Keryl Raist's Blog, page 14

Shards To A Whole: Chapter 282

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


Chapter 282: Dr. Cranston, I Presume


“So how does this work?” Gibbs asks Cranston on Thursday. He’s feeling a very strong desire to get another coffee, but the one in his hand is full. He takes a sip. It’s good. Hot, strong, very black. What’d Jimmy say about it? ‘What do you brew this out of, roofing tar?’ Something like that.
Of course, since he made it, himself, and put it in a travel mug, and brought it with him, it would be exactly the way he liked it, wouldn’t it? He was figuring that Cranston would probably have drinks available, but they'd be tame little things like herbal tea or light roast coffee with hazelnut flavoring or something. (He was sort of right, she's got one of those multi-flavor coffee makers with a whole bunch of little pods in different varieties. Strong, black, chew your tongue off coffee is not among them, however.)
He’s almost wishing for some sort of massive emergency, like another troop transport crash, that’d pull all hands on deck, no matter what.
Okay, so it might not get him pulled into action, because all he can do in the field is limp around and look stern, but it might get Cranston pulled in, and that’d work just as well.
Just because this seemed like a good idea two days ago, doesn’t mean he’s exactly relishing sitting in a very… comforting is probably the right word, everything about this place just oozes comfort and sympathy and empathy, office. Cranston, serene and also, comforting, is looking expectantly at him, right now.
She smiles at him, notices the way he’s fiddling with the coffee cup. He sees her notice and stops.
That gets another smile. “It usually goes something like this, we talk about why you’re here, what you’re looking to get out of this, we talk about where you are, and from there we try to get an idea of what to do to get you to what you’re looking for.”
“Getting back to work.”
“Good start. But, usually for psych evals I get calls from NCIS, not from the person in question.” He can see a sort of amused curiosity in the way she says that. Work may be the goal, but this isn’t how work usually happens.
“It’s not an official psych eval. McGee won’t let me back on until I talk to someone, twice.”
“About?”
Gibbs isn’t sure if he’s relieved that Rachel isn’t asking about Tim being the one drawing the line here, or upset because he can’t use talking about that to eat up some of this time.
“He thinks my head’s not in the game.”
She tilts her head a little, looking at him intently, thinking. “Is he right?”
Gibbs has never wished more devoutly in his life for a catastrophe than right now. But wishing won’t make it so. He sighs. “I can do the job.”
She writes something quickly, then looks up and says, “Okay. So, he’s wrong, but you’re letting him make you do this, even though he’s wrong?”
Gibbs can feel the trap on this and shuts his eyes. He doesn’t want to own being here, but he can’t admit that Tim’s making him go, because he’s not, not really. He opens them and says, “It’s complicated.”
Not quite a full smile, more the look of someone who knows she’s got someone who wants to talk, but is having a hard time doing it. “We’ve got an hour. Two if you need them. Don’t have another appointment until four. Lay it out for me.”
Gibbs really doesn’t like open-ended questions. At least, not when he’s the one doing the answering. He tries to find a way to build a structure for this, see it like a ship of words. Main beam, support beams, ribs, siding. What idea is all of this riding on? What ideas branch off of it?
“I’m here because I let fear make me give bad advice, and he called me out on it.”
“Doesn’t sound complicated. Was it bad advice about a case?”
Shrug, eyebrows furrow, another sip of coffee. “Not exactly. It was bad advice about how to handle the fear of having someone you love in danger and a case brought that fear on.”
“Doesn’t sound like it’d effect how you do your job.”
“In the sense you’re thinking, it won’t. I can’t chase down a perp right now,” he gently pats his knee, “but I can follow up on leads and interrogate, and my gut still works just fine.”
“And yet you’re here.”
“And I’ll be here at least one more time.”
“Because McGee thinks it’s bad enough you can’t go back to even desk work.”
Gibbs licks his lips, sips the coffee again. “No. He doesn’t.” Gibbs taps the coffee cup. “He’s using that as a way to make sure I do this.”
“The carrot to go with the stick?”
Gibbs nods.
“And how did you end up in a situation where Agent McGee gets to tell you what to do?”
He’s not sure if she doesn’t actually know the answer, or if she wants to see how he understands it. He does know that it’s been two year since he’s seen her in person, and as such she hasn’t been around to see a lot of the changes of the last three years.
While he’s thinking about that, she says, “He married to Abby, now. And she’s basically your adopted daughter, right?”
“Yeah, they just had a baby girl six weeks ago.”
“Congratulations.”
“Thanks.” Gibbs gets out his phone and shows Cranston a picture of Kelly.
“She’s lovely.” Rachel hands the phone back, and sits next to him on the very comfortable sofa. “Any family shots?”
“Lots of them.” Gibbs flips through a lot of them to find one of Tim and Abby and Kelly all together and shows that to Rachel, too. He shows her another of Tim and Jimmy messing around in his backyard. One of Tim holding Molly. He shows her shots of all the girls together: Penny, Ziva, Abby, Breena, Molly, and Kelly. He shows her Tony with Molly riding his shoulders at the pool. There’s one of Ducky gently stroking Kelly’s head while Penny holds her. He doesn’t show her any of the shots with him in them, because they’re his and they’re goofy and private and… And not for today.
“You’re not in them?” she says, looking at a shot of Ziva lighting the Shabbos candles while the rest of the crew stands around the table, waiting for the start of dinner.
“I took them.” Which has the advantage of being both true and misleading.
“So, if McGee were here, I could ask him for photos, and there would be shots of you in them.”
“Yeah.” And knowing Tim, he’d have absolutely no issues at all about showing off the goofy ones.
“So, is it safe to say that there’s a certain level of respect and affection between you and McGee?”
“Yes.”
“You trust him with your girl?”
“Absolutely.”
“And he’s one of the men on your team. You trust him with your life, right?”
“Yes, I trust him with my life, and no, it’s not my team anymore, it’s DiNozzo’s.”
“You’re still working, but you’re letting DiNozzo run the team?” She didn't seem to believe that.
“Yeah. I’m retiring soon. We’ve already got the first new member. It just works better with Tony in charge. Explosion took both of us out, which means, until we get back, it’s Tim’s team.”

She makes a note of that and asks, “So, Jethro, is Tim right,” he notices she shifts how she refers to Tim the same way he did, “do you need to be here?”
Gibbs sighs, so much for avoiding this, or getting into it, or… whatever. “Yeah.” He nods, staring at her, looking tired and a little lost.
“And is it really about having your head in the game?”
“Not really. It’s the lever he’s using to make sure I do it.”
“Okay. So, really, what do you hope to get out of this? What do you think he’s hoping you get out of this?”
“He wants me to be happy.”
She smiles warmly at him, and looks at the picture on the phone, this one of all the guys. “That doesn’t sound bad.”
“No.”
“Are you happy?”
He shrugs, tucks his phone back into his pocket, and sips the coffee again. “I’m better than I’ve been in a very long time.”
“What do you want, Jethro?”
Another drink of his coffee, another moment where he licks his lips, another moment of I’m so horrendously uncomfortable I’d rather be doing anything than talk about thisloud and clear in his body language. He looks up at the ceiling, takes yet another drink, and then says, “I wanted to be a good husband, and a good father, and a good Marine. And, for a while, I was.” A very sad smile crosses his face. “But you can’t do all of that at once. So, I was being a good Marine. My country needed me. It called, and off to Iraq I went. I had to be there, because I was good at my job, really good, and Shannon and Kelly were home and safe and… And when I went it was just another deployment, hotter than any I’d been on since Nicaragua, but just another job.
“And I got word that Shannon had witnessed a murder. I didn’t want her to testify. He was bad news and…” He licks his lips again, mentally skipping the fight he and Shannon had about her testifying. Last fight they ever had. Only fight he ever regretted being right about.  
“And I got word that there had been threats on her life. I knew she was in protective custody. Everyone said she’d be safe. I asked for permission to get leave to go home, but they denied it, there was a ground war and all, and I was a good Marine. I followed orders. I didn’t go home. And they died.
“I failed at being a father and husband because I was off being a good Marine. I let other men protect my girls, and they died because of it. And nothing I did in Iraq made a fuck of a difference. We didn’t take Hussein out. We just left him there. Ten years later, we were back again. Hundreds of thousands of people were eaten alive by his regime between the day I got there and the day they finally took him out.
“I can’t say we were making the world a better place. I wasn’t storming Normandy or taking out Nazis. Hell, I was barely taking out members of the Republican Guard. They were surrendering to anything with an American or British flag on it, including TV news crews. So I was there, doing fuck all, which meant I wasn’t home defending the most important people on earth.
He shakes his head. “That was the point of it, ya know? Honor, duty, sacrifice. All of it was in the service of saving lives, of protecting your home and the innocent. I’m a Marine. I’ll always be a Marine. But I couldn’t serve anymore, not after they died, not after that choice meant they… And then they pulled us out without finishing the job… It was death and pain for nothing…” He’s smiling a little, shaking his head, he’s not even angry about how Desert Storm ended anymore, the anger burned so hot for so long it scorched his ability to be angry about it away.
“I still believe in the Marines. I still serve them and our sailors and their families, but I don’t trust ‘orders’ anymore, and I don’t trust the powers that be to use those men and women honestly or wisely…” There’s a long, quiet minute after that. Then he takes another deep breath and says, “Everything that mattered to me died that day. And since then… I don’t know what I want.
“There are things I need. I need to put murderers away. I need to keep my girls safe. I need to protect people.”
She thinks about that, writes a few more words down, and then says, “I know there are things you want. You are not clinically depressed, so there are things you want. Even if it’s stupid or silly. What do you want?”
He looks away from her, spends a moment studying the abstract painting behind her desk. Sunset maybe? Sunrise? Lots of pinks and orange and yellow, little hints of blues and greens. Then he pulls his words together again and looks back at her. “I want them back.” Another head shake. “I want to wake up next to Shannon, and I want to see my Kelly hold Tim’s. I want the family I have to be part of the family I had, and I want all of us together. And I know I can’t have it. I know that if Shannon and Kelly were still here I would have stayed in the Corp and probably died…   
“I want what I can’t have.”
She rests her hand on his, giving it a gentle squeeze, non-verbally rewarding him getting it out, actually saying it, and then withdraws it, and asks another question. “What do you want that you can have?”
He snorts a quick, half-laugh. “Good coffee?”
Rachel smiles at that, laughs gently. “What’s Kelly going to call you when she can talk?”
“Pop.”
That got another warm smile out of Rachel. “Are you planning on being an active grandparent?”
“Yes.”
“You want that?”
“Yeah.” He nods. He does want that. Never thought about it in that light, but yeah, he wants it.
“That’s a start.” She looks pointedly at his wedding ring. “I’m guessing you didn’t actually get married again since I saw you last?”
“No. Shannon’s ring.”
She thinks about that for a moment, writes a quick note, and says, “Do you want to re-marry?”
That gets an alarmed look out of Gibbs.
“Let me re-phrase, I forgot how loaded a question that is for you. Would you like to have a relationship with a woman and not see her as a daughter?”
“Got one.”
“Really?” That did surprise Cranston.
“Penny Langston. Ducky’s… I’ll say wife because that’s close enough. Tim’s grandma. One third of our grandparenting team.”
Rachel laughs at that. “I’m not sure if that was you deflecting my question, or letting me know that you’re expanding your core of relationships in a healthy way.”
“Both?”
“Probably. Want to take a stab at the question I was actually asking?”
Gibbs looks up, looks away from Rachel, sips his coffee, starts to say something twice, but doesn’t. Finally he says, “Not really.”
“Okay.” But she doesn’t say anything, just letting that ‘okay’ linger.
Frustration is clear on his face as he says, “Not okay. Not really.” He shakes his head again. This is why he’s here. Don’t try to hide from it. Won’t work if you don’t get to the heart of it. “How much did Tony tell you about what happened?”
She starts to shake her head.
“Don’t want you to break confidence or anything, just want an idea of what you know about why we’re here?”
“How about you tell me how you understand what happened? How Tony understands it isn’t particularly useful when it comes to getting into your head.”
So he did. Explaining the case, and the explosion, and the how he was planning on getting off the pain meds, standing up, marching back to work, and telling everyone to go to hell, when he stood up, felt his knee slide out of joint and decided maybe the Doc wasn’t entirely insane about the whole lay around thing, so he sat back down and tried to figure out what the hell do to with himself if he was going to spend a week on his ass at Tim and Abby's house. Tony called in a panic once Ziva went back to work, and somehow, he hadn’t even noticed when it happened, but somehow Ziva slipped from Ziva to Tony’s wife, and went from co-solider manning the barricades to one of the women that get hidden when you’re hiding the women and children. (That got an interested look, and a note, but Cranston didn’t break in or interrupt him on that.) He gave Tony some god-awful bad advice that was part mourning widower, part terrified dad, but completely not Team Leader rationally assessing his team, let alone older, wiser head providing useful counsel, and then there was more about the case, and about living with Tim and Abby for a week, and about, finally, getting home and just missing that. 
“So, I take that to mean you are missing a romantic attachment? And that you want that, as well?”
“Yeah. Maybe not a marriage. I’ve screwed that up in every direction a marriage can be screwed up. And Ducky and Penny aren’t married, doesn’t look like they’re gonna get married, either, but they’re doing fine. So maybe the rings and words don’t matter.”
Rachel raises an eyebrow, looks at the wedding ring, and then wrote another note. “So, what do you want? You imagine this ideal home of yours, what’s there?”
He thinks for another minute, notices the coffee cup is empty when he lifts it to his lips. “Comfort. Another voice. Someone to listen to. Someone to listen to me…” He licks his lips. “It’s dumb…”
“I’m good with dumb. This is a very dumb friendly place.”
He just looks at her, really?  in his gaze, then he answers, “One of the clearest images is just having someone to sit on the sofa with and read. Shoulders to wrap my arm around and rest my chin on.”
“That’s not dumb. What else?”
He didn’t have much else, so he starts to flesh it out as he’s talking to her. What does he want? What did he miss most? “Someone to sort laundry with. Someone to show my sketches to. Someone who asks what I’m working on down there. Someone to call down so I can show off what I’ve done.”
“That sounds really good. What else?”
He thinks for another minute. What else… yeah, he’s lonely, but there’s more than that… What does the ideal look like? “Not fighting?”
“Did you do a lot of fighting with the ex-wives?”
He nods slowly. “Yeah. About everything.”
“Did you and Shannon fight a lot?”
“No. Some, everyone does some, but not a lot. Even you and Mr. Cranston fight every now and again, right?”
She smiles wryly. “Every now and again. Were you picking fights with your other wives?”
He was about to say no, because he never did, verbally. Never set a trap for them to make them want to argue. But, “forgotten” birthdays, late nights with no call home, hiding in the basement, refusing to do anything with their families, taking any assignment, no matter how long or far away from home, sleeping with other women… “Yeah, I did.” 
“Why?”
He half-lifts the coffee cup, remembers it’s empty and puts it down again. “They weren’t Shannon.”
“The shoulder your chin is resting on, is it Shannon’s?”
“You mean when I imagine it?”
“Yeah, when you see it in your head, is it Shannon?”
“Sometimes.”
“Most of the time?”
He thinks more. “’Bout half.”
“How about this time last year?”
He thinks about it. “Wasn’t thinking as much about it then.”
“As much, or at all?”
“As much. When Tony and Ziva started hosting Shabbos… That was back at the end of ’13, there was a change. I was home, with a family, doing family things, that started it. We were a family before, sort of… No… we weren’t. We were really close co-workers. We were a team or a unit or whatever. But it was all work. Once, twice a year we’d get together for Christmas or Thanksgiving, but that wasn’t the same. That was a bunch of people who were in the trenches together spending some off time together rather than be alone. Tony'd come over for dinner or a drink every now and again. Abby’d come over sometimes, but not a whole lot, not like she does now. Ziva did a few times, too, but she always kept her private life private. Never even saw Tim in my basement until he started dating Abby. We were a team. We were… close… friendly… depended on each other… trusted each other… but, not intimate. But we’re not anymore, now we’re a family.”
“And spending time with people who have loves and lives outside of work is reminding you of how much you miss that?”
“Yeah.”
“So, closeness, comfort, peace, someone to talk and listen to, what else do you see in this ideal home?”
“Is there more?”
“Sex?”
He gives her a of course, I’m old, not dead look.
“But you didn’t mention it. Didn’t think of it. Or did you just not want to say it to me?”
Good point. He didn’t think of it. Not right now. It was part of what he was thinking about as he sat on the step. Why not? “Sex isn’t too difficult to get. I want that and miss it, too, but it’s not…” He sighs again. “I can get laid. And I’m old enough that taking care of myself scratches that itch pretty well. So… it’s not sex…”
“It’s sex in the context of love and care and peace and family?”
“Yeah. The good morning kiss that runs hot.”
Rachel nods. “Are there children in this home?”
“Sometimes. The grandkids, Kelly and Molly, and the new one that’s due in December. Hopefully at least one more.”
Cranston flashes him a questioning look.
“I hope Ziva and Tony have one, one day. Love it if there’s more than the three of them. I’ll be good with just the three, though.”
“None of your own?”
He looks really startled by that idea, then finally says, “I’m too old. Helping out with Kelly has made it clear that I do not want to be a full time, 24/7 parent of a newborn again. And I’m way too damn old to start dating a woman young enough to have one. And even if I wasn’t, it’s not an option any longer.”
That questioning look again. “Too much risk?”
“Vasectomy back in ’82.”
“Ah.” That got a note, too. She glances over at her clock, fifty seven minutes down. “You want to keep going, or wrap up?”
“I’m good with wrap up.”
Rachel smiles dryly. “I’m deeply shocked. Homework for next time—“
“Homework?”
“Yep. I’ll play to your strengths. Tactical planning and assessment, I want a step by step plan for how to get to your fantasy home.”
“Isn’t that why I’m here with you?”
“Yep. But we start with a plan, and then we work on it, see what’s there, see where you’ve gotten tripped up before, things like that.”
He inclines his head, a physical version of ‘Oh.’
“Yeah. If you want the gold star, you can give me the version of how you got your past three wives or any serious girlfriends, and what you’re going to do differently this time.”
“Sounds like work.”
She smiles one last time. “Monday?”
He nods. “Monday.”

Next

Shards To A Whole: Chapter 281

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



Chapter 281: The Price



Make up sex is brilliant. There’s all the intensity of the emotions of the fight. Then there’s the even more intense ‘I’m so sorry; I hate you being angry at me; I hate being angry at you; I love you so much.’
It’s really, really nice.
The problem is, you can’t get to hot, happy, make up sex when the last time you had the exact same argument you pretended to make up, and then did exactly what you were going to do in the first place.
Because you can only get to the make-up sex when there’s trust that you have, indeed, made up.
So, while there had been yelling, and talking, and crying, and more talking, and more yelling between the DiNozzos, there hadn’t been any make-up sex.
There hadn’t been any cuddles.
Or hugs.
Because they aren’t made up.


Right now, Tony’s pretending to be asleep on the sofa (wasn’t allowed in their bedroom last night) while his ninja stealths around their home.
Someone once said, that if you’re getting along, even the smallest home has plenty of room, and when you aren’t, you can have acres of space and it’s not enough.
So, while it’s true they don’t have a huge apartment, until Ziva came home last night, furious, it had never seemed too small. It’s way too damn small, now. Technically, the entire eastern seaboard may be too small right now.
“I know you are not asleep.” She doesn’t look at him as she says it. She’s very intently making coffee, back toward him, facing the counter.
He sighs, opening his eyes, staring at the ceiling. “I know I’m not asleep, too.”
“Then why are you pretending?”
“I’m tired.” And he is, bone deep, every cell in his body begging for rest, tired. “Just want to rest.”
“Then rest!” Ziva says, slamming down the coffee mugs.
He sits up slowly, rubbing his head. He’s had a headache for two days, because of the fighting, not the concussion. “Not going to rest until this is done.” He hasn’t really slept since the bomb, and today isn’t likely to change that. (Also part of why his head hurts. He always gets headaches when he gets too low on sleep.)
“This isn’t going to be done anytime soon, so you might as well sleep. Maybe if you got some sleep you’d be sane enough to realize you are being completely unreasonable.”
“It is not unreasonable to ask you to value your life!”
“No, it’s not. But you didn’t ask.” She whips around to face him as the sk on ask slides off her tongue.
He just shrugs. “It’s not unreasonable to expect you to value your life.”
“I do value my life!”
“Not enough. If you’re going to…” He shakes his head, not willing to finish that sentence.
“You are not asking me to value my life! You are trying to make me your pet!”
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes you are. You wouldn’t have done that to McGee or Gibbs. You respect them enough to actually tell them the truth.”
“It’s not about respect.”
“Of course, it is! You say you love me, but you don’t respect me, not if you’re willing to do that. Making decisions for me, not telling me about it, lying to me about it. That is not respect.”
“I knew you wouldn’t like it.” And he did. He wouldn’t have lied about it if he thought she’d have been okay with what he was going to do.
“Exactly! You don’t pull this sort of crap on Gibbs or McGee. If you want to do something they don’t like, you own up to it and tell them about it. It’s completely about respect. You respect them enough not to lie to them.”
“It’s not respect! I don’t love either of them enough…” Tony shakes his head. “The world doesn’t stop turning if something bad happens to them. I knew you wouldn’t like it. I knew you’d be angry. And I didn’t care because you angry and alive is better than you dead and happy.”
Ziva’s furious again, and the coffee cup in her hand is in serious danger of being squeezed so hard it shatters. “That’s not how you treat people! That’s how you treat a child or a pet. You do not get to make that decision. You do not get to just… ignore how I feel about it. You are my husband, not my father, and no one, no one has any right to treat me like that, not anymore. Not you, not Gibbs. I am not a child, let alone your child, and I get to make my own decisions.”
He stands up, walks across the living room and kitchen to her. He stares her in the eyes, tired, angry, hurting, all of it in his face and voice. “You made the wrong one! You stop getting to make that decision when you make the wrong one.”
Something very intense, very hot, and very not English spills from her lips as Ziva glares at him. Then she turns, pushes past him, out of the kitchen, and says, “This is useless! I’m going out. You sleep. I’ll calm down. We’ll try again in a few hours.”


Sleep.
Easier said than done. But at least right now, he can lay in their bed (more comfy than the sofa), stretch out, cuddle into pillows that smell like her, and not sleep.
Because sleeping requires a quiet mind.
And right now his mind is anything but quiet.
Lying about it wasn’t a good plan. But he knew she wouldn’t go for it, knew if he said, I want you on a different team, I can't take this anymore, it’d piss her off, but, if she could find out about it as something accomplished, done and unchangeable, then she’d be pissed, but, eventually, she’d like having her own team, and then they’d go on.
Then McGee butts his big ass into this and fucks the whole thing sideways. 
It’s his team. Not McGee’s. Three days of running things doesn’t make it McGee’s team. He’s in charge of who’s on it, not McGee. It’s his job to make sure it’s running right, not McGee’s, and he gets to define what running right is. And if that’s just the three of them, slowly adding in new people, then that’s what it is.
Except that’s crap, and he knows it’s crap, the problem isn’t that McGee counteracted the shift. The problem was trying to move her in the first place.
Sigh.
Part of being a friend is smacking you upside the head when you’re being an idiot, and McGee’s being his friend.
Part of being an adult is seeing the problems that are there and taking responsibility for your part in them.
And all of being the leader is seeing the problems, facing them head on, and tackling them.



He sees it in his head again. Ziva standing next to them. Hears her say it, ‘You go. I go.’ Gibbs has his knife out, ready to cut, and he knocks it away, yanks out the detonator and tosses it. The most Hail Mary pass of the history of Hail Mary passes.
He stares at the ceiling. Feeling her body under his, hearing the almost slithering rush of the fire, how there was that second where he could hear it before the heat poured over them, then that month-long second between the fire and the blast.
Conversion aside, he’s not much of a praying man. He and God have a deal, and swapping out from not overly Catholic to not overly Jewish didn’t change that. But as the fire rushed over them, he was certainly begging God to get her through this, and even with as loud as the fire was, and his heart beating so hard as to drown out almost everything else, he could still hear her say the Shema, and…
And he panicked. He knows that. Or he took a calculated risk, but did the math wrong. Either way, letting Gibbs cut the wire was probably the better answer.
And he’s not sure which scares him worse, that her being at risk made him make the bad decision, or her running in to join them.
Her running in. He can (he hopes) control the panic. He can (still hoping) control himself.
He can’t control her.
And he knows that.
And trying was stupid.
But you do stupid things when the person you love above all others puts herself at risk. When fear reaches up, colors your world sickly green, chokes off your breath, makes your joints go week and your stomach clench, you do whatever you can to make it stop.


Ziva’s wildness, the fact that he couldn’t control her, that had always interested him. That, as much as her body, got his attention at first.
Like with Kate, the fact that she would be a challenge, that she wouldn’t just go along for the ride, that made him want to make her want to go along.
Be careful what you wish for.
He did it. He got her signed on for the long haul. He won her love and respect (at least, he’d had it up until he hit send on that email) and then came face to face (again) with why it’s easier to keep the walls in place.
After all, how many times can you volunteer to let your heart have the shit beaten out of it?


Of course, if he’s being honest with himself, he knows he’s doing it back to her. She scared him so bad, and that fear hurt so much, that he’s doing it to her, making her hurt the way he hurt.
And it’s not cool, or good, or responsible, or anything he wants to be, but… it’s true. Maybe, beyond acknowledging the fear, it’s the first true thing he’s thought about this.
Because you don’t just do crap like that, and all the justifications on Earth don’t make it all right.
And by hurting her, he’s hurting himself, and on some level, he feels like he deserves that, too.


The sound of her opening the door didn’t wake him up. Have to be asleep to wake up.
It did stop him staring at the ceiling. He gets up slowly, heads to the door of their bedroom, opens it, and leans against the door jam. She’s in the living area, just standing there, looking in his direction.
“I’m sorry I lied to you.”
“Not enough.” Calming down time does not appear to have done much to help with Ziva being pissed off.
“Right now, I’m sorry about this whole thing.”
“Yes, I know, you made that abundantly clear last night. That you are sorry about this wholething starting with falling in love and ending with lying to me. You’d rather have just stayed a gigolo.”
Yeah, so apparently mentioning that particular bit of doubt, which he’d done as an ‘I’m so scared and in love with you and I don’t know what to do with myself because this was so much easier before’ thing hadn’t been the right tact.
He rubs his forehead. “I love you. I am so terrified that something will happen to you. I hate feeling like this. I hate that I don’t know what to do with this.”
“Just stop it!” Ziva bites out. “You are not alone. You are not the only one feeling fear. You aren’t the only one who’s lost someone. You’re the only one who decided to cut one of us out of the picture and act alone. You’re the one who spent hours talking with me about our future, about getting everything in order, about making sure we’d go on… You’re the one who lied to me! You’re the one who cut me out!”
“I’m sorry!” he shouts that, then gets under better control. “It was stupid, and I’m sorry.”
“I don’t care if you’re sorry! You hurt me, and all the sorry on Earth doesn’t take it away. You cannot just make it better by being sorry. It’s not like this was some sort of thing where you just did not know I’d be upset. It’s not like you stepped on my toe or forgot my birthday or this is some sort of misunderstanding. You lied to me!”
“I know. You scared the shit out of me, scared me so bad, made me so angry… I wanted you to feel it, too!”
Ziva looks like she had been getting ready to say something, but that stops her dead. She spends a minute thinking, then says, “So this is… what… revenge?”
“I don’t know. It was stupid it what it is. It was panic and pain and my balls doing the thinking and not my head. And I shouldn’t have lied, and I may not be sorry I hurt you, because, honestly I’m still too fucking pissed at you to be sorry about that, but I still know it was stupid.” He steps closer to her, stopping before he can touch her, wanting to see if she’d meet him halfway, and she does, stepping to him, staring up into his eyes, not touching, though. “And if you want to be angry about me lying to you, fine, I get that, I understand it, and yeah, it was stupid. But I don’t care if you’re angry about me trying to keep you alive. I don’t care if you don’t like my tactics.” His hands close over her shoulders, gentle, and she can feel the slight tremors in his fingers. “I DON’T CARE if I have to lie, cheat, or steal to do it, but you are going to outlive me, and not by minutes or seconds, but by years, decades if I have any say in it. You say you love me, then prove it, don’t ever run into a bomb for me again, don’t throw yourself in front of the bullet.”
“That’s not fair.”
“I don’t care. I know which one of us is the better person, and it’s not me.”
“Tony—“
“No! That’s the line in the sand for our relationship. That’s the one boundary that cannot be crossed. Anything else we can talk out, work through, forgive, but you will not throw your life away for mine. That’s it. Love, honor, cherish, bullshit! I don’t care. LIVE! That’s your vow to me. That’s the only one I want, and the only one that matters.
“Not once have you said you were sorry for running into the bomb. It’s all about it’s your choice, and I don’t get a say in it, and I don’t get to be mad about it, and I don’t get to try and stop that, and it’s fucking bullshit! I save lives. That’s my  job. That’s all I’ve ever cared about doing for my entire adult life. That’s it. And I will be damned to fucking hell for the entire rest of eternity if I can’t save YOU!”
Ziva just stares at him, eyes wide, visually tracing the path of the tears running down his cheeks. “I… just…”
He shakes his head, breathing hard, and then says quietly, “That’s your promise to me. You want me, that’s the cost.”
She closes her eyes and sighs, then takes his hands in hers, and pulls him along to sit next to her on the sofa. “How can we be a team if I don’t have your back?”
He’s looking at her hands, her wedding band, then looks up to her eyes and says, “You go home at the end of the day, and that’s all the having my back I’ll ever need.”
She’s looking like she’s trying to find some wiggle room. “Our job is dangerous…”
“I’m not saying avoid danger. I know the job is dangerous. I’m not saying take a desk job. I’m not saying don’t ever go out again. But if you run into danger when you can’t help, when there’s nothing you can do but die… If I survive it… That’s it. You don’t think it’s fair? I don’t care. You cannot ask me to watch you die for nothing.”
“You aren’t nothing.”
“You weren’t going to die for me. Not then. You didn’t even reach for the bomb. You were going to die with me, and that’s… No! That’s my line that can’t be crossed.”
Ziva says sadly, “You have said nothing about living yourself. I don’t get to ask that of you, do I?”
Tony shakes his head again. “You don’t. And it’s not fair, and it’s not even, and I know it. But it’s who I am. I run into the fire to die with you, you don’t run in for me.”
“And you get to just dictate this?”
He shrugs. He knows he can make the promise, but he won’t keep it. “I could lie about it again.”
She glares at him.
“This is it. All honesty, I get to die for or with you, you don’t get to die with me, and if you think that’s me treating you like a child, if you think it’s disrespectful, I’m comfortable with that. This is who I am. I’m going out for a few hours. You think about it. And, I hope…”
He didn’t finish that sentence. He stands up pushes his feet into a pair of sneakers, and heads out of their home.



His wedding ring is a plain gold band. He’d inscribed hers with אתם לא לבד/you are not alone because he liked the promise of it, liked what he meant by it, how that was the day when he saw them having a future in a concrete sort of way.
His, though, is just blank gold.
There’s a jeweler only a few streets down from their apartment, so he heads in that direction. He’s not sure how long what he wants done will take, but he hopes it’ll be fast.
No one else is there. Not a lot of business at two on a Tuesday.
The jeweler hears him and jumps to attention. “Can I help you?”
“I hope so.” He took off his wedding ring and handed it over. “How long would it take to get it engraved?”
“Depends on what you want.”
“Got a piece of paper?”
“Sure.” The clerk lays his ring on the counter, then pokes around for a moment before coming up with a pad and a pen and handing them both over.
אני אחיה.  “That’s what I want.”
“Never tried Hebrew before, but…” He picks up Tony’s ring again, checking how wide it is, looking back at the Hebrew letters. “Yeah, I can do that. Probably about two hours. Give me some time to practice before I do it to your ring.”
Tony nods, turns, and was half way out the door when the jeweler asks, “What’s it mean?”
“I will live.”
He left, seeing the jeweler’s eyebrows still high.  


Three hours later, he’s in the elevator heading back up to their apartment.
He’s not wearing his ring. It’s in his pocket. The Hebrew looks good. All the characters are right. It’s nicely centered.
And hopefully this isn’t the stupidest thing he’s ever done.
She’s at the dining room table, cleaning both of their guns. He knows that she hears when he walks in, but she doesn’t say anything.
He stands behind her, staring at the back of her head, and then places the ring on the table next to her left hand.
“When you can make this promise, you can put it back on me. I want to wear it, but I can’t, not if this isn’t part of it.” Then he steps back, heading for the door again.
She’s staring at it, hasn’t turned to look at him. “Where are you going?”
“I don’t know.” He’s still facing the door. “McGee says his door is always open, but I’m not sure I can take McWedded-Bliss right now. I’ve got my phone. Call, and I’ll come.” And then he steps out, into the hall, heading toward the elevator.
He’d pressed the button for the ground floor, but doors hadn’t even shut when his phone rang.
She was standing outside their door, looking down the hall at him, ring in her hand.
She crooks her finger at him, and he came to her, she’s not smiling, or looking particularly happy with him.
He stands in front of her, watching, waiting to see what happens next.
“You will never lie to me again.”
He nods.
She gathers her hand in his, and slips the ring back over his finger. “Come home with me.”
He steps in.


And they weren’t done. There was still a lot of talking, and some crying, but no more yelling. And in the end they had agreed to go see a marriage counselor, because she’s not thrilled with the you will live ultimatum, but she understands that’s his price, and she’s willing to pay it.
And the make-up sex, (which, granted, happened on Wednesday, because they were both exhausted and needed the sleep after that fight) was excellent.


Next

Shards To A Whole: Chapter 280

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

Chapter 280: The Next Step


“You sure? You’ve got a lot of stairs at your place…”
Gibbs just nods.  They’ve just finished his checkup with the orthopedic specialist, and yes, he’s healing up nicely, and has gotten the green light to start moving around again.
He’s glad that Tim’s making sure he knows he’s still welcome at their house, but the Doc says he can start gimping around more, that he doesn’t need to be on his ass all the time, so he wants to go home.
“Okay.” Tim nods, putting  his key in the ignition. “You’ve got no food at your place, so write up a grocery list. I’ll drop you off, get the food, and then drop it off…” Left unspoken is: Let you spend an hour on your own, see if you’re really up to it, and then offer to take you back to my home again.
“I’ll be fine, Tim.”
“Great. You hurt yourself on the stairs, and Abby’ll kill both of us. You for being stupid, and me for letting you.”
“I’ll be careful.”
Tim gives him a long look, and Gibbs can read the I didn’t just meet you last week. I know exactly what careful means, and if you don’t want to spend another two hours getting yelled at by another pissed off woman, you damn well better not go falling down the steps. “You better.”
Gibbs rolls his eyes a bit. “I will.” Really, I’ll take it easy. Two hours with Ziva yesterday was more than long enough.
Tim nods. Okay, I believe you, this time.


An hour and a half later, Gibbs is home, alone, with a ton of food. He knows what was on the grocery list he sent Tim, and he knows what Tim got him, and… well… apparently he’s giving Jethro a less than subtle hint that maybe eating something of a vegetable nature every now and again would be a good plan.
He’s not entirely sure what this leafy green stuff is (kale, maybe?) but he does know it looks a hell of a lot like the spinach his mom would try to get him and his dad to eat.
Unsuccessfully.


He’d been expecting to get home and just revel in the quiet and alone. That’s who he is. The guy who gets home from work, tosses his keys on the table by the door, and then hits the sofa or his basement for some quiet.
And he did that, for about five minutes. (Might have worked better if he’d headed to the basement, and yeah, he can do steps, but he’s not steady enough on his feet to be standing without the crutch, but the only thing he’s got on tap right now it making sure all the wood for Baby Palmer’s crib is in order, which means planing, and he can’t do that sitting down.)
For about five minutes, sitting on his own sofa, in his own house, his own, quiet, house felt really good.
He loves Tim and Abby, but the soundproofing in their house sucks. And he’s glad they’ve got a healthyrelationship and that they’re enjoying each other that much, but he didn’t feel the need to be that well acquainted with what them having a good time sounds like. And once he got off the heavy duty painkillers, Kelly crying woke him up, too, and he’d usually get pretty well back to sleep, and then the sound of footsteps taking Kelly back to her crib post-nursing would wake him up again.
So, Tim and Abby’s place isn’t precisely quiet, or restful.
Add the hours of Ziva just yelling at him last night on top of that…
So, yeah, quiet: beautiful, blessed quiet.
And sure, it’s not like he didn’t spend years sleeping on his sofa. It’s not like the futon in Tim’s office is bad or anything, but he’s really looking forward to stretching out on his own bed. To sleep. All the way through the night.
That’ll be excellent.  
So, why doesn’t this feel right anymore?


“You free?” he asks Fornell.
“Still wrapping up the case your boy dropped on us. Seventeen down, thirty-six to go. Haven’t been home for more than an hour since Friday. Why?”
“Nothing. Just wondering if you wanted dinner.”
“I do, but it’s not happening today. Or tomorrow. Or the day after. Ender had all the goods on guys all over the world. We’re wrapping them up as fast as we can. The word’s out, they know they’ve been compromised, and they are running as fast as they can.”
“I’ll let you get back to it.”
“Thanks. Sunday maybe? Have dinner with Wendy and I?”
“Sure.”


Piles of food. Lots of good stuff. Gibbs decides to go see Elaine and let her feed him.
Cooking for just himself feels almost beside the point. He intentionally doesn’t think about how he cooked for himself for years, decades, and sure, he ate out a lot, but that had as much to do with the job as not necessarily wanting to cook. He does not think about how much more he enjoys cooking, even if it is just whipping up a pan of eggs, if someone besides him is going to eat them.
Then, as he gets into his truck, puts the key into the ignition and pushes his-- Holy shit… okay that’s just not working. He can’t push down on the gas pedal like that without pain shooting through his knee.
Come on, there has to be a way to do this. He messes around a bit more, adjusts the seat, plants his heel on the floor of the car, making sure he’s not going to move it, and tries again, just moving his foot.
Better.
It’s not comfortable, but it’s not white hot pain through his knee, either.


“You make a break for it, Hon?” Elaine asks as he heads in, propping the crutch against the counter.
“Only so long I can go without seeing you.”
She shakes her head, smiling. “Sweet talker. I’ll have your coffee up in a minute, pot’s not quite done yet.”
“Take your time, I’m not in a hurry.”
“Usual?” She’s watching him, looking him over carefully, seeing more than just Jethro in jeans and a t-shirt, sensing the patterns that are shifting.
“Eh… No. Not today. Surprise me?”
Elaine smiled at him.


“So, what’s going on? I was expecting to see Tim again,” Elaine says as she pours him his coffee.
“Just got the all clear from the Doc, so I’m on my own again.”
She gives him a long look.
“I’ve already been read the riot act by Tim. I’m being careful.”
“Good.”
One of the customers waved for a refill, and Elaine headed over to him, a minute later she was back. “That’s not all that’s going on, is it?”
Gibbs sips his coffee, look on his face saying, More’s going on, but I don’t know exactly what, yet.
“You’ll figure it out.”
This time the look said, Glad to hear it.
Elaine knows that’s as far as Gibbs can go with this now, so she asks, “How many tattoos does Tim have Until I saw him this weekend, I didn’t have him pegged as the type.”
“Three now, four soon. Getting one on his leg to celebrate Kelly soon.”
She looks mildly surprised at that. Not the tattoo per se, but the location. Usually people put tattoos in places other people see them. “Didn’t think he was a shorts kind of guy, either.”
Gibbs shakes his head, smiles, and says, “He’s not. Kilts. He likes kilts.”
“There’s a man with a lot of sides to him.”
Gibbs smiles.


Home again. His nice, quiet home.
His nice, quiet, empty home.
He tossed the keys on the table, put his phone down gently, plugging it in to charge, and looked around.
Everything is exactly where he left it.
Everything is exactly as he likes it.
So why isn’t this home anymore?
He hobbled over to the second from the bottom step and sat down, he can see most of the downstairs from there.
Once upon a time this was home. This was the place he went when the day was done. This was solace and comfort and… and quiet.
Why did quiet matter? Why was it so important that this place would be still?
Because noise meant family, and after three failed attempts at family he figured out that he couldn’t get it back and second best wasn’t good enough.
If it wasn’t going to be his girls, his life, his loves, then he wanted quiet and still and alone.


A long time ago, Ziva asked him, ‘Are you lonely, Gibbs?’ and he said no, and sure, he was lying, but, he wasn’t, too.
He wasn’t lonely in the sense of longing for people. (Okay, that’s crap, too. He wasn’t lonely in the sense of longing for people and hoping he’d have them again. He’d given up on hope.)
[image error] He’d told her you’re never lonely when you have kids, and kissed her forehead, called her kid, and that was true. That Ziva was and is his is true. (Even if she is spitting mad at him right now. Two hours of yelling resulted in two hours of yelling and a hoarse voice. Then Tony called, and she stopped firing at Gibbs, and started in on Tony. But she did agree to go home and yell at him in person, so that might be a step in the right direction. The last thing she said to him before leaving was, “We are not done!”)
But you are lonely when you have kids. You’re especially lonely when you can see them make lives, homes, and loves, and feel how you had that, and how much you miss it.
He thinks that’s part of what changed, why he’s sitting here, thinking about how this isn’t home anymore. Since Kelly was born he’s been spending more and more time in a home, a real home. Because it’s not really home if it’s just you. Home needs people.
And sure, he’s not feeling any need to listen to another night of Tim and Abby making love, but that’s part of what’s crystalizing what he’s missing. Not sex. (Okay, yeah, he misses sex. It has been a while, but that’s intentional.) Not just sex. Not just people. Not just family in the sense of parents and children.
It’s the whole damn package.
It’s love and care and people who pet you when you need petting, people who you pet when they need it. It’s touch and pleasure and noise and someone to ask you what the hell it was you did during the day while you were away and someone you want to tell about it. It’s smiles and care and someone else to eat the food you make and another voice when you fold your laundry and…
And this isn’t a home. This is a house. This is a grave. A mausoleum he crawled into when his girls died, and he never did right by the other girls he brought here.
What did Tim say? ‘You’ve been floundering around in the wilderness too damn long. It’s time to come home. You’re almost there, so let’s finish this. Let’s get you home.’
Time to come home.
Time to build his own home, again.
He rubbed his thumb over his wedding ring, lurched up onto his good foot, took two hops to the table his phone lives on, and shuffled through his contact numbers.
He stared at it for a long minute before hitting it.
“Jethro?”
“Hey, Rachel. Could we talk?”
He can feel that gentle smile of hers. “Certainly. When were you thinking?”
“Doesn’t have to be right now. You have, appointments, right?”
“Yes, I do. That’s usually how this works.”
“I’d like to make one.”

“Good.” 

Next

Shards To A Whole: Chapter 279

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

Chapter 279: Tony


Feel like company?  Tim texts to Tony as Abby takes Kelly from him. His original first opening line, Are you alone, went by the wayside when he heard Ziva’s voice coming from his office.
“She’s talking to Gibbs?”
They hear her voice get very loud.
Abby cringes a bit. “Yelling might be a better description.”
“Is he saying anything back to her?”
Abby shakes her head. “Not that I can hear.”
“How long?”
“Over an hour now.”
“Phew,” Tim says as shakes his head lightly.
His phone buzzed. Not really.
Too damn bad. Not leaving you alone all day.
Not alone.
Cranston still over?
No. Talking to Ziva.
Tim sat next to Abby, showing her the screen. Abby shook her head. Tim holds up his hands. “What do I do with that?”
“Call him on his BS and make him man the hell up and deal with this.”
Tim shrugs at that. “He might just really need the alone time.” Tim knows that sometimes he just needs to be on his own, he figures that Tony probably does, too.
“Then don’t spend too long with him. But go, talk to him, or sit next to him if that’s what he needs. But this isn’t good.”
She’s in my office yelling at Gibbs. You at home?
Yes.
I’ll be over in twenty minutes.


“You gonna gloat?” Tony asks as he closes the door behind Tim.
“Why the hell would I do that?” Tim replies, sitting on their sofa.
“’Cause you and Jimmy are just so good at this love crap, and in three months, I’ve taken her from love of my life to she’s looking up divorce lawyers.”
“Come on, sit down. No one’s gloating. How’d talking with Cranston go?”
Tony just glares at him. “Since part of the problem was Kate getting killed, she referred me to someone else.”
Tim winced, he should have seen that was likely to be a problem. But… hell, he didn’t have a plan B for that one. Not like he’s got Wolf’s number, let alone the kind of relationship where Wolf might make a house call. “Did you two talk at all?”
“Some. Until I got to Kate.”
“Did you start talking about Kate to shut her out?”
Tony’s listlessly picking at the splinters that came up from his dining table when he wrenched Ziva’s knife out of it. “The second guy asked that, too.”
“Did you?”
Tony glares at him again. And sure, maybe that’s a game he might play, but he doesn’t think he would, especially not to Cranston, because that’s just… cruel. But he’s not playing around with this, and the question annoys him. “I’m talking about her because I watched her head explode, and right now, for some reason, maybe because I just watched Ziva almost die, that’s really on my mind.”
“Okay.”
They sit quietly.
“So, she’s at your place?” Tony asks.
“Yeah, moving into hour two of yelling at Gibbs when I left. Have you talked to her at all?”
“No.”
“Are you going to?” Tim means soon, not ever. Obviously they’ll talk again, eventually.
Tony’s leaning elbows on his knees, hands laced together, staring at them. “Don’t even know where to start.”
“I’m sorry? That’s usually good.”
“I’m not.” Tim looks alarmed at that, and Tony looks up, catches it. “I shouldn’t have lied about it, but… I’m not sorry about moving her.”
Tim’s not sure how to even begin responding to that. His brain flails around for a few seconds looking for any angle on this, finally he came up with: “You want her safe?”
“Of course.”
“She’s safer with us. Draga’s green. He’s brand new. Anyone else, even if they had been in for a while, wouldn’t know her moves, wouldn’t know how she works as well as we do. She’d be in more danger with a new team.”
The look on Tony’s face says he’s not buying what Tim’s selling, and that Tim’s missing the point. “She can take care of herself.”
“Okay, good, you haven’t gone totally insane. She can take care of herself, but even Ziva can’t see in 360 degrees and keep watch on everyone’s back and protect her own. She needs a team that can back her up. She needs us.”
Now that look’s all you’re missing the point. “No she doesn’t. She was trained for solo missions. She can see in 360, or close enough. I’m not worried about someone getting the drop on her. I’m not worried about her team failing her. No one on Earth is better equipped to handle that than she is. I’m worried about her going on the suicide mission. I’m worried about her running into the bomb or the firefight when it’s hopeless so she can go with us. And a new team, she won’t love anyone on that team enough to suicide for them.”
“Oh.” That’s… Tim shakes his head, and sits back against the back of the sofa. Stop assuming. He keeps underestimating Tony on things like this, expecting shallow, veneer style issues, but they all go deep, and this one does, too.
“Yeah.” Tony’s giving him a knowing look.
They sit there. Tim’s collecting his thoughts. Tony’s picking at the table again.  
“Would you have run into a blast for her?”
“Yeah.” He doesn’t look up from the splinters to Tim. “And I know where you’re going with this, and it doesn’t matter.”
“Do you?” Tim raises his eyebrows, and Tony looks over at him, more you’re underestimating me in his look.
“You’re going to tell me she’s a grown up and she can make her own decisions and it’s her life, and if I’m dead anyway, I don’t get a say in the matter, and that if I really respected her and really loved her I’d be just as cool with her making that decision as I am about making it myself.”
Tim nods a bit. “That’s where I would have gone with it if I hadn’t talked to Ziva on Friday, or if I hadn’t gotten a report back from Jimmy about how she’s doing, today. But that’s not it. She’s just as scared for you as you are for her, so how about you both promise to live, no matter what. Add it to your Ketubah, engrave it on the rings, tattoo it on your body, whatever it takes, but make the promise and make it stand. When I was talking to her on Sunday it sounded like she meant it, that you’d work on this, together. But apparently you didn’t mean it.”
There a very sad, very small smile on Tony’s face. “I meant it for her.”
“It doesn’t work that way. At least, I don’t think it does. And if you think I’m good at this, here’s what I’ve got: you can’t expect her to do anything for you that you won’t do for her.”
Tony just kind of looks at him, and Tim’s not sure if that’s him being emotionally worn to a nub or just not believing Tim or not caring.
“Hey, you’re the one saying Jimmy and I are good at this being married thing. So, that’s it. That’s my great advice on this. You want her to not run into the blast, you can’t do it either. You want her to come home every damn night, you’ve got to do it, too. You want her to treat herself like the most important thing in the universe, you want to make sure she safeguards that which makes you happier than anything else, you’ve got to do it for her, too.”
Tony doesn’t say anything to that, but he looks like he’s thinking about it. Tim lets him sit there and just think for a few minutes before saying, “If it makes you feel any better, we all do stupid stuff when we get scared. Even guys who are ‘good’ at this.”
“Uh huh. I lied to her and fucked with her job without talking to her about it.”
“I’m not saying you didn’t manage to stick the landing and win the perfect 10.0 Olympic Gold in stupid stuff, but we all do it. Before we knew about the previa, we’re talking about how Abby wanted to labor and deliver and she said at home. And I handled that in a mature and sensitive way, like any good husband would, by literally yelling at her and practically shitting myself with fear. Shockingly enough, she was not impressed by that response.”
Tony snorted at that.
“How much of the toothpaste thing did you get?”
“Some sort of Pod Person Tim showed up and said some really mean things to Abby after she flipped out about the wrong toothpaste. Were you really cursing at her?”
“Yes, I was. There’s on so long I can get yelled at before I snap, and she took me over that line. Anyway, she was having a really bad dream. That I was messing around and was leaving for someone else. She was scared and angry and picked a fight with the real-life version of me. And it was stupid as all get out, but she was scared and angry and people do stupid stuff when they’re scared and angry. And in her own stupid and angry she managed to get me to the point where I was so angry all I had left was stupid and I said some God-awful hurtful things. Because people do stupid things when they’re scared and angry. We all do.
“But we’re still married. And so are you. Ziva was yelling at Gibbs, not asking him for advice on good divorce lawyers.”
“Might be better off if she was.”
Tim really doesn’t know what to do with that. He thinks for a minute and decides Tony might respond well to some hardness here, so he’ll try that out. “If you weren’t still recovering from a concussion I’d slap you upside the back of the head. No, you wouldn’t be, she wouldn’t be, none of the rest of will be better off if you two split up.”
Tony exhales, not quite a sigh. “It was easier to be her friend. I got to see her every day. Got to enjoy her, but I knew that if something happened to her, I’d still go on.”
“Because the whole Somalia thing was you and Gibbs being really healthy about moving on.”
“That was anger and revenge. And that was her leaving us, going off on a suicide mission to make someone else she loved happy. It’s a pattern for her, and… I know that about her and… This is so scared I feel like I’m going to just vanish under it.” He runs his fingers through his hair, looking away from Tim, like he can’t stand to have anyone see him, but he still wants to get the words out. “Like the world would stop turning if she’s not on it. It was easier to not let her in. It was easier to have a long string of fuck buddies and just be her friend.”
“It might have been, but that ship’s sailed. You can’t go back to where you were. And where you were might have been easier, but it wasn’t as good. Jimmy said this to Ziva, and I’m going to say it to you, marriage counseling is probably a good idea.”
Tony looks at him, tired, defeated, maybe annoyed, too. “You’re already making me go to counseling.”
“I know. And just like Gibbs, you don’t get to come back until you’ve talked to someone twice.”
“You’re not letting Gibbs back on, either?”
“He tells me he ‘suggested’ you take her off the team. No one’s going back to work until your heads are right again, and if that means Draga and I sit on our asses and work on cold cases, that’ll be what happens. And since Leon would rather cut off his own hand then get in the middle of your marriage, he’ll let me run this however I like as long as I need to to get our team back in order.”
“Lovely. Eventually he’ll want us working again.”
“Yep. But you’ve got time off owed you, a lot of it probably, and if you and Ziva need to take it all, take it. You can’t work like this. I can’t work like this. Just because Ziva trained for solo missions and is great at this stuff doesn’t mean I am. I need a team that works. If Kelly’s gonna grow up with memories of me, you’ve got to have it together enough to do a damn good job watching my back. My life, Abby’s happiness, my daughter’s future rests in your hands. I give that to you every day we go to work. I trust you with it. Usually. But I’m not giving it back until you and Ziva can work together again, and talking to someone together would probably help with that.”
Tony snorts at that, rolls his eyes.
“I’m not dying because of your existential crisis.”
“And it’s all about you?” Tony says dryly, pulling some of his emotional armor back into place.
“Damn skippy. You two want to fall apart after I’m in Cybercrime…” Tim shakes his head, he can’t keep this up. Hard’s not working for him, not for this. “It’d break my heart, Tony. You’re meant to be, and it’s hard and scary and… And I’m sorry this isn’t easy for you. I’m sorry you don’t have that little voice in your head that knows how to do this without pissing her off. But… She’s your life, so figure it out.”
“What would you do?”
“About which part?”
“If it was Abby on the line?”
Tim looks up a bit and shakes his head. “I honestly don’t know. Jimmy and I were talking about it. I was talking to Gibbs about it, too. I don’t know how you can take the fear. I… I know what I’ve done about it for her. Cybercrime isn’t about career advancement. Sure, it’s only for until you come back, but I’m a good Team Leader. I can do this on my own, but I don’t want to. I don’t want her worrying about the knock on the door or the late night call.”
Another snort from Tony, this time disdainful. “Easy for you. You’ve got fall back skills.”
“True.” Tim nods, acknowledging that. Abby gets scared; he does something else. Problem solved. Maybe not easy peasy, but easy enough. But Tony doesn’t have an easy out like that. “So does Ziva. But I don’t think you’ll have any luck convincing her to lay down her badge if you aren’t willing to do it, too.”
“And what the hell would I do if I did that? I can’t write novels, or hack computers, or translate nine languages, or build boats, or… I’ve done this all my life. I’m good at it. This is all I’ve wanted to be since I was twenty.”
“I don’t think you need to hang it up. I don’t think she does, either. But I’m pretty sure you can’t ask her to leave if you aren’t willing to do it yourself.”
“Every year we get the close call. And I’m fine with it for me, but I don’t want to be Gibbs.”
“No one, especially not Gibbs, wants you to be Gibbs.”
Tony nods; he knows that. Gibbs told him that, then suggested that maybe Ziva’d be better off with her own team. “You ever wonder what you’d do if you lost them?”
The answer to that is yes, but Tim doesn’t want to get too into it, because he knows he doesn’t want to be Gibbs either, and his own potential coping with it strategy isn’t healthy. In fact, it’s the antithesis of healthy.
So he lies, and feels no qualms about it. “When we first got the news about the previa, and were googling the hell out of it, reading utter horror stories about women bleeding out while their babies died… I didn’t let myself go there. Just wouldn’t let myself think it.” Absolutely none of that was true. He did think about it, especially that night, after everyone went home, and he lay there in their bed clinging to Abby, but what he came up with: that he wouldn’t outlive them by more than the amount of time it would take him to get to his gun, is A: Not useful for getting Tony to a healthy place, B: Nothing he thinks anyone else needs to know, because that might make them decide he doesn’t need to be in the vicinity of firearms if something were to happen to Abby and Kelly, and C: Maybe, (probably) like Gibbs, he wouldn’t actually do it, but he wants the option, and if you tell people stuff like that, you lose the option of doing it. But given all the above, he has no reservations about lying to Tony and doing it well.
“So, instead of thinking about it, I went bonkers on ways to avoid the problem. If we needed to spend the next six weeks in the hospital to make sure it didn’t happen, that was fine. I was ready to camp out there. But that wasn’t enough, I could feel myself starting to think about it, and I needed to shut it down. Couldn’t deal with it, so I started picking fights with my dad in my head rather than think about it.” Also a lie, but as per Rule Seven: Always be specific when you lie, he’s not above adding good details to sell the story.
“And when that stopped working, I moved into ultra-hyper-overprotective mode, which is what you’re doing, by the way, and as part of ultra-hyper-overprotective mode, I carried her from the car into the house, put her on the sofa, and wouldn’t let her move.
“Speaking of stupid, scared behavior, that one didn’t win me any points, either. And it pretty much did take an intervention from the whole family to snap me out of it. Penny actually headslapped me and Jethro over it.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Abby and I were being scared together. I’m panicking, she’s panicking and getting annoyed at me because I’m being stupid about it, I’m getting more scared because she’s getting more scared, we were feeding each other’s fears, because that’s just how we work. Fortunately Jimmy got worried when we didn’t call and let him know how the scans went, so he came in and saved the day. Told me I could freak the fuck out as much as I needed to, but not in front of her, and that if I ever needed to go hide at his place and melt down, his door was always open.
“Tony, my door is always open. His door is always open. Ducky’s is. Gibbs’ is, too, but, just, not for this. He’s the guy you go to when you’re freaked out about… anything else, but not this. This is what Jimmy told me: It’s okay to be afraid. It’s okay to be sad. It’s okay for her to see you being afraid and sad. She needs to know this sort of thing effects you, too. It is not okay for you to panic. You’re the man, so it’s your job to not totally lose it, especially when you want to. The other thing he said was this, ‘Only one of us has to be sane at any given time.’ And we’ll provide cover for you until you get sane again. We’ll help you fake it until it’s real.
“Bootcamp is part of dealing with scared. If we need to do it twice a week, once for you and once for Ziva, we will. But it helps. Your body wants to run or fight when it’s scared, so if you need it, come fight with us. Or run or yoga or, whatever. Tell us what you need, and we’re there for it.”
Tony looks at Tim’s arms. He’d kept a light jacket on when he was at lunch, because people who expect Special Agent Tim McGee look at him a bit oddly when they notice the tattoos and the wrist cuff, and they start to get concerned when they see bruises. But at Tony’s he’s just in jeans and a t-shirt.
“She do that to you?” He points to the bruises on Tim’s arms.
“Some of them. Some are from Jimmy.”
“What are you fighting off?”
“Mmm?” Tim’s eyes open a bit wider.
“You’re not just volunteering to be a punching bag. What’s got you so scared? What had you all beat the hell up back before Kelly was born?”
“Not scared, not right now. Week after we got the previa news, that was scared.”
“Uh huh. Come on. No bullshit, none from me, none from you. She’s fighting hard enough to make those marks on you, that means you were fighting hard, too.”
“We were. She took on Jimmy and I together and we lost fifteen out of nineteen rounds.”
“You won four?”
“Yeah.”
Tony looks a bit surprised by that. “That’s not answering my question.”
Tim rubs his forehead. “When we started it was about anger. It was about giving Jimmy a place to fight it out. But it’s good for fear, too, and for him fear stuck around a lot longer than anger did. For me it’s mostly been anger. There’s been some fear, but mostly it’s… It’s a place to beat out all the pissed off.”
“What’s got you so pissed?”
“Long story.”
Tony stood up and went to the kitchen. A moment later he was back with two beers and sitting on the sofa next to Tim.
“I’m not going anywhere anytime soon.”
“You could be going to my house, collecting your wife, and talking to her about your problems instead of listening to mine.”
“You brushed me off about this last time, too.”
Tim remembers after he’d had the post-talking-to-his-mom meltdown. Tony had asked about it then, and he had brushed him off. And Tony agreed to respect that, and he has. “I did.”
“Why?”
“I’m brushing you off this time because you’re using my problems to avoid your own.”
“Yeah, well,” he pops the cap on his beer and hands Tim the church key. “I’m not ready to face my own right now. And Ziva’ll still be there in an hour or two when we’re done. So, what’s got you so pissed you’ve got to beat it out?”
Tim sighs, not sure if he should play this game or not. But, Tony’s asking. He’s here. And if he wants this sort of access to Tony’s life, he needs to grant it in return. That’s part of the whole don’t do it if you aren’t willing to have it come back to you thing.
“Lots of things, but most recently… This is mine, and I’m going to be the one who tells Ziva about it. You’re not. Can you do that?”
“Yeah.”
“Not kidding about this, because it’ll be tempting to tell her, get her focused on something else, too.”
“I won’t say anything.”
“Okay. Ender was still working for the CIA. He was deep cover, and I gave the order that killed him.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah. And I’m doing better now, but I needed to beat the anger out. That fucker made me kill him. And eventually I have to tell Ziva about it, too, because she pulled the trigger on my order. It was a clean kill, and I’d give the order again, even if I knew he was working for the CIA, I’d still give the order, but I’m pissed.”
“Yeah,” Tony says quietly and sighs. “That’d do it.”
“So, we were both fighting hot and angry. And eventually you hit and get hit often enough and, at least for me, since I know I made the right decision, that… It just helps. Jimmy says it helps with the fear. It’s better for anger, but it helps with fear, too. They’ve got the twenty-week ultrasound coming up…”
Tony nods, he gets that. Gets how doing it again has to be terrifying for Jimmy and Breena.
“So that’s today.” Tony gets up again, and comes back with a few ice packs.
Tim puts them on his arms. “Thanks.”
“What was before?”
Tim looks down at his beer bottle, finger circling the rim, and sighs. “Tony, would you just trust me that now’s not a good time for it?”
“Now’s not good for you, or now’s not good for me?”
“Both of us. And I don’t know when it’s going to be good for me. But I meant it, you’re still welcome to ask Gibbs or Jimmy or Abby. But… I’ve got to think about it to talk about it, and I still don’t want to do that.”
“Okay.”
Tim fished his cell out of his pocket and holds it out to Tony. “Come on, give her a call, and ask her to come home.”
He doesn’t take it. “She’s gonna yell at me.”
“Yep. And here’s something else Jimmy said to me, and I’m going to say to you, because it was excellent advice, ‘You are going beg her to talk to you and when she does, you’re going to lay down at her feet and explain to her that she is your sun and the only thing that keeps you alive is getting to revolve around her.’”
Tony takes the phone, but he doesn’t dial. “Palmer said that to you?”
“After the toothpaste thing. And he’s right, and that basic idea, that: ‘You are my world, the most precious thing in my universe, and just the idea of anything happening to you kills me, so you can imagine how bad something actually happenings is,’ has gotten me a lot of slack on insane stupid fear stuff, too.”
“Hmp.” Tony hit Ziva’s contact on the phone, and Tim decided now was a very good time to wander off into the kitchen, shut the door behind him, and realize somewhat belatedly that he can’t read any of the books on his phone or call in to see what Abby’s up to if Tony’s talking on it. 

Next

Shards To A Whole: Chapter 278

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

Chapter 278: Lunch With Jimmy (Or The Difference 270 Chapters Makes.)


“Family is exhausting,” Tim says as he rolls the stroller next to the table and sits down across from Jimmy.
Jimmy smiles and tickles Kelly’s feet. She looks awfully startled, in that at any given time she’s not really aware of having feet, so having someone mess with them is something of a shock.
“I think she’s going to be ticklish.” Jimmy looks up from Kelly and really sees Tim. “You got your face back! Moving back into work mode?”
Tim shrugs, not feeling any need to explain why his goatee is gone. “I’m ticklish. Abby is. Wouldn’t be a surprise if Kelly is.”
“I didn’t know that about you. So, which branch of the family is keeping you from your beauty sleep? Baby or Grandpa.”
“Last night, Grandpa. She’s actually sleeping through the four AM feed now.”
“Congratulations.” And once again Jimmy engages Kelly, picking her up, cradling her in his arms, leaning in close, and saying, “Good girl, letting mom and dad sleep. You keep this up, you’re gonna end up with a little brother or sister.”
“Maybe.”
Jimmy’s eyes shoot up from Kelly and back to Tim. “Maybe? Already?”
“Probably not. She’s nursing. Only happened once. But, we’ll find out for sure next week.”
Jimmy laughs. “So, on purpose, or did you guys just forget?”
Tim’s shuffling through the baby bag, searching for Kelly’s bottle. “On purpose but not planned.”
“What does that even mean?” Jimmy asks, looking curious.
Tim looks up at him. “Come on, we’ve talked about this. You almost get killed, and really there’s only one thing your body wants to do to convince you and her you’re still alive.”
“Ah. Right.”
“So, plan was condoms until Kelly’s three months old, try not to have two kids in one year, but got home, almost died, and we were following the plan, but… It just felt wrong.”
“If you’re doing it to convince yourself you haven’t died, it should make a baby, or at least try?”
“Yeah something like that.”
Jimmy nods as Tim finds the bottle. “I get that.”
Tim pulls it out, and shakes it up, then hands it to Jimmy, because it’s easier to hand the bottle over than the baby.
“I’m on feeding duty?”
“You picked her up.”
“Lucky for you, Kelly, I know what I’m doing.” And he does, one arm holding Kelly, the other holding the bottle. “But it has been a while, so I appreciate you helping me get back into practice.” Kelly latches on and sucks greedily, looking a little confused about this person who’s holding her and talking in the perky voice. But he’s got food, and that makes him her favorite person. Once she’s sucking away, Jimmy looks over at Tim again. “You know, we’re required by law to tease the ever living hell out of you if you end up with two kids in one year.”
Tim rolls his eyes and nods.
“End up with three in two years and we drag you off to the urologist for the vasectomy whether you want it or not.”
“Oh, come on!”
Jimmy shakes his head a little. He’s joking, but he’s serious, too. The kind of tone that says he doesn’t think it’s going to be an issue, but making sure Tim knows that it would be an issue if it happened. “That’s just not cool. It’s not good for her, at all. Really not good for her.” Comments about Abby’s age and why three kids in two years might not be completely out of the question are left unspoken, but Tim gets them anyway. “Once, okay. Twice, that’s a pattern, and it ends there, because it’s really not good for her.”
“I know that. I’m not a moron.”
“Just making sure you know the lines.”
“I end up with three kids in two years, and I’ll take myself in.”
“Good.” Jimmy looks back down at Kelly. “Want some time to enjoy you all on your own!”
“Is this her?” Dana, their usual waitress at Carlo’s, asks as she comes over, setting a cup of decaf coffee in front of Tim without even being asked. Sometimes it’s good to eat at one of the same four places all the time.
“This is her,” Tim says.
“Oh my God! She’s adorable.” Dana leans down to pet Kelly’s cheek. She flashes that irked look. Dana laughs at that. “She’s what… six weeks old now?”
“Exactly six weeks old tomorrow.”
“Where’s Abby?”
“Having a girl’s lunch with Ziva right now. So I’m on baby duty.”
“Uh, excuse me,” Jimmy says. “You’re loafing. I’m on baby duty.”
Dana smiles at that. “And you look like you know what you’re doing.”
“Well, I should. Not like I’ve never done this before.”
Dana nods. “So, you two getting your regular lunches?”
“Yes.” Jimmy replies.
 Tim shakes his head. “Feeling pretty hungry today. I’d like a bowl of tomato soup to go with the grilled chicken salad.”
“No problem. Should have it up in a few minutes.”
“Thanks, Dana.”
“Soup in July?”
“I’m hungry.”
Jimmy stares at him, at the shaved goatee, and just nods, laughing a little, looking really smug. Tim grins. Then Jimmy looks back down to Kelly. “She’s so tiny. It sounds so dumb, but you forget. This morning Molly was tiny.”
“She is.”
“She’s a toddler. Kelly’s what, eight pounds?”
“There abouts. She’s got a check-up tomorrow, so we’ll find out for sure.”
Jimmy touches Kelly’s face, fingers tracing over her cheek. “You forget how blue their eyes are, too.”
“End of December.”
“Yep.”
“When’s the twenty week scan?”
“Earliest they’ll do it is eighteen weeks, so we’ve got an appointment for the 11th.”
“You want us to come?”
“Abby maybe. You don’t need to take time off for it.”
“I don’t need to, but if you want support, we’ll both be there.”
Jimmy looks up at him from Kelly. “It’s going to be fine. I know that. The nuchal fold came back normal, the genetic counseling said everything was good, but I’m still really nervous.” He nods towards Dana, who’s waiting on another table. “We still haven’t told anyone who doesn’t see Breena in person. Haven’t told my mom or brother, yet.”
“It’s normal.”
“Yeah. Great. Still hate feeling afraid like this.”
Tim nods, smiling sadly, understanding.
“Anyway…” Jimmy says, changing the subject, because until his newest child is alive and healthy and in his arms, this fear just isn’t going away, so something else to focus on will help. “Tell me the whole story with Ender.”
So Tim did, happy to get Jimmy thinking of something else. By the time he was done, Kelly had finished her bottle and was sleeping in her stroller, and he and Jimmy were both on post-lunch drinks.   
Tim wraps up by saying, “I’m temped to hack Hanson,” he sees Jimmy doesn’t remember which one of the names that was, “The head of the CIA.” Jimmy nods. “See what he’s got on Ender, what he was actually doing. But that’s probably just rubbing salt into the wound. It won’t make him any less dead.”
“Might let you know what happened to James.”
“Yeah. Might. Did he kill James? Was he so committed to the role he kept working with a guy who killed his brother? Did he even know? No, he had to. If he didn’t kill James himself, he had to have a plan to get him off the ship. If he didn’t have that plan, Simmers and Blake would have known something was wrong when the ship didn’t blow.”
“Think he was cold enough to leave the body there so he’d have a plausible excuse for how the detonator got found?”
Tim blows out a frustrated breath. “That’s absolute zero level cold.”
Jimmy just stares at Tim.
Tim shrugs. “I don’t know. For all I know, Ender never mentioned them being brothers and just played it as he found a guy who really looked like him. Running the faces through the recognition software and ‘planning from there.’”
“Maybe.”
“Yeah. Anyway… it looks like Vance wasn’t going to tell me. But now I know. And I do need to tell Tony. And I’m worried about telling Ziva. I don’t want to do it now, because they’ve got enough on their plates right now.”
“Yeah. What was so different about this time? My sense was as soon as anything dangerous happened, you all ran right into it. That the Venn diagram between self-preservation and your team was two circles on opposite sides of the page.” Jimmy says, circling each of his forefingers. “Is it just because they’re married now?”
“Spent most of last night talking with Gibbs about this. But, short answer, no. It’s not just because they’re married. Day after they started dating, Tony was telling me that if it’s ever him or her, the right answer is her, and he didn’t need to because the right answer has always been her. Before her, the right answer was Kate. And maybe that’s stupid and sexist, but… especially after we lost Kate…”
Jimmy nods at him. He gets that.
“I mean we all know Ziva can take care of herself. So we don’t… well, we didn’t used to… get stupid about it. But no matter what, she was the one who was going to come home. I mean, hell, we went to Somalia to get her back. We didn’t even know she was still alive. Actually Somalia should have been a good hint on how insane those two are on this.”
“’Those two,’ if memory serves, you went, too, Tim.”
“Yeah. A quarter of my family just died. I’m not letting two thirds of what’s left run off on a suicide mission without at least someone who actually wants to come home on the team. I didn’t go for Ziva. I hoped she was alive, but I didn’t feel it in my gut. I went for Tony and Jethro. If she was dead, I wanted to make sure they actually came home. Before we left, Abby said that to me. ‘No matter what you find out there, you make sure they come home.’”
“Isn’t she supposed to say that to Gibbs?”
“I would have thought so. Especially then. But she said it to me.”
“Because that time it wasn’t about making sure you fought right, it was about letting the white whale go before it killed you.”
“I guess.”
“So, they’re both kind of insane on this, but you guys get almost killed every year or two and until this time, Tony and Gibbs kept it under control, what was different?”
“Apparently, he and Tony, and me, you, too probably, are allowed to go on suicide missions if there’s any shot at all of getting the girls out. Hell, even if there isn’t any shot of getting them out. Save them or die trying is perfectly okay.”
Jimmy nods along with that. “Sounds right.”
“Yeah. Here’s the change. Actually, no, it’s not a change. They’ve probably always felt that way. Here’s what came into play on this one: they aren’t allowed to save us or die trying.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. We’re allowed to be the big damn heroes, but they aren’t.”
“Huh.” Jimmy looks perplexed. “Like, I get that if we’re talking about Abby or Breena, but Ziva? She’s better at this stuff than Gibbs and Tony, right?”
“I think so. But, apparently this was the first time Ziva had a good shot of getting free, and ran into the danger, and, on top of that, apparently both of them acted like freaking twits, at least, if what Gibbs was saying was true, which didn’t do much to improve anyone’s confidence in the whole situation. But, from what Gibbs was saying, there was nothing she could do by running in, but die with them, and that’s not okay..”
“Huh. So, she runs in, freaks them both out, and now everything is upside down?”
“Looks like it. And then apparently he and Tony decided to have some sort of heart to heart about it...”
“Because getting marriage advice from the guy who’s been divorced three times is such a great idea.”
“Marriage advice from the guy who’s been divorced three times because he’s never gotten over losing his first wife, and is still walking wounded on that front… I don’t even think it was marriage advice so much as how to deal with fear, and fear of losing your spouse is the one area you do not want Gibbs’ help. He suggested to Tony that she not be on the team anymore. Tony latched onto it, added his own particular version of screwed up to it, and now Ziva’s at your place.
“Anyway, that was my half of it. Talking with him until late last night. How about your half, how’s Ziva?”
Jimmy looks slightly disturbed. “It’s really nerve wracking to be in a home with Ziva when she’s pissed. She goes really, really quiet, so you never hear her move, she just appears out of nowhere.”
“Any less pissed, now?”
Jimmy shrugged. “She appeared to be pleased at the idea that Tony might have been talking to someone, but he doesn’t get any sympathy for having a hard past. That’s not really right. There’s sympathy, but I can’t ask her to overlook him being stupid because he’s had a hard past. I can’t say to her, ‘Cut him some slack, his mom died,’ because hers did, too. And ‘He's flipping out because Kate died’ doesn’t mean much when she had to kill Ari two days later.”
“Gibbs killed Ari.”
Jimmy shakes his head. “No. He didn’t. She did. Gibbs set it up as a trap, him as the bait, and trusted Ziva to do the job.”
“Oh, God.”
“Yeah.”
Tim shakes his head a little, sighing. “I actually said to him last night that I didn’t know how he could let himself love Ziva so much, so quickly, given how dangerous her life is.”
“Guess we were talking in parallel. I suggested that maybe she and Tony might benefit from some marriage counseling.”
Tim’s nodding along with that. “Got Gibbs to agree to see someone.”
“How much alcohol did you pump into him to do that?”
“Abby asked me the same thing.”
Jimmy looks at him expectantly.
“It’s still my team, and I told him he wasn’t going back until he’d seen someone. Twice. And I’d check.”
“I’m glad I don’t work for you.”
That gets a smirk out of Tim. “How’d it go when you suggested it to Ziva? Lead balloon?”
“Not that bad, but she wasn’t enthusiastic.”
“What does not enthusiastic mean?”
“She stared at me like I was speaking Swahili, laughed, realized I wasn’t joking, and then said she’d think about it.”
“Think they’ll do it?” Tim asks.
“I think they’ll do everything in their power to avoid it.”
“That’s kind of a pattern with this group.”
“Yeah, I’ve noticed,” Jimmy says dryly. And both of them know they both also have stuff that might be better off talked with someone about, and both of them aren’t doing it, either.
“You didn’t go talk to someone after Jon died, right?” Tim asks. He didn’t think Jimmy had, but he also hadn’t known about the sleeping pills until Jimmy told him.
“Breena did. I probably should have. But she was seeing our pastor, and that’s fine and makes sense, and she found it a comfort, but… I wasn’t in the mood to buy what she was selling.”
Tim nods at that. “Talked to Gibbs about that. He says it helps. Not right away. Nothing helps right away, but eventually you hurt less and feel less angry and the idea that they’re out there, waiting for us, helps.”
Jimmy shrugs. Not brushing it off, but not willing to engage it for himself. “So, Gibbs believes?”
Tim nods, not sure if he wants to say how deep Gibbs goes on that one. “I’m sure he’d talk to you about it if you ask.”
“That sounds like there’s a story in there.”
“There is, but it’s his story, not mine. Mostly. I guess some of it’s mine, but not most of it.”
“That’s ominous sounding.”
“Good choice of words there. It’s… Just ask him about it sometime.”
“God, that’s grim.”
“Yeah, well… You ever have a sex dream about another guy?” It was out of his mouth before he’d made any decision beyond maybe they didn’t need to be thinking quite so much about pain and death right now.
Jimmy’s staring at him like he just turned green, a really, thoroughly perplexed look on his face. “I think you need to leave the clowning around stuff to Tony. He’s way better at it.”
Tim turns his hands up in a, it’s what came out, gesture. “It’s not depressing.”
“Okay, yeah. Just… death, pain, missing the ones we love, sex dreams with men. That’s not exactly a natural progression, Tim. Why would your brain go there?”
“Got talking about it with Abby this morning. She thinks it’s weird that I haven’t. I thought it was pretty normal for a straight guy to not be dreaming about other guys. But I only know me. You’re here. You’re a straight guy. Gibbs’d just stare at me like I’m insane if I ask him. Tony’d get insulted by the question, and then lie to me. Ducky’d probably answer it, and then give me an hour long dissertation on the psychology of sexuality and Penny would kick in another hour of feminist theory of gender/preference fluidity.”
“I guess.”
“So…”
“You haven’t?” Jimmy’s sounding a bit guarded as he says that.
“No.” Tim’s slowly shaking his head.
“Come on, all of us have had that wake up in a cold sweat, heart pounding, wanting to wash your brain out with bleach moment.”
“Well, yeah. But none of mine have involved another man.”
That gets an intrigued look out of Jimmy. “If it’s not another guy, what are you dreaming of that makes you want to wash your brain out with bleach.”
“Just…” Tim shakes his head. “No… let’s not go there.”
“Okay.” Jimmy’s staring warily at Tim.
“So, you have?”
Jimmy rolls his eyes a little, looking slightly embarrassed. “Well, until five minutes ago, I thought we all had, at least once.”
“Huh…”
“So, you really haven’t?”
Tim takes another sip of his coffee. “I don’t remember a lot of my dreams, but, I don’t think so.”
“Not buying it. You just don’t remember.”
Tim shrugs.
“Why were you and Abby talking about that?”
“Just laying around while she fed Kelly, talking. Got talking about sex dreams. She wanted to know if—“ He realizes that he doesn’t want Jimmy to have quite that level of detail for what they were talking about, so he quickly edits what he was about to say, “I ever dreamed about guys. I said no. That not dreaming about guys was part of the whole being a straight guy thing, and she seemed pretty doubtful about that. So, she’ll be happy to know that she’s closer to right than I am.”
“I think it’s the waking up and feeling really squirmy about it after that’s the defining characteristic of being straight.”
“Uh huh. So, does it happen a lot?”
“NO!” Jimmy’s horrified by that. “Been more than twenty years since the last time.”
“Hey, just asking.” Yeah, well, that wasn’t horribly grim, but this was probably way too damn far into overkill territory. But… but he’s curious, and Jimmy isn’t going to flip out about it, and there isn’t another guy he can talk to about stuff like this, so… “Why squirmy after?”
“Uh?” Jimmy’s staring at him like that should be a really self-evident thing.
“Just, my own brain bleach dreams usually involve someone or thing I really don’t like.”
“Men are pretty high on my list of someones I don’t like,” Jimmy says dryly.
“Someone I actively dislike. Not just some random person.”
Jimmy nods at that, then asks, “Thing?”
“Like I said, we’re not going there.”
“How could a ‘thing’ make you feel all squirmy in a bad way?”
“Thing as a verb, not noun.”
“Oh.” Jimmy’s getting the sense that he’s talking uncomfortable dreams, and Tim might be talking nightmares.
“Not saying I’m interested in guys ‘cause I’m not but… don’t think it’d make me feel gross.”
Jimmy shrugs. “It’s been a long time. Might feel different about it now.”
“Good point. As a teen that would have been a brain bleach dream.”
“That’s all I’m saying. Spent the three days after more or less wrapped around my girlfriend, because it did kind of freak me out. Now, married, kid at home, another on the way, probably not a big deal. So, your brain bleach dreams involve a someone?”
“Sounds like yours did, too.”
“Not a real person. Well, yeah, real person, not like a comic character, but no one I actually knew. Yours?”
“No.” Tim’s shaking his head.
“Come on, who am I going to tell?”
“Everyone.”
“So it’s someone we know? A woman someone we know? Shepard?”
“Just. No. We do not need to go there.”
“Please?” Jimmy's looking awfully curious, and Tim's thinking maybe this wasn't his best hop off of an uncomfortable subject gambit, ever.
“What are we? Sixteen-year-old girls?”
“Says the guy who brought this up in the first place. Was it a sixteen-year-old girl?”
“NO! Stop it.”
“Fine…” Jimmy lets it trail off for a second while he drinks more of his Diet Sprite. “Ziva?”
Tim glared at Jimmy. Jimmy’s eyes lit up. “Oh, you have, haven’t you?”
“Yes, and you have, too, and, no, that’s not the brain bleach dream and if you ever say anything about that I am writing out a detailed list of every single piece of porn on your computer and giving it to Breena, Ziva, and Abby.”
“Whoa. Calm on down.” He’s holding up his hands in placating gesture, and then points at Tim, “And don’t do that. Breena’s stuff is on there, too, and trust me, you don’t know which is mine and which is hers.”
The look on Tim’s face says, really, you’re going to try that on me? “Ultra X Fetish Shoe House is Breena’s?” he asks, completely deadpan.
Jimmy’s having a very hard time not smiling. “It could be.”
“No.”
“Fine. If it’s not Ziva…”
“You’re not letting up until I talk, are you?”
“Wasn’t planning on it.”
“Threat still holds, and I’ll tell Breena why I’m doing it, and she won’t get pissed.”
“Terms accepted.”
“Diane.”
“Gibbs’ Diane?”
“Yeah. Gibbs’ Diane. Night after the first time we met her. Woke up in a cold sweat wishing I could rip my eyes out.”
Jimmy just laughs.
“And then, a year later, she wants me to ‘hug’ her.”
“Oh God. You poor guy.”
“Yeah.” Tim shuddered. “That’s kind of how the dream started, too.”
“You know,” Jimmy says, thinking about, “She is kind of hot.”
“That wasn’t the problem,” Tim said seriously, because it wasn’t. Diane being hot is why (probably) that dream started. “That’s never the problem. She’s mean and a bully and she was both of those things in the dream, too.”
And suddenly Jimmy’s got a much better idea of what ‘thing’ means.
“Sorry.”
“Yeah. But Spawn of Satan reputation aside, she’s actually not that bad once she opens up some. She’s one of those really bright, really accomplished people who’s also really insecure and covers it by attacking everyone.”
“So, she’s mean and a bully.”
“Yeah. I guess that is the traditional mold. According to her, she was softer before Gibbs.”
“You believe it?”
“I didn’t then. Now… Yeah, I know him well enough I can see how it probably went. I’m sure he liked the challenge of her, because softer probably didn’t mean soft. Liked that she’d stand up to him. Loved the body, because like you said, she’s hot. And Tony dug up this shot of her from about the time they would have been married, and smoking hot. Ducky said he was a lot like Tony back then, so he was probably all quiet charm and those big blue eyes. But she wasn’t Shannon, and he didn’t love her, and she didn’t know what was going on or why he’s pulling back. And she’s not soft, and she doesn’t put up with crap, so she’s going behind his back, because he won’t talk to her, rummaging through his stuff, finds the pictures, he’s still got his old photo albums, and she finds out he had this whole life he never mentioned. Next thing we know, she’s getting friendly with Fornel.”
“And we’re back to why you never ask Gibbs for marriage advice.”
“Or if you do, you listen to what he says, think about it, and do the opposite. So, that’s mine. Who was yours?”
“Hmmm?”
“Who freaked you out so bad you spent three days glued to your girlfriend?”
Jimmy rolls his eyes. “It’s really silly.”
Tim just looks at him.
“Fine. The apartment we lived in was small, and Clark and I shared a room. I’d do my homework at the kitchen table, because it’d be quieter, sort of, out there, and my mom is hovering around, getting dinner ready. In our room, he’d mess with me and stuff, but out there, he wouldn’t because she’s right nearby. Anyway, I’d be working, and she’d be watching this show, a lot, because she was like a major Beau Bridges fan and he was the star, and I didn’t pay much attention, because I’d be working. But there was this smoking hot actress on it, Talisa Soto, oh my god, just, so hot.”
“I don’t know who she is.”
“Kind of looked like Selma Hyack.”
“Oohhh…”
“Yeah. Gorgeous. Most perfect caramel colored skin and long black hair and...” Jimmy’s expression gets across that it wasn’t just her skin and hair he was impressed with. Tim nod, he knows what Jimmy’s not saying. “So, when she was on screen, I paid less attention to my homework and a lot more to her.”
“How old were you?”
“I don’t know. Fifteen, sixteen, something like that.”
“Okay.”
“Anyway. I’m studying my history, reading through this pathetically boring text on the unification of Germany, and my mom’s got the show on, and I fall asleep studying, and I start dreaming about her, which was great, but there was also this twerp on the show, a guy about my age, and suddenly he was in the dream, which was kind of weird, but not terrible, and then she wasn’t in the dream anymore, that wasn’t good at all, and I wake up sticky and horrified with my mom asking me what I was moaning about.”
“Oh lord.”
“Yeah, talk about conversations you don’t ever want to have with your mom while sitting at the kitchen table, let alone conversations you don’t want to end with, ‘Well, come on, clear up, we’re having dinner in three minutes.”
“No.” Tim's somewhere between horrified on Jimmy's behalf and about to burst out laughing.
“Yeah. She’s just standing there, staring at me, waiting for me to get up.”
Tim's vibrating and biting his lip he's trying so hard not to laugh. Then Jimmy rolls his eyes and smiles, giving Tim permission to lose it, and he dissolves into a laughing fit.

After a minute he says, "Sorry, I know I shouldn't laugh at that. At least you could use the books for cover.”
“Which I needed. All I want to do is get a shower and die of embarrassment, and she’s like, ‘Come on, Jimmy, we’re having pot roast.’”
“What’d you do?”
“Lurched up, ran to the bathroom, made myself puke, because once again, little apartment, and you could hear everything in there, so if I didn’t sound sick, she’d be knocking on the door, wanting to know what was up, then got the shower, and spent the rest of the night in bed, playing sick.”
Tim shook his head. “I have to say, I’m deeply glad to have never had that experience.”
“Yeah. Could have gone without it, too.”
Kelly chirped a bit.
“I know that sound. That’s the it's halfway through my nap time, you need to get moving if you want me to be home to Abby by my next feed call,” Tim says.
“Then I won’t keep you.”
“Last question, is Ziva going home anytime soon?”
“She didn’t have a plan when I last talked to her.”
“Okay. I’m going to get Kelly home, and then I need to track down Tony, see how he’s doing.”
“Let me know how it goes.”

“Will do.”
Next.

Shards To A Whole: Chapter 277

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


Chapter 277: Pillow Talk



They got eight minutes of afterglow together before Kelly started crying again.
Tim got up. “I’ve got her.”
Abby waited until she saw him walk past his dresser, past his pj pants, to say, “You’re naked.”
Tim shrugs, he’s two steps from the door. “No line of sight from downstairs to up here.” You have to be in the upstairs hallway to see their end of it. Sure, the bathroom and guest room are near the stairs end of the hall, but Kelly’s room and his room isn’t.
“Hey, baby girl. You have a good nap?”
She looking up at him, seeming to be pretty irked about this whole having to wait to get cleaned up before the food comes thing.
“Yeah, I know. But you’re pretty smelly right now, and the grown-up half of this equation is going to be much happier if you’re all nice and clean before you get into our bed.”
That answer didn’t seem to make her any happier. But since he is an adult, and he is picking her up and getting her changed, she knows that means the food will be coming presently, so the crying stops.


“One clean, hungry baby, looking for her mama,” Tim says as he lays Kelly on the bed next to Abby. She’s already laying on her side, which is good for nursing when they two of them want to snuggle.
Tim lays next to them, Kelly between him and Abby, watching as she gets her breast into Kelly’s mouth, and Kelly starts sucking greedily.
He lays his fingers on Abby’s shoulder, tracing down her ribs to her hip. Feels like it’s been a million years since they just laid around in bed together, awake, touching, and talking.
“Missed this,” she says.
“Yeah. Been a while. ”
“Got plans for today? Want to run downstairs, grab up some food, and lay around in bed all day?”
“God… I’d love to…” There’s a sort of sheepish expression on his face.
“But?”
“Promised Jimmy we’d have lunch. Should check in with Ziva and Tony, need to at least get downstairs at some point and poke Jethro, see if he’s still in one piece. Gotta give Fornell the heads up about Ender.” He lifted up on his left arm and looked over her back to the clock. “But I’ve got two hours before I need to get moving to make it to lunch.”
“Then I’ll take two hours, and I should call Ziva, see how she’s doing. Get some girl talk in. You guys probably didn’t get the whole story.”
“We never do.” He gently strokes Kelly’s cheek and she half looks over to him, but realizes that won’t work if she wants to nurse, so goes back to ignoring him. “You want to start alternating the 1:00 feed?
“Yeah.”
“Same as last time? You take three nights off, let your body get used to not nursing. I’ll catch them. And once you’re adjusted, we’ll swap?”
“Sounds… I was going to say good, because the whole sleeping thing does, but, ow… Hate this weaning part, it’s really uncomfortable.”
“Sorry about that.”
“All part of the job.”
“How about you stay out with Ziva as long as you need, have a good lunch. Use the pump. I’ll get her formula for lunch, and feed her a bottle of yours tonight.”
“That’ll work.”
“Three nights of getting to sleep from ten until seven should sound awfully good, too.”
She strokes Kelly’s tummy. “Oh they do, trust me. It’s the part where I wake up at five or so feeling like my boobs are going to burst that’s not sounding so good.”
He gently strokes the tip of his index finger over her breast. “What are you going to do when you go back?”
She tilts her head in a way that means not sure. “Pump as much as I can. Nurse morning and evening feed. Probably the ten o’clock one, too, as long as it lasts. But my guess is that she’ll end up on all formula all day pretty soon after I get back. Can’t see taking a half hour break every three hours to pump.”
That makes sense to him. When she’s working, she’s working and doesn’t much appreciate having to break. “Looking forward to getting back?”
“Yes. No. I’m loving this time here with her, and I know it’s short, and I don’t want to miss it. But I’m going insane home all the time with no puzzles to solve. And no, ‘why are you crying now’ doesn’t count as a puzzle to solve.”
He smiles at that, stretches again, feels his stomach rumble, and sits up. “What sort of food did you want me to grab from downstairs?”
“Usual.”
“Okay. I’ll be back in a few minutes with food.”
He’s slipping on his pj pants when Abby says, “Tim.”
“Yeah?” He’s turning from his dresser to look at her.
“Remember your blushing comment on Wednesday?”
He thinks about it, and, yeah, he does, but he's not immediately seeing how it's relevant. 
“If you go down there with a wet goatee, smelling like my cum, and Gibbs sees you, the next time I see him, I will blush. Wash up first.”
He starts to giggle at that. Then rubs his face, and yeah, it’s still wet and a bit sticky. “Didn’t even occur to me…”
“I know. Doesn’t usually matter if you walk around the house looking like we just had sex. Not like it’s a problem for me. But…”
“I get it. I don’t mind him knowing we have sex, but,” he touches his goatee, “that’s a step further than I want to go, too. I just didn’t think about it. Can’t see my own face.”
He heads to the bathroom to wash his face. Might was well brush his teeth, too. A minute later he heads out. “Presentable?” His hair’s still sticking up in fifteen directions, and all he’s wearing is a pair of flannel drawstring pants and his wrist cuff, but yeah, he looks like himself just getting up (as opposed to himself just gotten off).
“You’ll do.” She looks at him for a long minute, eyes trailing up and down his body, letting him know that she likes what she sees.
He sits on the side of the bed next to her, and kisses her shoulder, scraping his moustache across her skin, nipping gently. “Since you've got me thinking about it; how was that?”
It takes her a second to figure out that he’s asking how oral with his facial hair felt. “Honestly?”
“No, lie to me. Only reason I’m asking is I want you to pet my ego. Yes, honestly.”
She shrugs a little. “Kind of itchy and distracting.”
His eyebrows furrow. “That’s not good.”
“Couple times I was pretty close and then you’d shift and suddenly I was getting attacked by a toothbrush.”
He winces. Apparently he’s not winning any awards for greatest lover ever this week. “Great. Shaving went onto the plan for today.”
“That’s a good plan. I like the way it looks. And it feels good when we kiss,” she brushes her fingers over it, “or like how you just trailed it over my shoulder, but… don’t love it for oral, and when I get back to waxing regularly, just, ouch.”
He nods. And if they’re being this frank... “I really don’t like condoms. You’ve spoiled me, because back when all sex involved them, they were just fine, but now…” he kisses her, carefully, “now I know how good real sex is, and how spectacular your body feels, naked and wet and silky on mine, and if it’s about me, I’m good with mouth or hands or anal any other part of your gorgeous body until we can go back to non-condom sex.”
“And what if it’s not about you?” she asks with a smile, because after all, it’s not just all about him.
He laughs a little. “If it’s not about me, then they’re fine. I mean, it’s still sex with you. It’ll still feel good, and I’ll still get off. But, if we’re talking about general preferences, I’d rather skin on skin than skin on latex on skin.” He kisses her again, standing up, getting ready to get them some breakfast. “From now until we get back to baby making sex, it’s lady’s choice. You get to pick what we’re doing, and if I see the condoms come out, that’s fine.”
“You just wouldn’t mind if they sat in the drawer and collected dust.”
“Not at all.”
“And when we’re back to baby making sex?”
He smiles at her, eyes hot and sexy. “Gonna lay you out, hitch your leg over my shoulder, and slip into you long and slow, just easing into you, making sure to get that angle you like while rubbing your clit. I’ll do it so slow, all the way in and all the way out and over and over and over. Every single inch of your body clinging and slipping over mine.” He leaned in to kiss her one more time. “Gonna make you come so hard your ears ring and you see stars, and your body pulsing on mine’ll set me off, and we’ll see if all that hot, wet, clenching skin, and searing pleasure can make a little brother or sister for Kelly.” One last kiss, wet and slow, and if they’re ever going to eat, let alone not do something even more horrendously inappropriate with Kelly in the room, he really needs to get out of there. “I should probably get us that breakfast.”
“Yeah.” She sounds a little breathless as she says it, grinning at him, and he grins back, leans in one more time, and gently licked her bottom lip, just couldn’t not do that, then saunters down to get them some food.



“’Morning.”
Gibbs nods at him. He’s sitting at the kitchen table, coffee and eggs in front of him. “Got some in the oven on warm for you two.”
“Thanks.” Tim opens the oven, and there are two plates of scrambled eggs in there. He shuts the door and starts collecting peaches, strawberries, almond milk, and yogurt for Abby’s smoothie. “How’re you feeling this morning?”
Gibbs flashes him a look that may mean Come on, we’re not girls, we don’t have to actually talk about this stuff or possibly Pretty damn tired and maybe Didn’t we do enough of that last night?
Tim shakes his head. “Use words. I don’t know what that look means.”
“Fine.”
“Okay. I know that look didn’t mean that.”
He certainly didn’t have any problems following the back off in the look that followed.
Tim raised his hands, and said, “I’ll stop poking.”
“Good.”
Tim very pointed doesn’t ask while he cuts the peach for Abby’s smoothie.
“Hannah used to do that,” Gibbs says quietly, not looking up from his coffee.
“Hannah?”
“Ex-number one. She’d sit there silently not asking me things.”   
“Huh.” Tim shakes his head, then looks at Gibbs and quirks an eyebrow. “Must suck when people won’t talk to you.”
Gibbs glares a little, but there’s no heat in it. “Were you always such a smartass?”
Tim grins. “I have my moments. You and Tony probably should have heard some of the things I used to say in my head to you. You need anything else while I’m up?”
“No.”
Tim hits the blend button and the whirling of the smoothie kills any shot of talking.  When it finished and he had her smoothie poured into a glass, he turned back to Gibbs. “Really, you okay?”
“Thought you weren’t poking.”
“You didn’t like me not poking.”
Gibbs sighs, looking put upon. In his own home if he’s in a bad mood, he just goes down to the basement and works until he feels better. “Slept like shit, knee aches, I’ve read every book I had on my to-read list, and I’m bored.”
Well, Gibbs doesn’t want to talk much, so Tim’s not touching slept like shit. Nothing he can do about achy knee. Gibbs is moving around well enough he can get his own pain meds if he needs them, but there is something he can do about the lack of reading material, which may help with bored.
“Have you actually read my books?” While he was getting clothes and stuff for Gibbs, Tim noticed that he did have copies of all of his books on the bookshelves in his room.
“Yeah.”
“Like ‘em?” Gibbs has never said anything about them. Until he was fetching clothing, Tim didn’t even know Gibbs had them.
Gibbs nods. They aren’t his favorite books ever, but they’re good. Once he got over the whole the-main-character-was-based-on-me part, reading them got fun.
“Wanna be a beta reader?”
Gibbs looks startled, he’s got no idea what that term means. “A what?”
“I finished Shadow Force recently. After I finish one, it goes to hibernate for a month or so. Then I read it again, make sure I actually wrote what I thought I did. Abby or Penny, sometimes both of them, read it, too. Beta reading, the second reader. Then I take my notes and theirs, and beat it into a second draft. It’s rough as hell, completely unedited, on paper, and it’s the only copy I have, so you’ve got to be just as careful with it as you are with Kelly, and she can’t get anywhere near it, but if you want to read it and let me know what you think, I’d be interested.”
Gibbs thinks about it. It’d be a good way to eat up the last day of laying on his back. 
“Sure.”
“Reading on the sofa?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll put it, a pad, and a pen on the coffee table for you.” Tim heads out of the kitchen, and he hears him moving through the office, then footsteps in the living room, and back to the kitchen. “Don’t write on it. Penny’s gonna read this one, too.”
Gibbs nods again, watching Tim debate how to take both plates of eggs, and the smoothie upstairs. He settled for moving all the eggs to one plate and balancing a fork on it.
“Breakfast in bed?”
“That’s the idea. Haven’t had a lay in in forever. Still got almost two hours before either of us needs to get ready to go anywhere, and I don’t plan on getting out of bed again until then.”
That got a small smile out of Gibbs. “Enjoy it.”
“I intend to.”


Abby was still on her side, Kelly still sucking away. She had her phone and was reading something, head propped on her hand.
“Breakfast!”
“That was faster than usual.”
“Jethro made the eggs. All I had to do was carry them up.”
“Nice of him.”
“Yep.” He takes the phone from her and hands her the smoothie. Then set the plate with the eggs on it just behind Kelly, and settles into bed next to them, back against pillows propped on the headboard. He forks up a bite of the eggs, holds them out to her, and she eats them. “I remembered to say thanks.”
She nods at him while chewing, and he gets a bite for himself. They’re good. Gibbs cooks them in butter instead of the spray oil they use, and Tim thinks he adds milk and sour cream to them, too. Whatever it is, they’re tasty. Probably bad for him. But, once again, tasty.
“How’d last night go. When I got up to feed Kelly, I could hear crying. Didn’t sound like you,” Abby asks after she swallows.
“Probably was me some, too, but you were hearing him. Didn’t wake you up, did it?”
“Nah.” She shakes her head and Kelly looks up, wondering why her breakfast is moving. “Only one cry is on my wake-up-right-this-second-sensor, and it’s not his.”
“Good.”
“It’s funny, because Kelly crying did wake me up. Heard that and the switch flipped, and I was up. But the whole time I could hear him in the background, but that didn’t do it. Slept right through that until her little, baby cry cut through it.” Abby sips her smoothie. “This is really good. You do anything different?”
“Nope. Probably just got a really good batch of peaches.”
Another nod. “So, how drunk did you get him?”
Tim chewed another bite of egg. “Cold sober.”
Abby’s eyebrows went high as she sipped her drink. “Wow.”
“Yeah. Also got him to agree to see a counselor.” 
Her jaw drops. Finally she pulls it back up again. “It doesn’t count as sober if you shoot him up with something other than alcohol.”
He smirks at that. If you had asked him last week what it would take to make Leroy Jethro Gibbs go see a counselor, he would have said, ‘narcotics.’ “Really, sober. Not a chemical in his system. Well, maybe pain meds, but if he was on them, he took them before I got in there with him. I told him that unless he wanted to start planning his retirement party, he was going to talk to someone, at least twice. Not letting him back on the team until he does it.”
Now she’s looking worried. “How’s that going to work when Tony takes over?”
And that’s something that didn’t occur to Tim, either. Fortunately, it also didn’t seem to occur to Gibbs. “We didn’t get into that. But I told Vance that I’d hold the team until it was ready to work again, and I will. And if that means Tony spends some time working for me, or he and Ziva decide they need some vacation time to work things out, both of those options are fine. But they can’t work together if they don’t get this sorted out, and Jethro’s been struggling with this guilt for too damn long. I’m in charge right now, so I’ll abuse the hell out of my power to get them moving in the right direction.”
She smiles at that. “Tim McGee, Benevolent Dictator For Life.”
“Damn right, baby.”
“Eggs,” she says, pointing at the currently empty fork. He fetches another bite for her, she took it, chewing, and then asks, “What did you say to him that got him crying?”
He took his own bite. “Long talk about fear and love and back to Shannon again, because it always goes back to Shannon, and I said I was glad he didn’t kill himself after she and Kelly died.”
Abby blinks hard and swallows. “That’d do it. That makes me want to cry, and I wasn’t there.”
“Yeah.” It certainly had made him want to cry.
“Think it helped?”
“Honestly?” The expression on his face makes it clear he’s not sure.
“Nah, lie to me, I like the happy sunshine and roses version.”
“He’s all better. Took the ring off before we went to bed. He’s hunting for a new red head online while we speak.”
She poked him and stole his bite of eggs.
“I don’t know if it helped. I’m not even sure what helped looks like. But I know he thinks it’s not cool for Ziva to run into a bomb for Tony, but perfectly fine for Tony to run into one for Ziva, and that it’s based entirely on the fact that he didn’t save Shannon and Kelly and feels like if he couldn’t do that he should have died with them. And I’m not a psychologist, but even I know that’s not a good thing.”     
“That’s why you got talking suicide?”
“Yeah. Asked why he didn’t do it. Not sure what answer I was hoping for, something to link into not feeling like it was his fault, but he couldn’t give me that, couldn’t tell me why he didn’t pull the trigger, and I don’t know if he doesn’t know or if he just can’t tell me. He did tell me he was a lot closer than I thought he’d been—“
“How close?”
“Knows what a gun barrel tastes like.”
Tim can see her heart breaking for Jethro, and since he’d felt it the night before he knows exactly where she is. “Yeah. So, I told him I was glad he didn’t do it. And he spent an hour or so crying on me. And I have no idea if it helped, or changed anything, or… He’s in a pissy mood this morning. But he’s also saying he didn’t sleep well, his knee hurts, and he’s bored.”
“Is he lying?”
Tim shrugs. “I’m sure all of those things are true. I don’t know if that’s the whole story. I gave him Shadow Force to beta read to help with bored.”
“Oh my. That’ll be interesting.” Abby beta read Most Precious and Traitor Within and she knows exactly how rough ‘rough’ is. (She’s one of the few people who knows that his spelling skills drop in a direct ratio to how deeply he’s into whatever part of the story he’s telling. The more into it he is, the faster he types, the worse the spelling gets. Anything that’s spelled perfectly with precise grammar and all the commas in the right places is filler written to bridge one scene to the next.)
“To say the least.”
“Did you explain that he’s not proof reading?”
“No. Just said it was the first read through, and I wanted his thoughts.”
She shakes her head a bit, images of lots and lots of red ink.
He took another bite of the eggs. “Maybe it doesn’t have to help,” he says, taking it back to Gibbs, and she doesn’t seem to be having any trouble following that he’s not talking about Shadow Force. “Nothing changed or got better with my parents by talking about it. In fact, I think it’s safe to say things got worse with my Mom. So, talking about it didn’t ‘help’ but sharing it wasn’t bad, either.”
“Maybe it’s enough to just know the people who love you love you and they’re not going to freak out or run away if you let them know who you actually are?”
“Yeah.” He nudged her hand, taking a sip of her smoothie. “You’re right, that did come out well.”
She nods. “Sooo… are you going to talk to your mom at some point?”
He flashes her a little dismissive gesture before saying, “I should. But like going to the dentist, I know it’s going to hurt, I know I’m not going to like it, and I have the feeling it’s not going to provide me with any real benefit.”
“Going to the dentist is good for you!”
“Yeah, I know.” And he does. Which does not mean he likes doing it. Just being in the waiting room gives him a headache. “You and everyone else on earth says that. I’m still not buying that I’m any better off than I would have been by just brushing, flossing, and only going when my teeth actually hurt.”
Her eyes narrow a little. Abby’s beyond religious about taking care of her teeth. And unlike Catholicism, which she sees no issues with him sort of just barely going along for the ride, doing a good job taking care of his teeth is something she expects from him as well. As a result, he’s been seeing his dentist a lot more often.
“Not saying I won’t go. Just don’t think it’s good for anything.”
“Uh huh.” She changes the subject, a little, or gets it back to where it was. “You don’t think talking to her again would be a benefit?”
He rolls his eyes to the ceiling. “Sometimes I miss her. Sometimes I forget, and I miss her so bad that I just ache for it.” He smiles, but it’s a sad smile. “Lots of things I want to tell her about Kelly, but that doesn’t last more than a minute or two because I remember, and so much of that crap was her. There are three emails from her in my inbox now. Haven’t been brave enough to open them.”
“You might be pleasantly surprised,” she says with her hopeful voice.
“I might get my heart ripped out again. And I’m… If that’s what it’s going to be, I can wait. And honestly, I can wait for good, too, because speaking of things where I don’t know what helped looks like, this is another one where… I just don’t know. Say there’s a massive, I’m so sorry, apology in there. It wouldn’t change things.”
Abby squeezes his knee and kisses him. He kisses back, feeling the comfort of her touch, and the deep peace of not having to do anything about this. She won’t push him, and right now, that matters.
When he pulls back, she detaches Kelly from her left breast. “Come on baby, you’re all done on that side.”
Tim picks up the plate, holding it and the smoothie so Abby can get herself sitting up, Kelly on her lap, face over her knees, and start the gentle percussion that goes along with coaxing a burp out of their daughter.  
In a few seconds, there’s a massive belch, the sort that Tim can’t imagine can come from someone so small.“Can’t believe she can burp like that. I can’t do that, and I’m seventeen times her size.”
“You don’t live on an all milk diet.”
“There is that.” Tim scoots over a bit, and Abby rolls over, getting Kelly set on her right, while Tim walks around the bed to sit facing her again.
Kelly got latched on, slurping away, dreamy expression on her face, looking really relaxed.
“That is one really blissed-out little girl,” Tim says as he gently strokes her hair.
“I think she’s getting a dose of my post-climax oxytocin.”
“Hmmm… Interesting side effect.” Tim stretches, laying on his stomach, nuzzling Kelly’s ear, enjoying the smell of clean baby, and the ridiculously soft feel of her silk fine hair against his cheek. Abby’s fingers trace down his back, and he purrs at that.
“You’re looking pretty blissed-out, too.”
He kisses Kelly’s head, and looks up at Abby, smile in his eyes. “I’m at home, in bed, with my girls, pretty high on my own dose of oxytocin, and I’ve still got more than an hour before I have to do anything besides lay here and enjoy you two. I am pretty blissed-out.” He leans up on his elbows to kiss Abby. “How about you, feeling pretty good right now?”
“Yeah. Be even better if the rest of those eggs got over here and into my mouth.”
He reaches over to the bedside table, and grabs the plate, probably about one egg left on there, and begins feeding it to her.  
For a moment there was just the sound of content sucking/chewing, then Abby says, “You never did give us any details, how was Bootcamp? You and Jimmy fought Ziva together? How’d that go?”
“We spent the first two rounds tripping over each other.” He touches one of the bruises on his shoulder. “I think that one’s Jimmy’s elbow.”
“Ow.”
“Not too bad.” He holds up his left arm, still mottled with bruises from defending against Ziva. “This is sore.”
“You should put more ice on it.”
She finishes the last bite of eggs, and he puts the plate back on the bedside table, then scooted down, laying on his side, facing her, moving close enough so her leg could rest on his hip, Kelly snug between them. “I should, but I don’t feel like getting up right now. Anyway, when I was heading toward the ring, I heard Ziva asking Jimmy if we’d ever done anything like this, and he said we’d danced,”
“Uhhhh… Did I miss something…”
“He meant the four of us. But I said the same thing to him.”
She winks at that. “You know, if you two ever do do that…”
“Yeah, you want pictures and so does Breena.” He rolls his eyes and sticks out his tongue a bit. “Anyway, two rounds in it occurred to me that if we had some music maybe we wouldn’t be tripping all over each other, because we have danced as a foursome and we didn’t spend the whole time tripping over each other and obviously something was different, so maybe it was the lack of music. Got my old, college Nine Inch Nails favorites together. Jimmy knew them, too. And we got a whole lot better. We even won round nine. Then Ziva and Jimmy added their own music. It was fun. And we were a lot better with the music, even Ziva’s music, which neither of us had even heard before.”
Abby thinks about that. “Of course you’re better at it with music. When we dance, you and Jimmy lead. You’re like two poles, and Breena and I move between you, but each of you runs your own dance. When it’s all four together, whichever one of you is deeper in the press keeps leading. But when you fight, no one’s leading, or you both are, so it’s a mess. Add in the music, and it leads, so you work better.”
“Makes sense. And when it was NIN, or, Jimmy picked the Mortal Kombat soundtrack—“
“Good choice.”
“Yeah. But we both knew that music so we were doing better with the whole I look to my left a little and he nods a bit and between the two of us we get Ziva off balance.”
Abby seemed to be thinking about that, too. Her fingers traced up and down his shoulder, skirting the bruise. “Think you’ll do it again?”
“Yeah, I do. It was good, and I kind of want to show it off to Gibbs.”
“I want to watch.”
His eyebrows went high. In six months Abby’s never wanted to watch them fight. Something about not enjoying seeing him getting hit. Which he understands. If she was joining in on Bootcamp, he wouldn’t want to watch, either. Even if it’s not a real fight, even if it’s just practice, he doesn’t want to see anyone hit Abby.
Then it occurred to him what was different about this and why Abby might want to watch. “You’re never going to get us to dance with each other, so you want to see this?”
He saw the grin spread across her face as she watched him understand the context for wanting to watch. “What’s not to like? You, Jimmy, hot, sweaty, moving together, loud music, yeah, I like that a whole lot. Breena will, too.”
He laughs at that and tries to think of what it must have looked like from the outside, but he doesn’t have too much of an idea. He was so focused on the fight that the only images he has are what his eyes were seeing. “Probably not as interesting as you think it’ll be.”
“Oh, it will be.” There’s that sexy grin again. “Wait. Your dream. Club, loud music, hot, sweaty… How much of that started fighting with Jimmy?”
“The music and the way my body felt.”
“Was Jimmy in the dream?”
He rolls his eyes. “I’m still a straight guy, so, no. He wasn’t. Not having guys in my sex dreams is one of the defining characteristics of being a straight guy. Just you and Breena.”
He gently nibbles that little naughty smile that lit up her lips. “Hey, I can hope, right?”
“Hope all you want, love.” He shook his head, rolling his eyes a little. “Hope all you want.”
“So, are you saying you’ve never had a sex dream about a guy?”
Tim’s eyebrows scrunch together. His immediate answer is no, but he decides to think about it for a minute to make sure. “Nope. Or if I ever have, it’s not the sort of thing I remembered when I woke up.”
“Weird.” She looks really perplexed by that.
“Actually, um… no. I think that’s pretty damn normal for the kind of guy I am. I’m fairly sure Jimmy and Tony don’t dream about sex with men, either.”
“Or would never admit to it if they did.”
“Come on, Jimmy’d tell if he did. I just don’t think he does.”
“You could ask.”
“Umm… no…” he says while shaking his head.
She thought about that. “I’d ask.”
“And nothing is stopping you from asking.”
Kelly’s sucking started to slow down. Abby began stroking her cheek. “Oh no you don’t. No falling asleep, yet. Gotta finish both sides. Come on, baby, wake up.”
Her eyes lazed open and the sucking got a little faster. But she’s also looking a little miffed at the whole not being allowed to just drift off thing.
“That looks exactly like your I’m so done with you look,” Abby says with a chuckle.
“You’re not done with us, are you?” Tim asks, nuzzling her cheek and shoulder.
Her eyes track toward him, but she’s pretty focused on the food, so she doesn’t try to turn her head.
“She’ll be six weeks old tomorrow,” he says, slipping his index finger into her tightly clenched fist. “Hard to believe you’ve only been here six weeks.”
“Feels longer to you?” Abby asks. It’s been a very long six weeks for her.
“Longer, shorter, I don’t know.  She’s got a doctor’s appointment tomorrow, right?”
“Yeah. I’ve got one, too, and so does Gibbs.”
“Okay, I’m available for whatever chauffer service is needed.”
“Good. I think his appointment is the same time mine is.”
“We’ll make it work.” Tim sighs and stretches again. Bright yellow sunlight is striping between their blinds and over Abby. He trails his fingers along the stripes. Kelly’s in her shadow right now, no stripes for her, and they pick back up again on his side.
They lay there, Kelly nursing away, Tim idly tracing his fingers over Abby’s side and hip, Abby’s leg curled over his hip, both of them enjoying this series of quiet moments with each other.
And eventually Kelly finished up. And like before, she was looking awfully sleepy and peaceful. Tiny babies don’t smile, but they can look pretty satisfied. Once Abby got her detached, Tim picked her up, patting her back while taking her to her room. Another massive baby belch, and then once again she goes down to sleep.
That makes him think something, about relative time, and he’s getting ready to mention it when he heads back into their room, but Abby’s not in their bed.
A second of listening lets him hear the shower running, and turning toward the bathroom shows him the door is open. Shower time together works for him.
He heads over there and sees she’s not got the shower on. She’s filling the tub, sitting on the edge, water lapping at her ankles. Laying around, talking, warm water, yeah, he’s good for that, too.
He shucked off his pj pants and sat next to her. “When I put her down, I was thinking, for us a day is one wake up to the next. I wonder if it’s the same for her. She’s growing so fast, and if each sleep cycle is like a day for her…”
Abby shrugs. “Could be. I always thought a day was on dawn to the next.”
“Or that. Sometimes wonder how this all feels to her.”
“Yeah. She lives in a world without words, barely any images, it’s all touch and sound and smells and weird blurry things whizzing past.”
“She knows these.” He lightly touched her breast.
“Well, she spends a lot of time with them up close enough she can focus on them. I bet once upon a time we all knew that.”
“Probably. Think that’s why even straight girls like breasts? All those good, warm, being taken care of, safe, and happy associations.”
“I think that might be why you like breasts.”
“I like them for a whole lot of reasons,” he says with a smile, kissing her shoulder, “but yeah, that’s on the list, too.”
She leans over and kisses him quickly. “Temperature on the water good?”
“Yeah, feels good.”
“Great.” She shut off the water, and he slipped in, back against the slanted side of the tub, and she followed, settling between his legs, head against his chest.
“Mmm…” she purrs at him.
He kisses her temple. “Yeah, liking this a whole lot.”
Her fingers close between his, left hand in left hand, wedding rings next to each other. His head drops back against the edge of the tub, and they both just rest with each other.  
He’s getting pretty close to drifting off when his brain wanders back to ‘not that bad.’
He strokes her shoulder and arm, settling his right hand on her stomach, just below her belly button, about to ask, when she says, “It’s kind of trippy.”
“What is?”
“I can’t feel that.”
“Mmm?”
“There’s like a four inch wide strip below my belly button to my c-section scar, where I’ve got no feeling.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.” She took his hand in hers and traced the edges, about four inches wide and four inches long, just below her navel to the top of her pubic hair. “No sensation at all there. Just completely numb.”
“Is it supposed to be like that?” He’s feeling a little alarmed by the fact that six weeks later she’s still numb.
“I don’t know. I read that numbness could be a side effect of a c-section, but it didn’t say how much. Gets better supposedly.”
“Like, gets better in a few weeks or months or…”
“Don’t know. Have to ask Dr. Draz about it tomorrow.”
He skimmed his fingers from her navel to just below her scar. “Nothing?”
“I can feel where you are now. The bottom side of the scar has full sensation,” she moved his fingers to the point where they were tracing the bottom edge of the scar, “but anything above it on the midline is dead.”
“Nothing at all, not that tingly dull feeling you get with Novocain?”   
“Nothing at all. It’s like your hand vanishes when you get there.”
“Huh…” He’s not sure what to do with that. It doesn’t sound like she’s complaining, just telling him, and that, along with a whole lot of other things, goes into the seventy million reasons why it’s great to be a guy file.
“Were you about to say something? I think I might have cut you off.”
“What does ‘not that bad’ mean?”
“Not that bad.”
Yeah, that’s not helpful at all. Not that bad covers paper cuts and stubbed toes to the bruises all over him right now. “Like, sore, or achy, or…”
“Kind of like anal without enough lube and you didn’t stretch enough ahead of time.”
“Fuck!” He’s utterly horrified by that. Been there, done that, didn’t like it at all. “That’s not ‘not that bad,’ that fucking hurts!”
She shrugs. “Then it’s a bad example, because it’s not that bad. I still got off. Too tight, stretching further than was comfortable. Like” she pauses and says, “That’s not going to mean anything to you. It’s just not comfortable. Doesn’t hurt as much as getting a tattoo.”
“The whole way through, or does it get better as we got going?”
“The whole way through. Gonna take a while for my hormones to get all the way back into synch, and until then…”
He sighs and kisses her shoulder and makes a mental promise to keep his face as smooth as possible. “I know. Jimmy said right now your body is doing everything it can to not get pregnant again. I get it. Just, really, don’t like the idea of hurting you, at all. Even if it is ‘not that bad.’ Especially since we aren’t getting a lot of time for this, I want it to be really, really good when we do.”
“I know. We’ll go slow next time, start with one finger and tongue and figure out what feels good.”
“YES! You, me, Kelly’s nap time, one finger at a time and lots of lube and my tongue driving you crazy, and… Didn’t you get some sort of surprise or something?”
“I did,” she sounds very happy as she says that.
“And do I ever get to see it?”
“Tonight? Tomorrow morning? Wanted you to be awake enough to appreciate it.”
He smiles at that, kisses the top of her head. “Looking forward to it.”
She cups her hand under the water, then slowly dribbles a stream of it down his knee. “So, what’s on for lunch with Jimmy?”
“We never got to Ender. Stuff with Ziva took precedence, but he still wants to know what’s up. And then there’s the thing with Ziva and Tony and how Gibbs works into that. And just haven’t had the chance to really talk to him since last weekend.”
“Good. Glad you’re getting time with him.”
“Even though it means we’re not spending the day in bed.”
“I really should check in on Ziva. If that wasn’t true…”
Tim nods. “If that wasn’t true, I’d cancel on him. He’d understand.”
“Yeah, he would. But if that wasn’t true, you’d have talked it out yesterday, and all the rest of the stuff that has to get done today would have been done, and we would have had the chance to go to bed together at a sane hour last night.”
“Yeah.”
She lifts his hand, kissing his palm. “I’m liking today, though.”
“Yeah. I am too.”
Abby sat up, away from him, and twisted around so she could face him, wrapping her legs around his hips. “You’re going to talk to Jimmy about Ender?”
“Yeah. Still got to tell Ziva and Tony, too.”
“Draga?”
“Probably not.”
“And Tony and Ziva can wait until they get themselves straightened out?”
“Yeah. Not giving them any distractions they don’t need. I mean, I can easily see both of them grabbing onto that and ignoring what’s going on with them.”
“Because that’s not a common pattern for us at all. Finding something else to think about to get away from our problems.” She scoots closer, wrapping her arms around him as well as her legs. “So, it’s been two days, you’ve talked and fought and fucked… How are you doing with Ender?”
He blows out a long breath, and drops his forehead to hers, his arms circling her back.
“I’m still here. And I think I’m okay. I mean, you know I’ve got legendary not-dealing-with-it skills, but I think I’m okay.”  
“Still angry?”
He half shrugs. “I’m always going to be angry at that bastard. And if Kort knows what’s good for him, he’ll stay the fuck away from me for the rest of his life, because I will hit him so hard I will break my fist on him, and enjoy every second of the pain because it’ll hurt him even worse.”
“Speaking of maybe seeing a counselor…”
“Cranston’s going to be busy soon,” Tim says, too quickly.
Abby knows a bad excuse when she hears one. “Yeah, because she’s the only counselor on Earth.”
“I know. I get it.” ‘Cause Tim also knows a bad excuse when he makes one. “But, I’ll tell you, and I’ll talk to Jimmy, and eventually tell Tony and Ziva, and then I want to bury it. Just let the fucker go.”
“Can you?” The look on her face is concerned. She sleeps with him, knows how he gets nightmares, knows how the things that he pushes out of his waking mind come back to visit sometimes.
“Yeah. I really think I can. Not losing any more sleep over that son of a bitch.”
“Okay.”
They both know that means she’s letting it drop for now, but reserving the right to bring it back up again if it seems to be haunting him. He kisses her gently, nodding, accepting those terms.
Her finger trace over his goatee. “So, shaving it off?”
He nods.
“Want me to do it?”
That gets a smile out of him. He’d certainly enjoyed it the last time she shaved him. “Yeah, let me get it trimmed first. Are the trimmers still in the drug cabinet?”
“I haven’t moved them. Have you?”
“Don’t think so.” He gets up, water dripping off him, and takes the two steps to the medicine cabinet. “Yep, still here.” A minute’s worth of buzzing resulted in a much, much shorter goatee. (And a lot of dark brown stubble in the sink.)
He grabs a new blade for his razor and heads back to the tub.
Abby smiles at him as he sits in front of her. “Hey, you’ve got lips again!”
“Ha ha ha.”
She scoots closer, taking the blade from him and fitting it into his razor, while he reaches behind him to grab his shaving cream from the little shelf it lived on.
Abby puts the razor on the side of the tub and takes the cream from him, rubbing it between her palms to make it foam, then gently stroking it onto his face.
“Hold still.”
He blinks in response holding still very clear in his expression.
That also gets a smile out of her as she rinses off her hands and began to carefully run the blade over his face.“I missed how this smells.”
He squeezes her foot.
“Okay, I’ll stop talking until you can talk back.”
One more squeeze.
The slightly raspy sound of the blade pulling over his face, the crisp, slightly citrus scent of his shaving cream, and the feel of her fingers as she tilts his head one way and then the next, making sure she gets all of it, the smooth slide of sharp steel across his skin, and right now, Tim’s feeling very home, very cherished, and just, all over, good.
She dunks the blade into the tub, swishing it through the water one last time, then touches his lips.
“There’s the face I fell in love with.”

And he smiles at her. 
Next

Shards To A Whole: Chapter 276

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

Chapter 276: The Good Morning


Crying, the feel of the bed shifting, quick rush of cool air as Abby gets up out of bed and the blanket lifts off of both of them, bright light, red behind his eyelids.
Must be morning again.
Another few seconds of lying there, and his bladder decides to confirm that it is indeed morning, so he staggers out of bed to take care of that.
Tim always thought it was some perverse quirk of evolution that a full bladder gives you a hard-on and hard-ons make it difficult to pee. It’s (obviously) not impossible, but still, especially when all he wants to do is stagger back to bed, having to wake up enough to will his erection down enough to pee, and contort into a position where he can still hit the bowl isn’t his idea of fun.
When he gets out of the bathroom, Abby’s back in their bed, propped up, Kelly in her arms, getting everyone settled in to nurse. This triggers some memories from last night about what was going to happen after Kelly went back to sleep, and suddenly Tim’s a lot happier about the concept of morning.
He lays back down, the way he usually does when he’s sleeping around her nursing sitting up, right arm between her hips and the pillows, left over her thighs, lips pressed against her hip.
She gently pets his hair, and he kisses her hip, settling back into snooze mode, listening to Kelly sucking away, and Abby humming to her.


Tim never got the skill of lucid dreaming. He certainly tried to. Back when he was fifteen or so and his sex life was entirely based in dreams, fantasy, and his left hand, the ability to control his dreams so he could do whatever he wanted was way, way, way up on the list of skills to master.
Never really happened though.
Especially not for middle-of-the-night, deep-sleeping sort of dreaming.
He did find; however, that there’s this spot where he’s still aware of being awake, but his body’s pretty shut down, where he can just sort of start to see the images of dreams begin and his hold on awake wanders off, and he still can’t control that, not completely, but he can nudge it into whatever direction he’d like, and end up with a situation where he’s either fantasizing very intensely or lightly dreaming.
So, it’s not like he’s lying next to Abby thinking that there’ll be some sex in the offing soon, so ordering up some super explicit porn dreams of threesoming with Breena (been a while since he played with that fantasy) is a good plan.
It doesn’t work that way.
But, he’s leaning that way, and it has been a while since he’s played with that fantasy. And if he’s willing to hook into what’s around him, (Abby’s body and skin against his) and recent events, (flushed skin, endorphin rush from fighting, hard, throbbing music, feel of his body hot and wet) he can shape that into something that he won’t precisely control, but will most likely unravel in a way he likes.
Basically, he can set the scene and the tone, but from there his brain just plays it out, and he goes along for the ride. Usually he likes the ride just fine.
Mostly he’s seeing the insides of his eyelids, feeling Abby’s skin against his, hearing little baby sounds, but that starts to fade, and his mind starts pulling images, sounds in.
Hardcore goth/industrial club. He knows it’s a club because his mind has it labeled as a club. Music is loud, lights are flashing black and white and green and pink, and there are other bodies pressed around, moving, but there’s no real detail beyond that.
The music is loud. Really loud. And it’s fucking music. Not music for sex, or making love. This is hard, pulsing, throbbing fast and heavy fucking music. This is feel her come against you, fingernails tearing down your back and flip her over before she stops twitching and go at it again music. Nothing about it is gentle, and the lyrics are explicit.
Kilt, wrist cuff, collar round his throat, boots, nothing else on. Not even socks. He can feel the leather rubbing against his calf.
It’s hot, very hot, that’s why no shirt. He’s dancing hard, sweating, skin slick.
Whole place feels languid with the heat, moving fast and hard but slowed down at the same time. Almost a slow motion version of fast. Like he knows it’s supposed to be fast but he’s experiencing it slowed down.
Smells like clean sweat and sex. Turned on bodies pressing hard, grinding against each other. Wet pussy, musk, cum, not anything he’d want in a room freshener, but all of those scents scream sex to him, get him hard, make him want to fuck.
Abby’s in front of him. Not touching yet. Dancing for him to watch. Short skirt, plaid, green and black and red, so tiny, doesn’t even cover her whole ass. He’s watching it sway with the way she’s moving, seeing it just skim over the those sweet little cheeks.
He wants to reach out and grab. Wants to bend her over and lick.
She turns to face him, smile on her face promising good things.
Tiny white tank top, cut off, just barely covering the lower swell of her breasts. No bra. They’re swaying every time she moves, too.
He doesn’t know if he wants her facing him or facing away, just knows that she needs to stop dancing in front of him and needs to start dancing against him, right now.
Facing him. They’re kissing, and she’s pressed up tight against him, riding his leg as his hands cup her ass, holding her firm to him.
Breena appears from nowhere, but she’s beside them now, her body pressed into both of their sides, her arms over their shoulders. Abby breaks the kiss with him to kiss Breena, and one of his hands leaves her butt to circle Breena’s waist.
Skin. His fingers land on her skin. So hot, damp, soft. Bikini top, skin tight gold, another tiny little skirt, but hers is tight and Abby’s is pleated.
Lips. Abby’s on Breena, wet and soft and gliding over each other. Abby nudges Breena’s face to him, and he’s kissing her, enjoying the glorious, wet pull of her mouth on his tongue.
Abby turns, with Breena. Abby’s back against his chest, hot, wet skin sliding against his, her ass rubbing small circles against his hips. He can feel it, and since it’s a dream, he can see it from outside himself. See Abby grinding against him, and against Breena.
See them kissing more.
Breasts barely covered in tight little tops rubbing against each other, nipples hard.
He can watch them kissing, slow, wet tongues sliding over each other. Breena’s sucking on Abby’s tongue, and watching it is killing him. Watching it feels like having his dick sucked, and Breena and Abby know that. Abby’s still rubbing against him, and the kilt’s gone, but her skirt is still there, so it’s the slide of her skin and the raspy rub of her skirt against his dick.
Abby’s hands are on Breena’s hips. Breena’s arms are over Abby’s shoulders, her hands wrapped around the back of his neck. He kisses Abby’s neck, licking along her throat. His right hand is between the girls, letting them grind against his fist. (Skirts vanished, all three of them are naked now, except he’s still got the wrist cuff on, he can see that, and is kind of wondering why he’s watching thatwhen he’s got naked Abby and Breena in front of him, but, well, dreams are weird.) He bites along Abby’s shoulder to Breena’s arm, takes it in his left hand, and kisses to her wrist, then licks each finger, sucking them.
Breena’s head falls back, and she moans, loud. Abby’s kissing down her throat, to her chest, pressing her breasts up and licking both of them. Her lips are so red, her tongue so wet and pink and just lapping at Breena’s nipples, and Abby’s still rubbing against him, driving him insane.
On his side, in bed now, his bed? Breena’s? No idea. It’s a bed, or a carpet, or maybe not. He’s on his side, he knows that. His hands are tied over his head. He knows that, too. Can’t use them, but he wants to. Too much beautiful woman all around him, and he really wants to touch all over both of them, so he’s struggling against the knots.
He can feel Abby behind him. His leg is over her hip and she’s fucking him, getting his prostate over and over and each time he feels that pulse that feels like cumming, but isn’t.
Breena’s in front of him, and they’re sixty-nining.
Wet pussy on his lips, wet lips on his dick, and every time Abby nails him, Breena sucks harder, and God, he’s never felt this good. He’s so hard, and so turned on, and it’s a dream so he can go like this forever and…
God, so hard, so full, so… cock ring? Yeah, oh yes, that’s good, and both girls are licking all over him. They’re kissing each other around his dick and the visual on that and the way it feels, and fuck…


“Starting without me,” Abby says quietly to Tim when she gets back into their room. He doesn’t wake up. And right now, she’s fine with that.
In fact, him asleep opens some interesting avenues for playing.
He’s usually a not very deep sleeper. Usually he’s fairly easy to wake up. But they’ve both been tired lately, (and at the one AM feed, he wasn’t in bed, and she could hear Gibbs crying, so her guess is last night was an awfully late one on top of a ton of other late nights this week) and it’s obvious he’s dreaming right now, pretty deeply if the little half-gasps sounds he’s making are anything to go by.
Dreaming about some awfully hot sex if the erection that goes with those gasps is a guide.
So… what to do with sleeping beauty over there…
She knows that if she just creeps around quietly, and moves him very slowly, he’ll sleep through whatever comes next.
Very slowly, very gently. Perfectly silent isn’t necessary. These days they’re both pretty good at sleeping through the other one moving around, getting in and out of bed. But she knows that when she gets up to nurse, he rolls into the warm spot of the bed she left, and when she comes back he curls around her, but he doesn’t wake up for that.
She knows she does the same thing when he leaves bed, so, as long as his sleeping body thinks this is just normal getting up and back, it should work.
She creeps under the covers, same way she usually does, and like usual, his arm wanders out for her to lay her neck over, and he presses in close against her back.
Perfect. Only took a little scooting to get his wrist to the headboard. Only took a few more seconds to get his right arm secured to the bed.
Dreaming Tim doesn’t move much, beyond that snuggling in closer, but she can feel exactly how hard he is, so she rubs against him, and very quietly moans, letting him add that into the dream.
She feels the drop of precum smear against her back, and that’s a bit closer to the edge than she wants him right now. Doesn’t want this over before he wakes up, let alone before she gets into it.
She nudges him gently over, and he rolls onto his back.
More slow, gentle shifting around gets his left hand tied.
She pulls back and watches. God he’s looking so good. Spread out, skin flushed, cock hard, eyes closed, fluttering a little, mouth slightly open, lips so ready to be nibbled. So good!
Mmm… Delicious. She leaned over and gently licked him, just getting a little taste, and did taste another drop of precum.
Yeah, he’s way too close to the edge. And with the way this week’s gone, he probably hasn’t gotten off since they had sex, so giving him a bit of help is likely a good plan.
She headed for their toy box and grabbed the silicon cock ring.
She wasn’t sure if he’d sleep through that, but his hands were already tied, so she didn’t mind too much if he didn’t.
He moaned a little as she got it set, making sure it didn’t pinch or pull on anything, but his eyes didn’t open, and he didn’t say anything, so he was still asleep.
So, dive on in and play with him? Show off what she bought yesterday…
That’ll hold ‘til next time. She wants him awake enough to really appreciate it.
Supplies, that’s a plan, get that set ahead of time. Lube, definitely need that. No matter how turned on her brain is right now (and right now it’s awfully happy about the idea of sex) her body’s not on that same page, and likely won’t be anytime soon, not until her hormones get closer to normal, and that’s still at least a month or two off.
So, lube.
And if they’re going to do anything where lube makes sense, then condoms are on the list, too. Wednesday was good and right, and if she’s pregnant that’s God at work, but she’s probably not, and also not feeling any real desire to tempt fate on that again.
Prepped, ready, supplies laid out, Tim trussed up and ready to play, time to wake him up.
This time she wasn’t particularly slow or careful about getting onto the bed. She snuggled in close to him, on her side, pressed against his, hand circling his dick, stroking gently. “Wake up, baby.”
“Mmm?” He turns his head toward her, eyes still closed.
She kisses his lips, and the tip of his nose, and lips again. He’s not exactly kissing back, but he is making a sound she’s got categorized as slipping from asleep to awake.
Finally his lips get into the game, though his eyes are still shut, and she feels him try to roll toward her, which stopped the kissing as his eyes opened and he looked at his wrist tied to the headboard.
The expression on his face was very perplexed. “I slept through that?”
“Look down.”
He saw the cock ring and grinned. “Wow. Didn’t realize I was that tired.”
“When’d you get to bed last night?”
“After two.”
She nods, and he kisses her. “How much time do we have?”
She checked the clock. “All goes well, hour and a half.”
“Excellent.”
She straddled his hips, just brushing against him gently, and he groaned. (Quietly. This time he’s awfully aware of the fact that Gibbs is in his house, and probably awake.)
“What were you dreaming?”
He pulls her bottom lip between his, tongue stroking over it, arching up as well as he can to rub against her. “You and me and Breena, all wrapped up in each other.”

“Sounds good.”
“It was. Want details?”
“Always!”
“Mmmm…” He wriggles around a bit, getting more comfortable, spreading his legs. “Whole set up, or just images?”
“Was there a set up?” she asks as she skims down his body, slipping kisses across his skin.
“At first. Slipped into images and feelings after that, but we started in a club…” He tells her what he was dreaming as she licks her way down his body. “…and then Breena turned… Oh, god, baby…” She’s pulling his nipple with her teeth while her belly rubs against his cock. “That feels so good.”
Long slow lick while she ground into him. “Better?”
“Ohhh…” His head falls back and he almost closes his eyes.   
“You’re not talking.”
“Ease off enough for me to get six brain cells working, and I will.”
“Ease off, huh? So, not this, then?” She licked a wide stripe down his chest and stomach, and closed her hand around his dick squeezing firmly.

“Oh, God, Abby! Fuck me, baby, please!”
She licked the tip of his dick, feeling his hips jerk.
“God, please! Want you so bad.”
She knows part of this is him playing. He’s probably not that close to the edge. Close, sure, but part of this is letting his desire ramp up hers.
Abby pulled back a bit, made sure he was watching, and then licked her lips slowly, tongue dragging over every millimeter, getting them good and wet, and rubbed them against each other, keeping them just touching, and slowly bent her head and pressed down on his dick, letting him breach the soft, wet press of them.
He groaned. He’s not being loud, but very sincere in his appreciation, and the feel of his smooth skin on her lips is making her feel very pleasantly tingly in all the right places. Abby pulled back again, with a long slow sucking kiss, and reached for the condom.


Tim watches her reach for it, and part of him is really thinking that his dick doesn’t want to get anywhere near a slimy, cold bit of latex.
Part of him is really aware of the fact that, even with the cock ring, he’s not going to be setting any endurance records and the condom should slow him down enough for her to enjoy this, too.
And part of him really wishes she’d go back to sucking him because, fucking god in heaven and on high that felt so mind meltingly good.
But his hands are tied, so he can’t flip her over, and if this is the game she wants to play, he’s happy to play it.
And yeah, it is kind of cool, but her hand jacking him, spreading the lube over his dick felt excellent, and the fact that she’s going to slip right onto him, and there’s the sensation of heat, and the anticipation of her body slipping onto his. She starts to slide down him, and that’s so… God, pressure, really, really good pressure, oh fuck, yeah… Wait… that’s not right.
Abby just winced. It was very slight, just a second crossing her face, but that’s not a look he ever wants associated with them and sex.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
There’s still a little tension in her face, and not the good kind. Not the so turned on it looks like pain. He thinks this really is pain. “Really?”
“Hurts a little.”
He tries to pull back, but he’s the one on his back and tied on top of that, so there’s nowhere he can go. But ‘hurts’ certainly backs him away from the edge. He’s not feeling any burning need to get off any more.
He wiggles his tongue at her. “Come on, flip around, no reason to do anything that hurts.”
“It’s not that bad.”
That pretty solidly boots him out of any of the lingering vestiges of his sexy mood. “’It’s not that bad’ isn’t exactly the response I’m hoping for here. I know we haven’t been doing a lot of this lately, but you may remember, it’s supposed to feel good.” Which is when a horrifying thought hit. “Did it hurt last time?”
Abby looks sheepish. “Little.”
“Shit. Tell me stuff like that.”
“It didn’t matter that it hurt last time. We both needed it.”
“It mattered to me.” He’s feeling significantly less like he needed it now, not if it hurt. “Did you get off?”
“Yes.”
He’s searching her face, thinking she’s being honest, but not sure if she’s trying to keep him calm. “Really? You’re not just keeping me from freaking out?”

“Really.” She shifts so she’s laying on him, lips less than an inch from his, looking into his eyes. She hasn’t pulled off of him, but he’s about as limp as he can get wearing a cock ring. “Yes, it hurt, but… that whole night hurt. That’s part of this whole love thing, sometimes it hurts. And I needed it. Your body, in mine, maybe making a baby. I needed that, and it didn’t matter if it hurt because the pleasure through the hurt was more important. That’s how we got here, both of us deciding the pleasure of this… this whole life… was worth the risk of the hurt.
“I needed to know you came home, needed to feel it in my bones and heart and guts, and sex does that. Your body in mine does that. Your skin on mine. Your cum in me. Lips on mine. I needed it.”
He reaches up to kiss her. “Untie me?”
She pulls off of him and does, and a second after he had his left hand free, he took off the cock ring and condom, and once he had his right free, too, he pulls her against him, her whole body stretched out along his. He kisses her long and soft, hand cupping her face, leg wrapped around her hips, full body hug.
“I needed it, too. Needed to know I was still alive. Needed your body on mine. If Gibbs hadn’t come in with me we would have done it in the living room ten seconds after Kelly was done nursing. And I still hate that I hurt you.”
“It really wasn’t that bad.”
“Great.” He kisses her again, left hand tracing down her skin, shifting his leg, nudging it so hers rests on top of his hip, so his fingers can cup her pussy. “This isn’t supposed to hurt. And, ‘wasn’t that bad,’ isn’t how I ever want you to think of us fucking.”
“The pain wasn’t that bad. The sex was great.”
“How great can it be if it hurt?”
She shakes her head a little. “You’re so not a girl.”
“I’ve noticed that.”
“It was great because you came home. Because for the first time ever, you ran away from the danger and back to me. It was great because I could feel all of you and you were alive. It was great because it meant I got another day with you.”
He closes his eyes and sighs, feeling the worry in her words. Then opens them, looking into hers. “Not much longer.”
“I know. You’re doing so well with your own team, and, and I think you would have been a really great team leader, but I’m glad you’re leaving it behind. You and Gibbs walked in, and he’s got crutches and you’ve got that not really there look, and I can smell smoke on both of you, and I could feel my heart just stop.”
He kisses her again. “Not going to happen again.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I don’t. But I’ll hope and you’ll pray, and what was the line, ‘We’re too damn pretty to die?’”
She smiles gently. “Something like that.”
He takes her hand, presses it to his jaw, then kisses her base of her thumb, “Feel that chiseled jaw? I’m just too damn pretty to die.” He winks at her. She snorts at that, and held onto him for a long minute, her forehead against his. “And you’re right. I was good at it. And I liked it. I’m ready for a team. Been ready for a while. So’s Ziva, really. But I don’t want a field team. I’m good with Cybercrime. I’m good with not getting shot at. I’m really, really damn good with coming home to you every single day of the rest of my life, and I want that to be a good, long time. A thousand years isn’t enough, but I’ll settle for the fifty or so we’re owed.
“I talked to Gibbs about it, after the freezer case, and he told me that when it was time to leave, when I was ready, I’d know.
“I’m ready.”
She kisses him again, lips lingering over his, touching him with feelings that don’t translate well into words, but eventually turn into a murmured, “Good,” against his lips.
He sighs against her, holding her a little tighter, little closer, feeling her heart beating against his.
And eventually the soft, warm sensation of her body against his wakes his dick back up.
She giggles, feeling it fill against her hip. “I take it we’re good?”
He rolls onto his back, taking her with him. “We’re about to be a whole lot better than good. Flip around and let me lick your pussy the way I was dreaming of.”
She sits up, and switches around while he scoots down a bit, making sure there was enough room for her legs at the head of the bed. “Thought you were doing that to Breena.”
Once she’s settled, he gives her a small, fast lick, just saying hi really, and says, “You think I’ve got you both naked and only Breena gets eaten out? Oh no.” Another lick, long and slow this time. She moans quietly and presses into him. “Favorite meal on earth, no way I’m skimping on it.”
She probably smiles at that. He can’t tell because unlike in the dream he can’t see. But he did feel her tongue caress the head of his dick, and that’s an awfully good sign to shut up and fuck.
Been a lot longer since they’ve sixty-nined than he would have liked. For a few minutes he’s just getting back into the rhythm of it. Mostly remembering how the split focus thing works. How to really enjoy what she’s doing to him while still keeping track of her pleasure and getting her off. But it’s an old, familiar dance now, and his body knows what it’s doing.
He’s not trying to spin her out, mostly because he knows he’s not going to last for very long. Her mouth on his dick feels so amazing right now. Real, hot, wet, slick skin compared to the condom is utterly amazing, and her tongue’s rubbing him just right while she pulls back with just enough suction and, just, fuck, so damn good.
She slick with lube, but not wet on her own, so she tastes different than usual, (not bad or anything, but not that same delicious, oh god, yes, more, fucking right now, flavor that usually goes with eating pussy) but it’s still her, and she’s still making happy sounds as he circles her clit with his tongue in tight, fast little strokes.
Her legs are getting tighter, always a good sign, so he gets his fingers into play. No penetration, he’s not sure what ‘not that bad’ means, but he’s staying away from that for now. But he can stroke, and pet, tug gently on her lips, and once his fingers were very wet, very slick, he slid them back to circle her anus in time with what his tongue was doing on her clit, and that got some very, very happy sounds out of her.
Which is good because he’s about three seconds away from losing it. She’s got him deep in her mouth, using her hand as well as mouth, and moving fast, and it’s all wet, slippery, hot friction and feels so amazing.
He’s forcing his focus onto his lips and away from his dick because she’s not that close, not yet, but it’s so hard (difficult, too) and her mouth feels so fucking good, and he was so close before, and she’s rubbing his balls, too, and just, oh… holy fuck!  He felt the pleasure course through his whole body, and the sharp pulsing rush of cumming over and over into her mouth.
He’s stretched out, feeling very sated, very lazy, purring against her like a fucked out lion laying in an especially good sunbeam.
She gave him a minute, and then in proper lioness mode, nipped him on the hip, reminding him it wasn’t naptime, yet.
A little lick here, little lick there, long lick to tie them together, and he got back to it. Lapping at her gently. Ramping her up, finally tasting her own lube.
Her body wet against his lips, the sounds she was making, her legs clamped around his shoulders, as he slipped her slowly into a shuddering orgasm. God, he loves this, loves her, so much.   

Next.http://charactersaremyheroin.blogspot.com/2014/01/shards-to-whole-chapter-277.html

Shards To A Whole: Chapter 275

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


Chapter 275: Past Into Present


He’s in his car, key in the ignition, and texts back: Needed it so we could get her to come over and talk with Tony. Home in twenty minutes. Talk then.
There are times when Tim just doesn’t get Gibbs. This is one… Why would the idea of calling in Cranston be hard to understand?
Wait, he’s assuming. Yes, Gibbs usually knows what’s going on, but he didn’t know they were over at Tony’s or talking to him.
He just got an out of the blue text asking for Cranston’s number.
So he adds another line to his own text: Talked to Ziva. Got the newer(est?) part of the story. Went to visit Tony, got his version. Realized we were in way over our heads. Asked for number. Home soon.


He’s about half a mile from home when a horrifying thought hits, what if this isn’t fixable?
If Tony can’t work with her anymore… If they can’t find a middle ground…
He makes himself not think about that.
They’re going to be fine, because they have to be fine, because his world doesn’t work if they aren’t fine.


“So, you left Tony with Rachel?” Abby asks.
“Yeah. He didn’t want us to stay, and we knew we were out of our depths. There’s ‘you’re a bit spooked,’ and we’re good with spooked,” Abby knows that first hand, the whole family hopped in to help with their own spooked when they got the previa news, “but existential terror is something else altogether.”
“Is Ziva going home tonight?”
“I don’t know. When we were talking, she was saying she couldn’t be in the same room with him and not hit him, so none of us thought they needed to be in the same room.
“I do know how long her knife is, and how much of it was sticking out of the computer, so it had to be at least two inches into the table. And we didn’t do our usual non-combat exercises, but Ziva did eighteen rounds, seventeen against me and Jimmy. I know we were both dead at the end of round eighteen, and we could and were each catching quick breathers and letting the other attack for the last six rounds. She was going full out on both of us the whole time.”
“I’ll give her a call in the morning. Maybe head over, see how she’s doing.”
“Probably a good plan. I hope she talks to Rachel, too.” Tim looks over to Gibbs who’s been listening, but saying nothing, just holding Kelly on his lap, letting her chew on his fingers. “Did she really say, ‘You go. I go?’”
Gibbs nods. He’s not sure if that’s exactly what she said, but it was the heart of it.
Abby shakes her head. “That’s not good.”
Gibbs finally says something, “No, it wasn’t.”
There’s something Tim’s been wondering about since he got in his car, something… Not intangible, but it’s really only starting to get a shape now that he’s sitting here telling them about the latest bit of the case fall out and seeing Gibbs deal with it.
He knows Gibbs doesn’t think about this whole women, daughters, relationships, talk to girls, fear, and love thing the same way he and Jimmy do. And he’s also fairly sure that Gibbs won’t talk about it if Abby’s around. (Also part of not thinking about it the same way he and Jimmy do.)
But he’s starting to wonder if Gibbs suggested or flat out told Tony to pull Ziva off the team.
Even the eat his gun line (granted that’s also the term Tim tends to use when he thinks about suicide) sounded like Gibbs.
But he can’t ask about that now, not if he wants Gibbs to do more than brush it off. The guy who was in favor of pretending he fell down a flight of steps or something rather than distress his girl with the idea they were in danger is also the guy who’s not going to be comfortable talking about how scared he was with Ziva in danger.
And the fact that, when it comes down it, Cranston probably needs to chat with someone else, too, is something Gibbs really isn’t going to like.
But right now, it’s his team, and if Gibbs is the one giving Tony that god-awful bad advice, then he needs more help, too.


Tim’s brushing his teeth, trying to think about sexy type things, because Abby had been hinting in that direction when it came to what was on her Yay! Baby Slept Through The Night shopping excursion, but his brain keeps pulling back to Tony and Ziva, and Gibbs.
“Tim?” her hand on his shoulder, voice soft.
“Mmm.” Put down toothbrush, rinse, spit. “Yeah?”
“Finish up and go down and talk to him. I’m not getting your full attention back until this is done, so go get it done.”
“But…”
“Tomorrow morning. I’ll feed Kelly. You’ll snooze. When she goes back down for her nap, I’ll wake you up, and trust me, you’ll like it.” And she smiles warm and sexy at him. “Besides, he won’t talk to me about it, and I can see just as well as you can that Tony’s not the only problem right now. We both know that Tony didn’t come up with that insane plan all on his own, and neither of us are going to sleep well sitting up here worrying about how deep this goes.”
He kisses Abby, soft and deep, holding her close to him. “I love you so much. And I am so, so, so glad that we are okay.”
She kisses him back. “I know. Love you, too. Go take care of our dad.”
He saluted her and headed down.


For once, Gibbs isn’t on the sofa. (Though he’s noticing there’s a Gibbs shaped mark in the microseude.) Tim heads in the direction of the bathroom, figuring he’d check there first, but light’s off in there, too.
So…  He supposes it’s possible Gibbs could be sleeping, or getting ready to sleep. The man has to sleep at least on occasion, and in that it’s night time, and he appears to be in the room he’s been sleeping in lately... The idea that he may be sleeping isn’t insane.
“You coming in or just standing there?” Or he could be sitting there, hearing Tim moving around, wondering what’s going on.
Tim opened the door to his office. Gibbs is sitting on the futon, in his boxers and t-shirt, from the looks of it doing something involving… massage oil and his… thigh… hopefully.
He sees Tim eyeing him and glares a bit. “According to Abby just sitting around is bad for my leg, and if I don’t want to get stiff and lose muscle strength I need to do something. She showed me this.”
“She taught you how to Rolf yourself?”
“Something like that.”
“Is it helping?”
Gibbs sends him the how the hell should I know look. “It hurts, but in a kind of good way.”
Tim sits down in front of Gibbs, cross-legged, and snags the oil. No way he’s touching either of Gibbs’ thighs, and his calf is still bruised yellow-green so that’s out, too, but he’s got good hands, and at Jethro’s age atrophy is a possible issue for a guy who spends a solid week laying on his back.
“You work your ankle or other leg at all?”
Gibbs shakes his head, eyeballing the oil in Tim’s hands.
“Foot goes here.” Tim taps his right knee. Gibbs is starting to look a little alarmed now. “Come on, you aren’t the only one Abby’s taught some tricks to, and I’m good at this.”
Gibbs is looking awfully wary, so Tim very carefully lifts Jethro’s foot onto his knee. “Even Tony’ll let me work on him if he’s hurting bad enough. Congratulations, you qualify as hurt enough.”
Gibbs doesn’t jerk his foot back, and Tim gets the sense the only reason he didn’t is because he’s also wary of trying that with his knee still feeling loose. So, instead of jerking away he says, “You’re down here to give me a foot rub? You can do that to Abby.”
Tim laughs, wryly, cradling Jethro’s foot between his hands, warming it up, stroking the oil over it. “Always been my fondest dream, ya know? Sitting here, in bed, with you, soft glow of my computer monitor providing mood lighting. You in your undies, me rubbing oil on your nasty, sweaty, old feet. Ever since that first case in Norfolk, as we stood in front of each other, wind whipping through your hair, smell of dead body lingering gently in the background, you chewing me out, I’ve been dreaming of this moment.” Tim gently whacks the sole of Gibbs’ foot. “Now shush. Your dick’s not going to fall off because I’m touching you. And get yourself some toenail clippers, you could take someone’s eye out with those things.” 
Gibbs looks very slightly amused, like he’s trying to not be amused, but can’t quite manage it. Finally he grins, and shakes his head, and goes back to working on the top of his leg.
Given that set up, why he’s down here should be fairly easy to get into, but all of the start-ups Tim says in his head don’t quite sound right, and Gibbs isn’t volunteering anything, even though he’s got to know why Tim’s down here.
So, finally he flat out asks, “Did you tell Tony to take her off the team?”
“No.”
Shifty sounding ‘no.’ So, it’s going to be this sort of conversation... “Did you suggest it?”
“Yes.”
“Did you know he’d requested she get her own team?”
“I knew he was going to. I didn’t know he’d done it.”
Tim exhales long and slow. Great. “Uh huh… What was different this time? She’s never obeyed the order to run, and you’ve given it before. I didn’t get the chance to ask him. It was clear he couldn’t answer it, so I’ll ask you, what changed? We almost died the summer before last, too, and neither of you went bonkers on it.”
Gibbs also does not seem to be appreciating being called bonkers in regards to this. His eyes narrow very slightly, and then relax. Tim wasn’t there, he didn’t see, so he doesn’t know.
As Gibbs talks, Tim works on his ankle, stretching it a little, rubbing along where the tendons connect his foot to his leg. But he doesn’t need his eyes for that, so he’s watching Gibb’s eyes as he says, “’You go. I go.’ She ran in and said that to him. And he was screaming at her to leave, which means neither of them was working with the bomb. Draga’s useless on this, frozen, don’t know if it’s because he was scared shitless or because he’s the one who triggered it. I’ve got my knife out, getting ready to cut because I can see which wire goes to the timer. Finally he stops screaming at her, whips around, knocks my hand out of the way, yanks the detonator free and flings it into the pile of gasoline canisters.
“I knew what I was doing. He didn’t. It was complete, blind panic, grabbing at anything. And we both tackled her, got her down. Draga finally came to, and got the trick wall shut again, which probably saved our lives because the fire rushed over us a second later and hit the wall instead of the C-4.
“Something else in there went up, because the first rush of fire was followed by something loud and that’s what blew the crates all around and tossed us, too.
“And it was over, and we got out, as fast as we could.”
Tim just watches Gibbs. Everything about that report was factually true, at least, that’s how he’d bet. But it’s not the problem. That’s not why he and Tony were conspiring. Not if Gibbs is Gibbs. “So, you’re telling me that it’s your profession, tactical assessment of our team that even though they’ve successfully worked together for thirteen years that they’re not up for it anymore?”
“Yes.”
Tim stares at Gibbs as one of his earlier questions rang through his mind. What the hell could you have possibly been thinking where fire Ziva, lie to her about it, pretend you didn’t do it, and then what, hope she doesn’t notice, made any sort of sense?  Rule 18. Better to seek forgiveness than ask permission.
Tim’s still looking at him, eyes level, hands cupped around Gibbs’ ankle not moving, and shakes his head. “I’m calling bullshit on that.”
Now Gibbs is looking angry. “You weren’t there.”
“No, I wasn’t. But I didn’t just meet you, either. You think I can’t tell the difference between scared and pissed? Because there’s only two Gibbs reactions to what you just described, and let me tell you what pissed sounds like:
“Pissed Gibbs boots both of them off the team and makes them work it out between themselves, and the fact that it’s Tony’s Team or My Team or Hell, Vance’s Team doesn’t matter because you’ve never cared at all about rank when it comes to your people not working up to your standards, and from now until the day you die and likely a long time after that, we’re your people, so there is never going to be a time when you won’t feel the need to drag us into line if we need it. Your ghost will come back and haunt us into submission if we get out of line after you die, so don’t try to tell me you’re supporting Tony in his position as Leader.
“Pissed Gibbs knows that if both of them have gone into blind panic mode that neither of them can be allowed on a field team.
“Pissed Gibbs tells meif a third of my team is so far off the reservation she’s trying to toss her life away. Because pissed Gibbs doesn’t want my ass handed to me, either, because I can’t depend on my team.
“Pissed Gibbs doesn’t come up with plans to sneak around behind Ziva’s back, because Pissed Gibbs has no problem letting everyone in the universe know he’s pissed.
“Pissed Gibbs tells me he’s pissed, and he tells me why, and he doesn’t leave it open ended when I asked about it this morning, because Pissed Gibbs understands that this isn’t just Tony and Ziva’s marriage, but our team as well, and as such they don’t get a curtain of privacy the way Jimmy and Breena do or Abby and I do.
“And Pissed Gibbs would have told me to bring both of them home as soon as Tony was fit to travel and you would have chewed them both new assholes right in my living room, definitely in front of each other, probably in front of me, maybe in front of Draga, because he’d want it to stick.
“And lastly, Pissed Gibbs would have used the threat of tossing both of them out of NCIS to get them both to toe the damn line because he knows they both love this job and that the only thing that scares either of them worse than disappointing each other is disappointing you.
“So, don’t tell me that this is you being rational and cool and calm and assessing the situation and coming up with the best answer, because it’s not.” And he stopped there, hoping Gibbs would pick it up, maybe say something, but he didn’t.
He didn’t look away though.
And he didn’t seem angry.
And he didn’t deny it.
But he didn’t talk. Things like this work so much better when both members of the conversation actually say words. Now what…
Well, if he won’t talk about being afraid, then Tim will. Let him know he’s not alone. That’s a starting point, right?
“We were planning on going in and slapping Tony upside the back of the head. Angry, bluster, call him stupid, and then give him an out, let him pretend he was upside down from the concussion, because stupid or hurt is easier, less shameful than scared.” Tim shrugs a bit, hoping that he’s getting the fact that he thinks being ashamed of admitting you’re afraid is silly across by his expression.
“We know he’s scared. We’re not stupid. Ziva’s already told us that, and even if she hadn’t, we’re able to empathize. We’re married, we love our wives, and we’ve both had enough close calls to know what real fear feels like.
“And then he told us what he was seeing in his head, and that’s just, nothing we know how to deal with. I mean, Jimmy and I have had our share of shit, and then some, but not that. And that sort of fear, we don’t live with it, not every day. So we don’t know what to do. So I asked for Cranston’s number, because she probably does.
“He’s so scared, Jethro. And he’s got good reason for it. And you do, too. Something happens to Ziva or Abby, and it’ll break you for good, right? And it’s one thing if it’s an accident, if it’s the bullet that comes from nowhere, the babies would get you through that, but to see her run into it… Watch her throw herself into the fire to be with him…” Tim’s shaking his head. He’ not playing this, and he doesn’t have to make his voice sound unsteady for this, it’s genuine.
“You’re allowed to be scared about it.”
Gibbs is staring at him, silent, intense eye contact, not even blinking, and right now Tim can’t read what his face is saying, just that whatever it is, it’s very strong, and very now, and very real.
“It’s okay to be scared, or terrified, or whatever comes after that.
“I heard the blast, saw the destruction. I thought I’d lost you all, and I lost it. Everything in my body went galloping out as fast as it could. Tony found me sobbing in my own mess. And yeah, that’s nothing I'm proud of, but it’s just part of being human and having a body. It’s just love, and the thought of losing it hurts so bad. I get it.
“And if we’re being really honest, I don’t know how you and Tony can deal with Ziva working with us. She’s not my daughter, and she’s not my wife, so I can take it. But I know how I feel about Kelly, how I want her wrapped in a protective bubble all the damn time. And I know how I feel about Abby… Jimmy and I were talking about it, how we couldn’t take having a field agent for a spouse.
“You and I talked about this, how I refuse to make Abby deal with that fear all that much longer. I don’t know how she does it, especially since Kelly, especially since the cops did come to her door to take her to the hospital after her parents were in the accident. If I’d lived that, I couldn’t do it again, not knowing if today’s the day you’ll get the knock on the door. So I’m not doing it to her, at least, not for much longer.  
“And I don’t know how you latched onto Ziva so fast, not after you lost your Kelly. Not with what she does. Abby I get. Abby's safe, tucked in her lab. I don’t know how you can take day after day of this, but you do.
“But I do know this, it’s easier if you share it. You sat on my sofa and watched Abby and I cry together for the fear of the close call, and it was okay. Nothing bad happened after. We’re still married. We’re still good. I’m not letting her down by being scared. We’re allowed to be scared. We’re allowed to share being scared.
“You’ve got to be scared when the people you love are at risk.” He knows he’s very open right now, only two other people get to see him like this, Abby and Jimmy, and he hopes he can break into Gibbs with it, get him to open up in response. And if he can’t get that, he hopes what he says next will come across as concern and not an attack.
“But you and Tony can’t be insane about it. You can’t lie about it. You can’t try to send Ziva away without talking to her first. You cannot cripple our team because you’re scared.
“Taking Ziva off the team is the worst advice I’ve ever heard. That’s pure fear talking. And, not only is it fear talking, but it’s fear that’s increasing the chances that you or I or one of the rest of us gets killed because you’re taking our best member away. It’s fear that puts her in more danger, too. Her own team with just Draga? That’s insane. So, that’s not going to happen. Tony goes before Ziva does. He gets his own new team, and we keep Ziva. We sure as hell don’t send her off on her own with a brand new Probie and hope that’ll work out.
“It’s my team until next Monday. Actually, and Vance is cool with this, it’s my team as long as it needs to be to get working right again. And if I have to hold it longer than Monday to make this happen, I’ll do it. You’re off active duty for at least a month, great, you need the time to heal.
“You’re also off desk duty until you’ve talked to someone, Cranston, Wolf, someone, at least twice, about this. And I will check up on it.
Gibbs blinks slowly, and Tim finally looks away from his eyes, coming back to the fact that they’re sitting in his office. He’s in his jammy pants, Gibbs is in his pajamas, too, and he’s holding Gibbs’ foot.
“You’re going to tell me what to do?” There’s some edge there, but not the fire that would have been there, hell, last year, even, let alone the get his head ripped clean off he would have gotten five years ago.
“Long time ago you said I was yours. Not all that long ago, you said it again and offered to kill a man for me. Guess what, that’s not a one way street, not anymore. I’m yours. You’re mine. And if anyone on Earth has ever earned the right to tell you what to do, it’s me. So, yes, while you are in my home, on my team, and most importantly my dad, my daughter’s grandfather, and the second most important man in my wife’s life, you will do what you need to to be healthy.
“You know what Jimmy said to Tony? ‘We love Gibbs, but we don’t want you to be him. You don’t need to repeat his pattern of being so scared of losing what he wants that he screws it up because it’s easier to end it on his own terms than it is to fear losing it.”
“Jimmy said that?”
“Yeah. And he’s right about it, and I didn’t put it together, but that’s what you do. And nope, not anymore. You deserve to be happy. And you’ve been floundering around in the wilderness too damn long. It’s time to come home. You’re almost there, so let’s finish this. Let’s get you home. And if I have to pull rank on you to get it done, then I’ll pull rank on you, but one way or another, it’s going to happen.”
More quiet, more not talking, but this time Tim’s not going to fill the silence with his own words. Now it’s time for Jethro to respond, and if he has to sit here all damn night, and all tomorrow, too, it’ll happen.
Eventually Gibbs asks, “Can I talk to you?”
Tim relaxes, because he was genuinely starting to wonder if he was going to have to be here all night.
“Yes, always, about anything, but in addition you have to talk to someone who actually knows what they are doing. I don’t. I don’t even know where to start on this. I just know where to end it. This is where it ends, for you and Tony and Ziva, none of you are working another case until your heads are on right. And if there’s any imprint I’m leaving on this team, it’s that you’ll really be right, or at least have a plan to get there, instead of holding together by duct tape, insomnia, and bourbon.”
“What would I talk about?”
“That’s part of what ‘I don’t know what to do’ means. I don’t. But try this for me: what was different this time?”
Gibbs snags his knee brace. He’s not working on his leg, Tim isn’t either, so he might as well make sure it gets the support it needs. But he doesn’t pull his foot back away from Tim. Touch is… he doesn’t know… but he’s not moving away from it. “You ever read Cranston’s report, back when she first checked us out?”
“Above my pay grade.”
“I knew that. Did you read it anyway?”
Tim shrugs a little, of course he hacked it. “Just her section on me. Wanted to know what she took away from it.”
And? Gibbs’ look asks.
“Intellectual overachiever driven by a deep need for external validation from male authority figures. It’s safe to say she nailed it.”
“Did you read her letter to Vance?”
“Wasn’t in the electronic file. Just each of us by name.”
“He gave me the cover letter, wouldn’t let me see the individual reports.”
“They were supposed to be in confidence, so that makes sense.”
“Her basic read on us was we were a group of highly motivated but broken people who put our whole lives into the job because we could handle the job, we were good at the job, but we let everything else fall to the wayside because everything else wasn’t going so hot.”
Tim nods along, that was them. Not anymore, he hopes, but that certainly was them.
“The job, the team, that was all we had. I’m diffusing a bomb, and you’re standing next to me. Why? There’s no reason, at all, for you to be there. We don’t both have to die if I fuck up. And you’re not Ziva, you don’t know how to dismantle a bomb, you being there isn’t helping in any real way.”
“You go. I go.”
“Yeah. And we know that about each other, always have, but we’ve never said it. And if you don’t say it… But she said it.”
“She broke the rule. We’re supposed to pretend we want a life beyond this?”
“Yes... No... You’re supposed to really want the life beyond this. You ran away, Tim. Draga probably would have, too, if he’d had the chance. And… she’s supposed to be attached to her life. And her life is supposed to be more than Tony.”
“Ziva was supposed to run away?”
“Yeah. We’re supposed to run away from shit like that. We’re not the people we were when Cranston talked to us the first time. You’ve got lives and homes and…”
“Her home is Tony.”
Gibbs shrugs.
“You wouldn’t have held it against him if he had ran into a bomb blast for her.”
“No.”
Tim stares at him.
“It’s different,” Gibbs says.
“Ziva was remarkably unimpressed by that argument. I tried it on her. Didn’t fly.”
“I’d guess not,” Gibbs says dryly. But it is different, to him, because he lived it. “You do everything you can to protect her… and if you can’t… If you can’t, you’re not supposed to walk away from it.” He stops, stares at the ceiling, above and behind Tim, and Tim knows that’s him forcing himself to maintain control. “That’s what women and children first means. It’s the vow you don’t say, but you pledge your life to when you marry one of them. That’s the core of being a man and loving your woman. That you will die to protect her. She will outlive you. That’s not negotiable. And… And I know Ziva thinks it’s crap. I know I won’t be winning any prizes from Abby or Breena on this, either. But, unless there’s a kid on the line, if you can’t protect her, you go with her.”
Tim closes his eyes and sighs. He squeezes Jethro’s ankle. And in the end, at its core, there’s always this. The original (though probably not original, his mom dying is probably the original, so ultimate, not original) trauma that’s shaped the rest of his life. Shannon died, and he didn’t go with her, and he’s been dragging that around for more than twenty-five years.
“After Shannon and Kelly, after you put the bullet through Hernandez, why didn’t you kill yourself? You talk like you wish you had.”
Gibbs sniffs, looks away from the ceiling and back to Tim. “Damned if I know. Not like I don’t know what a gun barrel tastes like.”
Tim puts Gibbs’ foot back on the futon, swaps around so he’s sitting next to Jethro, and wraps his arms around him. Gibbs isn’t nearly as stiff as he usually is when he’s getting hugged, but he’s not relaxing into Tim, either.
Tim doesn’t know what to do with this. He has no idea how to help. He wants some sort of magic words to make this better, ease this guilt, but he’s got nothing.
He can’t tell Gibbs that Ziva’ll always be fine. He can’t tell him that it’s irrational fear. He can’t make the guilt of Shannon go away. And he can’t tell him that he’s being silly about giving Tony any advice he can possibly come up with so Tony won’t have to walk his path.
He squeezes Gibbs tighter, rubs his back, and says, “I’m glad you didn’t.”
Gibbs nods, and Tim feels him start to relax, feels more of his weight ease into his body, and a minute after that he feels the shaking start, the full body, wracking spasms that go with just falling apart. Jethro’s trying to muffle himself, biting his fist, but it’s not helping with the volume and he might be hurting himself. Tim pulls his hand down and holds it.
“In five weeks, no loud noise has ever woken Kelly. When she’s down, she’s down. Don’t worry about it. Do what you need to. I’ve got you.”
And this time, Tim held Gibbs while he cried.
And it wasn’t quick, and it probably didn’t make anything much better, and Gibbs certainly didn’t seem happier after, just, tired mostly, and pretty embarrassed.
So Tim pokes him gently and says, “If you think that’s gonna get you out of having to talk to Cranston, uh uh.”
Gibbs smirks, snorts a little, and flips him the bird.
“Better. We’re going to sleep in as well as Kelly’ll let us. See you in the morning.”
Gibbs nods, and Tim heads up to his room. 

Next

Shards To A Whole: Chapter 274

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

Chapter 274: Out Of His Depths


“So, what are we walking into?” Jimmy asks Tim as he gets out of the shower.
Tim’s already sitting on the bench in front of the lockers, putting his socks on.
“Not certain. She and Tony are fighting.”
“What?” Jimmy wasn’t expecting that, case crap troubling both of them, sure. But that? Nope. Of course, he’s also been out of the loop this last week.
Hard case and Team Leader means Tim hasn’t actually talked to Jimmy about, much of anything, really, since, God, Monday probably. Hard case means no getting together for lunch and gossip. Or lunch and real conversation, or, hell, a lot of the time, hard case means just no lunch.
“You know what happened at the warehouse?” Tim asks. They hadn’t talked about it yet, and since they all survived, Ducky and Jimmy didn’t get called in, but he’s not sure what the scuttlebutt on it is.
“You all almost got blown up?”
“Yeah, that’s the gist of it. Draga trips the bomb. Gibbs yells at Ziva and I to run. We’re at the doorway, almost outside the building. I book off, find the biggest, most solid building and get my ass behind it. Ziva runs into the building, toward the bomb, to Tony.”
“Ohhh…” Jimmy’s wincing. Tim can see that’s the fear of the person you love most in danger. That’s his husband sense kicking in, and he’s getting pissed at Ziva on Tony’s behalf.
Tim nods, he felt it, too. But, that’s not the whole story.
“It gets better. According to her, he handled it in a mature and rational way by screaming at her and telling her that if she ever disobeyed a direct order from him or Gibbs again, he’d fire her.”
Jimmy winces again, and Tim nods at that, too. Because while they are both sympathetic to not wanting your love in danger, they’re also both aware that while there may be women who appreciate caveman-style marital dictates, none of them married one. “He’s so fucked.”
“Yeah,” Tim says, still nodding.
“He told Ziva he’d fire her? What the hell was he thinking?”
“Well, he was home with a concussion, so maybe he wasn’t?”
“Youch. Wait, if you know this, when was that?”
“Thursday/Friday sometime. She was just steaming at her desk, so we broke off to talk, make sure she could work.”
“If she’s still that pissed, he probably made it worse.”
“Yeah.”
Jimmy stares at Tim for another second. He’s got an idea that if Ziva is still pissed about this, and if Tony did make it worse, it’s extremely unlikely they’re just chatting with Ziva today. “We’re not going to get to both of you, are we?”
Tim shakes his head. And really, right now, he’s not feeling too much need to get to him today. The desire to beat the living shit out of something been well-sated at this point. He’s not okay, but he’s not walking wounded, either, and that’ll all he needs for today. “Not today. Mine’ll hold.”
“Really?” Jimmy looks concerned for Tim, too. Yeah, he’s seeming better since they got done, but, he can feel there’s still some edge there.
“Really. Nothing that needs to be dealt with right now.”
“Your parents?”
Tim shakes his head. “Nah. It’s the job and this case. Got the last piece of the puzzle and it’s complete shit.”
“Tell me?”
“Yeah, but I need to be the one who tells Tony and Ziva, and Draga may not ever get this.”
“Okay.” Jimmy gets that’s Tim trusting him to keep his mouth shut.
“Ender was still an active CIA Agent.”
Jimmy looks like he got punched in the stomach, hard. “Oh, God, Tim.”
“Yeah.” He stops for a second, but knows part of owning it is saying it. “I’ve killed two undercover cops.”
“You… okay? God that sounds dumb. You’re not; I can see that. You…” Jimmy’s not even sure what question he’s trying to ask.
“I’ll be okay. I know it was the right decision this time. I do. But, yeah, I’ve had better days. Getting out of my head was good. It was really good. Probably gonna write when I get home.”
Jimmy nods. He knows that’s how Tim gets back into his head, but in a safe way. Sounds like a very good plan to him. “Don’t think we’re getting home anytime soon.”
“Not given how pissed she was. I mean, she was pissed on Friday, but was doing better when we closed the case, and now… Gibbs tells me he’s been talking to Tony, and that ‘I don’t need to know unless they tell me’ what about.”
“Ohhh…” Jimmy comes up short. “Ummm… Was Gibbs giving him marriage advice?”
“Uh. I hope not. When we got home from the bomb, he didn’t want me to tell Abby what happened.”
Jimmy shaking his head slowly. “That’s not good at all.”
“He didn’t want her to worry.” Tim’s voice makes it clear how intensely ridiculous he thought that was.
Jimmy just shakes his head slowly. Sometimes it isn’t a huge mystery as to why Gibbs has been divorced three times. Jimmy doesn’t know any woman who has ever appreciated, ‘I lied because I didn’t want you to worry.’
“We will talk about that, too. I’ll come in for lunch tomorrow, we’ll catch up, but she’s waiting for us, and this is like twice as long as it takes us to change.”
“Good point.” Jimmy stood up, dropping his towel, and opened his locker. He started to put on his briefs and caught sight of his thigh and hip, already dark red verging toward purple. “That’s not gonna be pretty.”
“We’ll make sure to get you some ice packs.” Tim held up his right arm, his entire forearm was mottled yellow purple from deflecting Ziva’s hits, and his legs aren’t in much better shape. “Me too. She’s gonna need them, too.”
“Gibbs keeps his door open, right?”
“Yeah. I locked up when I got his stuff, but I’ve also still got his key.”
“We’re getting the drinks to go and heading to his place. We’ll be able to talk, no little people begging for attention, and lay around and ice down everything.”
“That sounds really good.”


He got to Gibbs’s first. Not too much of a shock. Jimmy’s the one getting the drinks, and there’s no reason to race because Ziva can’t get in until he’s there.
But he’s not there for long when Ziva heads in.
While it’s true that Gibbs doesn’t have a well-stocked kitchen (Tim makes a note to do a grocery run for Gibbs before he heads home to his own place.) he does have ice, and ice packs, and some frozen vegetables that’ll do for ice-pack duty, too.
So Tim’s laying out the frozen goodies, finding dishtowels to wrap them in, (Cause Jimmy will scold him about possible ice burn if he just puts them on bare skin.) and then heads to the basement for the alcohol. Ziva prefers Tequila, and Gibbs doesn’t seem to have any of it, but if they have to get her drunk to start talking, and then drive her home, he’s ready for it.
Ziva’s sitting on the sofa, ice on her right calf, right arm, left shoulder, and back. “Scotch and Gin?”
Tim shrugs. “I know you don’t like bourbon, so I didn’t bring it up.”
“I thought Jimmy was bringing the drinks.”
“He’s bringing some of them. This is here if it makes it easier.”
“I do not need to be drunk to talk, McGee.”
“Good. Once he gets here, you want to tell us what’s up?”
Once again Ziva shrugs at that question.
“What?”
She shrugs again. There’s a reason she doesn’t talk about stuff like this with Tim or Jimmy, well, several reasons, but the one that’s coming up right now is the fact that, no matter how pissed she is at Tony (and the answer is god awful fucking pissed) she’s also still aware of the fact that the three of them have a sort of competition as to who’s better at the husband thing, and that Tony, at least, according to Tony, feels like he’s been coming in third for, well, since Jimmy got married and Tim started dating Abby.
And she doesn’t feel like this is a problem that will necessarily get better if Tony’s got his buddies ragging on him about it, too. (Let alone being smug about him being a twit.)
But she’s not sure if it’ll get better on its own either.
And there’s no way to keep this a secret.
And it will directly affect Tim.
Jimmy came in and handed out the drinks. Mango smoothie for her, iced-latte for Tim, and a diet vanilla-mint soda for him. He sees the booze on the table and looks from Ziva to Tim, eyebrow high.
“Thought it might help,” Tim says with a shrug while trading a few ice packs for his drink.
Jimmy sits on the sofa, next to Ziva, across from Tim on the easy chair, and sighs as he gets the ice settled on his hip.
“Come on, Ziva, you’ve beaten it out, now get talking.”
“Tim can go first.”
Tim shakes his head. “Nope. Mine isn’t going to get worse if it stews for a day or two. Yours might. Spill.”
Ziva took a few minute to tell her version of the explosion, getting yelled at, ultimatum fight, then segued into getting home early Saturday. “By then I was thinking it would be better. We’d had time apart to cool down. He’d realize he’d been stupid. I’d apologize for scaring him so bad. We’d talk. It would be better.
“But I get home, and he’s not in bed, or on the sofa watching a movie. He’s at the dining room table, working on his computer, and doesn’t hear me come in. He sees my reflection in the screen and slams it down shut, turns around looking panicked and guilty.”
“What was he doing?” Jimmy asks.
“Porn?” Tim asks. Panicked, guilty, furious wife, not impossible, but he didn’t think Ziva was touchy about stuff like that.
“Nothing like that. But I didn’t know that then. At least, I didn’t see any pictures, and he was typing, but…”
Both of them know sitting in front of a computer, typing away, late at night, and slamming the screen shut means lots of possibilities. And of course, Ziva knows that, so she’s going to get suspicious as soon as she sees that.
“I ask what he’s doing, and he says getting everything in order. And we had a serious conversation, about serious things, which makes sense, we both almost died, but the whole time I had the sense that was not quite what he was doing. Why slam the screen shut if he was writing a living will? I should be able to see his will, right?”
“I’d think so. Breena and I wrote ours together.”
Tim nods along with that. Sure he got his stuff in order first, then told Abby about it, but he showed her everything and told her any changes she wanted made, he’d make. “We’ve got to re-do ours since Kelly’s been born, but I’d assume we’d do that together.”
Ziva nods at them and sips her smoothie. “That is the way you do that. Together. But we had our conversation, and I told him I was sorry, and how I understood how scared he was, and how scared I was for him, and… And it was a good conversation.”
“One sided?” Jimmy asks.
“No, he was talking, too. His mother died, and Wendy left, and Kate died, and if anyone gets that, it is me. I understand what having everyone who ever really mattered ripped away feels like. I understand. We talked about how to deal with it better. Talked about how… how some of our coping mechanisms weren’t healthy, and how to do better.
“I thought we were in a good place when we went to be bed that morning. We’d deal with it, together, get better at it, together.”
Tim and Jimmy are listening, this sounds good. This sounds healthy. The fact that they know Ziva’s so pissed she was beating both of them to pulp means that everything in this story is about to go drastically wrong. “We went to bed, slept in late. Saturday was a good day. We had fun. He seemed lighter, happier. I was feeling better, case was closed, we got them, all wrapped up and ready to go, and we’ve got a week off. It was good. This morning, when I woke up, he had  left a note on the mirror saying he’d gone out for food. His computer was still on the table, screen up. I was curious. So I peeked.”
Tim sees her hands ball into fists and her jaw clench, and then she forces her muscles to relax and begins talking again, “He was writing the request for me to be transferred to my own team. I’d take Draga, start my own. He’d take you and Gibbs and build his own, new team from the ground up as you left.”
Tim and Jimmy both wince and Jimmy makes a very pained sound.
“Does that sound like working on it together? Does that sound like healthier coping mechanisms? No, that is him pushing me away.” And Ziva is spitting mad.
“Maybe it was just a draft. What he was thinking before you talked?” Tim asks her.
She shakes her head. “I thought that for a moment, chided myself for jumping to conclusions, and… I was going to wait, going to talk to him, but…” Tim and Jimmy don’t need too much input on but. Ziva’s home, alone, this bomb dropped into her lap. Tony’s computer is right there, and if she checks his email and he never sent it, she can just let it go and pretend she didn’t snoop. “So I checked. He sent the request to Vance last night while I was sleeping. He lied to about what he was doing. This wasn’t getting his affairs in order, not the way he let me believe. He did not even suggest that was what he was thinking. He didn’t talk to me about it at all. He just did it.”
“What did you do?” Jimmy asks, suddenly very worried for Tony.
“I stabbed the knife he made me through his computer and left. I have not been able to even think about being in the same room without really hitting him, so I figure we are better off not in the same room.”
Tim’s nodding. Jimmy is, too. They look at each other, neither really sure where to go from here.
“You want us to talk to him?” Jimmy asks.
Ziva tilts her head a little, looking curious. “What could you possibly have to say to him?”
“We could slap him upside the back of the head without killing him,” Tim answers.


“How does he even start to fix this?” Tim asks Jimmy as he pushes the button on the elevator at Tony’s place.
“Abject groveling and making it very clear that he knows he went insane? Hell, I don’t know. I’m trying to imagine what Breena would do to me if I did something like that and lied about it.”
“Abby’d kill me, and I’d hand her the fucking knife, because that’s just… You just don’t do that.”
“Yeah. Look, I don’t hold him not wanting to work with her against him. I don’t think I could stand seeing Breena in danger every single day. Especially after Jon. It’d kill me.” And Tim knows that Jimmy’s really not kidding about that. “So, I get that part of it.” Tim’s nodding along as he says that. He gets it, feels it, too. And he doesn’t know if he could handle Abby in the field now. Once or twice, yeah, he’d make it through, but every day. No. “But you sit down and you say, I can’t do this anymore. I can’t take the fear. You don’t go over her head and get rid of her, just… No!”
They stand quietly as the elevator eases its way up the levels.
“So, shock and awe? Use that to at least handle the work part of it.” Tim asks.
“Go in pissed and then give him an out by saying the concussion was acting up?” Jimmy replies.
“Works for me. You check him out, and while you’re doing it I’ll call Vance and countermand his email.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
Granted it’s true that beyond the rules, no one in their family has any sort of guy code or guy playbook, but that doesn’t mean they don’t watch out for each other, and that doesn’t mean that all four of them aren’t invested in slapping (literally or metaphorically) the others upside the head if they’re being stupid.
That’s the point of having each other’s backs.
That’s the safety net. You don’t always have to make the right decision. You don’t always have to be strong. There will be men who will hold you up if you fall down, save your ass if it needs saving, and they’ll do it in a way that’ll hurt your pride as little as possible.
And for Tony, it’s a lot easier to be stupid than it is to be scared. So they’ll work the stupid angle, lay down cover for him, let him save as much face as he can, and help him fix this mess as best as they can.


“On a scale of one to toothpaste, how much trouble am I in?” Tony asks as he opens the door.
“Between invade Russia in November and reject Hitler’s application to art school.” Jimmy answers, herding Tony to the sofa, getting him sitting down and starting to check him out.
Tim adds, “Marginally closer to invade Russia, though. Trust me, Abby was significantly less horrified by the toothpaste thing than Jimmy was.” (At least, he’s assuming that’s why Tony knows about the toothpaste thing, and that’s going on the list of things he and Jimmy are talking about tomorrow, because he’s got no idea how bad the version Jimmy told Tony was, especially compared to real life.)
“Where is she?”
“My house,” Jimmy replies, holding his finger in front of Tony’s eyes. “Follow my finger.” Tony does, looking exasperated. “She hasn’t gone looking for a divorce lawyer, yet. How’s your head feeling?”
Tim’s staring at the remains of Tony’s computer, still on the dining room table, Ziva’s knife still sticking out of the keyboard. Time for the awe part of shock and awe. He gets his phone and dials up Vance.
It rings a few times and Vance sounds a little wary as he says, “McGee?”
“It’s just come to my attention, that due to severe head trauma, Tony somehow got the idea that this was still his team, and that he was allowed to request a change to the roster. It’s my team, and will continue to be my team until at least 8:00 AM August 3rd, when it may, if he’s all healed up, revert back to being his team. Any communications you get from anyone other than me until then, just toss right into the trash. Don’t even open them. I’m the only one you’re talking to right now.” Tony is staring absolute daggers at him, and might have been on the verge of getting up and doing something about what Tim’s saying, but Jimmy’s keeping him in check.
“Good.” Leon sounds relieved. And Tim’s certain he doesn’t want to get in the middle of a DiNozzo work/marriage fight. “And is DiNozzo receiving appropriate medical care?”
“Yes, I’m getting him checked out right now.” Now the daggers are aimed at Jimmy. “Preliminary reports indicate some level of temporary insanity due to…” he’s looking at Jimmy, give me a reason on his face.
“Inter-cranial pressure.” Jimmy adds, making it up on the fly.
“Inter-cranial pressure,” Tim says to Vance.
“And will this issue with inter-cranial pressure…” Leon’s voice makes it clear that this is bullshit, and he knows it’s bullshit, because among other things, the man’s a boxer, so he know everyone has inter-cranial pressure. It’s like blood pressure, as long as you’re still alive, there will be some level of pressure. Too much is a bad thing, too little is a bad thing. But his voice also makes it clear that he’d much rather have Tim fix this mess than deal with it himself, so any lie Tim wants to tell him right now, including that Tony is currently a pod person and he and Jimmy are trying to get him back with the help of Mulder and Scully, he’ll happily accept. “…be resolved by next Monday?”
“I certainly hope so, but if not, I’ll let you know. I’ll handle this until it doesn’t need to be handled anymore.”
“Good. Keep me updated as necessary.”
“I will, sir.” And Tim hung up.
“You’re pulling rank on me?” Tony asks him sounding… a lot less angry than he should. Tim’s looking at Jimmy wondering if maybe something really is wrong, but Jimmy shakes his head slightly, Tony’s checking out okay.
So Tim stays with the angry play, because that’s the plan. “I don’t have rank on you to pull. This is a flat out mutiny. Second-in-command and the Doctor can take out the Captain if he’s being insane. And, my God, Tony, you’re being insane. What the hell could you have possibly been thinking where fire Ziva, lie to her about it, pretend you didn’t do it, and then what, hope she doesn’t notice, made any sort of sense?”
There’s a fast flare of anger from Tony, and his words are hot, and… God… just so, so sad, and defeated. “You wanna know what I was thinking? I was watching Kate’s head explode right in front of me and feeling her blood spatter my face wet, not even sticky yet, just wet, like drops of water, warm, salty, water. I tasted her blood, Tim. It was on my lips and face and… And the sharp sting of the little shards of her skull against my cheeks,” he gestures to his face where the bits of skull tore across his skin, “and superimposed on that was the fire of the explosion rushing over us and holding Ziva down, my body, Gibbs body on top of her, and begging God to please, please, please no matter what pleaselet her get through this because if I lose another one I will eat my gun.
“I was thinking about how I don’t know what to do if she’s not here.
“And how I don’t care if she hates me as long as she’s alive.” He takes a deep shuddering breath.
“I was thinking that as long as we are on the same team that no matter what, she will come to me. She won’t let me go. She won’t not jump to put her body between mine and the bullet heading toward me. ‘You go. I go’ that’s what she said to me when she ran toward me. Not, ‘I’m better with explosives, get out of the way and let me do it,’ but, ‘You go. I go.’
“She says she’ll work on that. And I’ll say I’ll work on it, but in the end we’ve both lost too damn many people, and if she’s there when push comes to shove, she’ll run to me to shove right back. And this is the line in the sand, the one I can’t let her cross. She’s not dying for me.”
Tim remembers Gibbs saying, ‘Scared guys do stupid stuff.’ And he’s staring at a terrified guy who just did something remarkably stupid.
He looks at Jimmy, and Jimmy looks back at him, and there’s giving your buddy a smack and some cover to get him moving in the right direction, and there’s so far out of you depth you don’t know what the fuck to do.
And this is way beyond what he and Jimmy can handle.
Tony’s just staring at his hands, probably still seeing his own, personal, mental horror show.
Then Jimmy says, and Tim thought this was very wise, “When was the last time you talked to Dr. Cranston?”
Tony shrugs.
“Would you talk to her? Because, there’s smacking you upside the back of the head for being stupid, which is something both Tim and I are willing and able to do at the drop of a hat whenever you need it, and there’s this, and this isn’t going to get better with a smack and some booze.” Jimmy takes Tony’s hands and gets him looking at him. “We love Gibbs, but we don’t want you to be him. You don’t need to continue his pattern of sabotaging the things you want best because it’s easier to screw them up on your own terms than it is to live with the fear of losing them.”
Tony doesn’t respond. He’s looking pretty listless right now. Tim’s texting Gibbs, asking what Cranston’s phone number is.
“Look, if you need help to do this, I will take you myself.” Jimmy’s voice is gentle, soothing as he says this. “I’ll go with you if you need it. And if you want to come to Bootcamp and fight it out, too, we’re here for that. It helps, it really does. But you need to talk to someone who knows how to deal with this, and that’s not me and it’s not Tim, and it’s really not Gibbs, not on this one.”
Ten digits flash up on Tim’s screen, and he punches them in. While it’s ringing he can hear the phone letting him know he’s got another text, but he wants to move on this before he talks more to Gibbs about it.
“Hello.” Her voice sounds warm and open. He has the sense this isn’t her professional number.
“Dr. Cranston?”
“Yes.”
“Hi. It’s Tim McGee, do you…”
“I remember you, Tim McGee, what’s up?”
“I need to ask a massive favor of you. Tony’s having a really, horribly bad week, and he really needs to talk to someone.”
“And you think that someone should be me?”
“I know that someone isn’t me, and it’s not Jimmy, or Gibbs, and if it’s not you, you’ll have a much better idea of who to point him to than any of us will. Anywhere, anytime, just, soon, please?”
He has the sense of her nodding, that gentle, concerned, curious look on her face. “And you’re with him?”
“Jimmy and I both are.”
“Text me his address. I’ll be there as soon as I can be.”
“Thank you.”


Turns out as soon as she could was seventeen minutes. During all of that, Tony didn’t say much. He made a half-hearted joke about Dr. Kate’s Sister coming to visit, straitjackets, and how maybe he needed to hide the computer.
Jimmy smiled a little and asked if he wanted him to stay, and Tony shook his head.
Rachel knocked, and Tim let her in, giving her a very cut and dried version of the last week, but she stopped paying attention to it about four sentences in when she saw that computer with the knife through the keyboard and Tony sitting on the sofa, Jimmy next to him, hand on his shoulder.
“Did he do that?” She pointed at the computer.
“That’s how Ziva let him know she was pissed. He had the knife made for her as a Valentine’s present last year.”
Cranston nods, then notices that both Jimmy and Tim are sporting bruises. “Did he do those?”
“Nope. We… Long story. Not from him.”
“Ziva?”
“Some of them. But probably not the way you’re thinking. We train with her.”
“And trained extra hard with her today?”
“Yes, as I said, it was a really long, really bad week, Tony got it double barreled.”
Her head tilts slightly, that’s got her attention. “Interesting choice of words. That sort of bad?”
Tim shakes his head a little. “Among other things. Really bad week.”
Cranston heads over, and once again Jimmy asks if Tony wants him there, but he shakes his head, so they leave them to talk.



“God, I hope that was the right thing,” Jimmy says.
“I can’t imagine it’ll make things worse.”
“That’s not a high bar to jump.”
“I know.”
“I’ll head home, let Ziva know what’s up.”
Tim holds up his phone, Why do you need it? from Gibbs on his screen. “Gonna go find out what Gibbs has been telling Tony, if I can. Lunch tomorrow?”
“Definitely. Tuesday, too, if you can?"
Tim nods, they’ve got more than an hour of talking to do. “If we can.”   

Next

Shards To A Whole: Chapter 273

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

Chapter 273: Work Out


He woke up with a jerk, heart pounding, bedroom dim with almost dawn sunlight.
It was his night, and he missed it. His job to get Kelly fed and he slept through it.
FUCK!  Yes, Abby will forgive him, but still, FUCK!
Apparently he wasn’t exactly thinking that, and may have, just possibly, said it out loud, because Abby moved when he did it. (He’s really sleepy and jittery with adrenaline and all in all, pretty out of it.)
“Tim?”
“I’m so sorry.”
She’s looking barely conscious. “Huh?”
“You got Kelly, didn’t you?”
She shook her head. “No. I’ve been sleeping.”
His eyes went wide, and the first thing he did was more or less leap out of bed to check on her, but she was still in her crib, still breathing, still sleeping. He very, very quietly crept out of Kelly’s room, and crashed back into his own bed, suddenly feeling completely exhausted as last night hit and the adrenaline crash faded.
“She slept through?” Abby asks.
“She slept through.”
“Yay!” Abby said, tiredly, and then snuggled into him, and they both caught more blessed sleep.


Round ten he got out of bed feeling… He doesn’t really know. Not good. Not sick, that haunted, all-over-ill sort of feeling that went with Benedict isn’t there. Just, kind of on edge, like he knows something’s going to break if he pokes it, but right now it’s in one piece.
He decides not to poke it.
Like most Sundays he checks his phone first, and today there’s a text from Jimmy.
Molly’s got a cold, and Breena didn’t sleep well. Skipping church.
“Thank you,” he says quietly under his breath, and quickly sends back. Good, couldn’t feel less like it if I tried. Bootcamp?
By the time he finished with brushing his teeth and putting on some clothing, (More pjs. He’s home, he’s tired, and he’s not planning on going anywhere soon, so jammies work just fine.) he had one back. Hope so. See how Breena’s feeling when she wakes up.
What’s up?
More of the same, tired, nauseous, pregnancy dreams. Touch of Molly’s cold.
When she wakes up give her a hug from Abby and I.
Will do.
I’m going to hit the gym no matter what. Come if you can. I’ll understand if you can’t.
No problem.
He fired one off to Ziva: Bootcamp?
YES!
Sounds like you’re in a good mood.
And he realizes he’s got two other people who need to--
Or maybe not… Vance wasn’t going to tell him. He didn’t even get to figuring that out last night, and now it’s sitting there in front of him, and maybe if it had hit him earlier, he might resent it, but thinking about Ziva and Draga…
They don’t need to know.
They just don’t.
But you don’t lie to your team, not about stuff like this. Draga’s idea. Ziva installed the canister. He made the call, but they’re part of it. And they deserve to know…
Maybe…
Part of him really doesn’t want to say. Just let it go. Bury it. 
Would it stay buried? If it’s going to come out, he wants them to hear it from him. If it can stay a secret…
He heads downstairs, finds Jethro on the sofa (where else was he going to be…) “You want a hand getting to the porch? Suck up some sunshine?”
Gibbs looks up from his phone. (Probably reading on his kindle ap.) “Yeah, that sounds good.” He lets Tim give him a hand getting off the sofa, but not in getting to the porch, (beyond opening the door for him) and he accepts help in getting down onto the chaise.
“One more day.”
“Jethro?”
“On my butt for a week. Tomorrow is the last day.”
“You’ve got an appointment for a checkup on Tuesday, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll take you. Or Abby will, if she wants to get out of the house some.” Tim smiles and heads inside, foraging for breakfast, and then heads out again, a few cold turkey sausages on a plate next to a peach.
“Where’s Abby and Kelly?”
“Abby said Kelly slept through the four AM feed, so to celebrate they went out to do some shopping.”
Tim thinks about that for a moment, about what sort of celebration Abby may have in mind for baby sleeping through the night (ish) let alone what sort of shopping it may involve. He’s very pleasantly intrigued by that idea.
“Cool.” He ate a few bites, enjoying the fact that it wasn’t oppressively hot, yet, and then got back on track when he remembered why he was down here chatting with Gibbs. “I’ve got a question for you.”
“Fire away.”
“Do I tell Ziva and Draga? Would you have told us?”
Gibbs thinks about it then counters with his own question: “What are you thinking?”
Tim makes a dismissive sound, indicating that if he had confidence in what he was thinking he wouldn’t be asking Gibbs about it.
“Gonna run your own team soon enough, tell me what you’re thinking.”
“If they find out, I want it to be from me. But they don’t need to know, not really. But if it gets out, and I don’t tell them, Ziva’ll rip my head off, and she’s smart enough the dead battery is bugging her, too. Bugs Draga, but I don’t think he’s got enough experience to put it together. The gas was Draga’s idea. Ziva installed the canister.
“He’ll take it bad. He already feels like he’s screwed this one because of the first bomb, add this on top of it, and that might be the end of him as a cop.
“Ziva… I don’t know. I’m not the one she talks to about this sort of stuff. She might just take it in stride, hazards of the job. It might really hit her, she was a handler who’s asset went off the rails. She was an asset out there, spent months, probably, hoping her back up would get her, and then realized they weren’t coming." Tim shakes his head. "She was an asset left to die. Getting her out was too expensive, so Eli didn't even try. And if I had known Ender was an agent, that's the same calculation I would have made for him. Too many people would have died if that house had gone up. 
“So, I don’t know. I know she’ll be really pissed if I don’t tell her and she finds out anyway. And I know that she doesn’t need to know. She probably wants to. She’d probably, I hope, be okay with it… Well, as okay as I am.”
“Are you?”
Tim exhales long and slow and eats a few more bites of his peach. “I don’t know. It’s not hitting me right this second, but I feel like it’s still there, waiting to hop out. Bootcamp is going to be interesting.
“Which gets us to the next point, can I not tell her? Say she doesn’t want to know. Say it won’t help anything. She’s always been able to tell when I’m lying and has never had any problem getting me to talk.”
Gibbs tilts his head in agreement, that’s been an issue, too. “I always thought that was because you wanted to tell her. You never seemed to have any problems not telling her about stuff you really didn’t want her to know.”
“And yet it always came out anyway.” Tim half-smiles. “But it’s entirely possible that’s true. And I haven’t tried to keep anything from her, besides taking her home for Tony to propose, in years. I might be better at it now.”
“Not craving approval so much now. You’d probably hold out better.”
“Great. So…”
Gibb doesn’t say anything.
“You ever not tell us what was going on?”
“Yes.”
Tim’s expression is saying, go on tell me.
Gibbs shakes his head. “If I didn’t say then, I’m not now.”
Tim stands up and tosses the peach pit into the far back of their yard. He eyeballs the grass, gotta mow tomorrow.  Without turning around he retries the question. “Then how about this, she talks to you about this stuff, should I tell her?”
“As her friend, you should tell her. As a leader trying to keep his team working as well as he can... You’ve got the next week off, that’s time for you and her to get your heads on right. And that week’ll be shorter than the fall out that might happen if she finds out another way.”
Good, that makes sense. He turns away from the grass to face Gibbs. “Draga?”
“Draga doesn’t need to know. Draga especially doesn’t need to know if Tony’s going to can him or get him transferred. And that’s the last part of this, Tony needs to know. When we go back to work, it’ll be his team again, so he has to know.” 
Tim nods at that. He’d… forgotten isn’t exactly right, but stopped thinking about Tony as Team Leader. Not once during that week did he call to check in, (About the case. About Tony as an injured friend, yes, he checked in) or try to get any advice, or… anything. Once he took over and benched Tony, that was it. From Wednesday to Saturday it was his team, so that’s how he ran it. (He also made a quick mental note to give Fornell the heads up on that, too. He’s fairly sure CIA wants Ender’s cover in place but he’s also sure that whoever’s in charge of the FBI clean-up of this should know what’s going on.)
“I should probably go see Tony.”
Gibbs nods at that, too.
“You talk to him?”
“Commiserate about how much being on the shelf sucks?”
“Something like that?”
“Yeah. Talked with him a few times.”
“He okay?”
Gibbs doesn’t answer.  And it was in the silence of not answering that Tim notices something, Ziva never responded to his comment about being in a good mood.
He snags his phone out of his pocket and sends her. Are you in a good mood?
A minute later he gets back. Bootcamp 4PM.
So he texts: See you then.
“Jethro, she told me they were fighting, are they okay?”
“Unlike Ender, that really is something you don’t need to know unless they want to tell you.”


Originally, six (Really, six months? Only six months? It feels a whole lot longer.) months ago, when Bootcamp started, it was mostly about making sure Jimmy had a place to really work out his feelings.
Because fighting is good for that. You have to focus on what your body is doing, so you can’t be focused on the wider world. Stress makes your body produce chemicals that trigger a desire to run or fight, and if you don’t run or fight, those chemicals just hang around, linger, making you less and less happy, more and more tense, and often cause chronic-pain conditions. When you fight, your body floods with endorphins, which not only make you feel better, but they also help to shut down sad, afraid, depressed, and the like.
And when you fight, those walls you build to keep the crap away, to hold it in a safe place where it doesn’t touch you, they crumble, and you let your body do the physical work it needs to do to grieve and move on.
And so, when they began, it was about that. About letting his body do what it needed to do to get through the loss of Jon.
But they kept at it.
Because it’s good exercise. Because it feels good. Because time went by and there were Sundays where he didn’t need it so much, but Tim did. And every Sunday, Gibb is there, because… (Feels a little odd to say this, even in his own mind, but it’s true, so he might as well say it, even if it is only in his mind.) because they’re his boys and this is the kind of stuff you do for your boys. (The kind of thing Jimmy is desperately hoping he’ll have the chance to do for his own boy one day.)
And Ziva started showing up every week, and so far she’s been here because… Jimmy thinks it’s mostly because she likes it, and because she needs to practice. And maybe she’s here because Ziva misses having brothers, misses dad time, too, and this space here, where they beat on each other fills that need. (He thinks that’s probably kind of weird that his family’s deepest communication form is combat, but… it works, so it doesn’t matter if it’s weird.)
So far, though, they’ve never had a Sunday where they were there to let her fight off rage or fear or unhappy or whatever.
But in that she’s killing him, absolutely killing him, and not in a let’s-kick-this-up-a-bit-and-get-your-heart-pumping sort of way, but in a holy-shit-I-need-pads-or-I’m-going-to-die sort of way, Jimmy’s realizing that Ziva is not in a happy place.
Jimmy calls time before he hit the mat, holding up his hands in a ‘stop’ gesture. Any of them can stop any fight at any time for any reason.
He looks over at Tim, who’s just… brutalizing… the punching bag, and realizes that Tim’s got something going on, too.
For a second, he feels a surge of thankfulness at working in Autopsy, he knows this last case was an absolute bastard, but not for more than a second, because Ziva’s glaring at him for stopping things. She wants to fight, but he’s so far outclassed by pissed off Ziva, he knows he can’t give her what she needs.
“Tim!” He has to yell; Tim’s got earbuds in.
Tim stops, looks over at him, expression curious, as he takes out his earbuds.
“Get over here.”
Tim’s still in the dark, though he’s heading over. Ziva’s not looking nearly as annoyed. Two on one should be just what the doctor (literally) ordered.
“Have you ever done this before?” Ziva asks Jimmy as Tim slips between the ropes.
Jimmy shakes his head, hoping he hasn’t just signed his own death warrant. “But, we’ve danced together—“
“When the hell have I ever danced with you?” Tim asks as he catches that bit.
“You and me and the girls. Ziva’s killing me one on one. She’s going to kill you one on one. Both of us against her should let her get enough of a fight in to calm her back down, and not get either of us killed.”
Tim nods, smiles, and Jimmy’s seen that smile before, that’s the dark, predatory thing that hides in Tim and doesn’t come out a whole lot, but when it does...
Jimmy sees that smile and sighs, silently wishing Gibbs wasn’t flat on his back, an extra set of hands would be really useful today. “Okay, looks like both of you need this today. But when we’re done, we’re getting drinks and talking, too.”
Ziva shrugs, and Jimmy knows they aren’t the guys she usually talks to, but, you put your literal skin on the line to help your friend, you get to find out what the problem is. Tim nods, because for him, Jimmy is one of the guy he talks to. (And he was planning on telling Jimmy about it no matter what.)


Tim’s thinking this isn’t dancing. It’s really not. He and Jimmy would be a hell of a lot better at this if it was dancing. But the skills aren’t completely dissimilar. And when it is the four of them dancing, he does have to keep track of three other people, one of whom is Jimmy, and Jimmy’s doing the same thing, and they do have some level of skill at doing that. (Okay, they’re not going to be winning any dance competitions anytime soon, but everyone has a good time and no one gets their toes stepped on.)
See when you’re dancing either one on one, or one on one on one on one, two things are true, first off, there’s music, which helps you keep an idea of time and beat, and you’re moving slowly enough you can actually see what the other people are doing.
And he and Jimmy can sort of, kind of, okay, not really, but it’s better than nothing, communicate what they’re going to do by look, and kind of coordinate. If Ziva wasn’t so fast, they’d be better at it.
(If they’d danced as a foursome sometime between Ziva’s wedding and now, they’d be better at it, too, but for some reason there just hasn’t been any clubbing dates lately…)
But, as of this point, (round two) he’s only accidentally hit Jimmy twice and gotten in his way four times. Jimmy’s doing about the same with him.

And Ziva’s winning.


End of round two, another thought has hit Tim, he’s got unlimited music on his phone and two floors up and a few hundred feet over, he’s got speakers. Good speakers. LOUD speakers.
And, it still won’t be dancing with Abby and Breena, but he and Jimmy are both going to do better if there is music for this.
So he calls stop, tells Jimmy and Ziva what he wants to do, and goes to do it.


Nine Inch Nails. Full volume. Unless Abby’s playing it he hasn’t listed to them since college. But he knows it well enough to know what’s going to happen when. And he knows Jimmy does, too. No one their age who grew up in the States and went to college in the late '90s doesn’t know this music.
But Ziva’s five years younger and didn’t grow up in the States.



That smile pops up again. The first few beats of Mr. Self Destruct come up. Jimmy’s head jerks up when he hears it, and he shakes it softly, grinning, and mouths, you bastardat Tim. Yeah, he knows this.
This is going to be fun.
This is going to be the kind of fun that he really needs right now.


Better. This is a whole lot better.  Set beats both of them know, means he hasn’t gotten in Jimmy’s way and Jimmy hasn’t gotten in his since the music began.
Music, loud, thumping, vibrates through your bones, inflicting minor hearing damage music means that even Ziva’s moving with the beat, so they’re having an easier time anticipating where she’s going to be.
Music they know means that if he takes one melody (if NIN can be said to have melody) and Jimmy takes another, (Usually Jimmy takes the main lyrical line, and he takes the beat. He thinks that’s because Jimmy’s the singer.) they have a much easier time anticipating each other’s moves. Likewise, they’re doing much better at coordinating attacking and defending because there’s a steady beat holding the whole thing together. (Or as much as NIN can be said to have a steady beat.)
The fact that this music is as much rage and pain screaming at the sky as anything else, doesn’t hurt either. This music was designed to be yelled, designed to celebrate pain, channel it, force it into something tangible and real.

It’s a very good way to blow off even more of what’s bugging him. (It’s possible he may be singing along at some points, at least mentally, because he needs his breath to fight.)



Round six (Get Down Make Love) begins with the electronic beat, spoken voice, and moaning, and Ziva’s staring at Tim, “You listen to this McGee?”
“I did in college.”
She shakes her head, listening trying to map out the music, knowing that Tim and Jimmy will corner the music, use it as their guide.
“You, too Jimmy?”
“Trent Reznor dropped out of my college about five years before I went there. We fighting or resting?”
Ziva pivoted on her back leg, looking like she was aiming to kick Tim, but her right hand flashed out and would have caught Jimmy’s cheek but he got his forearm up in time to defend while Tim spun into an elbow strike that Ziva deflected with the kick she started the move with.
“We fight!”
By the second verse he and Jimmy are working together well enough for one to constantly be defending and the other to constantly be attacking and to swap back and forth between them well enough to keep Ziva off balance.


Round nine, Head Like A Hole, began. Two main musical lines: ‘Head like a hole, black as your soul’, has one sound. ‘Bow down before the one you serve’ has another. They blend and support each other. Like the way Tim and Jimmy are fighting. Jimmy takes the bow down refrain, Tim’s got head like a hole. Tim’s moving faster, more attacking. Jimmy’s slower, distracting, on defense.
Head like a hole, black as your soul, I’d rather die, than give you control. And sure it’s not real, not him, but he can feel it, hook into it, channel all the pissed off just want to beat the hell out of Ender into this, and he’s making Ziva sweat, literally and metaphorically.
And on what Tim considered a very well-coordinated move, in on the last run of ‘bow down’ Jimmy caught his eye a second before the line hit, and Tim knew, because he knew the music, what was going to happen. He slid slightly behind Jimmy, while Jimmy was engaging Ziva, but when the word bow hit, Jimmy dropped to the floor, and Tim kicked through where he had been, forcing Ziva’s balance back as she leaned back to dodge the kick. Jimmy, on the mat, grabbed both of her feet and yanked them out from under her.

Round nine, for the first time ever, Ziva hit the mat. 
Round ten, Ziva asked if they could sub in some of her music.
They took a ten minute breather, each adding three of their own songs.
He stayed with NIN. Jimmy tossed in the Mortal Kombat soundtrack, which Tim recognized. Hell, he even watched the movie back in the day. Perfect music. He’s got no idea what Ziva’s added. It’s not in English and he’s never seen it before, and steels himself to getting killed when her music comes on.
He flicked the play to random, music he didn’t know, had to be Ziva’s, began to shake the gym, and they got ready to go.
By the end of the playlist he knows he was feeling better, and he hopes Ziva is.
Next up, talking.

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