the puzzle I didn't have. Only talked for like, five minutes, something like that. But, 'Hey Dad, I'm getting married tomorrow, gonna have a baby in the summer,' got nothing. Just disapproval that Abby was already pregnant. I mean, even if you didn't like the guy, you'd offer some congratulations on that, right?"

"I would."

"Yeah. Me, too. But from him, nope. And in that it didn't involve him cussing me out or insulting me, that was our best conversation in… God… Ever."

"I'm sorry, Tim."

"Yeah. Me, too. So, anyway, he and Sarah are fine. I haven't been brave enough to ask about it, what she might be doing with him about me, beyond telling her that I didn't expect her to cut him out of her life. Penny yelled at him a few times and when he wouldn't come to the realization that he'd done anything inappropriate, she stopped talking to him."

"She cut ties with her son?"

"Yeah. I… I don't know what to do with that, either. I know how bad the idea of losing Kelly hurts, and I don't want to be responsible for that for her."

Jimmy shakes his head at Tim. "I know one thing to do with that, stop thinking it's your fault. He behaved in a way your grandmother felt was indefensible. She cut ties with him because you don't keep relationships with people who do things like that. None of that is your fault."

"I guess."

"Stop guessing. You know. Him being a psychopath is not your fault."

Tim smiles at him sadly. "But I don't know. Wish I did. Be easier if I did. He adores Sarah. She was able to be everything he ever wanted for her, and they get on fine. She could make him smile, so why not me?"

Jimmy slowly closes his eyes and opens them again, then put his cider on the coffee table and scoots closer, wrapping an arm around Tim. "It was never you."

Tim snorts, bitterly. "Be a lot easier to believe if he'd been a psychopath to both of us."

"It wasn't you."

"Yeah. That's what everyone but he and my mom say."

That last bit kills Jimmy, feeling Tim's hurt from his mom having agreed with whatever it was his dad thought, even if she didn't want to use the same tactics. "What did your mom say?"

Another depreciating smile from Tim. "That they were afraid I was too soft. That I needed to be tougher or the world would beat the shit out of me. She's not saying that anymore. Now it's all, 'So, so sorry,' and walking on a tightrope, afraid to say something that'll scare me off. I have a feeling Penny ripped her a new asshole or six. But before she started double and triple thinking everything she said, that came out. I was too soft, too afraid, and needed to be tougher. And Sarah was fearless, she always was. I was twelve, she was three. I'm babysitting. She had one of those Big Wheel tricycles, and she'd take it to the top of the driveway and go down, full speed, straight toward the garage…"

"And you were babysitting when she crashed?" Jimmy knows where this story is going, but that doesn't make listening to it any easier.

Tim nods. "Yep. One of the few times he got home before Mom did. She's screaming. There's blood all over the place. She'd split her lip…" And they both know, first and second hand, how a split lip bleeds like crazy. "I'm trying to get her cleaned up, and he comes in, takes one look around, orders me to my room. So up I go, but I can hear him talking about his brave little girl, and I can see him, half an hour later, zooming down the driveway with her, she's shrieking with laughter. Later, after she was asleep, he came to my room and chewed me out for an hour over how I was an irresponsible cunt incapable of keeping a three-year-old under control, and if I couldn't keep her safe, how was I ever going to be of any use to anyone else? How were other men going to depend on me? How was I going to run a ship if I couldn't get a three-year-old to follow my orders? And on and on and on and fucking on.

"I'd been taking care of her on and off, with help and without, since the day she came home from the hospital. I spent more hours alone with her that week than he had in her entire life at that point, but yeah, I was the irresponsible fuckwit who couldn't be entrusted with another life."

Jimmy's rubbing his shoulder, trying to be comforting. "You know, before Breena, I wasn't a church guy. But my family went, and I had some buddies in Sunday School. No one I was really close to, we didn't go to the same school, but there were guys I'd hang out with between the services."

Tim nods, he's familiar with how that worked. He had a few guys like that at his church, too.

"One of them was gay. He came out senior year. The second he turned eighteen, his parents booted him out of the house. And everyone at the church, the grown-ups at least, were all, 'You made the right decision. Can't have a kid like that hanging around. You've got to think of your younger kids,' all this bullshit that boiled down to if only Tom had acted different, if only he'd pulled it together and been the guy his parents wanted him to be, it'd have been all right.

"They were all sanctimonious assholes, Tim, one big circle-jerk of rabid homophobia. Tom couldn't have 'pulled it together.' He couldn't have made himself straight. And it was not his fault his parents and the people around him were scum. And it's not your fault you weren't Captain America or whatever the hell sort of super sailor your parents wanted. It is entirely their fault they couldn't look at the child you were and loved you like you were. And if Sarah was more what they were hoping for, well, Tom's little brother and sister were straight, and none of that changes that his parents and yours are assholes. It's on them, not you, not Tom. Them."

Jimmy smiles at him a little. "That's why it's a job, right? We make these people, and they're gonna be whoever it they are, and it's our job to love and shelter them and help them become the people they want to be, not the people we want them to be."

Tim closes his eyes and leans his head on Jimmy's shoulder for a moment, seeking and taking comfort from his touch. Then takes a deep breath and sits up, away from Jimmy. "What do you think, should I see her again?"

"I think seeing her is going to hurt. But it may be pain you need to go through, like having a bad tooth pulled. I think not seeing and not making a firm decision as to if she's going to be in your life is putting that pain off. Tooth is still bad, it's still festering in there, and you've got to get it out. You're right, ignoring it until you blow up is a bad plan. I think the only thing that's going to fix this on any long term sort of way is making that decision, cut her out or forgive her. And that… I don't know what the answer is to that."

They heard Kelly start to cry, and Tim got up, fast, going to grab her before there was any shot of waking Molly up, but as he headed up, he said to Jimmy, "Neither do I."

Shards To A Whole: Chapter 311

McGee-centric character study/romance. Want to start at the beginning? Click here.


Chapter 311: Pittsburgh Rare


He supposes it's something of a record. Almost five full days. He took the ring off on Tuesday. They'd all seen it by Wednesday. They saw his look and didn't press.

And kept not pressing.

But, with the little glance he sees Ziva shoot to Tim and Jimmy as the three of them head to the men's locker room after bootcamp, he's got a pretty good sense that not pressing is about to end.

Double teamed by Tim and Jimmy is both frustrating and impressive. Impressive because they're handling it well. Frustrating because it's annoying as hell to have two guys nattering away with each other, very much not asking you about what happened so that you took your wedding ring off while talking about wedding anniversaries (Tim's is next week, and the party that acted as Jimmy and Breena's wedding was the second week of November.) and being married and all of that jazz.

But they aren't actually asking. They're just talking to each other. Slowly. With lots of looks at him and breaks in the conversation where, should he so desire, he could, add some information of his own.

"Doing anything special on Sunday?" Jimmy asks Tim, looking at Jethro, and both of them pause, leaving an opening for Gibbs, but he doesn't say anything, so Tim responds. And they just keep doing it.

Finally, having done it all through getting stripped off and their showers, without any useful results, Tim opened his locker, pulled out his boxers, and turns to Gibbs and says, "So, you want us to keep doing this 'Cause we can keep it up until you get home, and then we'll wander down into your basement with you, drink your booze, and just keep doing it."

"All three of the girls have deputized us to do this. We've been told not to come home until we've gotten confirmation that you are at least okay," Jimmy adds, opening his locker.

"I'm fine," Jethro says, pulling his briefs out of his locker.

Tim and Jimmy look at each other, roll their eyes, and then they look back at Gibbs.

"What exactly do you think is going to happen to me if I go home and tell Abby, 'He says he's fine?'"

"Breena's not buying that either," Jimmy says, shaking his head.

"And really, just because she won't jump down your throat about it, does not mean Ziva will be cool. Our ninja will be displeased and take it out on us next week."

"You won't be here next week. And I won't either," Gibbs reminds them. Sunday is Tim's anniversary, and Gibbs will be babysitting. Though, last he checked, Tim thought everything was starting up well after bootcamp ended.

"I am not going one on one against her if I have failed to have gotten the information she wants. So, shall we keep chattering away, waiting for you to volunteer the information, or do we go out, get some drinks, and just talk?" Jimmy wraps with.

"Girls don't expect us home until later. Dinner's on me. Whatever you want." Tim says as he buttons his jeans.

"You should be getting home. Abby doesn't need to be spending all day alone with a sick baby."

Tim shakes his head, reaching for his shirt. "Nope. Not getting out of it that easy. We already had that conversation. Ziva and Tony are heading over to my place after she gets dressed. Abby's getting some down time. They're getting some babysitting practice. We're interrogating you for details." Tim smiles.

Gibbs grits his teeth and sighs, pulling his t-shirt over his head. The downside of a family full of cops is that none of them are good with just letting mysteries be, and they've got the planning skills to dig deep and find out what's going on.

"Fine. But you two are going to be useful."

"We're trying to be," Jimmy adds, zipping his fly.

"Useful to me."

"That's what he meant."

For the most part, woodworking is soothing for Gibbs. He likes the whole thing: the tactile experience, the feel, smell, and sound of metal shaping wood. The repetitive, yet focusing, motions. Put that all together and it's a very good place for him.

Stripping the finish off of wood on the other hand… Not his idea of fun at all. Dousing wood in nasty smelling chemicals that you have to keep yourself covered head to toe to prevent it from touching your skin does not make his day.

So, if the wonder twins want to pick his brain, they can also strip his wood.

"Is that you bed?" Tim asks, very surprised at what they saw when they got into the basement.

Gibbs nods.

Jimmy steps closer to the pile of beams laid out between two sawhorses. "You took off your ring and disassembled your bed?" Taking of the ring makes a certain amount of sense to Jimmy, the bed is leaving him boggled.

Gibbs nods again, and Tim adds, "It's the bed he built her."

"Oh."

Gibbs tilts his head toward his workbench. There's a sketch of a new bed on it. Like the rest of Gibbs stuff, it's fairly restrained. Like the original, it's mostly straight edges and square corners, but there's more detail work here, showing how he's grown as a woodworker in 36 years, beveled edges on the headboard, intricate legs, and when he finds the right piece of wood, he'll make his own veneer for the main part of the headboard.

He explains this to the guys, who are following along as well as two guys who know basically nothing about woodworking can. He wraps up with, "It's time to rebuild."

Both of them nod. They may not have gotten what precisely a hidden dovetail was, let alone how Gibbs was going to make them, but rebuilding is a concept they both understand.

"What do you want us to do?" Jimmy asks.

He picks up the bottle of solvent and tosses gloves at them. "Gotta get the finish off of these."

They're nodding along, gloving up, getting ready for this when Gibbs opened the bottle and Tim's lungs decided that they weren't going to play along.

"I'm on dinner," Tim says with a wheeze.

The other two stare at him.

"Can't do this," he says, heading up the stairs. "Abby doesn't need a sick kid and husband at home. Stay down here much longer and I'll have a full on asthma attack."

Jimmy and Gibbs nod at him, and he heads up.

Jimmy surprises Gibbs by not saying much of anything. He's just steadily working away on the wood, dabbing on the solvent the way he showed him.

"Thought you guys were supposed to be cross-examining me."

"Tim told me it was your anniversary. You took your ring off. You're rebuilding the bed you built her. I tell the girls that, they'll know you're okay. That you're doing something healthy with your grief. Don't need to press more than that. Though, if you want to talk…" Jimmy gestures to indicate his ears work just fine.

Gibbs doesn't say much. They keep working. A few more minutes pass and Jimmy says, "I've been thinking about this… How to work with someone who isn't Ducky. I know it's not as soon as you heading off, but one day he won't be down there anymore. It'll be me and whoever I hire."

"Got your own stories."

"Not sure I want to spend all day telling them. Not sure I want just quiet, either. I think part of why he talks all the time is to help fill the room. Too easy to just blend in with the dead if it's just silent. A voice, even your own, helps keep your mind on life."

Gibbs tilts his head, adding more solvent to his rag; he can understand that. "His mom told stories. Knew everything about everything, and she told them all the time. Used to say they were a clan of Bards and historians. They told the tales that made men immortal."

"You knew her before she started to slip away?"

Victoria Mallard, circa 1949ish.He shakes his head. "Met her four-five times. And the last few times she didn't remember who I was from time to time. Remember Ducky talking about her."

"Keeping the stories alive. I guess that'll pass down to Tim."

"You've got stories, too."

"He's better at telling them."

"Doesn't mean you can't."

Jimmy smiles at him, and Gibbs starts to wonder if he just talked himself into a trap. "Nope. It doesn't. Of course, just because your best friend tells the stories, doesn't mean we don't want to hear yours, too."
Gibbs shakes his head. "Smartass."

Jimmy smiles again, even brighter. "I try. So, are you okay? This really moving forward or a new layer of hiding?"

"Hope not." Gibbs pats the beam under his hand. "Was the cross piece, one of them," he points to the other one that matches it. "Gonna cut it in half, here." He gestures to the midpoint of the beam. "Then split it in quarters." He points to the legs of his current bed, which are propped against the wall. "Will cut two inch-thick sections and an eight-inch section out of those, take the corners off, and fit the quarters into them. Glue it into a solid block. The eight-inch piece'll get drilled for pegs, and that'll connect into the mattress supports. Those supports and the pegs'll be made from new wood."

"The memories and history are still there, but changed into something beautiful, something that supports a new life?" Jimmy looks at the pieces in front of him and starts backtracking. "Not that the old one wasn't beautiful before, but…"

"I got ya, Jimmy. And, yeah. It's easier to build it with my hands than say it."

"Where's the ring?"

"With her."

Jimmy touches Jon's diamond on his medic-alert bracelet. "Are you going to keep anything to mark it, her?"

"Sleep on this bed, live in this house, sailing the boat with her name. Probably enough, maybe too much."

"Naming the boat after her… That's you and her heading off into the sunset together?"

Gibbs nods. That was the idea.

"Maybe naming it after her, especially if you're thinking that you might want to sail off with someone else at some point, maybe that's not such a good plan."

That wasn't a thought that had hit Gibbs, but hearing it, there is a certain logic to it. "Been thinking of her as Shannon since before I started building her."

"Yep. But it's been… four years? Lot's changed since then, though, right?"

"True."

"Come January, you're not going to just vanish off the face of the planet, right?"

"Didn't intend to." Which is the closest he's come to admitting to any of them that that did used to be the plan.

"So, maybe she needs a new name." Jimmy can see Gibbs thinking about that, so he doesn't press. A few minutes later, as they flip the beam they're working on over, to get the underside wiped down with solvent, he does ask, "You find out what Franks was doing? Tony and Ziva aren't talking."

Gibbs nods.

"You're not talking, either."

"Can't tell you for the same reason he couldn't tell me."

"Oh, god. How illegal is it?"

Very says Gibbs' expression.

"Drugs?"

"No." Quit asking.

And Jimmy may not, as he said, be psychic, but he can read that loud and clear. "Fine. Are you going to start doing it?"

Gibbs doesn't answer. He does glare slightly.

"I'll leave it alone."

A few seconds later, they hear Tim yell down, "Jimmy, where are your keys?"

"In my pocket." He puts his rag down, and strips off his gloves. "Why do you need them?"

"Got the fire started, thought it might be a good plan to buy some food to cook on it."

"Good point." He heads to the base of the stairs and tosses his keys up to Tim, who caught them tidily.

"Back in a bit. Fire's lit, got the grate closed." Jimmy nods, and a few minutes after that, they hear his car pull out of Gibbs' driveway.

Jimmy heads back, snaps the gloves back on, and says, "Okay, last thing about whatever it is Franks was up to, keep good notes if you want Tim, Tony, and I to pick it up in twenty year."

"Maybe it won't be necessary then."

Jimmy's eyebrows shoot up, and Gibbs shakes his head again, not willing to say more.

Gibbs is better at cowboy cookery than Tim. In that he's been doing it for decades, this is not much of a surprise.

So, yes the steaks are simultaneously somewhat less rare than Tim or Jimmy like (black around the edges) and a bit more rare than they like (quietly mooing in the middle), but they are steaks, and the fire's still burning, so getting the middle bit cooked more isn't that much of an issue, and he absolutely nailed the greens.

(Of course, the fact that Gibbs thinks this is the best spinach in the history of spinach may have something to do with the fact that it's kale and chard. Or possibly that Tim cooked them in lots of butter, garlic, and salt, and then added a little cider vinegar to them. Either way, this was the most enthusiastic they'd ever seen Gibbs about a vegetable.)

They're sitting near the fireplace. Tim and Jimmy close to the flames, trying to get their steaks a bit less rare. Gibbs is further back, sitting on the floor, leaning back against the sofa, happily eating away.

Jimmy's got a piece of steak on his fork, charred top and bottom, luke-warm, almost purple center. He's toasting it over the fire, trying to get it to rare without burning it any more. "So, is next week's bootcamp learning how to cook over a fire?"

Gibbs sniggers at that, chewing, looking like he's enjoying this quite a bit. "Don't like your steak black and blue?"

Neither of the guys know what that means.

"Pittsburgh rare?" Gibbs adds, seeing that means nothing to them, either. He stares at Jimmy, confused. "He grew up in California, so I know he doesn't get it. But you're from western PA, right?"

"I went to college there. Wasn't eating much steak then. Grew up in Wilmington, Delaware."

Gibbs nods at that, tucking it into his mental map of Jimmy. "Burn the hell out of it on a really high flame and keep the middle rare."

"People do this to steaks intentionally where you're from?"

Gibbs nods. "Douse 'em in melted butter first, stick 'em over a high flame, fwoosh. Black and blue."

"Really?" Tim had been feeling pretty embarrassed about the steaks. They'd been sizzling along, looking fine, smelling great. He went into the kitchen to start on the greens, and as they were cooking down nicely, he started to smell char and by the time he got them flipped they were black on the side closest to the flame.

"Mom made 'em like this. She said that the steelworkers would take cuts of beef to work, pop 'em on the cooling steel for a sec, flip 'em, and that was lunch."

Jimmy's staring at him, not buying it. "You sure that wasn't an accident? Sounds like the kind of story my mom would tell when she accidentally messed something up in the kitchen. Spaghetti's still crunchy in the middle, 'Oh, that's the way they eat it in Italy.' Spaghetti's cooked to soup, 'That's how they do it in France.'"

"Saying my mom couldn't cook?"

Tim's got Danger! Back away! all over his face.

"I'm sure she was a great cook. Just, you ever see Pittsburgh rare or black and blue anywhere else?"

Gibbs laughs. "She was a weird cook. She'd put chocolate sauce on apple pie or ketchup on scrambled eggs. Pittsburgh rare is a real thing, not like 'French' spaghetti soup."

"Ketchup on eggs?" Tim asks, that's not just weird to him, it's revolting.

"Uncle Ron came home from World War II and ate ketchup on everything. He'd put it on oatmeal if you let him. Sort of like how MREs all come with Tabasco. Everything came with ketchup then. She was seven when he came home, and idolized him, did everything he did, so for a while she put ketchup on everything, too. Ketchup on eggs, she liked."

Tim's shaking his head, eating a less raw piece of his steak.

"'French spaghetti soup' only happened once or twice. Most of the time dinner was okay. But she did like those god-awful pour canned mushroom soup on top of canned tuna, frozen peas, and noodles and bake for ten hours casseroles."

Both Tim and Gibbs wince at that.

"Jello salads," Gibbs says. "No dinner was complete without some sort of jello with all sorts of weird stuff floating in it. Orange jello with chunks of carrots, apples, and raisins. That was always part of Thanksgiving."

Jimmy and Tim look at each other. Tim says, "Doesn't sound too bad."

"The carrots and apples were hard and crunchy, size of a dime."

"Oh," Jimmy says.

"Red white and blue Jello for Fourth of July. Cherry and lime Jello for Christmas, eggnog jello on top. Pink and yellow and blue Jello eggs for Easter. Name a holiday, and we had Jello for it."

"Labor Day." Jimmy says.

"Whatever the pink stuff was with watermelon and strawberry chunks, Cool Whip on top."

"Your mom loved Jello."

"Yeah, she did."

"Baskin Robbins," Jimmy says. "We had one five blocks from our apartment. Friday nights in the summer, Mom'd make hot dogs on the little grill we had on the back patio." He looks at the steak on his plate. "Actually, they were usually cooked pretty close to this. Then we'd walk down to the Baskin Robbins and get ice cream. Summer break's ten weeks long, so one year, fourth grade, fifth, something like that, we decided we'd try all 31 flavors." Jimmy smiles at that. "Each get two scoops, and try all of each other's as well. Clark let us down, he kept getting the same four flavors, but we still made it."

"Tim?" Jethro asks. They've been talking about family food memories, but besides listening, he's not adding anything.

Tim shakes his head. "Wasn't a big deal for us. When I was little, it was mostly just me and Mom. So, sandwiches, take out, McDonald's playland some nights. By the time I was ten, Sarah was a baby, and we'd split cooking. Nothing special, just enough calories and vitamins to keep us going. Only time dinner was ever a big deal was when The Admiral was home, and I didn't cook those nights. Didn't eat much, either. Gran was a 'good, plain' cook, which was code for well-done everything cooked with salt and pepper and boiled veggies with butter or bacon. She could bake though. Good pound cakes and biscuits. Penny didn't learn to cook until she was in her sixties. She got back from traveling one time, and had all these ideas she wanted to show us. I remember that."

"Any of them good?" Jimmy asks.

"Probably. I was fourteen and lived on a diet of white bread peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, soda, microwave pizza, my own cooking, and fast food. Salt and pepper was the extent of my skills with seasoning. I remember being mildly horrified by anything she tried to spring on us. However, I had mastered spaghetti by then, and never served it as soup."

Jimmy snorts at that.

"How about Shannon, what was her special thing?" Tim asks.

Gibbs smiles, looking at the fireplace, and waits a beat or two, until they've got the kind of steaks he makes on there in mind. "Who'd you think taught me how to do that?"

"Wasn't the Marines?" Jimmy asks.

"Or Boy Scouts?" Tim adds. Even he got the cooking badge, so he's sure Gibbs had to have gotten it, too.

"No one gives a pile of Marines or Boy Scouts decent steaks. They'd kill 'em. Cook 'em like Jimmy's mom's hotdogs."

Jimmy's eyeballing Tim, the steaks sitting between them, Tim again. Tim pokes him in the knee with his foot.

On the beach."Shannon's family liked to camp. She and her mom believed that being miles away from a stove was no excuse for making a bad meal. She was even better with fish. When we lived in California, we'd spend long weekends at the beach, cook 'em less than a hundred feet from where we caught them. Doesn't matter what it is, catch it, gut it, cook it over a driftwood fire, finish it up with s'mores. That's gonna be a good night."

Jimmy nods along with that.

"Did that once, with my grandparents," Tim says. "Hadn't thought of it in years." He watches the fire, sorting through the memories, trying to place them. "Would have been little. Sarah wasn't with us, yet." He rubs his eyes, thinking more. "Dad and Pop caught the fish. Dad built the fire, really big and high, probably not great for cooking on but it looked awesome. Spent the day fishing and playing in the surf. Might have been clams… Are clams an east coast thing? I remember a big pot, so something must have gone in that pot. But we were with Gran and Pop, so that meant California, not the east coast." Neither of the other two answer, letting Tim talk. Both of them getting an idea of how young 'little' had to be if Tim was referring to his father as 'Dad.' "Built this huge sandcastle. Walls, ramparts, moats, more walls, towers… Surf got it eventually, but it had to work hard to get it. I don't remember eating the fish. Probably did, get yelled at for wasting food if you didn't eat it, and I don't remember yelling. I do remember the marshmallows." He smiles at that image. "Pop was holding me around the waist, making sure I didn't get too close to the fire, showing me how to keep rotating the marshmallow or it'd catch fire. Then my mom just stuck hers right into the flames, and up it went, she let it burn for a few seconds, blew it out, and popped it in her mouth, grinning at him, teasing him about how much better they were charred."

"And thus we learn how Tim learned to cook over an open flame."

Tim rolls his eyes at Jimmy. "That was a good night. And marshmallows do taste better gently browned with salty driftwood smoke."

Gibbs is nodding in agreement. "Three, four years, when they're all potty-trained and down to one nap a day we'll find a place on the coast and do that."

Jimmy smiles at him. "Already got a place. It's on the water. Four bedrooms. Don't even need to wait for them to get potty-trained, never have to be more than two hundred feet from a convenient changing table. Ed and Jeannie's place in the Outer Banks is ready and waiting for little girls to come and play. Ziva and Tony manage to not be really pregnant this summer, and we can head down."

"Remember what Leon said…" Tim adds.

Jimmy shrugs. "By this summer you'll run one department, I'll have another, Abby'll have a third, Tony and Ziva'll have the MCRT and we'll all have seconds in command. Won't be like the lab shuts down when Abby leaves, or MCRT can't investigate. Cybercrime'll go without you for a day or two. And yeah, I'd need to get up there pretty quick, if someone dies, but that's not as big a deal as having the investigative branch, the lab, and the morgue all shut down."

Tim nods, that's a pretty good point. Jimmy looks at Gibbs and asks, "You got more than one fishing pole?"

"I will by this summer."

Next

Shards To A Whole: Chapter 310

McGee-centric character study/romance. Want to start at the beginning? Click here.


Chapter 310: October 23, 2015


At 11:23 on October 23, 2012 McGee and Abby were making love for the first time in a little less than a decade.

They were in her apartment, on the floor, right in front of the front door, having a very good time.

At 11:23 on October 23, 2013 Tim and Abby were sitting in his car, pulled over on the side of an empty road in Kansas, listening to the song Abby had picked for Tim to celebrate the anniversary he thought was the next week.

She snuggled in his lap as they listened to the music, cold fall air whirling around them, as stars undimmed by the lights of man gleamed overhead.

At 11:23 on October 23, 2014 the soon to be Mr. and Mrs. McGee were in bed, just having finished making love in their new home for the first time. He was spooned up behind her, hand on her belly, both of them wondering if they had just made a baby.

And, at 11: 23 on October 23, 2015 Mom was nursing an intensely fussy baby girl while Dad googled ear infections, hoping there was something they could do to make her more comfortable because, with the exception of when Kelly has Abby's breast in her mouth, she's screaming bloody murder and all the baby Tylenol in the world does not seem to be helping.

At all.

And while it is true that if you were to ask either of them if this was how they had hoped to celebrate their third anniversary, the answer would be no, that this is, at its heart, the essence of love.

They are both exhausted, dark rings under their eyes (Kelly was up all last night and all day), crabby, Abby is god awful sore, wanting to wince every time Kelly sucks because she's been nursing for close to an hour and a half now, and no one's nipples were designed to take that, but they are still working together, still supporting one another, and still trying to comfort the person their love made.

Zzzz...And yes, there is sarcasm and snarkiness here, and short tempers, but when Abby can't take another suck, she hands Kelly to Tim, and he takes her in his arms gently, letting her suck on his finger. (She's less than thrilled about that, but she still seems to prefer it to the pacifier.) He kicks back the recliner sofa, props Kelly on his stomach and chest, letting her suck away, and Abby snuggles into him, and both of them catch a few minutes of sleep while Kelly chews on her Daddy's finger.

Eight minutes later, when Jimmy texted them back with Baby Orajel, could be early teething or sore throat to go with the ear infection, they were overjoyed to try it, and see Kelly fall into an almost immediate sleep.

So, for their third anniversary, the now married, now parents, now Mr. and Mrs. McGee, got to sleep, both of them, for a solid three and a half hours.

And by that point, that was all the celebration either of them wanted.

Next

Shards To A Whole: Chapter 309

McGee-centric character study/romance. Want to start at the beginning? Click here.


Chapter 309: Goodbye


"It's tomorrow, isn't it?" Rachel asks as they're wrapping up the session.

"Yeah." He doesn't need clarification that they're talking about his wedding anniversary. Only one big thing happening tomorrow, and the advent of yet another Tuesday isn't it.

"What are you going to do?"

"Don't know."

She doesn't believe that, but his evasion has her interested. "What do you usually do?"

He shrugs at that. It's been a while since he hasn't wanted to answer her questions but this one's… not so much personal, though it is, it's more that he'd prefer she didn't think he's gone fully bonkers.

But she's learning his different looks and silences, and knows that this is something he wants to say, but hasn't worked himself up to yet, so she pokes a little further. "Don't have a usual, or don't want to tell me?"

He half-smiles, sips his coffee. "I've got a usual. Sounds crazy."

"You're already talking to a shrink," Rachel says with a gentle smile.

"It's straight jacket crazy."

She raises one eyebrow. "I doubt that intensely. No one wraps you in a straight jacket unless you're a danger to yourself or others. Are you going to do anything dangerous tomorrow? More so than usual." After all, he's a cop, a day at the office might be awfully dangerous.

"No." He shakes his head. "We got married a bit before sunset, and… usually, around then, I see her. We talk."

Rachel's considerably less surprised by that than he was expecting her to be. "Does it happen when you aren't alone?"

He tries to remember. He doesn't take the day off, but he also does his best to be home by sunset. Hasn't always worked, but it's probably been a while since it didn't. "I usually am, but if not, then no, it doesn't happen. She waits until I'm on my own."

"What do you talk about?"

"Stupid stuff?" He's not sure how to characterize what they talk about. But it's not… important… on any real level. Last year he told her about Tim and Abby's wedding. She liked the idea of him dressed up in the morning suit, and really liked him giving away the bride.

"The weather?"

"Nah. Not that stupid. Just… stuff. Whatever's going on. The kind of things you store up over a day or so to tell your spouse. Dinnertime talk. Always wraps the same. I tell her I miss her. She tells me to move on. That we love each other." There's a sad smile on his face. "Just stupid, everyday stuff."

"Talk about Kelly?"

"No." They don't. And he doesn't know if that's because it'll break the illusion in his mind of Shannon, prove she's not really there, or if it'll just make him too sad.

"Do you see Kelly, too?"

"Rarely. Sometimes on the anniversary of their death. Sometimes when I've been close to dead." He watches Rachel for another moment. "Why don't you think that's insane?"

"Jethro, one of the exercises we often have clients do is talk to people who aren't there. Say the things they need to say. That you're doing it on your own isn't a problem."

"I'm telling you I see ghosts. That's not a problem?"

She flashes him a get over yourself look. "One of my clients is a wizard. Full on magic. Summons angels, likes to talk to them about the secrets of the universe. And you know what, I am completely indifferent to the truth value of his magical skills or the existence of his angels because that's one of the aspects of his life that's functioning and makes him happy. And as long as your ghosts are also trying to point you in a healthy direction, like Shannon encouraging you to move on, I have no trouble with you chatting with them. Ghosts in and of themselves aren't a problem. Ghosts encouraging you to do stupid things, that's a problem. Anything like that happening?"

"No."

"Then enjoy your visit with Shannon."

"That my homework?"

"Yes." And he can tell, by her smile, that like with enjoying some time with Diane, she expects this to take him deeper than just a pleasant evening.

"How are you going to get what you need if you can't let go?" "It's time, Gibbs." "You need to let go." "You can't get what you need if you're still clinging onto me."

She's said it a lot of different ways, lot of different times. At least every year for the last five years. Said it to him when he was with Hollis. He doesn't think she said it before then, but that's at least ten years now.

"It's time, Gibbs." He's not sure if that's her, or if he's saying it to himself. Either way, when they quit work, he shakes his head at Tim, who invited him over for dinner, gets into his truck, and begins to drive away from his home.

He hasn't been back here in years.

They aren't here. Not really. Names on a stone and bones don't matter, not in any real sense, but he doesn't have a better place to go in mind, so this will do.

He sits down, back against the tombstone Shannon and Kelly share. There's one empty space on it, for him, and sooner or later, and these days he's gotten to the point where he's consistently sure it'll be later, and more importantly, he's also hoping it will be later, Tim, Tony, and Jimmy will carry him here and lay him to rest with his girls.

He feels her before he sees her.

That's always been true. Was true the first time he saw her. There was just a sense that something, someone earth-shakingly important was nearby, and it drew his eyes, made him look.

He saw the red hair, fine build, and warm smile and fell in love before he even knew her name.

Her hand lands on his shoulder, and he grasps it, squeezing gently, not saying anything while she sits beside him.

"Been a long time since you've come here," Shannon says to him, letting his hand go and resting her head against his shoulder.

"Yep."

"Don't know if I like you coming here to remember us. Home is better, or the beach, or somewhere we were together."

He nods and sighs.

The sun is setting and it's starting to get cold. He points to the left, where a scarlet maple filters the sunset, the reason he picked here. "This time thirty-six years ago you were standing in front of a tree like that, getting your picture taken."

"Oh." She looks over at it. This one is bigger, one of many trees, not a lone ornamental in the churchyard. "Why here, why not the church in Stillwater?"

"They remodeled in 2006. The tree's gone. So's the church, really. It's glass and steel now."

"Blech." She sticks out her tongue, and then smiles at him.

That pulls a smile out of him. Emanuel Episcopal Church had been made of the local stone. Quarried less than five miles from the site. It was old, always a little damp and cold, no matter how hot it got outside, the gray granite slowly going black and greenish with time. It built it almost two hundred years. But it was old, and damp, and cold, and growing black mold, and didn't attract new young people, and stone was hard to renovate so that it met with the OSHA codes, so they ripped it down and built it up new and shiny.

She takes his left hand in hers and strokes his wedding ring. "Putting this on you was one of the happiest moments of my life."

"Mine, too."

"But it's time to take it off. You've spent twice as long mourning me as you did married to me."

"I know." And he does. He feels the weight of those years very intensely right now.

"And this last year, you've done a good job getting yourself right. You're finally letting the anger go and filling up that hole with love."

He's looking at her fingers stroking his. "I miss you."

"I know." She's staring him in the eyes, her expression soft, tinged with sorrow.

"I'm trying." He smiles sadly at her, and she strokes his face, leaning in to press a gentle kiss to his lips.

"I know that, too. And you're succeeding." Her face is earnest and encouraging. "You were meant to be a family man. Being a dad and granddad, it's good for you."

"Yeah, it is."

Shannon shifts around so she was kneeling on the ground in front of him, between his outstretched legs. She holds both of his hands in hers, and stares into his eyes.

"You were meant to be something else, too."

He nods, knowing that the heart of the family is husband and wife.

"All I ever wanted was for you to be happy, Gibbs."

"I know. It's all I ever wanted for you, too."

She squeezes his hands. "You made me so happy. And you can make me happier. You're ready; it's time to move on."

He cups her face in his hands. "How can I be ready for this?"

"Because you are. Because it's time." She shakes her head. "It's more than time. Because the hate and the anger and the guilt are almost gone, you just have to let them go. Because I want you to remember me and smile, not cry. Because I want to stop being your pain and go back to being your joy." There are tears streaming down her face as she kisses the ball of his thumb.

"You are."

"Not yet. But I will be."

Gibbs slips the knife he always carries off of his belt, and digs a shallow hole over Shannon's grave, then places the ring in it. She smiles, still crying, as he does it, helping him replace the dirt and grass over his wedding band.

"Will I see you again?" He doesn't wipe away the tears that are streaming down his face.

She shakes her head. "Not for a good long time. Got a lot of life left in you, Gibbs, you gotta go live it."

He's quiet, looking at the hole, feeling the lack of her very intensely.

"Gibbs…" He feels both of her hands on his shoulders. She's standing behind him, and he turns to look up at her. "I've never had any problem with sharing you. I shared you with the Marines. I shared your love with Kelly. One of these days, you'll bring another woman here and you'll tell her about me, and it will be okay. You'll love her, and she'll love you, and it will be okay."

He nods, unable to speak.

Shannon bends down, kisses his forehead, and vanishes.

He spends a long time staring at the darkening sky, crying for what was lost, fearing what is new, but when he stands, he feels purged of anger, of guilt, and ready to go on.

It's well after dark when he gets home, and like with burying the ring, he knows what he needs to do.

He goes upstairs, takes his mattress and box spring off the bed, and begins to take it apart. Carefully, slowly, he knows he'll save the wood. Won't use all of it, and he'll redesign, but at least some of the new bed will be made with this wood. The main support structures, probably. The big beams, the legs. That seems fitting to him.

His fingers linger on the oak, drift along it.

It'll never really be goodbye. Shannon and Kelly were so much of his life, so much of who he was and who he is, and that will never change. They're the bedrock foundation of Gibbs.

But it's time to build something new on that foundation.

It takes an hour for him to get it completely disassembled and then all of the pieces down to the basement.

And from there he spends the rest of the night sketching, working on a new bed, something that remembers who he was, honors it, but isn't trapped by it.

In the morning, there's no call out, another paperwork day. He can feel all four of his teammates staring at his hand, seeing the missing ring. He shakes his head. He'll tell them about it, explain, sooner or later, but not yet.

Right now, this needs to be just his.

And right now, they aren't pressing him on it, which he appreciates.

Next

Shards To A Whole: Chapter 308

McGee-centric character study/romance. Want to start at the beginning? Click here.


Chapter 308: Perfume


Somehow, after Molly was born, the occasional Saturday morning at the Farmers' Market got added to the things they did with the Palmers on a semi-regular basis. Maybe once, maybe twice a month. It depends a lot on caseload and how rammy the babies are. (Might have something to do with the Farmers' Market being open early on Saturdays and babies not grasping the concept of sleeping in on the weekend.)

And, while it's true that Tim's been aware of the fact that DC has a really awesome Farmers' Market, it wasn't the sort of thing he ever bothered with. But once it got added to the routine, he's come to look forward to seeing what will be there.

Since October 10th dawned absolutely glorious, bright blue sky, highs in the mid-sixties, leaves in full autumn fire, he was supremely unsurprised to see: Farmers' Market? Half an hour? Pop up on his phone from Jimmy.

And in half an hour, they were getting Kelly's car seat into Palmer's van, and another half hour after that they were strolling around, looking at the harvest, artisan crafts, and all sort of yummy things, feeling pretty relaxed and happy.

(Well, Tim and Abby are pretty relaxed. Kelly's just chilling in her stroller. Jimmy and Breena are kind of nervous. Molly objected vehemently to riding in her stroller, so she's on foot and wants to touch everything.)

But for the most part, they're just sort of ambling along, snagging things like apples, jars of heirloom popcorn, fresh breads, greens, mushrooms, talking with each other.

"What do you think of this?" Abby asks Tim.

Tim's not really paying attention. He's looking at a stall selling wind chimes, half-thinking maybe they should get some; the front porch is kind of bare-looking, half-pondering the fact that he still doesn't have an anniversary present for her, and both of them are getting closer and closer.

"Tim?"

"Huh?"

She thrusts her wrist under his nose. "What do you think of this?"

He inhales and fucking hell, what is that?

It's deep and rich and… and… he thinks it's sandalwood and vanilla and maybe jasmine or something floral and some sort of musk, maybe some leather and smoke, there's a tickle of something spicy in the back, and it's just… it's everything perfume is supposed to be. The ads always act like perfume is bottled sex and yeah, it's okay, and there are a lot of scents he likes, but that gotta grab the woman wearing it and eat her alive, nope, he's never felt that.

Not from a perfume. Not until now.

Which isn't to say that there aren't scents that get to him like that. But the kind of scent that grabs him by the balls and yells SEX at him usually is a sex scent. Her pussy, wet, God yes!, that hits him so hard. His saliva along with that. That's a scent that gets him hard. The way his hands smell after he's gone down on her, when they're wet with her cum, and his saliva, and usually some of his musk, too, that definitely gets to him, gets him so hard he'll ache. The way her face smells after she's gone down on him. That mix of his semen on her breath, sure that's usually a too little too late sort of thing, but it gets to him. His semen on her pussy. Also, generally, too little, too late, but for a second round, that one really gets to him.

But whatever the hell it is they sell for three hundred dollars an ounce and stick in pretty blown glass bottles, not so much.

But this, whatever this is, on her arm, that's getting his attention in a very good way. In a wanna-push-you-up-against-the-nearest-stationary-object-and-get-it-on-right-here-and-now sort of way. In an he's awfully glad he's not wearing his kilt sort of way.

He's probably staring at her with that hit over the head hasn't quite managed to come to yet look, because she smiles, giggles, and says, "So you like it?"

He nods. "Oh yeah."

"How much?" she asks with a saucy grin, licking her lips.

He steps closer to her and says very quietly, finger tips lightly stroking her thigh just below where her gray and navy plaid skirt ends, "If we were in a club, I'd already be balls deep in you. As it is, I'm counting the minutes to naptime."

That got another smile and a teasing kiss, as she cupped her hand on his cheek, holding her wrist just below his nose, and he inhaled deeply, again, then titled his head to kiss her wrist, biting gently where her pulse throbbed.

"The booth behind us." She tilts her head toward it. "It's called Thousand and One Nights. My purse is in the car. Buy it for me?"

"Yes!"

Finding the booth took about nine seconds. Finding the right scent took longer. There has to be at least one hundred different blends here, all of them with identical labels. But, fortunately they're alphabetical and it didn't take him long to find it among the Ts.

It's a tiny little amber bottle. "Five-fifty," says the girl behind the display. Like Abby, she's probably not as young as she looks, her eyes are just too adult for her blue-haired, teenager-ish aesthetic.

But the price is right. Really right. Hell, five-fifty, and he'll buy it out. He takes the other three bottles and hands the woman a fifty.

She just stares at him, shakes her head slowly, and hands him the fifty back. "Five hundred and fifty dollars."

He just looks (eyes on the verge of falling out of his head) at the bottle. It's the size of his thumb. According to the label there's only half an ounce of perfume in there. (He can hear Jimmy laughing behind him.)

"What's it made out of, gold?"

The lady at the booth looks amused at that. "Most of the ingredients actually cost more, per ounce, than gold does. And even if they didn't, the skill necessary to put them together to make something that smells like that is worth more than gold."

He hears the pride of ownership in her voice. "You make this?"

She nods. "I make all of them."

He smiles at her, hoping he didn't insult her with the gold crack. "You're right about that. That's beyond delicious." He puts the other three bottles back, very carefully, and gets his credit card out. "Don't suppose you ever have sales?"

"If you give me your email address, I'll put you on my mailing list. I do, on occasion, have sales."

He hands her one of his Thom Gemcity cards. (This didn't seem like anything he wanted going to his computer at NCIS.) She reads it and looks up at him, scrutinizing.

"How many twitter followers do you have?"

"I don't know. Let me check." He gets his phone out and looks, thinking that's a really bizarre question. "Forty-three thousand four hundred and twelve."

She thinks about that for a tenth of a second. "Mention it in a tweet and the second bottle's free."

And then her question made a whole lot of sense. Better advertising than any five hundred dollars could buy. "Done." He took a quick picture of the bottle, making sure the label, which had the name of the scent, the company, and their website on it, was clear, and then sent out: Anniversary present for my love.

She tucks the second bottle into a small, padded box, and put both of them in his bag. "Enjoy."

"I intend to."

She looks to Jimmy, who's just been standing slightly behind him, watching the exchange, smirking at Tim, until he realized Tim was actually going to buy it, and then looking stunned. "Anything I can help you with?"

"Got anything I don't need a second mortgage to afford?"

"You got forty thousand twitter followers?" she asks with a smile.

"If I had twitter, all six of my followers would follow him, too."

She smiles at Jimmy and points to the left side of the booth where there are even tinier vials. "Two point five milliliter vials. They all run less than fifty, and for most people that's about twenty or so applications. Or you can use it to scent a bottle of moisturizer, massage oil, shampoo or something like that."

"So you mean he's got enough for the rest of his wife's life?"

She nods. "Pretty much." Then looks at Tim, realizing how that may have sounded. "You can swap one for another scent if you want."

He shakes his head, holding one hand up. "I'm good with this."

"Okay. Store it in a cool, dark place. As long as it stays in that bottle it'll be fine, and that particular scent gets better with age. In about three years, it'll knock your socks off."

Given how he's reacting to it already, the idea of better is staggering. "Good to know."

Ten minutes later they're wandering back toward the girls. (Jimmy had gotten two little vials for Breena, both sweeter, more floral scents. Tim thinks of them as being 'pink' scents. They're pretty. He likes them. Doesn't have a visceral reaction on any level to them.)

"Can't believe you actually bought that," Jimmy says, smiling.

Tim shrugs. "Got an anniversary present now."

"And then some."

"Got two of them in one week, this should do."

"Two?" Jimmy's expression is curious. He knows one is coming up, but isn't sure what the other is.

"Second first date was the 23rd, wedding's the 1st."

"Good point."

"What'd you do for your first anniversary?"

Jimmy smirks a little at Tim, and shifts his eyes to Breena, about five stalls up sitting next to Abby on a bench, Molly in her lap. She's wearing a pretty maxi dress in pink and coral, and a white cardigan, very pregnant with his third child, sharing a muffin with his first child, and that smirk morphed into a genuine smile. "Made Molly. Maybe. Probably. Like to think we did, you know?"

Tim smiles at that, nodding, he knows. Then Jimmy looks at him, does a bit of quick math, remembers one of his pre-wedding conversations with Tim, and says, "Same thing you did, too."

"Probably. Technically that was our second anniversary. I missed the first, thought it was a week later than it was."

"Oops. Think you may have made up for it this year."

"Maybe. So besides baby-making sex, you guys do anything?"

"Dinner, movie, ate the top of the cake we missed because we spent our wedding day in the hospital waiting to hear if Ducky was going to live, checking our phones every ten second to see who they'd found at NCIS and if they were all right."

Tim sighs. "I forgot how exciting your wedding day was."

Jimmy rolls his eyes. "Try traumatic."

"Yeah."

"Puts for better or worse in context."

Tim nods. By that point they were back to the girls. Abby's smiling up at him, looking excited. "You get it?"

He takes the little box out and shakes it (gently) at her. "I really hope you like this."

She looks mildly confused by that, and he shakes his head, smiling.

"I get any treats?" Breena asks.

Jimmy smiles at her, looking satisfied. "Maybe. Did you want a treat?"

"When don't I want treats?"

"Treats!" Molly says, excited.

"You've already got one," Breena tells her daughter, breaking off another piece of the muffin and giving it to her.

Jimmy sits next to her on the bench. "Close your eyes."

Breena did, smiling.

"Okay, this one." He opens one of the vials, wafting it under her nose. "Or this one?" Then he repeats it with the second one. (Abby leans over, sniffing both as well, nodding at Jimmy, giving him a thumbs up, approving of his choices. He nods at her, pleased.)

Breena's grinning. "They're both great. How about the second one?"

Jimmy covers the top with his forefinger, flicks it upside down, letting the fluid touch his skin, and then gently drags his forefinger down her throat, kissing the other side, and then kissing the top of Molly's head.

"Does Mommy smell good?" he asks his daughter while capping the vial, as Breena rubs her wrist against her throat, and then against her other wrist.

Molly snuggles in close, inhaling loudly, and nods.

And Tim is noticing, able to smell it on her, that before by "pink" he meant flowers, cotton candy, and teddy bears. Now he's thinking flushed skin, wet lips, and hard nipples, "pink." In the bottle it smelled innocent. Nice. Pleasant. Not even remotely sexy.

On Breena, like the scent Abby picked, it's sex in a bottle.

Whatever the hell it is that woman does, it's worth a grand an ounce.

The car ride home is interesting. Kelly's feeding schedule means they needed to rearrange the seating. Usually if both of their families go out, Jimmy and Breena'll take the front, the girls go in the middle row, and he and Abby hang out in the back. But Kelly wants to eat, and she can't feed herself, so Jimmy's driving, Breena's in the front next to him, and Abby's in the back row with Molly. He's in the middle row, feeding Kelly her bottle.

But, in the middle, twisted toward Kelly, he can easily see both of the girls, and he can definitely smell both of them, too.

Like the women, each scent is very different, but they both hit him hard, both appeal deeply to him. The longer they wear the scents the more they shift, blend into the woman, but amplify her own unique sensuality. Floral and sweet are still there on Breena, innocence is there, too, maybe. Debauched virgin, that's the words that come to mind, pink roses and eagerly pulling the bride's panties off. And Abby's scent is still warm and sensuous, spicy, exotic, dark, making him think of darkly painted eyes, silky veils, tied wrists, and hidden, forbidden sex in verdant, wet, blooming, walled gardens.

The last time he was this turned on by both of them together was the tail end of that dry spell before Kelly was born. When they were sitting on the sofa together, and there was just lots of beautiful woman in front of him looking all soft and pregnant and sexy.

And breathing in both scents, watching Breena in coral and pink and white, long flowing blonde hair, very round breasts and tummy, all sensuous, pregnant curves, and Abby in thigh high socks, a short plaid skirt, relaxed gray sweater with a wide collar slipping off her shoulder, and short , sassy blonde/pink hair, he can honestly say that he is deeply grateful that it's not going to me more than an hour until he gets laid.

The girls are chattering away, smiling, having what looks to be a great time. He's quiet, torn between keeping the tip of the bottle in Kelly's mouth and the x-rated fantasies flying through his mind. He's vaguely aware of the fact that Jimmy's not saying much either, and he half-wonders if the way the girls smell is hitting Jimmy as hard as it's hitting him.

Abby's putting the groceries away when he gets downstairs from putting Kelly down. They don't have all that long, half an hour tops, twenty minutes, realistically, before she wakes up and wants to eat again.

DC has an awesome Farmers' Market, and everyone and their cousin agrees with that. By the time they got free of traffic a good hour and twenty minutes had gone by.

So, now, home, baby down, it is indeed naptime, and Abby still smells like walking sex.

Delicious, sultry, hot, exotic sex bopping around the kitchen, (she's got music on, pretty loud) putting groceries away.

"She go down okay?" Abby asks without looking at him, pulling a bunch of broccoli out of one of their bags. They've had occasional issues with Kelly not transferring well between her car seat and the crib.

He nods, steps right up behind her, pulling her flush against him, his hands on her hips, and nuzzles her throat and ear. He nibbles gently before sucking her earlobe. "For future reference, wearing this scent means 'Fuck me right here and now, I don't care if the neighbors are watching or not!'"

She squirms against him, as he takes the broccoli out of her hand and tosses it toward the counter. (Didn't actually hit the counter, ended up on the floor.)

"You're saying I shouldn't wear it outside of our bedroom?" Her hands stroke up his sides, curl around his neck, and then run through his hair.

"Depends on how much you want our neighbors to know about us," he says, wet and hot against her ear has his hands slide under her sweater, gently cupping her breasts.

"Uh huh." She grinds into him, rubbing her ass against his erection, and he groans quietly. "And what if I wear it to work?"

That gets another groan as several images go spinning through his mind. His left hand settles on the back of her neck, stroking lightly with his nails, getting a sharp inhale and goosebumps out of her, then grasping firmly, as he pushes her to the counter, bending her over it.

"Unless you want Corwin to walk in on this." He flips her skirt up, kneeling to kiss her through her panties, hot breath meeting moist cotton, then hooks his finger in the crotch, and pulls them down in one swift move. He gets them off her left foot, and lifts her leg, so her knee and thigh are also on the counter, spreading her wide open, while kissing his way up her right leg. "I wouldn't suggest it."

She groans as his tongue finds her clit, arching back against him. "You'd just have to… oh fuck…" His teeth graze over her clit. "Go fast… wouldn't want… God…" She shudders as he sucks gently, one finger stroking over her gspot. "That to happen."

He stands up, popping the button on his fly, unzipping quickly, and pushing his jeans and boxers down. "Fast?" It slurs into a long groan as he thrusts into her, hard, fast, deep.

"Yeah!"

She's touching herself, and he's rocking into her as quickly as he can. This isn't about spinning their orgasms out or finesse. This is desire so sharp it has to be acted on at once. This is need burned into quivering strokes and half-moaned grunts.

It's not pretty at all, just hard, sloppy fucking, his hands gripping her ass, as he slaps against her in hard, solid thrusts, one of her hands steadying herself on the counter, the other rubbing fast on her clit, and both of them loving every second of it.

Doesn't take long before both of them are crying out, bodies jerking, quivering in blissful release.

Took even less time after that for both of them to tense and look over at the sound of the sliding glass door opening followed by Jimmy saying, "Hey, we got one—" Which is when Jimmy actually looked over and sees what they were up to. "Oh shit! Sorry… um…" He grabs one of the bags off the kitchen table. "Bye." And sprints out of there.

Tim's head drops to Abby's shoulder and they both giggle as they hear Jimmy's car pull out of their driveway.

While it's true there are a lot of things Breena likes about the latter months of being pregnant, constantly craving salty snacks is not one of them.

But with twoish months to go, she's well into the MUST HAVE SALT, SALT, ALL SALT ALL THE TIME, SALT! phase of her pregnancy.

And, the Farmers Market was kind enough to provide her with many wonderful options for dealing with this particular craving.

As they pull out of Tim and Abby's neighborhood, heading toward their own, she's really hankering for the home cured olives they'd picked up. For some reason they sound unimaginably good right now, and she really, really needs them.

But she can't find them. All three of their bags are in the space between the front seats, and she's looked through the first two, no olives, and the third… still no olives.

Of course, the reason there are no olives in the third bag is that it belongs to Tim and Abby.

"They've got one of our bags."

Jimmy sort of shrugs at that. He's having enough difficulty trying to focus on the road and not how Breena smells, or the fact that her dress is gloriously low cut and he can see the tops of both breasts, and how much he really wants to be touching them right now.

Given that, he is not feeling a burning need for olives right this second.

But, in that he is a veteran pregnant daddy, he feels the flavor of the silence that follows his shrug, and looks at his wife. Okay, looks at her face, he's been looking at her, as much as he can, without crashing the car. "You want us to turn around and go get it? Or is tomorrow at breakfast soon enough?"

"Now!"

He nods. "Now it is." And runs them through a u-turn at the first intersection he sees where it's legal. Minutes later, he pulls back into Tim and Abby's driveway, grabs the bag that isn't his, and heads toward their back porch.

He can see the grocery bags on the kitchen table through the sliding glass door, and yes, one of them is his. Since Tim and Abby have a no knock policy, he opens the door, heading toward the table, saying, "Hey, we got—" which is when his eyes slide to the right, and see what is happening in the part of the kitchen not visible from the sliding glass doors. "Oh shit! Sorry!" he grabs his bag, fast, drops theirs, "Bye," and runs back out, blushing furiously.

Breena looks at him curiously when he gets back into the car, blushing and giggling.

He gets out, "They were busy."

She stares at him for a second, then figures out what busy means, and starts to laugh, too.

Jimmy holds up the bag. "Busy or not. I got you your olives."

"Good husband!" She takes the bag from him, leans over to kiss him, smiles, and says, (while opening the jar) "Hoping for some busy time when Molly goes down?"

Jimmy nods, kisses her shoulder, looks her over, from head to toes, puts the car into reverse. "God, yes."

She smiles brilliantly at him, and gently licks the juice off the olive between her fingers, making sure he sees
her tongue slipping soft and wet over the round tip of the fruit.

He closes his eyes, grits his teeth, and puts the car in reverse, trying to focus on driving. "You're killing me, you know that? Literally, dead."

"Yeah, but you love it."

"I do."

Next

Shards To A Whole: Chapter 307

McGee-centric character study/romance. Want to start at the beginning? Click here.


Chapter 307: Diane

Interagency squabbling over who gets the lead is the fun part. But once that's done, and the perp's behind bars, there's the much less fun part of alphabet soup cooperation. Namely, you and all your compatriots sit down with the casework, go through all of it, and then break it down into who's got jurisdiction over what, how, why, and all the rest of it.

It's long, boring, and usually as soon as you get something worked out the prosecutors toss the whole damn thing out anyway.

But you've still got to do it.

Gibbs entirely understands why Tim is sitting there, across from Fornell and Diane in the conference room, all of them with their laptops out, working on who gets what (The answer that seems to be winning: Diane gets all of it. Don't mess with the IRS. The IRS always wins.) while Tim explains how he got them to Bing in the first place.

And given the way Fornell was glaring at Draga, and the way Diane was watching him like she wanted to pounce on him while they waited in the bullpen for Tim to grab his stuff, Gibbs gets why Draga isn't in there with them.

But, beyond amusing Tony, he's not seeing any reason why he's in there. Not like his presence is enriching the discussion on any level.

So, while it's true that he's not doing anything particularly useful on a helping Tim keep a hold of any of the case. (Tim's doing as well as can be expected, namely he's losing. Diane is rapidly taking over the entire case. At this point, pretty much the only thing they'll be able to keep Herden on is assaulting an officer and resisting arrest. Apparently there is a specific level of IRS Hell reserved for violators of the ACA, and Diane is gleefully getting ready to introduce Herden to all of its torturous glories.) It's also true that there's not much he can do, so he settles in to try and do what Rachel had suggested. See and enjoy the woman who's actually there, not just his image of her.

They saw each other, very briefly, last fall. Tim and Abby were honeymooning. He was happy from the wedding. She was happy with a new boyfriend. Fornell was getting ready to propose to Wendy. All three of them were in a good place, good mood. The case went fast and smooth.

So, the last time he really talked to her, when she dropped in on him back after she got a hit called on her and Fornell, was when he told her to not hold it against Victor that he was Victor.

And now he's trying to not hold it against her that she's not Shannon. Trying to see the woman who's really there.

She's dominating the conversation. Half of that's just her. Half of it is both Tim and Fornell are well-versed in the art of dealing with her. Path of least resistance gets everyone out alive and in one piece.

The heat, that's real. That's her and something he always liked. She's spouting regulations, quoting how many violations they've got Herden on, laying out why the case is theirs, and she's all fire. Her eyes are sparking, her words fast and hot.

It's overkill. Neither of the guys are putting up much (any) fight, but that was her, too. She'd keep going until she collapsed (after going much, much, much longer than anyone thought she could) regardless of if she needed to keep going.

That's something he feels a kinship to. He'd keep going past all reason, too. But two people together like that, probably not the best idea ever. Someone's got to know when it's time to throw in the towel, and neither of them ever did.

"Oh, come on, I am not giving you their bookkeeper! You are not investgating Grandma." Tim taking a stand draws him back from musing on Diane.

"What do you mean, giving her to me? His company was ripping off the VA. She had to—"

"No. Leave her be. She's eighty-four and senile."

"You hand over those notes, Chucky!"

"NO!"

"She's in violation—"

"I don't care. You can't have her!"

"Diane, you know those laws are so complicated every company in the US is currently in violation of something in regards to them," Fornell hops in, trying to calm things down.

"That was the point, Tobias! We'd have leverage over everyone. I can't believe you guys haven't figured that out. Company gets stubborn, owner won't talk, call us in and we will find at least half a dozen ACA violations. They tell you whatever it is rather than pay the fines. It's literally impossible to be in perfect compliance. That was the point."

"Yeah, well Herden's singing," Tim says. "He already gave us Bing, and we've got everything we need on him for his own for the VA fraud, leave Granny out of it."

"Chucky…"

Tim's got that very determined look on his face, made significantly more sinister by the bruising. "You just said the whole point of it was to screw people. You're not screwing her. She was doing her job as well as she could, and from what we saw her job was literally writing checks. Leave her be."

Diane glares at Tim, but shuts up, so, hell, maybe people do change. Maybe she's finally learned to occasionally drop things. Gibbs certainly knows he has.

At that point, Gibbs notices they're getting low on coffee. (In the sense that his personal cup is about half full. Okay, they aren't even remotely low on coffee, but he wants to get out of there.) "Coffee run, who wants what?"

Tobias leaps up. "I'll help. You two keep squabbling. We'll be back in about a month." He pulls Gibbs out and they walk, slowly, (without actually having gotten any orders) toward the coffee trolley.

Gibbs is easing toward the elevator when Fornell shakes his head. "Steps. Slower."

"Can't. Bad knee."

"Oh, right." He looks at Jethro's leg, as if he could see through his pants to the knee under. "Doing better?"

"Don't need a crutch anymore. That's better, right?"

Fornell nods.

Seth starts laying out cups when he sees Gibbs and Fornell head toward him. "Regular for McGee and I, double caff Sumatra, one cream, three sugars, two squirts of hazelnut, whipped cream on top, and caramel sauce, and… cappuccino for you, right?" Gibbs asks Tobias.

He nods. "Can't believe you remember her order."

"Only had to watch her take a sip, grimace, put it back down and glare at me three times before I had it down."

A small smile crosses Tobias' face. "And then you only got it wrong on occasion to piss her off."

"Something like that. Put French vanilla in it once to see what she'd do."

"What'd she do?"

"Gave me a thermos of what smelled and tasted like my coffee the next morning. It was decaf."

"Oh." Fornell winces. He's seen Gibbs sans caffeine. It's isn't pretty.

"Didn't notice until my head started to hurt and my hands were shaking."

Fornell shakes his head while watching Seth make up their orders.

"So… She seeing anyone these days?"

Fornell whips his head back towards Gibbs. "Why on earth would you want to know that!"

"Curious."

"Bull."

"Looking out for Draga."

"More plausible, still bull."

He glares at Fornell, who still hasn't answered the question.

"Best I know, she's single. But these days all single means is not married. She's probably got three or four Dragas lurking in the background somewhere."

"I'll let him know."

"Like hell you will. You aren't contemplating doing something stupid, are you?"

"No. Just asking."

"You never just ask anything."

"I'm just asking about this."

Fornell's not buying that. "Like hell you are."

See who's really there. Enjoy it. Heat, passion, intellect. Once they got through the territorial squabbling, Tim's taking her through what he did to find Herden, and though he and Fornell are somewhere between asleep from boredom and lost by the details, Diane is following along just fine.

She might not be a hacker, but she can see the money trail Tim honed in on, and understands some of the techniques he used to follow it.

He's showing her the database of Bing's fraudsters, and why he called in Fornell, and she's nodding along, pointing out that some of these people are legitimate businessmen running companies that get actual government grants and the like.

Tim's nodding back, talking about how the first link in this chain, the guy they found Herden through, had produced similar issues. He actually did genuine web work in addition to bilking the VA.

Gibbs thinks that in some ways Diane and Tim are very similar. Diane was the oldest of three girls. Daddy, career Navy, wanted boys, sailors to follow in his footsteps. Mom wanted princesses. She could never be enough of a boy to make her father happy, and wasn't the docile little girl her mom had envisioned, either.

Unlike Tim, instead of hiding in plain sight, she responded by being sharp and aggressive. She couldn't ever be a boy, so she'd scare the crap out of them, be harder and better and smarter than they were, and she'd make sure they knew it. Make sure Daddy knew it. But in the end, Daddy didn't much care. By the time they were getting married Daddy was on his third family, this time with two little boys, and didn't want to be reminded of his girls.

She was never going to be a placid as her sisters, but she was prettier. So she played that up, too. Her mom wanted pretty, so pretty she was. Granted, her mom wanted Cinderella, and what she ended up with was Scarlet O'Hara. Last he heard Mom was in Florida living with Gillian (her older sister) and her insane husband. (He only met Gillian once, liked her, too. Never met the husband, though he used to be FBI. They both did. Fornell's got some really bizarre stories about them.)

He sees, watching Diane and Tim working together, two very different responses to similar childhoods.

Tim quietly begged for attention by doing the job better, faster, spending more time at it than anyone around him. He'd light up when he was petted, and put his head down and work harder when he wasn't.

Diane demanded attention, screamed for it, hit him in the head with a golf club when he kept ignoring her. That's what she had said to him, that it was all she had ever wanted, someone to love her and fill up that hole. Someone who would pay attention.

And right now, he's paying attention.

Tim stands up and stretches. "Lunch break?"

The other three nod. Everyone is tired of sitting around, talking numbers, and a break sounds like a splendid idea.

"I'm going to head down and see if Abby's free. Back to it in an hour?"

More nodding.

Diane looks at Jethro, head tilted to the side, "Get some coffee with me?"

"Sure."

"Just got to freshen up. Meet you downstairs?"

He nods, pleased, and smiles at her.

"Are you flirting with our ex-wife?" Tobias asks the second the door closes behind her.

Gibbs shakes his head. He's not flirting. He's intentionally not flirting because part of this whole see the person who's there, involves actually seeing Diane, and if he's going to do that, really see who's there, not moving into flirty, romance, get laid mode is the plan. So, no, he's not flirting.

He is being nice, and considerate, and, maybe, looking at her longer than is strictly necessary, while listening very intently. And, maybe, smiling more than usual. Because he's putting her at ease, getting her to talk more, and actually listening to the answers.

Shit. That's flirting, isn't it?

"Don't give me that. What could you possibly be thinking, flirting with the Spawn of Satan?"

"I'm not flirting, I'm… being nice?"

"You aren't nice! You especially aren't nice to her. What are you doing?"

"Just, tryin' something."

"Well, don't!"

"It's just coffee."

"It's never just coffee with her. She's probably got five boyfriends she's happily off having coffee with. Hell, she probably had coffee with McGee. And she's been eyeballing Draga like he's an extra foamy mocha latte with chocolate and caramel sauce. You don't need to go down that road again."

"That's not… You remember that thing I told you I was doing, with Cranston."

"God, you make that sound like getting coffee, too. Most people would just say, my therapist said…"

"Fine. She suggested-"

"Picking things up with Diane? That woman is insane!"

"No. Just… I like her. I always did like her."

"That's the problem! She's likeable. You think you're getting this cute, little, sassy kitten, next thing you know your heart is broken, your bank account is empty, and she's having a kid with another guy."

"I know, Tobias. Not talking about marrying her again. Just, trying to see how liking someone feels. Without all of the baggage."

"You have an entire airport terminal's worth of baggage with that woman!"

So do you, so stop dropping your baggage on me, okay? Comes through loud and clear in Gibbs' expression. "Just coffee. Just talking."

"You don't talk!"

"I'm talking to you!"

"No, you're listening to me talk about you shooting yourself in your own ass and then rubbing salt in the wound and then finishing it off with a nice dip in a bath tub full of lemon juice." They spend a good minute staring at each other, Gibbs feeling frustrated, Fornell searching his face, trying to figure out what on Earth Gibbs could possibly be trying to do, before Fornell takes a quick breath and says, "Right, we're going out tonight and getting you laid. Look, I know, trust me, I know what you're seeing when you look at her, and I know it's been a long time and you're getting edgy—"

Gibbs holds up his hands and winces. "Stop. Right there. It's not about…" Fornell's still talking about how Tony's got to know somewhere they can find a girl for him. "Stop!" That finally ends Fornell's dissertation on the subject of getting Gibbs laid. "Don't wanna get laid. Just want to sit down and have a cup of coffee and talk to a woman I like."

Fornell doesn't look like he thinks that's legit, but he's willing to go with it. "There has got to be some other woman you like who will have a cup of coffee with you." Fornell is watching Gibbs carefully so he catches that little flicker in the back of his eye. "Okay, what the hell was that? There is someone, isn't there?"

"Yes, but I can't ask her."

Fornell's mid don't give me that lame excuse look when something hits him. "She married or something?"

"Yes. She's married," Gibbs says, relieved to get off of this.

"Well, that doesn't mean you go after Diane."

"I'm not going after her. It's not about that."

Fornell doesn't seem to buy that, but he backs off, curious about the new one. "So why haven't you mentioned her?"

Gibbs opens and closes his mouth in his I don't know, don't make me think or talk about this gesture.

"How married is she?" Fornell asks.

"Married! Doesn't matter if she's barely married or joined at the hip with the guy. She's married."

"Do I know her?"

"No." Drop it is written all over Gibbs' face.

"Only new woman you've mentioned in months is…" Fornell's eyes go wide and his shoulders slump. "Oh, holy shit, Jethro, that's a bad plan! That's the mother of all bad plans. That's the only plan I can think of where going out with Diane sounds like a sane alternative. What the hell is wrong with you?"

Jethro is giving Fornell his I am so done with you look. "Nothing. There is no plan. The only plan is have a cup of coffee with Diane and remember what liking someone felt like. That's it."

"Sounds like you remember liking someone just fine."

"Yeah, I like Rachel. Nothing I can do about it, so that's that. Nothing I can do about it is probably part of liking her."

"Like, seriously liking her?" The warning bells are all going off in Fornell's expression, and Gibbs knows he's asking, falling in love with her?

"No. Just. I like talking to her."

"You like talking to a woman?"

"I'm not completely mute!" He looks at Fornell, earnestly. "It's… nice, you know?"

Fornell squeezes his shoulder. "God, you are so lonely, aren't you?" he says gently.

Gibbs rolls his eyes and shakes his head. Fornell keeps looking at him, waiting for a response. Finally he says, "I'd like to not screw it up this time. I know I'm not in a good place for it, yet, but… yeah, I miss it." He looks away from Fornell. "I'd like to sit down and just talk to a woman. Ya know?"

Fornell nods, that he understands. "But, Diane?"

"When we weren't fighting, it was always fun. I liked playing with her. You, me, and her, remember the dinners we'd have?"

"Yeah." Fornell nods at that, too.

"It was fun."

"It was."

"I'm not going back, but… be nice to feel something like that again. I know how to push her buttons. She knows mine. And, maybe… this was what Cranston was thinking… maybe trying that, seeing her for her, not her for some sort of Shannon substitute… would be a good thing. She told me once I was using her as a human anti-depressant. Too much truth there. Might be nice to just see her for her, at least once."

"Tall order for one cup of coffee."

Gibbs shrugs, smiles, says dryly, "Might be pie, too."

Fornell snorts a laugh at that, then gets serious. "Jethro, don't fall in love with her again."

"I didn't the first time."

Give me a break is unspoken but clear. "How long you been telling yourself that lie? She wasn't Shannon; that doesn't mean you didn't love her."

"I…"

"I was there, remember? Steaks on the fire, sitting on the floor in front of the fireplace, her cuddled up on your lap, feeding you little bites, teasing both of us. Us telling her about our different cases, sounding like big damn heroes. All three of us sucking down beer and laughing. Just because it wasn't fairy-tale, forever love didn't mean it wasn't real."

Gibbs remembers those nights. Hasn't thought about them for a long time, especially not in a way that recognized that those had been good nights.

"And I heard your voice when you got that letter. You don't sound like that if it's someone you were just fond of. It went wrong, Jethro. I fucked you over. You fucked her over. She fucked both of us. It went wrong in almost every direction it could go wrong. You loved her. I loved her. She… God only knows… I think she loved us, or you, at least. That's why it hurt. That's why it still hurts. And you don't have it in you to give her the attention she wants. I didn't either. I don't know if any man does. But you'll like her again, because she's warm and fun and beautiful and sexy and sharp… and you'll get sucked in, and she'll hurt you when she wants more than you can give. And, honestly, you'll hurt her because you can't be the man she needs."

"Just coffee."

Fornell shakes his head. "Fine, have your coffee. Tomorrow night, come to dinner with Wendy and me."

Gibbs is on the verge of nodding when he notices something in how Fornell said that. His eyes narrow. "Dinner?"

"Yeah, we've had dinner before. Food, at night. You remember how that works, right?"

"What else?"

"Else?"

"Yeah, you've got something else in mind."

"Wendy's sister is in town," Fornell says with a guilty smile.

"No. We've already got the same ex-wife. I am not getting hooked up with your sister-in-law."

"You'd like her."

"I don't need to get set up."

"Says the guy so lonely he's contemplating coffee with Satan Incarnate."

"Tobias…"

"Fine. Don't do anything stupid."

"I won't."

"Tobias try to talk you out of this?" Diane asks half a minute later when he meets her outside the conference room.

"Yep."

"What are you doing, Jethro? Trying to give him heart failure? Last time you spent that much time looking at me, we were still married."

He raises an eyebrow in question, looking her over intently. "You mind?"

"No. Nice to know you still like to look. Starting to wonder about that these last few years."

"The view was never the problem. Always liked the view." He smiles warmly. "Still like the view."

"Thank you. You're looking awfully fit these days, too. You and Chucky make some sort of get in shape pledge?"

"Something like that. Want some food to go with your coffee for lunch?"

"Sure. Know anywhere that makes a decent salad around here?"

"I know someone who'll whip one up for you."

Monday and Tuesdays are Elaine's weekend, so while they do go to the diner, the service is a bit less personal. Which actually suits Gibbs just fine. Elaine has heard of Diane, and… that's a complication he doesn't need to get into.

Mindy, the girl who takes over on Elaine's days off is friendly and efficient, but not prescient. They actually have to order.

By the time the food is sitting in front of them, he had gotten through why he and Tim are in better shape. (The quick version. He doesn't like to whip out Jimmy and Breena's heartache to just anyone. He may have indicated it was more of a passing on of Dad-like martial virtues to his two younger boys, and then a few weeks later Ziva got into it.)

"Show me some pictures," she says as he wraps up the story of them putting Ed in his place.

"Hmm?"

"That's what old people do when they reminisce, right? Chucky showed me some shots of his girl, and you with her. So, show me the rest of your family."

"You're not that old."

She laughs at that. "I'll be fifty next year. I'm old enough."

"Happens to all of us. They're making me retire in January." He switches around to sit next to her and pulls out his phone.

She looks taken aback. "I was expecting you to whip out a shot from your wallet."

"Tim got me this."

"And got you to use it?"

"It's… handy. Plus he wired it so that if you mess with it, it'll take your hand off."

She rolls her eyes. "You and your guns."

"This one has pictures of my kids on it." He grins. "My Sig doesn't do that."

She rolls her eyes again and laughs a little. "So, show me some shots. Got one of all of you together?"

"Got one of all the grown-ups." He flips around and finds the shot of all of them from Tony and Ziva's wedding.

"Oh, wow. You give away the bride?"

"Both times."

"I know everyone but the lady with Ducky. Who's that?"

"Penny Langston. Tim's grandma."

"Date for the evening?"

"That one and every one after it. They're living together now."

"I saw some shots from Tim and Abby's wedding. Emily kept telling me about it. She had a blast, she's still Facebook friends with… Harper, right?" Gibbs nods. "But the ones she took were of the other kids or Tobias. Didn't see a shot of you."

"Here, this one will make you laugh." He found some shots with him in them from Tim and Abby's wedding.

"Are you wearing a morning suit?"

"Yep."

"I had to pull your toenails out with pliers to get you into a tux. What did Abby do?"

"Pouted a little. Threatened to have a RenFaire wedding."

She laughs at that. "I would have paid money to see you dressed like that."

He smiles wryly. "You and everyone else."

She's holding his phone, flipping through the shots, and stops of the one of Tim and Abby dancing together at Tony and Ziva's wedding reception.

"They really that happy?"

"Yeah."

"Good. The night I slept over, when we were talking… I mentioned how things were going wrong with Victor, and he talked a little about how sometimes you need time to get yourself right before you can make it work. That sometimes the second time was a charm."

"Sometimes."

"Looks like it was for them." He catches the wistfulness in her voice, and sees the deep loneliness. He thinks that was always there, too, part of what drew him to her, his sorrow to hers. He catches another layer there, the question she's too hurt to ask, too burned by him and years of rubbing each other raw, the part of her that opened up in his basement, named how she felt, and watched him say nothing.

But that spark is still there. Hope he doesn't feel like he ever earned. It's still lurking back there, still striving for his attention and affection.

He very lightly, just the back of his forefinger, strokes her cheek. Her eyes close and she leans into the touch. "I'm sorry, Diane. Sorry I never saw you for who you are. Sorry I couldn't enjoy you for you. Sorry I couldn't let it go."

She smiles, warm and pleased, overwhelmed by that, for a second, and for one more second, and then on the third second she pulls her armor back into place. He sees her snap it back around herself. And he nods at her, recognizing it, as she says, "Oh, God, Jethro, did you join a twelve step program or something?"

He smirks at that, shaking his head, taking a bite of his meatloaf. "Or something."

"Good, Lord. I knew… I didn't know it was…"

"No. Not that sort of or something. Just… Remember me telling you that I'm not such a great guy to be?"

She nods.

He took the phone back from her and found a shot of him with Molly and Kelly. "Got a bunch of little girls gonna be looking up to me. Another one's due in December. Really hope Tony and Ziva have one, too, someday. Got a bunch of kids who need a Dad. It's time to get to being a man worth looking up to. Time to get to being the guy I was supposed to be."

"And this is part of that?"

"Maybe. Don't know. Doing a lot of thinking, lot of figuring stuff out."

"You're not dying are you?" She says pointedly, spearing a cherry tomato on her fork, lifting it to her lips, amused smile on her face at how intensely he's watching her.

"Hope not."

"But…"

"But they're making me retire. Tony's in charge of the team now. Tim'll be heading to Cybercrime any day. Duck's gonna fly soon. Everything changes."

"Yes, it does."

"Emily's a sophomore now, right?"

"Uh huh." She sighs. "We're starting to look at colleges next month. PSATs are next week. Her grades are good, and if her scores are high enough, she's talking about skipping her senior year and going straight onto college."

"Has she mentioned that to Tobias yet?"

"No, not yet. He's still debating going to college with her and sleeping at the foot of her bed with a loaded gun."

"He's not that bad."

"He's not that good, either. He's scared for her. Afraid he didn't do enough hands on dadding and that she'll run off and throw herself at the first boy who shows her any real affection."

Gibbs shrugs. He knows it's real. Fornell's talked about it. But he missed that phase with Kelly, and now it's a good thirteen years off for his girls. "Want me to help talk him down?"

"Sure. If it happens. Got to see how she does on the PSATs, might not be an option. But if it is… She's so excited to get out there. I want it for her."

Gibbs nods, he knows all about wanting good things for your kids. He takes another bite of his meatloaf. "Now that you've been back at it a while, how you liking have your own badge?"

She takes a sip of her coffee and smiles. "Feeling overshadowed?"

"Nope. Just curious. You spent so much time listening to us blather on about it, wondering how it feels to have one of your own."

"I like it. I really like it. Without it, I'm just a pretty numbers wonk. With it, I'm terrifying."

He snorts, amused. "You are more than terrifying without it."

"Then I'm the step beyond terrifying. 'Diane Anderson, IRS.' One guy wet his pants."

Gibbs laughs at that. They spend a pleasant half hour talking. Him listening mostly, enjoying it, because listening to Diane talk about something she loves is fun. She lights up, happy, passionate, and it's not like he can't sympathize with the high that comes from solving the puzzle and tracking the bad guys down.

"Should head back soon," she says after eating the last bite of the caramel apple pie they shared.

He doesn't need to check his watch to know they are already bordering on late. He's reaching for the check when she snatches it. His eyebrows rose in surprise.

"Not a date, Jethro. IRS will expense me for it, since I'm in the field today."

He nods and they head back toward NCIS.

Apparently, they weren't the only ones taking longer than was strictly necessary for lunch. As they got out of his car, they see Tim, Abby, and Jimmy getting out of Breena's car. Jimmy leans over, kisses Breena through the window, and she drives off.

The three of them start toward the lobby. Tim has his arm around Abby. Abby has one arm around his waist, and has her other arm linked through Jimmy's.

Diane sees it and stops, staring, then looks over to Jethro. There's a warning in her face. "Are they?"

He almost shakes his head, but doesn't. He's fairly sure Tim or Jimmy will talk to him before they jump in, and he's absolutely certain that even if they don't, he'll know, feel it if their relationship changes that drastically. He hasn't heard anything from Jimmy, and nothing new from Tim since April, so whatever it is that might be brewing between the four of them is probably currently on hold. So instead of a flat out denial of whatever it is they may have he just says, "Good friends."

"Good friends can be a lot of trouble. Hope they're smarter about it than we were."

"They're gonna be okay." And no matter what else may be going on, that's something Gibbs is sure of.

"I thought we were, too."

There's a gentleness in his face that only shows up when he's working with women or children. "We were never okay."

She shrugs, looking tired, little sad, and smiles, but it doesn't get to her eyes. "No. I guess not."

He thinks about it, in an idle, almost intellectual sort of way, as they head back into the building. What would have happened if he and Tobias could have shared her? Would have solved the pay attention to me problem.
Diane wanted more love, affection, and attention than any one man (any one Gibbs or Fornell) could provide. Together? The two of them? That would have been a whole hell of a lot of attention. And a happy, well-loved Diane was a treat.

But together wouldn't have solved the Shannon and Kelly problem. Wouldn't have taken care of the gaping Dad-shaped hole in Diane's heart. Might have helped with Tobias feeling like a third wheel.

And together didn't get near to touching the complications of him and Tobias together, let alone trying to share anything. One of them always has to be in charge. Even on cases, they can't really share; they just swap back and forth for who's in charge. Trying that with a relationship? With Diane, who also wanted to be in charge?

Could have been three times worse than it was just as twosomes.

Didn't matter. That ship not only sailed, it headed off to Valhalla, flames kissing the sky as the still living passengers burned.

She and Tim are finishing up the official who gets what draft when he thinks of his proposal:

"I'm not much for words.

"Most things are better left unsaid

"It'd be a lot easier if I could just pick you up, and we'd start running, and we'd never stop.

"Maybe I'll still do that. But before I do…" and he knelt down and whipped out the ring, and her face was soft, her eyes lit with pleasure and love and she grinned wide, and said, 'Yes."

Running. Take her and run, run away from the pain and who he was and who she was and just live in those minutes of sex and fighting and teasing.

Say goodbye to the past and their ties and… And it never works because you can't run away from yourself. You always come along for the race.

He never told her he loved her. Never said the words. Hid it behind the not talking thing. Wrote it a few times. Gave her some cards with it. But never said it, and right now, watching the late afternoon sun light her hair and eyes, he doesn't know if Fornell is right, doesn't know if he never said it because it was never true, or if he never said it because he couldn't bear to admit it was.

They're still talking through the final settlement of who'd be charged with what and by whom, and what they'd be taking to their individual prosecutors. He's got nothing to add to that, so he takes out his phone and sends a text to Rachel.

What if I did love her?

A minute later he gets back: Would you rather be a rock who used women you didn't feel for to make yourself more comfortable, or would you rather be the guy who couldn't make it work because if it worked that might threaten what you had before?

He's not sure if she expects a real answer right away, and even if she does he can't give one. They're wrapping up for today. So he sends back a quick: Thanks. Thinking.

As Diane and Fornell head off, bickering gently with each other, Tim says to him, "Have a good day?"

He shrugs.

"Fornell talked to me some before you and Diane got back from lunch. Whatever it is you're contemplating… Rachel or Diane… It's a bad idea."

"I don't need an intervention."

"And we're not having one. This is just me and you having a chat."

Gibbs glares, not hot, more of a back off look.

Tim raises his hands, peace gesture. "Just, you know, I've been so lonely that anyone who's even remotely interested in you starts to look good. No matter if they're good for you or not."

Gibbs nods at that.

"Gotta give this to Tony." He taps the folder with the agreement in it. "You want to come over for dinner?"

Gibbs shakes his head. "Got some thinking to do."

"Okay. See you tomorrow, then?"

"Yeah." Gibbs is in the process of stepping past Tim when he put his hand on Gibbs' shoulder and pulls him into a hug. Gibbs stands there, and lets himself be hugged, feeling kind of stupid, wondering exactly how much of what he was thinking was on his face today. When Tim lets go, he squints at him What was that for?

"Looked like you needed one. Besides, how long has it been since someone touched you? Saturday night? Friday? Whenever it was Abby hugged you last?"

Gibbs nods.

"You need to be touched. We all do. Took a damn long time for me to figure that out. Helps you make fewer stupid decisions."

"Think I'm about to make a stupid decision?"

"I hope you're not."

That gets another eye roll and a gentle ruffling of Tim's hair as Gibbs steps out of the conference room. "See ya tomorrow."

Next

Shards To A Whole: Chapter 306

McGee-centric character study/romance. Want to start at the beginning? Click here.

Chapter 306: Working Out The Details


"Good morning." He sets Rachel's coffee on her desk, and then sits on the sofa across from her.

She takes the coffee and arches an eyebrow at him. "You're in a surprisingly chipper mood. What's changed since Thursday? You and Tim come up with yet another plan to keep you on for another year?"

"No. I…" his voice trails off. In the rush of having a plan and in the mindset of you-can-tell-her-everything, the shut-the-hell-up instinct hit him a few seconds too late.

"You…" she leads looking very intrigued.

He bites his lip. "Stuff I tell you is confidential, right?"

"Mostly. Unlike, say a lawyer or a priest, the things you tell me can be subpoenaed. And should such a subpoena show up, I would have to turn my notes over. However, a thorough investigation of my notes will never reveal any illegal activities on the parts of any of my clients. I'm more interested in helping you than providing Internal Affairs with fodder for an investigation. If you're doing something that's against my own rules, I'll boot you as a client, but I won't write it down."

He finds that reassuring. "Okay."

She smiles at him, lifting her coffee, inhaling the bitter/sweet scent. He's added cream and pumpkin spice to it for her, a nice fall touch. "So, what has you in such a good mood this morning?"

"I think I found the next thing."

"Really?" She sounds intrigued by that. His email had seemed so helpless and adrift, the idea that less than a week later he had something planned out and ready to go seems incredible.

"Yeah."

"And are you going to tell me what the next thing is?"

He squints at her, fairly sure she'd be fine with it, but… Not like they've ever actually had a chat about US immigration policy. And some people really are law and order types. (But she's not. She just said she doesn't write stuff down.) Of course, some people actually agree with the idea that everyone who comes here has to go through the proper channels and that if they don't they have to leave.

And some people just don't give a shit.

And some people don't want to see anyone who's any darker than they are coming to this country.

But he's sure she's not one of them.

"How much have I told you about Mike Franks?"

Rachel looks at him, curious about what appears to be a digression. She's not following how Franks might work into any of this. She knows he's dead, so it's not like he could be doing much to help Gibbs. "He worked Shannon and Kelly's case. He got you into NCIS. He took care of you and gave you what you needed to know to go after the man who killed them."

As she says that, it hits him, she already knows he's murdered a man. Adding human trafficking to the list really isn't going to be terribly shocking compared to that. Probably. He's talking about pre-meditated, going at it cold, straight out breaking the law. This wouldn't be a crime of passion or revenge or a broken heart looking for an instant of peace.

"What do you think about that?" He sips his coffee, watching her carefully, seeing if her face matches her words.

"About which part?"

"Him giving me everything I needed to kill Hernandez."

"It's not about what I think."

The looks like standard boilerplate, but he's not sensing any condemnation. "I'm not asking for your approval. Just, trying to figure out how specific to be with the next bit."

"You want a sympathetic audience for your grand plan?"

"Doesn't everyone?"

She nods. And she knows that it's much easier to tell people what it is you intend to do if you think they'll approve. Granted, she doesn't think her approval will influence Gibbs' actions one way or another, but it will affect how free he is in the telling of what he's thinking. "You remember, the first time we met, you took me to your basement, showed me where to stand, and asked if I could feel that spot was where… that…" he senses that she doesn't have a word foul enough to describe Ari, "died?"

"Yes."

"Did I look like I had any moral qualms about that?"

"No. But it was a clean kill. He had a gun on me and was going to shoot. Ziva had every right to pull that trigger. Hernandez… I was almost a mile away. One second he was driving, the next second he wasn't. He wasn't a threat to anyone in that second. And… I had to kill him for me. If I was going to live with myself, I had to do it. But I didn't have to kill him to save or protect anyone else. And honestly, I could have shot the tires out, then shot his knees out, and brought him in. I could have made sure he stood trial. I didn't. I killed him." It feels very… freeing… to actually say it. Everyone he loves knows he did it, but this is the first time he's actually said it, said all of it, owned the fact that it was a choice, something he had to do for himself, not for honor or justice or anything like that.

"Were you right? Did he kill your girls?"

"Yes."

"Did anyone have any doubts about that?"

"No. Only reason he didn't stand trial was because he'd run across the border. Only reason he wasn't extradited was because he owned the local government there. Short of invading Mexico, we couldn't legally get him. Grabbing him to take back for trial to the US would have been illegal, too."

"Then no. I have no problem with that. What have you found? Your email sounded very lost, and you look more excited right now than I've ever seen you. Are you planning on killing someone?" It's a serious question on her part, and he can see how he walked right into that.

"No. Not killing anyone. Mike… Mike always played fast and loose with anyone else's rules. Hell, he played fast and loose with his own, too. He knew he was dying well before it happened, and started to give me his 'insurance policies…'"

"Everything you ever wanted to know about everyone at NCIS?"

"Pretty much. But there was some other stuff he gave me, too."

"What kind of other stuff?"

"Blackmail stuff. Very… specific blackmail stuff. Getting onto ten years ago now, Mike found out about his son, and his son's fiancee, Leyla, and his granddaughter, and… we smuggled her into the US when Liam, his son, died.

"Mike got it straightened out, eventually, she and Amira are legal, now…" Though it occurs to Gibbs that he doesn't actually know that for a fact. She works for Homeland, so whatever she has passed the background check. "Maybe… I'm sure her papers look really good.

"Anyway… I think… I think he kept doing it. All of the blackmail stuff, it was aimed at the kind of people you'd want to make look the other way if you were, say, smuggling people into the US. Or, some of it was the kind of stuff you'd use if you wanted someone to give you a visa."

"You think he was smuggling people into the US?"

"Girls. You don't have to do too many tours in the Middle East, especially Afghanistan, before you don't even want to look at the men there. You see a guy with a fifteen-year-old wife, and he's already got a kid or two with her, and… and the nicest thing you can say is you don't want to look at him. He's probably not a 'bad' guy. He's some farmer from the middle of nowhere just trying to keep himself and his family fed. He's not violent. He's not a terrorist. He treats her as well as any guy treats a woman back there. It's his culture, but his culture's rotten. He's got no problem fucking a little girl. No problem giving his own little girls to some other asshole. And he's one of the good guys.

"One of the cases we did was a series of bombings to destroy a school for girls. Girls reading was too horrifying for those bastards, so the school had to go. They killed the teachers. They tortured some of the girls, too. Other cases, ones we didn't work, where they barred the doors and burned the girls alive. You… You see stuff like that and all that you can feel is rage. You stop seeing the men there as individual people. Some good, some bad, some indifferent. And you start seeing predators, start seeing evil." Gibbs shakes his head. "Not supposed to do that. Makes for sloppy work. But… Can't say I don't feel it. Can say I try not to work too close with the locals in situations like that."

"And you think that Mike was the kind of guy who'd have no problem helping girls like that get to the US?"

"I know it. We smuggled Leyla in. Liam died before they could get married. It wasn't legal, at all. Her family eventually reconciled with her, but… She can tell you stories that'd make you want to bomb Iraq back into the dark ages. Just make you want to kill everyone who had a hand in it or ever turned a blind eye to it. And if she got talking to Mike, and she would have, he'd have done something about it."

"And now you're thinking of doing something about it?"

"He gave me all of his leverage. There's only one reason to do that."

She smiles gently. "I'm fine with the assumption that Mike wants you to do it. That's not what I'm asking. Are you going to do something about it?"

"I'm tempted." Gibbs shakes his head. "More than tempted. I want to do it. Once we put it together, it was like a light going on. I'd be good at it. Probably couldn't do a lot. But an old guy with a boat and a 'friend.' Hell, I don't care if they think I'm a pervert buying sex as long as I can get 'em on the boat and out of there."

"Afghanistan is a landlocked country."

He flashes her his don't bother me with stupid details look. "Doesn't have to be Afghanistan. Iran, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia they've all got ports."

"And they're lousy places to be a girl."

He nods. "Pakistan's not a picnic, either. India's got a lot of honor killings. Not like it'd be hard to find a place. Probably wouldn't be hard to find them on this side of the world, either."

"So, how do you find the girls? I'm assuming you're not planning on just sailing over and kidnapping some."

"I don't know. You're right, you don't just run up and grab a few. Gotta find the ones who want out. And Mike didn't leave me anything on how he found the girls. Or if he did, I haven't figured it out yet."

Rachel pulls him a bit closer to reality. "If he found girls. You don't actually know that's what he was doing."

"It fits."

"And it makes you happy, gives you a sense of purpose." She's giving him that knowing look, filling in the is this what he was doing or is this what you want him to have been doing with her expression.

"Yeah."

"Say you dig into this and find that Mike was doing something else. Then what?"

"I don't know. I like the idea of this. Even if I could only get one out a year…"

"If you can't do this… If you can't find someone to hook you up with girls in need of transport, then what?"

"The same problem I had before. I might find something else, but I won't be as good at it as I was at being a cop. Say I signed up to be an EMT, yes, it's useful, it'll save lives, but it's not what I'm best at. Any other EMT will do as good of a job as I could, if not better. And what I'm best at, looking at people figuring them out, solving puzzles, I won't be doing anymore."

"Cold cases?"

"Leon's offered. I'll probably take him up on them. I'll be ripping my hair out because they won't let me in the field for more than ten days a year. It'll be my job to go through the paperwork on dead cases, see if there's anything that still can be found, then tell someone else to go find it.

"If something else is people, they might let me do interrogations. Don't need fast reflexes for that, just a good brain. Or not, there're plenty of Probies who'll need practice, and it's not like there's any rush on a cold case."

"Private detective? Your friend Fornell, he'll be hitting the mandatory retirement age soon, too, right? You two could partner up."

"FBI lets team leaders stick around until 62. Tobias still has another year and if they bump him up one more level, another four because you get to hang on to 65 if you hit management. Emily'll be going to college soon. I know they've got plans for traveling and stuff like that once she's out of the nest."

"What was your original plan?"

"Have Shannon finished by now. Wake up, deal with the hangover from the retirement party, then out to sea. Float around until I got it out of my system. Come home four, six, eight months, however long, later. Maybe not come back at all."

"So, it's safe to say that plan's well out of date."

"Can't miss eight months of my girls. Eight months from now Kelly'll be unrecognizable, and Molly'll be two and a half… Anna's due in December, miss eight months with her she'll go from a bright pink peanut to… like Kelly, unrecognizable." He shakes his head. "Not heading off for more than a few weeks…" He thinks of how long it'd take to get to the middle east and back by Shannon. "Three months, tops, now."

"Which means you need to solve the problem, not run away from it."

"Yeah. And this… This solves the problem. I can pick up new languages fast. And if I could find someone to get the girls to the Black Sea… I already speak Russian, and Leon's offering me a shot to go spend some time in the Crimea, keep an eye on things."

"That sounds dangerous. Mixing those jobs."

He nods. "Be good cover though. Depends on the girl. If she's a child… Grandpa and his girl doing some touristy things. Give her some time to work on her English before hitting the States. If you start somewhere where no one else speaks English, no one will notice if hers is bad."

"What happens to her after she gets to the States? Are you planning on adopting a collection of girls?"

"No. Mike had to do something with them."

"If that's what he was doing."

"If… And if he wasn't… I could do it. I'd be good at it. I've got good connections. I don't know about either of the ends, but I can handle the middle part. I've got the boat, just have to finish it. I'm old and white and speak perfect English and I'm a retired cop and Marine, Coast Guard isn't going to look twice at me. Shannon's small enough… And… I was talking with the kids a bit about maybe finding a place on the Chesapeake, maybe the Potomac, if it had its own pier… Wouldn't have to deal with customs or docking fees or any of the rest of it. Just an old guy, maybe with a dog, on a boat. Look like I'm out for a day or two with my girl."

Rachel smiles at him. "It's a nice fantasy."

"Yes."

"What would you do about making it real?"

"Finish the damn boat. There's step one. Talk to Leyla, that'd be step two. Can't do anything if I can't find the girls."

"You think maybe she was involved?"

"I don't know. Knowing Mike, probably not. He would have wanted to keep her as out of it as he could. But she might still have a clue as to who to talk to."

"And by then, you'll have the boat finished?"

"Yeah. I don't want to be messing around with blackmailing ICE agents or the TSA guys at the airport, trying to get them to look away. I'd go old school. Boat, quiet bit of beach, blend in, just another sailor on vacation. The east coast is really big, there's got to be some bits of it no one's watching too closely."

"Or like you said, Grandad out with his girl, assuming the girl's young enough, doesn't matter if anyone is watching. You just stroll on out like it's the most normal thing ever."

"Go out enough with my own girls, get a reputation for being the old guy with the pile of kids on his boat all the time anyway. They might just assume I was out with the kids and some of their friends."

"I have a feeling that won't work for a few years at least."

"Probably not. But in a decade… Fifteen years…"

"Would you want to involve your whole family in this? Mike didn't tell you about this while he was alive for a reason, right?"

"Yeah. If he was doing it… Yeah. If he told me, it'd have put me in a bad situation."

"And if you tell your kids…"

"Same thing."

She looks at him knowingly. "It does seem like this has given you a lot to think about."

"Yeah."

"I also take it that you couldn't care less about the whole illegal thing?"

He nods.

"How about channeling your energy in a more… socially acceptable direction?"

"Like what?"

"Getting involved politically. Trying to get our immigration laws changed? Trying to make it easier for girls like the ones you're talking about to get asylum?"

He shakes his head. "Rather do good than talk about good." He thinks about that for another second. "Wouldn't be good at it. No patience for bullshit. Jen was good at it. Leon's good at it. Me, I'd sit there for five minutes, until my blood pressure shot so high I could feel my pulse in my eyes, and then I'd storm out and go shoot things to blow off steam. Not my thing."

"It could be your thing."

He shakes his head. "Even if it was, we're not talking about girls who can just head over to the consulate and sign up for a visa. Someone still needs to get them out safe."

"And clandestine missions, you and a boat and the open sea, swooping in and saving the day, doing the impossible job, that's your thing?"

He nods vehemently. "That's my thing!"

"And it's very important to you to be not just good, but excellent at what you do?"

The thinks about that for a moment. "Yeah, it is."

"How are you with learning new things?"

"Usually pick things up pretty quick."

That isn't what she's trying to get him to think about so she shifts the question a little. "How are you with someone teaching you something new? Someone you don't know or respect?"

That gets a shrug. He didn't bite Tim's head off when he was setting up the computer, and he did call about the gchat thing, but it's also true that now that it's up and running he'd rather take six hours looking for help online than ask a stranger for help.

"This girl rescue idea, this doesn't require you to learn something new from someone. Not as a student. You'd have to investigate, track down leads, then find the girls, then infiltrate, sail, land somewhere, smuggle them in. You might need to spend a lot of time with Rosetta Stone picking up Farsi or Arabic, but letting someone else see that you don't know what you're doing wouldn't be part of it, right?"

He nods in concession of that.

"But, say, signing up to be an EMT, that would require you to learn someone else's system, be the low man on the totem pole, deal with another person's rules, take orders from someone else. Realistically, as an EMT, you'd be saving lives every week. Good at it or not, you'd still be there getting people to the hospital when they needed to go."

He nods at that, too.

She looks at him, sipping her coffee, not saying anything.

He sips his too, also not saying anything. She's got a very good point, but not one he wants to comment on, not right now.

She sees that, nods, allowing him time to think about it, and says, "How are things going with Tony?"

He tells her about Jimmy's fake it 'til you feel it' plan, and how he'd put it into action the night before.

"I have a feeling I'd like Jimmy."

"You haven't met him?"

She shakes her head. "Saw him in passing for a few seconds. But we've never sat down and had a conversation. So, how did faking it feel?"

"Uncomfortable. Once we got into the work, it was better. Once I figured it out, and the light flicked on, and Tony wasn't so much the… Tim's got a word for it… harbinger?" Rachel nods, that word will do. "The image of things ending, it was a lot easier. I think we were in good shape as I packed everything up and we all agreed to pretend we had no idea what Franks was up to."

"But you haven't gotten back to work, yet."

"No I'm—" he's about to say heading straight there from here when his phone buzzes. He takes it out, glances at the screen, texts back to Tony, and sighs.

"What, something wrong?"

"Not… wrong. Did I tell you about the last case?"

"Just a little."

He fills her in on how Tim handed the case over to Fornell, and how Tony just got a call from Fornell, requesting Tim and the NCIS conference room, so that he, Diane, who is an IRS investigator, and Fornell could go through everything together, cutting the case into pieces, and how Tony had just, gleefully, sent him orders to accompany Tim. "Not that there's much I can add. I was here while Tim and Draga were up there handling the last bit, but I think Tony's looking at having me handle them as a sort of payback."

"Excellent," she says with a smile. "So… is Diane seeing anyone? Thinking about finding yourself a quiet bit of parking lot?"

He glares at her, but there's no anger in it. "I think I said something about being drunk, flirty, and at a wedding for that to happen."

Her expression says that she considered those aspects negotiable.

He shakes his head. "No. We'll snipe at each other, and…" He shakes his head again.

"I'm not saying you need to fall in love with her. But, enjoy it… Without feeling guilty about it. Take the time to see the woman who's really there, and enjoy her. Doesn't have to be romantic or sexual."

"Is this today's homework assignment?"

"Yep. You don't need my help on figuring out the mechanics of what happens next. And it sounds like you won't move in that direction for a while, yet." He nods, besides working on Shannon, getting her done, adding some less than common modifications to her interior design, he won't move on that until he's officially retired. "Meanwhile, you've got a chance to experiment with something here, namely letting yourself genuinely feel an emotional response to a woman you like. Just go with it. See where you end up. It's supposed to be fun, so let yourself have some fun."

Next

Shards To A Whole: Chapter 305

McGee-centric character study/romance. Want to start at the beginning? Click here.

Chapter 305  : The New Path


A/N: Quick reminder Anonymous Was A Woman happened after STAW went off the cannon. More at the end.

Gibbs thought about it the whole ride home, what had Franks been up to?

Whatever it was, he wasn't doing it when Gibbs stayed with him that one summer. Or, if he was doing it, whatever it was didn't involve doing anything for four months at a time.

But Gibbs didn't think he was doing, whatever it was, back then.

But the last few years… especially after the Doc said it was cancer… he was doing something. Wouldn't say what. And, thinking about it, Gibbs doesn't know why he thought Franks was up to something. There were no obvious tells. Mike wasn't asking him for favors or anything. But… there was something.

He knew it in his gut.

Or maybe he just knew Mike so well that he knew there had to be more to it than laying on the beach drunk all day long. Even Mike couldn't do that for a decade at a time.

So, what was he doing?

The box. (technically, boxes) Gibbs had had it for years. All of Franks' "insurance policies." Everything he ever knew about anyone that he could use for leverage.

Gibbs built the false wall behind his bookshelf, stuck the collection of stuff Franks had given him in it, and left it there. And though he added to it as Mike gave him more and more stuff, he never opened any of it.

Because, unlike Franks, he was never so much of a loose cannon that he needed to blackmail people into letting him keep doing the job. Never bent the rules so far that he'd have to keep a loaded gun to make sure that no one would smack him for it.

Well, that's not true.

Unlike Mike, he never felt like he deserved to wiggle out of getting smacked for the rules he'd bent or broken.

So, there was a sense of… trepidation as he opened the box. A sense of peeking behind curtains he never meant to touch.

On the upside, if it can be called an upside, by now most of the things he was looking at were moot. The cases were over, the people involved dead. The entire first box was filled with dead men on dead cases. Things that happened not just before his time, but in several cases, ended before his time as well.

The second box caught up to when he began at NIS. Not exactly current events, but at people he knew, cases he heard of, some he'd been on as a Probie. He refused to look into the file marked "Leon Vance," though he found the quote marks around Leon's name ominous.

And, it was true that he felt dirty by reading through them. These weren't just the skeletons in the closets; these files told the tales of the monsters that put those skeletons there. All 'greater good' arguments aside, there was some awfully shoddy work in these files and a boat load of men who deserved to sleep poorly because of it.

Worse than that, there were signs that the people he knew, respected, men who helped him to anchor himself when he was lost after Shannon and Kelly, were full of shit when it came to doing the job and doing it right.

That was probably part of not opening Leon's file. He doesn't want to know if Leon's full of shit, too. Doesn't want to know how many bodies Leon had to bury to get to where he is.

But for most of these files, and the men represented by them, they've passed to eternal sleep. And for almost all of the others, retirement has come and taken them off every case, forever.

Gibbs burnt the dead files without thinking twice. Nothing left to do with them. The ones where any of the agents were still alive, he kept, one day those cases may open again.

He looked at Leon's one last time, and tossed it on the fire, as well. Whatever was in there, he didn't need to know. Whoever Leon was, the man he is now will own up and act right if it ever comes back at him. Gibbs trusted that. Gibbs needed to trust that.

In the last box, the one Franks gave him right before he died, there are clues to something different. There are files on Coast Guard employees, on Federales and Mounties, on members of the TSA and the FAA, ICE, there are a bunch from the Border patrol, both on the Mexican and Canadian sides, there are files on high ranking officials at the Miami, Los Angeles, Philadelphia airports, and there are dossiers on people in different US Embassies.

These were all, as much as they can be, Frank's has been dead since '11, up to date. These were recent files on men still doing the job. These were also, unlike the others, which were mostly case files highlighting shoddy or flat out illegal work, straight up blackmail, lists of mistresses, gambling debts, embarrassing past activities, that sort of thing.

They're clues, but beyond the fact that everyone Franks had a file on was involved in some sort of travel or border thing… Gibbs wasn't seeing it.

"God, Mike, what the hell were you doing?"

He looked at the files in front of him again. FAA, Coast Guard, TSA, Border Patrol, ICE, airport officials…
"Smuggling?"

He looks around for a moment, willing Mike's ghost to pop up and tell him, but he doesn't. The Embassies are all in the middle east… Opium? If it meant making sure that Leyla and Amira never wanted for anything… If the payout was big, and he was dying already… Yeah, he'd do it in a heartbeat.

"Mike…"

Not drugs. Keep thinkin', Probie, you'll figure it out.

He doesn't see Mike, but the voice is clear.

"Thinking about what?"

Left you all the clues you need. Practically spelled it out. Just keep thinkin', you'll get there.

Thinking about it through church didn't help. The only answer he can think of, drugs, doesn't make any sense.

Actually, no, it makes perfect sense.

He can see what Mike's got set up is some sort of smuggling ring. With Mike's background in law enforcement and the military he'd have had good connections for drugs or guns.

But… he wouldn't leave that lying around for Gibbs. Mike knew there was no way he'd touch anything like that, and Mike wouldn't have given him all of this if he didn't expect him to eventually pick it up and use it.

So, it can't be drugs. Just. No. Never. Wouldn't matter how bad off their family was, how much they were hurting for cash. He'd hire out for wet work before running drugs.

Guns… Not like he couldn't think of people he wouldn't mind getting their hands on some good weapons. He was sure Franks felt the same way… (Though, given what he can see, this looked like Mike was moving something into the USA, and Gibbs really hoped he wasn't arming groups inside the US.) But… TSA? Airport officials? Immigration? Passport officials at different consulates? Guns are big, heavy, take up a lot of space. That's not who you call in for running guns.

It's who you call in to get a cover ID for someone who was running drugs…

Sort of… But… No, there isn't a document guy in the list of files Mike had. There's a list of people who you ask to turn a blind eye. Some you might ask for help. But you don't go to the US Consulate and bribe the Ambassador in an effort to get fake papers. You do that to get real ones, in a hurry.

He was distracted at Sunday dinner, still thinking through the problem, wondering. That got some minor ribbing from various Slaters, but in that he wasn't paying attention, it didn't much matter.

He's tempted to skip Bootcamp. Tim's not fighting, not risking getting a hit to the face today, and he can't, either, not really, and with just Ziva and Jimmy there, they might decide he needs to do some of that god-awful stretching stuff they're so fond of in an effort to get his knee back to functional.

The PT guy already has him doing a shit ton of it, and he hates it because it hurts like a son of a bitch and doesn't seem to be helping much. And with only Jimmy and Ziva able to fight, they'll probably do a few rounds and then make him stretch with them while Jimmy explains, at length, about how all of him needs to be loose and supple if he's going to really get back to fighting prime. (Sometimes having a doctor for one of your kids is highly overrated.) Then Ziva will explain how this sort of conditioning was part of her training and how it helps with fine muscle control or some other thing… (Mossad-trained former assassin isn't necessarily much better.) And… next thing he knows, they're trying to see if they can turn him into a pretzel while his hamstrings and low back scream in pain because there are some positions that guys in their fifties just shouldn't try to get into.

Ed Slater sidling over, looking at Tim, and saying, "The tech guy gets into fist fights?"

He stared at Ed, perplexed that they're still having a version of this conversation. "Tim's a field agent. Won't be after he takes over Cybercrime, but right now, he doesn't spend his days glued to a desk. His job is just as dangerous as mine."

Ed shook his head.

"What?"

"Just, hard to believe."

"Other men have thought that, too. They're dead."

That got a quick, shocked laugh out of Ed. "How about the guy who did that to him? He dead?"

"Nope. In jail. He'll be spending a long time there."

"Thought you and DiNozzo did that stuff."

"All five of us do."

Ed nodded and glanced at the clock. "You and Jimmy heading off?"

Gibbs responded with a nod as well. Time to go.

"You're being awfully quiet," Jimmy said to him as they headed toward the Navy Yard.

Gibbs shrugged, putting his key into the ignition.

"Even for you, you're being quiet, what's up?"

Gibbs turned off the radio and told Jimmy about Tim's suggestion, and what he'd found, what he was puzzling over. He didn't tell him about the other part that was also keeping him quiet. Namely, that Ed's 'Thought you and DiNozzo did that' bit got him thinking about Tony.

Who, of everyone he knew, could look through Franks' papers and help him figure it out.

But he didn't much want to talk to Tony right now.

He was sulking. He knew he was sulking. It was not Tony's fault that he was getting old. Not Tony's fault that he'll take over when Gibbs leaves. And it was not Tony's fault that he was not doing a good job of gracefully slipping into whatever comes next and handing the reins over.

None of that was Tony's fault.

But that didn't mean he wanted to spend an afternoon or two sitting in his living room, next to Tony, drinking a few beers, looking over a bunch of files.

That wasn't right. He wanted to get back to being the guy who enjoyed that. He needed his second-in-command's eyes on this. He wanted to bounce ideas off of Tony.

But right now, bouncing ideas off Tony meant looking the fact that he has to leave right in the face, and he didn't want to do that.

"Gibbs?"

He'd just sort of stopped talking, thinking about Tony and keeping his eyes on the road.

"Mouth open, words coming out," Jimmy said, while making a little talking gesture with his fingers. "I'm not psychic. I'm the one who spends nine hours a day with a guy who talks constantly. So, I need words, out loud, coming from you."

"Not much more to tell."

"Okay, let me remind you of this, in addition to not being psychic, I'm also not stupid."

Gibbs looked irked by that, turning his gaze from traffic to Jimmy. "You were a lot easier when I had you scared into submission."

Jimmy smiled grimly. "Would you like me to shut up and let you stew?"

"If I say yes, will you?"

He shook his head, no. "It's extremely unlikely."

Gibbs rolled his eyes and added in what he'd been thinking about Tony. Jimmy nodded at that, thinking quietly, a few miles down the road he said, "This time last week, you'd have worked out with us, gone home, given Tony and Ziva a call, tossed some steaks on the fireplace, and the three of you would have gone over it?"

"Yeah."

"So, this week, work out with us, get your shower, pick up some steaks on the way home, and then give Tony and Ziva a call."

Gibbs flashed Jimmy something that could only be called 'the stink eye.'

"Fake it until it's real again. You know you're sulking. You know it's stupid. Hiding in the basement isn't going to make it any better, and it won't solve your problem with Mike. On top of that, you know you owe Tony an olive branch and showing him that you still trust and value him does that."

That made an uncomfortable amount of sense. Fortunately he was parking the car when Jimmy said that, so he didn't have to respond immediately to it.

Unfortunately, unlike Tim and Tony who knew well enough to leave the hell alone, as soon as he was done parking, Jimmy was looking at him expectantly, waiting to hear something along the lines of… Jethro rolled his eyes and said, "Fine."

Jimmy smiled brightly at that. "Good. So, besides drugs and guns, what do people smuggle? Art? Antiques? I'm sure Ducky has a good fifteen hours on different stories of how people have been smuggling artifacts out of Iran and the like."

Gibbs nodded at that. Ever since everything went haywire in the Middle East, everyone who could, had been smuggling stuff out. He doubted Mike would have any objections to something like that, especially if it did provide a pile of cash for his girls to live on comfortably.

Jimmy added, "You might use people in the consulate to provide a diplomatic pouch for something like that. Don't want your ancient statue of whatever to get checked, go bribe someone into giving you diplomatic protections."

Gibbs nodded at that, too. It felt plausible, but not right. He was about to say something along those lines when Jimmy saw Ziva and called out to her, "You and Tony have dinner plans?"

"No."

"Good. Jethro's cooking. You two are going to his place and helping him solve a mystery."

Ziva looked very pleased by that. "What sort of mystery?"

"The sort we'll tell you about when we get changed. See you in five," Jimmy said, heading them toward the locker room.

"No chance of backing out, huh?" Gibbs said quietly.

"Nope. It'll be good for you."

"Uh huh." Gibbs didn't sound convinced as he dropped his gym bag on the floor and sat down to take his shoes off.

"Speaking of good for you, how's the knee?" Jimmy asked while opening his locker.

"Fine."

"Fine, like how you're doing with Tony, fine?" Jimmy knelt in front of him, looking at the knee in question, gently poking at it once Gibbs had the brace off. "Or," he extended Gibbs' leg and tested to see how much play was in the joint when he wiggled it, "fine, fine?"

Gibbs slapped his hands away and began to get changed. "Fine."

"Run a mile, fine?" Jimmy's expression was serious as he asked.

"Not yet."

"Walk a mile?"

"Yes."

"How's it feel?"

"Aches after that. Have to ice it down."

He nodded along with that. "Any weight on the leg curls?"

"No."

"How long can you go without the brace and not have it ache?"

"An hour."

"Stand on one leg, steady?"

"About half a minute."

Jimmy thought about that, and this time, hands hovering over Jethro's knee, waited for permission (and got it) before feeling how everything moved through a full extension of his knee. "You're healing."

"Not fast enough."

"Ducky felt that way after his heart attack."

"I know."

"How about after Ziva and I fight, we work on some targeted calf, hamstring, glutes, and quadriceps exercises?"

"Am I going to have to stretch?"

"Yep." Jimmy looked like he enjoyed this idea quite a bit more than was warranted.

"Great." Jethro did not look like he was enjoying that idea.

"More flexibility means lower chance of reinjuring yourself. More flexibility means better blood flow which means faster healing. The looser you are the more of each muscle works-"

"I know. I got it the first three times you started singing that song. We'll do it. Just don't love it."

Jimmy turned back to his locker, hanging up his jacket and quickly stripping out of his church clothing. "You don't have to love it. You've just got to do it."

Gibbs stared at Jimmy not sure he wanted to say it, but… "Why?"

"You want to be able to walk without a brace?" Jimmy wasn't sure what exactly he was asking there, and the puzzled expression on his face said that loud and clear.

"Yeah, but… big picture, what's the point? Say I set the record for fastest recovery ever, how soon will I be back on full duty?"

"Middle of December?" By which Jimmy meant first week of January, and Gibbs knew it.

"So, I'll have, at most, a month. And really, a week. What's the point?"

"Oh…" Jimmy sat down on the bench next to Gibbs, understanding that this is about more than just his knee. Unfortunately he doesn't have any good answers for Gibbs, not at first. "Getting the most out of that month that you can?"

"Yippiee." Dry, withering sarcasm, more the style of Tim than anything Jimmy expected out of Gibbs went with that.

"Being able to play on the floor with little girls easily?"

"Better." That got a ghost of a smile, but it's a genuine ghost.

"Finding out whatever the hell Indiana Jones stuff Franks was up to, getting your own whip and fedora, and heading off into the sunset for incredible adventures that Tim'll steal and stick in his book?"

Gibbs laughed dryly at that, but that was real, too.

Jimmy poked him gently and gave him a dirty smile. "Because six months from now, when, on said adventure, you meet Ms. Right, you want all of your different bits working so you can rock her world."

That got a genuine, unreserved laugh.

"Can't get through a proper tango, let alone pick her up and carry her off Rhett Butler style if your knee's gimping out on you."

Jethro nodded wryly, and grabbed for his shorts, tugging them on.

Fire crackling gently, savory scent of steak and potatoes cooking away, one beer in his system, Operation: Fake It Till You Feel It was about to begin.

Tony also looked a bit wary as he headed in, but in he went, took a beer from Gibbs, and waited. He and Ziva were staring at him, seeing the pile of files on his kitchen table, looking expectantly at him, waiting to get filled in. He offered pointed out what was on the table and explained what he wanted them looking at.

For the first hour, it was pretty quiet. Sounds of eating, papers rustling, Ziva and Tony looking through the files.

"You got a map of the world?" Tony asked.

"Yeah." He headed upstairs, went searching through the books on the shelves, and found their atlas.

Tony stared at it when he came down, shaking his head. "Need McGee and the plasma."

"Or MTAC," Ziva added.

"Yeah. Spread it all out so we can see it easy." Tony squinted at the little map in front of him, shaking his head. "This isn't going to do it. Look, East Germany. It's" he opened the book's cover, "thirty years out of date."

"What were you thinking of putting on a map?" Gibbs asked.

"The Embassies… All but three are in the Middle East. Then he's got one in Jamaica, one in Mexico City, and one in The Dominican Republic. They're all US Embassies…" Tony tapped his fingers on the files in front of him. "Why? That's got to go with the border thing, somehow. You don't bribe US Borders and Customs to get things out of the US, but to get them in. They don't care about stuff going out."

"Look at what is not on this list," Ziva said. "He has no one at DEA, FBI, or ATF. That means your first two guesses, drugs or guns cannot be right."

"So, Jimmy's antiquities?" Gibbs asked.

"Maybe. But why no high ranking officials in the middle east? Everyone he's got there works for one of our Embassies. Afghanistan's a mess, but if you want to take the local Mona Lisa out, you still need some of their people to look the other way, not just ours." Tony was staring at Gibbs' mantle, looking at the pictures. There was a shot of Leyla and Amira. "Why was he doing this?"

"Money? Make sure the girls are set. Leyla never married Liam, so she doesn't get spousal benefits."

"Isn't her family rich?" Tony asked.

That was true. "Yes."

"And she and her mom are on good terms again, right?"

"Think so."

"And she is working for Homeland as a translator, correct?" Ziva added.

"Yes. Married last year, too."

"Mike would not have known that. But she has been working here since before he died. And she and her mother reconciled long before Mike died," Ziva said.

"So, not financial security for his girls," Tony says. "And he told you you were better off not knowing?"

Gibbs nodded.

"Not guns, not drugs, probably not antiques…" Tony was shaking his head. "No one on his list seems to know squat about that… Not, it can't be antiques, there's no fence on this list. Someone's got to buy and sell the damn things after he got them here. What's that leave?"

It hit Gibbs like a hammer, and he could see Mike smiling at him from behind Tony. "People. It leaves people." He turned to look at the picture of Leyla and Amira, and he knew, he felt it in his gut. "It leaves girls in a bad situation looking to get somewhere better."

All three of them stared at the folders in front of them. Then Gibbs started to close them and pack them up, quick. Illegal, very, very, very illegal, but not immoral. Never immoral. Because Mike didn't care about legal, he never did. But he cared a whole lot about what was right, which was why he couldn't keep working for a government he felt had betrayed it's people.

He looked at Tony and Ziva and both of them shook their heads, a silent, 'We didn't see this, you didn't see it either, we're all blind, stupid, and deaf, and we weren't here to boot.'

He nodded at that, finishing tucking the files back into their box.

A minute later, as Tony and Ziva were getting ready to leave, Tony glanced at him, almost as if he was going to ask what Gibbs was going to do with this, but, just like Mike wouldn't tell him, because he was a cop, Gibbs won't tell Tony. But he nodded at Tony, and Tony nodded back.

They got each other.

And as they left, Gibbs knew something else, this box was going back into the hidden wall, and it was going to stay there, for about three and a half months, and then, when he was no longer a cop, he was going to pull it out and really look it over.

A/N: So, I love the idea of Mike running the Afghani-girl underground railroad. That's such a wonderfully Mike sort of thing to do. I enjoyed Anonymous Was a Woman, too. Give me tons of McGee and Gibbs together and I'm happy.

But, I did not, for a second, buy the idea that Mike told Gibbs what he was up to and Gibbs didn't help.

The idea that Gibbs placed "legal" and his job over helping little girls/teens escape repeated rape and slavery did not compute. My suspension of disbelief snapped with an audible twang.

Okay, actually it snapped with an audible "No fucking way!" and while it's true that my husband doesn't curse, he agreed with my assessment of that situation.

One of the reasons we root for Gibbs is that Gibbs stands for what's right. He doesn't care about the niceties or legalities. He does the right thing at the right time for the right reasons. Add in his history with girls, let alone his go to the wall for family, and there's just absolutely no way he didn't sign those papers for Mike and get those girls on that plane.

No way!

So, we've done a bit of a rewrite here. Mike never told him. He was sensitive to who Gibbs was, and his position, and that Gibbs could get into a shit ton of trouble for this, so he didn't tell. He just, set it up so that Gibbs could, should he go through Mike's stuff, start putting some pieces together and maybe, if he found himself with some free time, a boat, and a desire to be useful, take over for him.

Shards To A Whole: Chapter 304

McGee-centric character study/romance. Want to start at the beginning? Click here.

Chapter 304: The Lady McGee

After Gibbs leaves, Tim heads upstairs. Abby’s still in the shower, water still on full blast, so he takes a moment to head to their toy box, snag the glass dildo she’d used last when they were playing these characters, along with the… blindfold.
It’s not exactly a blindfold in the way most people mean that word. Pretty much just taking a scarf or tie or piece of fabric and tying it over someone’s eyes is a really inefficient way to go about making it so they can’t see.
If the fabric is narrow enough to not hide most of their face, (Which is important when it comes to sex play. It’s much easier to tell if your partner likes what you’re doing if you can see her face.) then it’s also narrow enough to gape at the nose. He’s also noticed that most fabrics don’t tie well against hair. Either the hair gets caught in the knot, or the fabric slips over the hair when the person wearing the blindfold moves her head, (say if she’s lying on her back and squirming, next thing you know the blindfold’s round her nose or in her mouth.) and more annoying than that, a blindfold that’s large enough to really block sight is a blindfold large enough to block most of the expressions on the person wearing it’s face.
So, Tim doesn’t much like a traditional blindfold.
But every now and again he likes to set a scene they don’t happen to have on hand, and Abby being able to see where they actually are takes away from the idea of the scene he’s setting.
So, about a year ago, after showing her the house for the first time, and not being very satisfied with how the blindfold he used then worked, he came across an idea, tested it out with Abby’s enthusiastic cooperation, and both of them were pleased.
It’s a cheap, little masquerade mask. Probably cost about three bucks. He trimmed it down a bit so it covers less of Abby’s face than it would otherwise. (She never blindfolds him, he likes watching way too much for that to be fun for him.) Then he bought some soft, black felt, and lined the inside of the mask, over the eyeholes, with it.
Voila, perfect blindfold. It stays in place when she moves. Her hair doesn’t get caught in it. She doesn’t have an uncomfortable knot in to deal with. If the elastic ever snaps, he’s got three more he can set up in a jiffy.
It’s even black.
He snags it, as well as the dildo, and the lube, and heads into their extra room, making sure everything is ready to go.

He’s laying on their bed, googling what sort of things Irish people wore in the 1300s, thinking about costume ideas. (Obviously not for this round, but for the story and future play. For this round, he’s debating putting on a kilt or keeping on his jeans.)
Looks mostly like tunics and a cloak. No hose, so that was a plus. No kilts, a minus. Maybe it’ll be magical Scotland, not like there aren’t already seventy million versions of that out there…
Hell, maybe their part of the universe has denim. Yeah, they’ll be cotton-baron dragons of a mythical medieval Alabama… He shakes his head and rolls his eyes. It’s fiction, and more than that, fantasy, you can set it up however you like.
The water stops running, and that pulls his attention away from costumes. A few minutes later, Abby’s standing in front of the doorway, toweling off her hair.
“So, besides ‘all cleaned up,’ do I get any hints for tonight?”
He answers that with a question of his own. “Does Skye have a first name? Is it a title, where she’s from, just something that sounds good?”
She sits on the bed and starts to smooth on her moisturizer, recognizing his lack of answer means that nope, no more hints. “Not sure. There’s an Isle of Skye, right?”
“I think so. And even if there isn’t one on the real world, doesn’t mean there can’t be one in my world.”
“Good point.” She thinks while he googles, then says, “Katherine. That’s an old-school English name, right?”
“Think so.” He looks up from his phone. “Isle of Skye. It’s up in northern Scotland, just off the west coast. It’s beautiful, green and craggy, no trees, or bushes, but lots of grass, rocks and sky, and water.”
“So… I’m thinking Katie got bored of fish and sheep and decided to make her fortune further south.”
He nods along with that and leans over to show her the picture on his phone.
“Does anyone live there?” Abby asks, the only thing that looks like human habitation on the pictures he’s showing her saw its glory days in the 1500s.
“Says about nine thousand do. Apparently it’s a tourist attraction.” He holds out his hand. “Want me to get your back?”
“Sure.” She squirts a bit of the lotion onto his palm, and he shifts to sitting behind her, rubbing it onto her skin. “Mmmm…”
“Feels good?”
“Always. Wanna go there, someday?” She continues to go through pictures of the Isle of Skye.
He shrugs. In the pictures, it’s beautiful. Very green and severe, lochs and moors, sky stretching out forever, the feel of the sea even in the pictures where you can’t see it. It doesn’t look like anything in the United States. He would like to see it.
The tenish hour flight to get there isn’t rocking his world. Though commercial air travel is likely quite a bit more comfortable than the troop/equipment transports Gibbs delights in plopping them on for work.
“Find a quiet bit of grass and make love on the moors?” She turns his phone toward him, showing him a shot of very green grass broken by standing stones. Looks, honestly, kind of rough and prickly to him, but that’s what picnic blankets are for.
He smiles at that. “As soon as we can drive there, I’m all for it.”
She laughs. “So, you want a name. Anything else?”
He thinks as his thumbs press into her shoulders. She purrs quietly at the massage. “You’ve been keeping me as a pet for a few months; what kind of stuff would Gabe have learned about Skye in that time? Besides her name.”
“If you’d been a pet, and really a pet, mostly how to fuck.” She looks over her shoulder and grins at him.
He mock pouts. “My charms aren’t enough to get you talking while drowsing post-sex?”
“You might be good in bed, but I don’t think Lord Gabriel McGee of the Nightfuries is much of a spy. If you were paying attention, you might know a whole lot more about alchemy now. But, really, I think you’re her boy toy, how she blows off stress at the end of the day.”
He trails his fingers down the back of her neck, making the fine hairs on her skin rise. “I suppose there are a lot of ways to bring honor to the clan.”
That gets a laugh. She shifts around, so she’s kneeling between his legs, and gently kisses him. “How’s your face feeling?”
“It’s sore.” The bruises from getting head-butted are sore, and his right eye is still a bit swollen. He kisses her finger and his tongue darts out to lick her fingertip. “This still works just fine.”
“Excellent.” She grins at him, and he sucks on her fingertip, letting his tongue slide over the tip, heavily hinting what’s coming later.
Kelly’s going to wake up soon, so he doesn’t want to get too deep into playing, yet. Right now is just about being with each other, setting a mood, and enjoying these little, everyday intimacies. So one last suck, a quick flick of his tongue, and then he releases her hand. Tim takes the bottle of moisturizer, and adds another squirt to his hand, then taps the back of his knuckles lightly against her knee. She changes position again, her leg over his, and he strokes the lotion over her right leg as she did her left.
“This stuff new?” he asks, hands smoothing up her leg. “Smells different.”
“Yep. You like it?”
“Not sure. It’s not bad. Just not that ‘you’ scent.”
“Turns out my last brand started testing on animals so they could sell their stuff in China, so I ditched them.”
He nods at that, rubbing her thigh gently, making sure all the lotion absorbs evenly. She let him keep it up for a minute or two longer than necessary, then takes his hand away from her leg and kisses it. “Don’t want to get me too revved up before I’ve got to feed Kelly.”
“Good point.” He glances at the clock. Any minute now, Kelly would wake up, and once she’d eaten they could get to really playing.
Abby stands up, slipping on one of her nursing bras. “So, costume for this?”
“Hmmm…” He ponders happily. “Were you planning on putting anything else on?”
“Robe or button down. Little too cool for naked.”
“Go for the robe then.”
She nods, reaching for it, and as she did, they heard the first tiny wail of their daughter looking for second dinner. Abby checks the clock. “That’s the fourth night in a row that she’s hit 10:04. How can she possibly be that accurate?”
He shrugs. 
“Back in a bit.”
He grins. “See you then, Lady Skye.”

    Second dinner usually clocks in at half an hour. He uses that half hour to make sure he’s got his scene set. Everything looks in place. He’s standing in the spare room, checking around, thinking about his own costume.
Jeans or kilt…
You’re a captive sex slave breaking free. Did she let you have clothing? You didn’t in the first game. The keep’s fallen, everything is in chaos, you’re breaking out and snagging her to go with you. Did you go hunting for clothing before grabbing her or are you just grabbing her and leaving? He tosses off his jeans. No way you’d take the time to go scrounge up some pants. You’re grabbing her before someone else does, and getting the hell out of there.
He’s naked; the room’s set. Time to get in place for her. He picks up the blindfold.
Kelly’s room will be dim. The night light gives just enough illumination to make sure all poop comes off during the pre-feed diaper change, and that’s it. He flicks on the hall light, opens the bathroom door, turns on that light as well. He wants it bright out here, so for a few seconds she won’t be able to see much.
He waits, standing, pressed against the wall, right next to Kelly’s door. If this goes the way he hopes it does, she’ll shut the door, he’ll leap over, snag her, get the blindfold on, hoist her over his shoulder, and into the not so empty, empty room they’ll go.
That’s the plan at least.


He can hear her humming, the slight click of the rocking chair settling back into place as she gets up. “Sleep well, baby girl.”
One step, two, three, her hand hits the doorknob.
She opens the door, blinking hard at the bright light, and he pulls her to him, fast, his hand over her mouth. “Quiet.”
Abby nods.
“Your keep’s fallen. Time to get you out of here, Lady Skye.”
“Before I’m taken as a prize?” she whispers.
“Before you’re taken as someone else’s prize.”
“And how do you suggest we get out? You’re clearly wounded, unarmed, and naked.”
“I fought my way to you like this, and I’ll get us out.” He flashes her a cocky smile. Tim slips the blindfold over her eyes, hoists her over his left shoulder, and murmuring something he hopes sounds vaguely magick-y, he carries her into the spare room.


He’d set the room carefully. A few of the LED candles are glowing, providing him with enough light to see. He’d turned the “music” on while Abby nursed; it’s the sound of waves and wind. Turning the ceiling fan on means they have a bit of a breeze. Dragging the humidifier up from the basement and running it while she was nursing means the room is slightly damp.
It feels and sounds, he hopes, a lot like they are on the ocean.
He puts her down, gently, on the fuzzy rugs. “I wouldn’t stray far, Lady Skye, the water’s rough, and twenty feet below us.”
“I’m a good swimmer,” she says, still sitting, reaching around her, feeling what’s near.
“Make sure you jump far then, the rocks below us are rougher, yet.”
“And will I get my vision back?”
“Eventually. You don’t need it right now.”
“Why? Keeping me from running off?”
“Something like that,” he says as she feels around, finding the edges of the rug. “The cliff we’re on only extends a few feet beyond the rugs.”
“How did we get here?”
“Magic.”
She stops feeling around and looks at him, exasperation on her face. “This whole time, you’ve been able to just leave whenever you wanted?”
“Yes.” He kneels, straddling her legs, and gently strokes her lips with his fingers. “But being your amusement of choice made for a very pleasant situation. Didn’t feel any need to leave until I could let my men know where I was.”
She nods, starting to put the pieces together. “And did my keep fall to your men?”
“Yes. Daegan has it now. If it’s any consolation, I’m sure you’ll get back to it.”
“You’re just going to let me go?”
“That wasn’t how I was envisioning this working.” He sits back on his heels, next to her, slipping one of the scarves out from under the rugs, looping it over her big toe, crossing it over and over her foot, and tying it gently at her ankle. He kisses the knot and once again said something low and nonsense, magic words to work the spell. “On the off chance you can’t actually swim, this will make sure you don’t fall.”
“And how did you envision this working?” she asks, foot still between his hands, her hands braced against the rugs, leaning back against them, robe slipping off her left shoulder.
“Did you know I have six brothers?”
“You hadn’t mentioned that.”
He shrugs, gently stroking her ankle, tips of his fingers skittering between the lines of the scarf. “Well, we didn’t do a lot of talking. They’re envious of my position as firstborn and covetous of my lands. I would find it… convenient… to have a well-fortified keep they didn’t grow up in, finding all the nooks and hidden passages. A keep staffed with men who aren’t loyal to my family might be nice, too. Likewise, that keep of yours is on prime land, and it’s much easier to defend lands when the people attacking them do not know every river and glen.”
“Uh huh.” She doesn’t look particularly impressed by that, understanding where he’s going with this. She changes the subject. “What is this place?”
“Mine. This is my one holding that I do not have to defend from them. They see no use to it. First of seven boys, only one with a lick of magic to him. For them, this is just a cold lump of rock in the middle of the ocean. But for me… All magic is sea, sky, earth, and fire, and here, we sit on earth that was once fire, that burned until it hit the sea, cooled, became this shelf of rock, here sea beats below us, and sky dances above. Here we are fire made earth, held between sea and sky. Here is perfect.”
Abby moves the edge of the rug and touches the carpet below, as if to touch the rock. “Poetic. This is your power source?”
“One of them. But, yes, this is an especially fine node. Easy to pull off of, easy to work with. I’m not, by a long margin, the first mage called to this rock, and I won’t be the last. But while my heart beats, it’s mine.”
“Why bring me here?”
He smiles, but she can’t see that. So he reaches for her hand, and places it on his chest, over his heart. Her other hand lay on the carpet below the rugs, touching what would have been bare rock. “Bringing my heart to my heart.”
She tilts her head, teasing, emotional armor in place, but her voice is soft as she asks, “Are you really that fond of me, Dragon Knight?”
“I think I could become so, and I’d like that chance. I am that fond of your lands, and it’s an awfully nice keep, very comfortable, hot and cold running sex available at all hours. I like it there.” He smiles brightly, keeping the lightness in his voice, so she can hear it.
She smirks at that, starting to tug her hand away, but he holds her wrist firm over his heart.
“Do you think I’m that fond of you?” she asks him.
He keeps hold of her hand, lifting her wrist to his lips, kissing gently, and then biting softly, scraping his teeth over the sensitive skin where her pulse thrums. He smiles at her again. “We’ll find out.”
“You’ll try.”
“Unlike you, Lady Skye, I’ve got more than thick walls to keep a person near.” Abby looks too amused to be properly Lady Skye, but, lack of proper indignation aside, he’s very pleased to see Abby’s having a good time with this. He kisses her wrist again, then licks gently up the inside of her forearm, speaking against her skin, letting the breath of his words tickle damp flesh.
“I bind you, Katie of Skye,” her eyes go wide as he says that. Apparently that isn’t what Abby or Skye expected him to do.
“I bind your flesh to mine.” He snags another of the scarves, one that already had a small loop tied into the end, slipping it over her first finger.
“I bind you Katie of Skye, here, where earth meets air.” He wraps the scarf over her hand and wrist, looping it further up her arm as his lips slip over each new word.
“I bind you, here, where sea kisses earth.” He kisses the crook of her elbow with that.
“I bind you, here, where fire met water.
“I bind you, here, in the shadow of where fire leaps to air.
“I bind you, here, my woman” a kiss to her wrist, “to my magic” a kiss to her palm, “to my name.” One last kiss to her lips.
He finishes tying the knot onto her arm, and then shifts his hold to her other arm, where the knot tattoo is. “I bind you, Katie of Skye, brand you with my mark, take you as my woman.
“I bind you, Katie McGee, from this day ‘til our spirits return to the heavens that gave us birth.
“I bind you.”
Abby’s grinning widely at that, and he has no problem feeling her break character as she says, “I like that.”
“Really?” That was quite a bit more one-sided than he’s ever taken his playing before. After all, Skye, in character, probably wouldn’t have been thrilled with the whole magically overpowered, taken captive, and married by force thing. And though he liked saying it, was in it, with the character in the moment, there is a part of him feeling a bit wary going that far. He thinks she knew he’d need a bit more reassurance to take this that far, and he appreciates getting it.
“Oh yeah!” She’s nodding at him. “I think most girls like the idea of being swooped up, taken, and claimed, by the right guy. You know, as a game… Different if it’s real. But, sometimes it’s nice to be reminded of exactly how much bigger and stronger you are. Sometimes, it’s fun to be… swept off your feet, literally.”
He slips off her blindfold, (he doesn’t like having a real conversation when he can’t see Abby’s eyes) and she quickly looks around, appreciating what he’s done to set this.
“Nice.”
“Thanks.”
“Why are there two kitchen chairs up here?” There’s a chair on either side of the rugs.
He smiles happily at her, naughty gleam in his eyes. “That binding might get a whole lot more literal. Just don’t tug hard; they won’t hold for much.”
She’s still grinning at this, and looks him in the eye and says, “Sometimes, an edge of danger is fun. Sometimes, the safeword isn’t just about making sure you’ve got a way out, sometimes it’s about allowing the illusion of lack of consent…”
That’s way further than they’ve ever taken his Doming. He knows he’s not comfortable going that far. She’s never said no in a game, but he’s sure, even though that’s not her safeword, that it’ll stop him dead.
Edge of danger, bigger, and stronger, and just taking what you want… That’s also a different flavor than how they usually play. Even when he is in charge, he’ll tell her what he wants, have her do it for him, but she always has the control of not following orders. He’s never just taken what he wants. There’s a huge chasm between saying, ‘Pull it out and suck’ and actually grabbing a woman by the head and forcing her to do it.
He’s looking at her, not quite sure how to even put what’s bouncing around in his mind into words, but she’s nodding at him, reassuring.
“Play with me. Trust me, I’ll like it. And Skye’s not from around now, she’s used to a world where men decide what they want and then grab it.”
“But, does she like it?”
“She does if the right guy’s doing it.”
“Is Gabe the right guy?”
“I have a feeling that’s the main plot of book one.”
“You think there’s more than one book here?”
“Oh yes.” She grins up at him, kisses just below his chin, where his skin is unbruised, and then slips the blindfold back over her eyes.  
Tim takes a moment to shift the storyline in his head a bit, embracing a more ‘taking’ less ‘telling’ perspective. Then says, “It’s not nice to tease a man.”
He leans over her, snagging another scarf, whispering in her ear, “Not nice to show him something he wants, day after day, letting him see, but not touch.” He bites her earlobe, and then ties her right wrist (loosely) to the leg of the chair.
“And what, poor little Knight, did you want so badly that you couldn’t have?” She tugs the binding as a token complaint against being tied, but Abby’s being careful not to yank too hard.
His hands stroke over her hips, unknotting the tie on her robe, pushing it off her body and up and over her arm, so it pools in a soft silk puddle up by her right hand.
“Hands and knees, Lady McGee, on your hands and knees.”
Abby’s wriggling in a very pleased sort of way. Completely out of character for Skye, but well, he’s a guy, and an ass guy at that, and her wriggling a soft, plump ass at him in a very come and get it manner hits him all sorts of all right.
He quickly ties her left ankle to the other chair, spreading her legs apart, and lays a line of kisses down her spine, then settles, kneeling between her legs, looking.
“Best view in the world,” he says, hands cupping her rear, stroking gently over her skin, staying to the sides, nearer her hips than her pussy.
“Not my face?” she asks, back into Skye, looking (well, not looking, she’s got the blindfold on, but turning her face to him) over her shoulder.
He pats her cheek gently. “Get to see your pretty face all the time. This treasure’s usually hiding under your skirts. Shame to see it covered.” He gently licks the base of her cross tattoo. “Maybe I’ll do that… Take you to my home, keep you bent over all day and night, on display for my pleasure? You kept me ninety-seven days. Shall I keep you bent over for me ninety-seven days?”
“Open to your every whim?”
He growls gently at that. Many, many whims flashing through his mind. “You’re teasing again.”
“Maybe I like teasing. Besides, what sort of teasing is this? ‘Get to see but didn’t touch.’ You touched me all over.”
“No, Lady McGee, I didn’t. You let me touch here.” His hands slid down her hips and legs. “And here” he drags them up the backs of her legs, over her ass, and up her back. “Of course here.” He cups her breasts gently. “And here.” His fingers trail down her throat and over her arms.
He kisses her pussy lightly, just brushing his lips against hers. “Loved touching there.” He slips his tongue between her lips, lapping gently at her, taking the time to savor her taste and tease her clit, working her until she’s rocking against him, soft, breathy moans matching the cadence of the waves in the recording. When he felt her start to tighten, when her voice got higher and her legs began to just barely quiver, he slid further up, over her perineum, and an inch further, circling her anus then lightly flicking his tongue against it.
She jerks at that touch, gasping, sounding surprised, drawing in a little, and he’s sure that’s her being Skye, because he knows Abby likes that just fine and having been told to get all clean, was certainly expecting something like that to happen.
“But you didn’t let me touch here.” He licks his finger, making sure it’s wet and slick, and then slides it over her, circling the delicate skin. “You teased, and you let me imagine, you told me how good it’d be, let me see,” he grabs the glass dildo and trails it over her, “that, but you didn’t let me touch.” He bites the curve of her buttock, where it met her thigh, while continuing to circle her with his finger.
“No more teasing, Lady McGee, time to deliver on your promises.”
She inhales fast and hard, shifting away from him as much as she can without pulling too far on the ties and tipping over the chairs.
He strokes the dildo up the insides of her legs, teasing closer and closer toward her pussy, but not touching. “No sarcastic quip for me? No more teasing?”
She shakes her head. “Not about that.”
He licks gently over her, tongue trailing in a wet, silky promise. She tightens against him, squirms, partially pulling away, partially pushing back, getting more friction, and sighs. He licks again, and again, nothing demanding, no penetration, just kissing her properly, making sure everything was warm and wet, quivering in anticipation. When he pulls back he says, “Do you not like it?”
“I like what you’re doing. I’ve… never…” She blushes prettily, and Tim’s not sure if Abby’s so into Skye right now she can’t find the edges between them, or she’s just that good of an actress. Either way, he’s really liking it.
“Never?” That got another long, wet lick, and this time he points his tongue, very gently starting to press forward, wriggling against her. When she presses back against him, he stops. “Tease me like that, and you’ve never…”
“No.”
He bites her gently again, growling, feeling a surge of lust-filled possessiveness through him. “Nothing a man likes better than virgin territory.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” she says very quietly.
“Afraid I’d like it?” he asks, gently, concerned.
“Afraid of being marked by you.”
That got a smirk, and another kiss, his fingers dancing over the lip print on her throat and the cuff tattoo on her arm. “Little late for that, Lady McGee. You’re mine. Body, lands, soul. Mine.” He leans up, so that his chest covers her back and his lips are near her ear. “See me.” He whispers against her ear, and slips the blindfold off.  She turns her face to him, and he kisses her lips. “I want you to see me do it. I want you to know it’s my body. No closing your eyes, no pretending. My body, in yours. My cock, making you come.”
“You’re awfully sure about that.”
“Ninety-seven days. That’s how long you held me. Eighty-nine of them you came to me. Came for my tongue, my cock, my fingers, my body. You slept in my arms and screamed my name. I know you had other men you kept as toys, but you came back, over and over, for me.”
“Maybe they were just lame fucks,” she says with a smile, seeming more in control.
“Maybe. But you know I’m not.” He unbinds her hand and ankle. “When I sink into you, I want you to see it. I want you watching. First man to take your ass’ll be me, and I want to make sure you know it.” He picks her up again and carries her into their bedroom, dropping her on the bed and quickly adjusting the mirrors in their room.
A second later, he’s back again, this time with the dildo and lube. He takes a few seconds to rearrange the pillows, wants something to help keep him easily propped up, then he reclines against them, shoulders and chest off the bed, rest of him lying down.
“Hands and knees again. Over me. Want you sucking me while I play with you.”
Abby nods, settling into place over him. He scoots them (and the pillows) over a few inches. “Can you see everything?”
“Yes.” It’s not an easy angle to get a good view of, but lots of mirrors means he can bounce the view off of one to another, so she can see him as he touches her.
“Good.” He licks her slow and steady. Then notices she’s not doing much licking of her own, and pushes his cock toward her lips. A second later, when she sucks him in in one long pull, he groans. “Perfect, just like that. Keep me happy, while I get you ready.”
One last lick, wet and slick and lavish, lingering on her skin, making her arch against him, he’d probably like to do more, but once penetration gets involved he stops being able to kiss the rest of her, and he’s got a damn good way of helping distract from the uncomfortable part of stretching out, one he needs a clean tongue for.
He reaches around, finding the lube by feel, and tossing it to her. “Slick up my fingers.”
She does, using lots of lube. This is one time when extra friction isn’t a good thing. He pulls her hips a bit higher up, begins to stroke her clit with his tongue, while his fingers begin to gently massage around her anus. He takes his time, slow, easy, lots of long strokes with the pads of his fingers to relax the muscles, help get everything loose and happy.
She’s rocking against him, humming blissfully against his dick, mouth wet and supple on him, making it difficult to concentrate on what he’s supposed to be doing, but it’s the best kind of distraction.
He starts to ease his first finger in, slow, steady pressure, while he sucks on her clit, flicking it with his tongue. She’s moaning against him, thrilling him with the sounds of her pleasure and the feel of it on his dick.
Once his finger’s sunk in he pulls back for a second to say, “God, that’s beautiful. So, hot and tight. Still watching?”
He feels her nod and starts on finger two. Slow, gentle pressure, easy stretching, making sure her body has time to adjust. Making sure to keep her just on the edge of getting off as he adds each new finger. He’s reading her responses carefully, feeling the building tension in her body, the almost-there clench of her ass around his two fingers as his tongue speeds up, getting her closer and closer. He wants to feel her twitching around him as he slips the third finger in, wants to hear her coming on him.
It’s there, that breathy, gasping, high-pitched moan that lets him know it’s time.  He speeds his tongue and slips the third finger in, fast, knowing by that point she’s so turned on the burn’ll feel good. And it does, or seems to, at least, her legs twitch and her body spasms around him as the third finger slides home.
He waits until she’s not twitching anymore, until her breathing calms back down. She’s resting against him, not sucking anymore, just lightly licking his thigh. “Still think my confidence is unfounded.”
“No.”
He wriggles his fingers. “Still feel good?”
“Yes.”
He starts to pump them in and out, slowly. She moans again. He rises his hips toward her again. “That wasn’t nearly muffled enough.”
She giggles and takes him back into her mouth. He moans, then goes back to licking her, rolling her clit with his tongue in fast circles as his finger set a slow steady glide. When her mouth work starts to get sloppy, when she lets him slip out and doesn’t seem to be paying much attention at all to his dick, that’s his cue to move from fingers to the dildo.
He was about to press the dildo in when an idea occurs to him. An idea they haven’t played with before. He’s not even entirely sure how the mechanics of it would work, but he reaches back, just able to get the drawer on the nightstand open, grabs one of the condoms, and quickly covers the dildo.
Abby had been watching and is looking at him curiously. They’re the only ones that use their toys, not like they need extra protection. He adds more lube to the condom and then pushes forward with one long, smooth thrust, watching her shudder and moan.
“Like it?”
“Yeah.”
“How’s it feel?”
“Full—“ he slides it out a little and she moans again. “Hard. Unh… Slick…” She rocks back onto it, groaning again, head dropping to his thigh.
He pulls her head up by her hair. (Gently, mostly just nudging her up.) “Keep watching. Want you to see every second of this.”
He bends low, licking her clit while sliding the dildo in and out, listening to each hitched breath and half moaned sigh. Again he licked until her body was tight, quivering on the edge of climax, and again he stopped.
“Fuck you, Gabe, do not leave me like this,” she spit at him as he pulls back, lips, chin, and neck shiny with her juices.
“Patience, Katie. I’ve always gotten you there before. Tonight’s not gonna be any different, love.”
“Damn well better.”
“Up, off of me.” He sits back on the bed, still making sure the mirrors are keeping everything in easy view. He takes her hands and gets her straddling him, so she was over his cock, facing the mirrors, then holds her hips so she couldn’t sink down. “Stay. Watch.” He coats his cock with lube, generously, pumping his shaft with his hands as her eyes follow every motion.
Then with slick fingers, he got a hold of the dildo, slid it out, stripping off the condom, and pulled her onto him, sinking balls deep into her pussy, hissing at the feel of it. “Fuck, Katie, you feel so good.” He rocks into her, feeling her rise and fall against him, and then on yet another upstroke he stopped her, pulled out, and shifted his dick back.
“Watch. Watch my cock slip into you. Watch me fuck that glorious tight little ass of yours.”
She slowly lowers herself, and they both watch her body spread around him, watch as his slick flesh was enveloped by hers.
Her eyes grow heavy, and he knows they usually close when she’s feeling intense pleasure. “Keep them open, Abby, want you to see me fuck you.”
“Yes” slurs into a deep groan as she settles onto him.
He’s kissing her shoulder and neck, reveling in the soft, tight, hot, so incredibly hot, feel of her body on his.
“Want you to touch yourself. No getting off until I say you can, but I want to see your fingers on your clit.”
“Yes.” She does, circling slowly, and he feels her muscles tighten against him.
His teeth worry her shoulder, nipping along the skin, as he rocks gently in and out. Can’t move too much, but right now he’s just adding a little friction, enjoying how this feels, her body so tight and slippery on his.
Finally he remembers he’s still got the dildo in hand, and why he put a condom on it in the first place.
“Suck it. Get it good and wet.” Not that it really needs it. She’s so wet there’s a puddle on the bed under them, but he likes to watch. And like always her perfect mouth wrapping around something dick shaped and slurping ramps him up a few more notches.
She stops licking, eyes glinting at him, knowing where this is going to go.
“Never tried this before.”
“Didn’t think you had. Okay?” They’re both fully out of character, but it doesn’t matter.
“Oh yeah. Go slow.”
“I will. Keep rubbing yourself. Want you so close you’re begging for it.” He licks her earlobe as he says, “But no coming. Not until I say you can.”
Her fingers speed up, faster pace, not flying over her skin, but moving quickly, firmly. He keeps rocking against her, building up his own speed, and then begins to rub the head of the dildo against her. Not slipping in, not yet. Just playing it over her lips, nudging between them, letting her use the head like a finger, rubbing it over her clit, then sliding back again to trail lightly over her pussy lips.
She starts rising and falling on him, fingers moving a bit faster, and she might not be begging for it, but he knows he’s not going to be able to hold on all the much longer, so Abby flushed red and whimpering is close enough. He shifts his hold on the dildo, moving it a fraction of an inch, gently parting her lips with it, and holding it in place, letting her sink down on it.
She does, slowly, hissing, body tight, low, deep groan echoing from her lips. “Oh God!”
He agrees with that. ‘Oh God!’ is right. It feels amazing. He didn’t think it’d feel that different to him, but it’s more pressure, more tight, more everything, and he really likes it.
He stops rocking, knowing he can keep his hands moving or his hips, but not both, not this far gone. Abby’s slipping up and down on him, fast, blowing his mind. He starts to ease the dildo up and down, different speed than her hips, and that… that’s her cursing with every breath, a long half-gasped litany of delicious profanity, and him… he’s got no idea, he knows he’s making noise because that,up-down, her body at one speed and the dildo at another, and he can feel it sliding up and down against him, but not exactly, because he’s feeling it through her. It’s like her, all around, but her more, where the ridge of glass pushes into her, and it’s pressure and tight and friction and everything moving at once and just, holy fucking mother of god gold-red-white pulsing, burning, tingling pleasure through his whole body, every nerve sizzling with it, shouting, probably as loud as he can, her body clenching and spasming and rippling and everything wet and limp and lightly twitching, collapsed on each other, so high neither of them is in any danger of coming down anytime soon.
Waaaa…
Or, coming down right now. Waaaa… Crying baby is the proverbial wet blanket tossed on a good post orgasmic glow.
Abby’s not moving at all. Tim really doesn’t want to move, either. Really. Every limb of his body feels like it’s made of gently twitching, very happy, cement. But not only is it his night, he also missed the last two, so really, he needs to get up and get Kelly back down again. He inches away from Abby, very much regretting not getting to nestle in close and let his body calm back down, basking in the tight gentle heat of hers as he went soft.
He’s quietly muttering to himself about Kelly picking an extraordinarily inconvenient time to stop sleeping through everything, as he wipes up a bit, when he notices the clock, 1:04. Or she’s just woken up at her usual time, and they played a bit too long.
He stumbles into her room. “I’m here.”
The appearance of a parent (late) but no food produces what could best be called an irate look. But in a few minutes, when she’s cleaned up, laying against his chest, slurping away on her bottle, she’s mollified. And, by the time she’s mollified, Abby’s gotten cleaned up, too, and come in, sitting on the floor, head on his knee, dozing against him.

Eventually Kelly finishes eating. Eventually they go back to bed. And eventually he curls up behind her, lips pressed to her shoulder, inhaling the post-sex scent of her skin, and falls into a deep, content sleep.
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