Keryl Raist's Blog, page 22

Shards To A Whole: Chapter 199

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


Chapter 199: 3:00 AM Fuck In The Lab



It was three in the morning when Tim got done with his part of the case, so he headed, slowly, down to the lab.
Abby was sleeping on the rugs. Even though she's not falling asleep every moment she's still, Tim still doesn't want her driving herself home at night, and she's been kindly humoring his insane overprotectiveness, both of them aware that this was pretty insane. But they work in the same place, so waiting a bit for him to get done to take her home usually isn't a big deal.
And nights like tonight, well, it's not like they haven't slept in the lab before, and it's not like they won't do it again...
And it hits Tim, as he drapes his jacket over her desk chair, that this may be the last time.
He's slipping off his shoes and belt, watching her sleep, when he realizes that once the tiny person inside her gets on the outside, one of the two of them will have to get home every night. They won't be able to work all night, crash, fuck, snag a ton of Caf-Pow, and go back to catching killers.
In two months, and really, one probably, he can't see her doing this nine months pregnant, this chapter of their life will end. And who knows, in twenty years or so, when this kid is out of the house, maybe they'll start doing it again, though he'll be 57 then, and she'll be 61, which is just too hard to wrap his head around.
He lays down next to her. Scooting his arm under her neck and snuggling in close around her. These last two months she usually sleeps through that, but today she stirred a little.
"What time is it?"
"Three."
"Okay. You find what you needed?"
"Yeah. Ziva and Tony are driving to Virginia Beach right now." Just because Gibbs is gone doesn't mean they've let up on the pace they work at. Two days ago they caught a case, what looked like a straight up murder, and after sixteen hours of sorting through the main suspect's tumblr and youtube videos, Tim thinks he's found the actual crime scene. Tony and Ziva are off to process it.
"Good." She rolls over to face him, and kisses him gently. It's soft and sleepy, and he was fairly sure they were just going to sleep, but her tongue slipped out to lick his bottom lip, and that got his attention in a good way.
"How sleepy are you?"
She smiled a little, though her eyes are closed. "Sleepy, but not so much so that I don't want to have sex."
He's stuck between that wired space that happens after more than ten hours on a computer and ready to drop from exhaustion. Sex'll certainly help with that.
"Pretty fried right now."
"You want to just sleep?" she asks.
"No, just letting you know I'm not up for anything energetic."
"Me either."
"Okay." He stood up and pulled off his pants and boxers, while she scooted out of her panties. He smiled at her.
"What?"
"Last of the red-hot lovers."
"Even Don Juan phoned it in at three in the morning after working all day."
He lays down, snuggles up against her back, and kissed her neck, enjoying the comfort of her skin on his, the warm weight of her body against his, and the scent of her hair. He sighed. "Mmmmm…" Inhaled long and slow, felt her rock against him gently.
His hand found her breast, gently cupping and stroking under her shirt. Her hips set a slow, steady roll, rubbing soft and easy against his dick, and in a few minutes her leg hooked back over his, and he slipped into her.
Quiet moans, deeper, faster breathing, and slow, easy, sleepy motion set them alight and quivering.
A few minutes later, as they were drowsing in the afterglow, still spooned together, Abby asked, "Why have we never done this at your desk?"
That gets a smile out of him. He's certainly thought about it, and sure she has, too. He kisses her shoulder. "Because while I might like the danger of maybe getting caught, actually getting caught doesn't get me off. There's always someone wandering through the Bullpen, and I know for a fact there are security cameras up there."

"There are security cameras down here, too."
His eyes went very wide, and he looked like he was about to start grabbing for his pants.
She kisses his hand and smiles. "No one's gonna watch them unless something goes missing. And I have a feeling right now you're awfully motivated to make sure the lab is safe."
"That's one way to put it. When did they get security cameras down here?"
"After Chip."
So, the entire time they'd been together. Which means NCIS basically has its own porn channel starring them. Might be time to do a little hacking and deleting. After a full inventory of the lab. "Makes sense."
"And right here, we're pretty much out of range. They're focused on the doors, so you can see who goes in
and out. I think they can see you from the knees down and my feet."
He thinks for a moment, wondering why she knows exactly what the camera feeds are. Finally he asks, "So what can you see of my desk?"
"The whole thing, from two angles. There's one in the corner behind Ziva's desk, so the front of yours is in plain sight. And there's one above and behind, so you sitting at your desk is awfully visible, too. Honestly, you might just have the worst possible desk when it comes to surveillance."
"Think they're watching me? Making sure I don't hack the Pentagon again or something?"
"Maybe. Or maybe who ever watches these things before archiving them is hoping to see something good."
He smiles wryly. "Then why are only the doors covered in your office?"
"I moved the cameras."
"Really? So, you don't want to get caught, either?"
"Not exactly. We do this often enough that it's not just a treat, so..."
"Okay." He gets that. This isn't just the place for the occasional fast screw. This is, besides their home, this is the most common place they do this.
"And we sleep here. We talk here. We have dinner here some nights."
"This is a private space, or as close as you can get at a place where two hundred people work."
"Exactly."
"I was thinking about that, sort of, when I was getting undressed." She arches an eyebrow, he's still got his shirt and socks on. "Okay, as I was taking my shoes and belt off. We're probably not going to be doing this a whole lot more. Two more months and one of the two of us will have to be home with Kelly every night."
"Oh."
"Yeah. The days of the 3:00 AM fuck in the lab are numbered."
"Maybe kids weren't such a good idea," she says with a smile, so he knows she's joking.
"Yeah, terrible idea." He's grinning too. "If I had realized how badly they'd cut into our sex life, I would have been in favor of skipping this."
She laughs, reaching up for the tissues that for some strange reason always live on her desk now. She hands him a few of them, and slips off of him, both of them wiping up quickly. He pulls on his boxers and pants. Sure, he might prefer sleeping naked, but he's not about to do it at work. A quick glance at the clock shows him they've got four hours until the time he's normally up in the Bullpen again.
Abby pulls her panties on, and then snuggles back into his arms. "Good night."
"Good night."

Shards To A Whole: Chapter 198

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


Chapter 198: In The End


In the movies, the story ends when the character dies. That's just how it is.
Or maybe it keeps going, but there's just sadness and some sort of epiphany of the value of life and holding your dear ones close for as long as you can.
And that's true.
Jackson's story is done.
Jethro, Leroy as his dad called him, has been holding his loves close these last two days, literally as well as figuratively. He's spent more time snuggled up to something warm and female then any time since his first marriage.
And it helps, some.
But mostly, now, as the funeral is over, and he's more or less beating his kids back into their cars to get them to go back to DC, there's just this huge pile of stuff.
Literal stuff.
A lifetime of stuff.
Sitting in a house.
And it's his job to deal with it.
LinkAbby and Tim are giving him puppy-dog eyes, offering to stay and help. Tony and Ziva are being cooler about it, but pretty much because they know they aren't cute enough to pull off puppy dog eyes, but just as insistent. Ducky has declared he's staying and helping. The only ones he's not having any problems with are Jimmy and Breena, namely because an open-ended trip with a seventeen-month-old isn't much fun, and for Ducky to stay, Jimmy needs to get his butt back to DC and handle Autopsy.
"Really, Jethro, I can stay—" Tim's saying as he's putting their bags into the back of Palmer's van,
"Maybe I wasn't clear enough the first three times, I do not want Abby a minute farther away from her OB than absolutely necessary. I don't want you five hundred miles away from her, either. And I don't want either of you wasting your off time with me. You're gonna have better things to do with your personal days than help me sort things very soon. Go home. I'll be fine."
"You sure?"
Lessons in cute?He's staring at Gibbs with big, worried eyes, and Gibbs is wondering if he's been taking lessons in cute from Abby. "Go home."
Tim nodded, hugged Jethro for a long time, and then handed him over to Abby, who'd been pouting at him through that whole conversation. She squeezed him tight.
"You call us. You need anything, you call. Even if not to talk. You don't have to talk. Just to see a friendly face on the other side of the Skype. You call."
Gibbs nodded and kissed her forehead and then firmly guided her into the Odyssey. He shut the door and said to Jimmy, who had his window open, "Get them out of here before they change their minds and I have to shoot them with tranquilizers to get them back into this van."
Jimmy saluted Gibbs and pulled away.


He felt Tony behind him, in the few seconds before he said, "We've got personal days and vacation days, and don't need to be near a doctor."
"I know, Tony. Go home. You're basically still on your honeymoon."
"Are you certain?" Ziva asked.
"I'm sure. There's nothing in this house Duck and I can't handle. I'll be back in a week or so."
Tony claps a hand on Gibbs' shoulder. "Like Abby said, you need anything, call. We're six hours away, faster if we use flashers."
"I'll be okay."
"I know." Tony hugged him.
Ziva cuddled in as well, reaching up to kiss him. "You will be. You really will."
He rests his head against her dark hair, aware of how, out of all of his kids, this is the one most similar to him, the one carrying many of the same burdens. He kisses the top of her head. Eli David died less than three years ago, and he's sure the memory of doing this, alone, is still very fresh for her.
"We should have gone with you."
She smiled at him and shook her head, understanding what he meant by that. "No. Not then. But never again will any of us mourn alone."
He knows that's true. Driving up on his own, not telling anyone, that was shock forcing him back into the patterns of old. He spent so many years on his own, the idea that there were people who would worry, who would travel five hundred miles just to sit with him, didn't occur to him.
And he didn't know how relieved he would be, how a flash of love and gratitude would spread through him when he heard the sound of a car pulling up, three doors opening and closing, and opened the door to see Ziva, Tony, and Ducky on his father's porch, and to be immediately wrapped in Ziva's arms.
He nodded and kissed her one more time, holding both of them tight, then let go. "I'll call if I need anything."
"Good," Ziva said as they headed to her car.


He watched them drive off, waving, and then walked to the front porch, sitting down on the steps. A moment later Ducky sat down next to him, handing him a cup of tea.
"Where shall we start, Jethro?"
Gibbs put the cup on the step next to him and rubbed his eyes. "I don't know, Duck, I don't know."


They started in the basement. Three piles: donate, toss, keep.
There aren't many things here he wants to keep. The last eight years were better, but this house isn't a bastion of good memories for him.
Ducky kept up a gentle stream of chatter. Mostly talking to himself. Gibbs is only half-listening, but he finds the sound of it comforting.
But it hits him, as he boxes up his dad's dishes, that there will be a day when Ducky's voice goes silent. That one day, he, and he assumes, Tim, will do this for Ducky and Penny, and he has to sit down for a minute to keep from bursting into tears. Ducky sees it, quiets, and just rests his hands on Jethro's shoulders.


He kept the Monopoly game. An old but well-loved baseball glove. Someone'll need to teach those girls how to play catch, and he's not feeling overwhelmingly optimistic on Tim or Jimmy's skills when it comes to that. Two end tables Jackson made, and his dad's tools. Gibbs doesn't have any use for Jackson's tools, his father was a mechanic first and then moved into electronics, but best he can tell, Tim might find them useful.
He kept a bundle of letters. They belonged to his parents. He hasn't read them. Won't read them. Before they head back to DC, he takes a few minutes and buries them with his parents.
He kept his dad's computers. Somewhere in there is his accounts, and he needs that information to handle the business. So they've got to go back to DC, where Tim'll sort through them and find what he needs to take care of the store.
And the rest of it got boxed up and given to Goodwill or tossed in a dumpster.
It took three days to empty the house.
He's not even sure what to do with the general store. He knows his dad owns the building, but it's got to have bills and suppliers and all sorts of things, but he doesn't know what they are. Back when he was a kid, Jackson had tried to get him interested in running the store, but even if they had gotten on back then, he still would have found it painfully boring.
Fortunately the lawyer seems to have an idea of what to do with that, because he doesn't.


It took six days, but when he was done, the house was empty, and up for sale, the store was closed, and also up for sale. He loaded the few things he was keeping into his car, waited for Ducky to get his seat belt buckled and started back to DC.
"Thanks, Duck."
Ducky nodded. "When Mother died, I wanted the quiet of our home to grieve in. Her last few weeks had been so loud and traumatic…" Victoria Mallard lived to 101, which was about five years longer than she should have. That last month, when she was conscious she was out of her head, delirious from the Alzheimer's, often screaming, raging at imagined insults, or drugged into an almost comatose slumber. The Corgis, all six of them, upset at the strangers, hospice workers who had descended on the house to help him, spent hours barking. Nothing about their home was quiet those last few weeks. "That I wanted nothing more than quiet. But I think now that sharing it with a dear friend would have been a good thing."
"Yeah."


As they pulled out of Stillwater, it occurs to Gibbs that this really is the last time he'll come here. This chapter of his life is really over, and all that's left is memory.

Shards To A Whole: Chapter 197

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


Chapter 197: Jackson


"You're home!" Tim said to Tony and Ziva as he walked into the Bullpen on Monday morning.
"We are home," Ziva said with a smile.
"Good time?"
Tony smirked. "Oh yeah. You want to see the pictures?"
Tim raised an eyebrow and grinned, "Do I want to see the pictures?"
"Get your mind out of the gutter, McPerv!" Tony says, shoving Tim gently, as Ziva grabbed her phone and started to show off their honeymoon shots.


Link"Where's Gibbs?" Tony asked. It was nine thirty, an hour and a half after Gibbs usually got in to work. They'd gotten into looking at the pics, (really cool animal shots, amazing views, Tony with a beard, because apparently he can grow one in like, six days, them snuggling, beach shots, they took a lot of pictures) telling stories of South Africa, safari, getting through customs with the diplomatic pouch (No problems, but Tony had been pretty nervous about it.) and the general good time that had been had by all.
Then Tim caught them up with what he had been doing, and how the interviews had gone, and they all confabbed for a time to have a second interview with Draga and Aubrey.
Between those two things an hour and a half had slipped by without them noticing.
"No idea." Tim checked his phone, no messages. "He didn't call you guys?"
"No." Ziva answered, checking her phone. Tony shook his head, nothing on his, either.
It's not that Gibbs never misses work. He's missed, well, at least five days in the last five years at this point, but that he always calls his team to let them know where he is and when he'll be back.
Tim's firing off a text. Where are you? Everything okay?
Ziva picked up her phone. She asked for Vance, and then waited, and then asked if the Director knew where Gibbs might be. Her eyes went wide after a minute and she said, "Thank you, Director."
"He's asked for four days personal time."
That sent Tim and Tony into action. Tim pinged his phone, finding out where he is, while Tony called him.
Gibbs didn't answer his phone, but in a minute Tim's got his location.
"He's in Stillwater."
The three of them stare at each other. Jackson is 88. And Gibbs didn't call. And he's not answering his phone. And he's in Stillwater, with four days of personal time.
Tim had Stillwater General hacked in about ten minutes, looking through the medical records. Ziva and Tony were standing behind him, watching what he's coming up with. He's actually pretty glad they're standing behind him, because they can read the screen as well as he can, so he doesn't have to say the words, not yet.
Though in a minute, when he goes down to Abby, he will.
His voice is shaky when he says to Ziva, "Call Vance. We're gonna need some time off."
She nods, tears in her eyes. Tony's already heading toward the elevator. "I'll tell Ducky and Jimmy."


linkTim feels like the Angel of Death. Less than four months ago he came down here and told everyone about Jon.
Now it's just him and Abby. Which he prefers.
She's bopping around the lab, music on so loud the computer screens are vibrating. Must be a song she really likes.
He knows where the remote lives, and flicks off the music, seeing her little combo dance/data hunt come crashing to a halt.
"Tim?" Over the course of one word he hears her voice go from irate to afraid as she sees and reads the look on his face.
"Jethro didn't come into work this morning…" He's explaining what happened, what they did, like somehow extra words between now and how this paragraph has to finish will make it easier, or make the pain at hearing this paragraph's end lessen. Or maybe he's giving himself a little more time to work up to actually saying it. But he can see her eyes tearing up, saw her stiffen when he said Stillwater, and he knows the only real question is how bad is it and how fast are they going to get there. And the answer is, it's bad, and they'll get there as fast as they can. Finally he's run out of filler words, stretched this moment as long as he can, so he says the words he doesn't want to say, "Jackson died last night.
"I hacked his medical records. He was in the shop and had a stroke. Dead before the ambulance got to him. Probably before he hit the floor. It looks like it was fast and painless." And he's got no idea if that's true or not. But she's crying, and he's trying to be comforting as he holds her, and even if it is a lie, it's a lie he wants to believe.
He kisses her, soft and gentle, and she cuddles into his shoulder, holding him. They stand there, like that, for a long minute, until they hear Jimmy say, "We'll take my car.


Ziva, Tony, and Ducky took one car. Leaving the Palmers and McGees in the other. With Ziva driving the trip between DC and Stillwater is six hours. With a seventeen-month-old and a pregnant woman, both of whom do vastly better with a break every hour and a half for either the bathroom or to run around, it's a lot slower.


They take turns driving. Not talking much as Palmer's Odyssey eats the miles between DC and Stillwater.
Maybe the others are thinking of their grandparents or parents. Tim knows he's thinking about his.
Nelson McGee died of a heart attack on his ship. He was sixty-four, had been feeling a bit off, but brushed it off as having slept on his shoulder wrong, and in the middle of an inspection tour slumped over and died.Penny gave permission for him to be buried at sea. He remembers his grandfather talking about how all life came from the sea, and how, for those who were lucky enough, they'd get to return. Penny let his final resting place be the element he loved.
His father was well enough connected at that point to get helio-ed in for the burial, but the rest of them gathered at Penny's home for a memorial service.
Tim doesn't remember it much. He was ten at the time. Mostly he remembers the way Penny looked shell-shocked. Thinking about it now, he realizes that Nelson was probably about a year, maybe three, tops, away from retiring. He realizes that they'd been married for forty years. That they probably had plans for life after the Navy. He realizes that Penny and Nelson must have been very different people, but they built a marriage that survived her becoming a pacifist while he became an Admiral.
And driving north, his turn at the wheel, it occurs to him that Penny never got to say goodbye. One day her husband left for a float, and he never came home.


Pop died slow. Though, from everything he's read about it, actually, all in all, it was pretty fast. Christmas of '94, the Annapolis Christmas, the one where everything went wrong, was when they also first noticed he was fading.
At first it looked like stress. That was a bad holiday for everyone, so if Pop asked the same question a few times, well, who cared? It'd get better when things calmed back down again.
But it wasn't stress. And he didn't get better, and by the time Tim was leaving for college six months later Pop kept calling him Michael, his Mom's brother's name. Summer of '96, he lived with his grandparents, the last summer he wasn't on his own, and Pop was gone.
He spent that summer with them, helping out, trying to be useful, but mostly he was babysitting a 76-year-old who looked like a man he loved, but wasn't. The fire in his eyes, the memories, the life that had enriched all of them was gone, and all that was left was a body too stubborn to die.
When he caught pneumonia that October, Gran didn't seek treatment for it.
And he felt like a coward for it, but Tim claimed he had midterms (which he did) and didn't go home until after Pop had died.
He didn't say goodbye, mostly because he couldn't handle it, but if you had asked him, (and one of his friends did) he would have said there was no one left to say goodbye to.
His mom doesn't talk about that last week, other than to say it was very hard.
Driving to Stillwater, he's thinking that Nelson and Jackson got off easy.
He hopes he does, too.


They found Gibbs sitting on the sofa in his dad's house. Ziva, Tony, and Ducky were already there. Ziva was cuddling with him. Tony and Ducky were just there, being quiet and supportive.
He stood up and hugged all of them when they came in. Molly was asleep in Jimmy's arms, so she got half of Jimmy's hug.
He went back to the sofa. Abby cuddled into his other side. Gibbs kissed her forehead.
Breena sat in front of Jethro and rested her hands on his knees. "Tell me what you want done, and I'll take care of it. I'll make sure he gets sent off properly."
Gibbs nodded, tears in his eyes, not saying anything.


Two days later, Gibbs, Tony, Tim, Ducky, Jimmy, and LJ carried Jackson to rest next to his wife.
And if Jon's funeral was the dull, crushing pain of horrific fate, this was more the sharp, mercifully brief cut of quick and done. It hurts. There are tears here and the ache of not enough time, because when it comes down to it, there's never really enough time, but the shell-shocked, stunned horror of the loss of Jon caused isn't here.
And like with the funerals for both of his grandfathers, after this service, there was a house filled with somewhat inebriated people telling stories, laughing while they cried.
Gibbs listened to stories, smiled a little, cried a little, got a little drunk, didn't talk much. Tim's fairly sure the eulogy was the only time he said more than five words in a row that day. Abby and Ziva more or less kept hovering protectively around him, herding people away from him when it looked like he'd had enough of them.
Breena ran the whole thing, planned it from beginning to end. She'd asked Gibbs the morning after they got there what he wanted, again, and he shrugged, so she kissed his cheek, hugged him, and took over. It was beautiful, tasteful, a little generic, because all in all she didn't know Jackson all that well, though she was able to get his favorite hymns out of Gibbs for the service, and maybe the actual funeral director wasn't thrilled with dealing with her, but the end result was as comforting as a funeral can be.


When the last of the guests left, and the food had been put away, the downstairs cleaned back up, and Molly fed and put to bed, there was just this sort of hollow emptiness. A sort of blank, now what? feeling.Gibbs got up and headed upstairs, looking determined.
He came back a few minutes later with a Monopoly box, that he laid on the coffee table in front of the sofa. "Used to play with him and my mom and grandparents. Want a game?" His voice broke on the last word, but he was half-smiling, and very carefully counting out the money.
The game lasted 'til three. Ducky won. And no one said anything about the fact that even though they had to scrounge a few pieces (Tim was playing a battery from the TV remote, and Tony had a quarter) Gibbs kept the top hat in his hand the whole time. link

Shards To A Whole: Chapter 196

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


Chapter 196: Grass


With the exception of the past six months, for the entirety of Tim McGee's adult life, he's been an apartment dweller.
Now, usually this wouldn't be an issue, but with April edging toward May the weather's getting warmer, and he's noticing something: namely he is now in possession of a large amount of grass. A very large amount of grass, and none of the neighbors have knee high grass, so it's probably his job to do something about this before he does.
So, what to do?
There are two ways to handle this. The easy way, namely pick up the phone, make a few calls, and hire someone to deal with it.
But for some reason that's just not hitting him right. He's a homeowner damnit! He might as well mow his own grass at least once.
So he takes the hard way, spending a week researching lawn mowers (between interviews and paperwork. And every day when he gets home from work, the grass is taller.), while Abby gently teases him about nesting, which, well, that's probably true, there's no other reason why he'd suddenly be in a take care-of-grass-or-die-trying mindset.
But the fact that may be true is in no way diminishing his need to manage the grass.
And so, bright and earlyish, because he doesn't want to be the bad neighbor who's mowing at 7:00, he's in their yard, mucking about with the mower, getting ready to embark on his first mowing experience since he was seventeen.
It's not like riding a bicycle. Mostly because it's not a damn bicycle, and the thing he's pushing around right now is about ten light years more advanced than the old push mower his mom had had.
And honestly, this isn't that bad. It's cool and pleasant out, still a little damp from the night. And it's not terrible exercise. Granted, he's not thinking this is ever going to be something he likes, but it's not bad either. Better than shoveling the driveway when it snows.
It takes a lot longer than he expected it to. Until he was pushing the mower back into the garage, he didn't think he had a huge yard.
Walking through the house he smells bacon, and between that delicious smell and the fact that, yeah, he is a bit on the hungry side, he's suddenly wondering what Abby's up to.
He heads into the kitchen. "What are you making?"
"Your favorite."
"Really?" He looks her over from head to toe, she's in a black t-shirt and a pair of loose, drawstring, flannel jammie pants, left over from when he was still heavy, licks his lips, grins, and says, "You're looking way too dressed for my favorite."
She laughs. "BLTs. Ready in about five minutes."
"Oh! Those are good, too. How about ten, let me hop in the shower."
"That works."
He doesn't need to really scrub or anything, he's just rinsing off the sweat and the little bits of grass that are stuck to his legs. So it's pretty quick. When he gets out he changes into a pair of pajama pants and a t-shirt, they aren't going anywhere else today, and heads back down.
She's got the door to the porch open, and is dragging out chairs. He glares at her a little when he sees that and takes the chair from her.
She sticks out her tongue back at him. She's six months pregnant, not helpless. But she'll usually humor him on things like this, because she doesn't like seeing him worry, and he does worry when she does anything even remotely exerting.
"Thought it was so nice, we could eat out."
He nods at that, it is really pleasant out, mid seventies, the porch is shady this time of day, and then goes and grabs some of the folding tray tables they got as wedding presents.
linkSitting on the porch, pregnant wife by his side, freshly-mowed grass perfuming the air, it hits him, he's really not single anymore.
He wonders idly if Palmer felt this way. If, like him, there was this second where he just finally realized that yeah, he's not in any way shape or form single. He's a suburban dad, with a beautiful pregnant wife, and a house, and a yard, and hell, the minivan is probably on the way.
He smiles at that, Abby looking at him with a question in her eyes, so he explains, and she smiles, too.
Her hand rests on her belly, and she says, "It's real."
And from that day until Kelly came, the McGees had the best kept yard in the neighborhood.

Shards To A Whole: Chapter 195

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


Chapter 195: Interviews


Having your team be on the shelf also means you’ve got time to do some interviews. Get to know some prospective new team members.
So, for week two of Tony and Ziva’s honeymoon, between paperwork, and running down leads for other teams, Tim and Gibbs started interviewing possible replacements.
Technically, they’re replacements for Gibbs, since Tim is trying to keep his moving to Cybercrime on the quiet, though they don’t actually know which one of them will go first.
Tim’s handling most of the preliminaries. The get to know NCIS speech, tour the building, explain a little of what they do. He figures it’ll be good practice for when he’s in charge of Cybercrime. In spare minutes he’s been thinking more and more about how he’s going to whip it into shape. It’s one thing to tell Vance he’s going to turn it into the premier cybercrime division, and a whole other thing to actually do it. Best he’s got so far, without really getting to see what they’re up to, team building and better hiring are going to be his two main strategies.


Karen Howard was the first of the interviews. She’s younger than Tim thought it was possible for a person to be (which he figures is a good sign of his having become middle-aged) but somehow she’d managed to get her Masters in Forensic Computing from CalTech by twenty-two. No military background, but according to Carter, she’s the best hacker FLETC’s seen in, well, ever.
They’re both a little nervous. It’s the first interview he’s given, and he’s got the sense it might be the first one she’s ever had, either.
He tries to remember the last time he had an interview, he thinks it was for MIT. NCIS recruited him out of MIT, more than four agencies got into a bidding war over him, so the nervous, proving he was good enough thing didn’t happen.
Query letters for Deep Six was probably the closest he’s ever come to the traditional apply for a job/interview thing, and that was done entirely by mail. He didn’t have any face time with his agent until after he’d gotten his manuscript accepted.
So, it’s not like this is something he’s familiar with, or has done a lot, but he does know what it’s like to be on the wrong foot, feeling overwhelmed and a bit out of place. And Howard looks out of place, overwhelmed, and like she really wants to make everyone like her.
So, that’s not something he had a hard time empathizing with. Plus he read her thesis over the weekend, and got talking to her about it, which got them both into a pretty comfortable place, and for a fairly pleasant half hour they chatted about smarter search algorithms. And once she seemed settled, or at least started to smile some, he led her to his desk, handed her a thumb drive and said, “It’s a closed case, but here’s all the raw data we had. Have at it. Show me what you can do with it.”
She stared at it. “Here?”
“Yep. These are the tools you’ll have, unless you bring your own.”
“Okay. What am I looking for?”
“It’s a murder. This is everything we found about the vic. The killer’s buried in the data. Go find him.”
She nods. “That’s really vague.”
“Yep. But I picked this case intentionally. It’s one where we caught the guy from the data. Nothing about the scene or how he died was useful. It’s all in there. Find me a killer.”
“Okay. Any parameters for the search?”
“Nope. Do whatever you like with the data, just find the guy.”


Tim’s rapidly coming to the conclusion that Carter is right. He’s used to being, well, not the best and brightest, but he is the guy who can follow what the best and brightest are doing, figure out why they’re doing it, and what they’re going to do next.
He plays damn good computer defense.
He can tell she’s nervous because he’s hovering, watching her, but even with that, her code is simple, elegant, cutting away the chaff in long, clean strokes.
She’s faster than he is. Not as well-trained, no instincts, yet. She’s skimmed over the trouble spot twice now without seeing it, but for pure technical skill, she’s phenomenal.
The question is, can instinct be learned?
He flashes Gibbs a text. Did I have any instincts when you hired me?
Gibbs very slowly texts back: Knew not to piss me off.
He looks up and glares at Gibbs. Seriously. She’s killing the code. I’ve never seen skills like this. But she’s missed the problem three times now. Can’t seem to see it. Trying to remember if you learn instincts or not.
Both. You start with some, and then learn how to use them. Which case is she hunting through?
Salazo.
Weekly meeting with the killer, being blackmailed, ran out of cash, and got killed for it?
Yeah. It’s in his calendar, financials, and email.
And she can’t see it?
If she does, she hasn’t put it together yet.
Then what’s she doing?
Right now, analyzing cell phone data.
That was a dead end, right?
Best I remember.
How long you going to let her work?
I got it in an hour. Gonna give her four.
Okay. Go get a coffee. Stop hovering over her. You’ve seen how she’s working, now let her work.


It took Howard three hours to find it, but find it she did. He was sitting at Tony’s desk, filling out paperwork when she jumped up, sprang, kitten-like over the twelve feet to where he was and said, “Got it! It’s jakeb@brinny.com. Some sort of blackmail thing that went wrong, right?”
Tim nods, smiling.
“Yep. What do you do next?”
“Track down jakeb.”
“Good. So, you like doing it?”
“Yeah! That’s so cool.”
“Glad you liked it.”
“Any questions?” Tim asks Gibbs as Howard stares at them, looking, for the first time, fairly pleased with herself and confident.
Gibbs gets up, stands behind her, blocking her view of Tim’s cubicle and says, “Tell me about McGee’s wife.”
All the blood drained out of Howard’s face. “Excuse me?”
“You sat in his cubicle for three hours. Tell me about her.”
“Uhhhh…” They could both see blind panic in Howard’s eyes as she desperately tried to think up anything about the mysterious Mrs. McGee. “I’m sorry. I didn’t notice. Unless you’re married to your computer…” She smiled, hoping that would go over.
“Okay, Howard. Thanks,” Tim said. That was actually a pretty good question. Because it’s not just computer skills they need. The ability to see what’s around you is vital for this job.
“I just totally bombed this whole thing, didn’t I?”
Tim smiled gently at her. “Not the whole thing. You’re great with a computer, any of the Federal Agencies would be glad to have you on their cybercrime teams. You want to apply for our Cybercrime team, I’ll put in a good word with Jenner for you, but you do need to pay attention to the world around you in this job.” And as he said that he made a mental note to keep her contact information. If she didn’t apply for it on her own, he’d look her up when he was in charge.


Wednesday, Alex Draga came to visit.
Twenty-nine years old, once a Navy flyboy, honorable discharge when an accident left him with a need for glasses. His vision was more than good enough to be a cop. Not good enough to fly a fighter jet three times the speed of sound.
Tall, relaxed, seemed to see everything, asked lots of questions, took to Gibbs fast, didn’t really pay much attention to Tim.
His computer skills were passable. Tim’s are better. Howard’s were much better. But he knows what he’s doing, and he’s got the pattern pulled out in two hours. Tim was pretty impressed. This one might be a good match for their team. He could see Ziva liking him.
And like with Howard, Gibbs asked Draga, “What can you tell me about McGee’s wife?” when they got to the end of the practical skills test.
“Black hair, tattoos, tall for a woman but not as tall as McGee, pregnant, congratulations by the way, first baby, right?”
Tim nods, impressed.
“She’s his daughter,” he nods at Gibbs, “and it’s your first baby but not his first grandchild, right?”
“Close enough,” Gibbs said, smile tugging at his lips.
“How close?” Draga looked interested in the answer to this.
“None of us are blood, but you’ve got the basic relationships right. How are you figuring first baby?” Tim asks.
“Ultrasound pics, no baby pics, means she’s pregnant but baby isn’t on the outside yet. Little curly haired girl on…” he turns to Gibbs, “That’s your dad, right?” Gibbs nods. “Obviously family, she’s on your wall, but not his, so not his baby. So, she’s one of your grandkids, but not from his wife.”
Draga turns to look at Gibbs’ desk and the cubicle behind it, quickly finding the snap of Gibbs giving Ziva away. (Jimmy had taken it, and Breena made him give Gibbs a copy the day they got back to work.) “She your other daughter’s child?”
“Nope.” Gibbs looks over his cubicle. “Don’t have pics of her parents up. Probably should get some.” He scanned Tim’s cubicle and found Jimmy and Breena in one of the wedding shots. “She belongs to those two.”
“Ahhh…”
“So, do you have any questions for us?” Tim asked.
Draga thought about it. “Agent Gibbs is retiring, but he’s not the tech guy on this team, you are. So, why are you looking at me for the job?”
Tim and Gibbs smiled at that. “Baby’s due in July. I’ll be in and out for a few weeks, maybe longer.”
“You don’t need me for just a few weeks.”
“Nope. But it’s a good place to start. I’m the only one with tech skills. Back in ’02, when I started, that wasn’t a big deal. These days, those skills have to be redundant. Put plainly, I’m tired of being irreplaceable. I went on vacation, and it took Ziva ten hours to do a job I do in twenty minutes because she was looking by hand.”
Draga looks horrified by that. “By hand?”
“Yeah, sorting phone records by hand.”
“Ugh.”
“Yeah. And from what Carter’s sent me, you can shoot, which is a skill for both of us, pick locks, he’s better at that than I am, you speak Navy, which we lose when he goes, and we’re gonna guess that with a background in aviation, you can probably handle a car well.”
“That’s true. Used to drag race as a kid.”
“You and Ziva are going to get along so well,” Tim says.
“Ziva?”
“His other daughter. She and Tony are on their honeymoon right now.”
“So, wait. I join this team and it’s you, and your brother and sister-in-law?”
“Sort of. It’s me and my partners. We’ve been working together for more than a decade now. They’ve been married ten days.”
“New man in after that much time together’ll be tricky.”
“Yeah, it will,” Gibbs says. “The question is, are you the guy to do it?”
“Honestly, I don’t know. But if you think this went well, I’d like to meet Agents… DiNozzo and DiNozzo?”
“He’s Tony and she’s Ziva, but yes, the Agents DiNozzo,” Tim answered. He noticed Gibbs looking around, realized neither of them had said Tony or Ziva’s last name, then saw the name plate on Tony’s desk and nodded again. Yeah, Draga was winning lots of points on this interview.


Friday they saw Shaun Aubrey. The twenty-seven year old former Marine, did one tour, used the GI Bill to go to college, got his degree in forensic accounting then hit FLETC. Carter had said he’d been looking at the FBI and IRS, but seemed intrigued with the idea of NCIS when he mentioned it.
He looks significantly more the traditional geek than Howard or Draga. Not so much clothing, he’s in the more or less required male uniform for an interview, navy suit, white button down, conservative tie, but there’s a sort of fussy air to him.
Tim has a hard time imaging how he survived in Afghanistan in the dirt and grime. He looks like the kind of guy who carries hand sanitizer. If anything he’s a few steps beyond Tim on the everything needs to be properly organized front.
He’s the first one to look at Tim’s set up after being offered the thumb drive and actually ask, “May I rearrange it? I’m not left-handed.”
“Sure, do whatever you like to make yourself comfortable. Just put it back when you’re done.”
Ten minutes later, Tim’s workstation was more or less completely rearranged, and Aubrey had subbed out Tim’s mouse and keyboard for his own, which he had brought along with him.
Tim hovered behind, watching him work. Forensic Computing, Tim’s specialty, and Forensic Accounting, Aubrey’s, are not actually the same thing, though there is a large overlap. Tim’s having no problem following what Aubrey’s doing.
When Tim works a case, he starts with phone/email records, then moves onto financials. Usually something in the first two give the others some leads to hunt down, and while they do that he sifts through bank accounts, looking for more info to connect the dots.
Aubrey starts with the financials, finds the payments, highlights them, then hits email and has the case solved in twenty minutes.
Which, if he had started with the financials and not the cell records, is only slightly faster than Tim would have done it.
Then he took five minutes and put everything back, exactly the way Tim had had it.
He, Aubrey, and Gibbs confer at Ziva’s desk, and Gibbs asks his question: “What can you tell me about McGee’s wife?”
Aubrey shakes his head, looking at Tim. “I noticed you had some wedding pictures up, but beyond that, I didn’t really look. She was in white and red? You were in gray. I think her hair is black… Sorry.”
“It’s okay, you weren’t there very long.”
“I can, however, tell Agent Gibbs the specs for all the equipment on your desk, including the stapler. After all, that was a question to see how well I pay attention, right?”
“Yes. What you see of the things you aren’t focused on. You never know where the clue that tells the real story will be. The body may get all the attention, but sometimes it’s the pictures on the mantle that let you know who the killer is,” Tim replies.
Gibbs keeps staring at Aubrey. ‘You really want to be a field agent?”
“Do I not look like a field agent to you?”
Gibbs shrugs. He’s seen all sorts make it at this.
“I wouldn’t be here if the idea didn’t hold some appeal. I prefer a combination of desk work and getting out in the real world. The Marines was too much field. School was too much desk work. I think NCIS may provide a balance where I’d thrive.”
“Just might,” Gibbs agrees, especially given that Aubrey would most certainly be taking Tim’s place on the team. Even with a Marine background, Gibbs can see this isn’t the kind of guy that’ll automatically command respect from other military men.
“You have any questions for us?” Tim asks.
“What is the field/deskwork balance?”
Tim smiled at that. “With your skills, it’d be about seventy percent desk work, thirty percent field. We all process the crime scene. You’d head back to run the data,” because Tim’s sure that if they end up with him and Aubrey on the team, he’ll be out in the field while Aubrey runs the data, until they could get someone with more of Gibbs skills/Aubrey picked up more field skills to round out the team. “While you run data, we round up leads, deal with the evidence. Few hours later we get together again with the preliminary data, and work up a plan from there. But, until you’d been in the field more, you’d mostly be on crime scenes. Over your probie year, you’ll get out in the field more, start learning interrogation, talking to people, eventually dealing with perps. But at least at first, you better like orange, because you’ll be seeing a lot of it.”
Aubrey smiles at that. “But, eventually, I’ll get out there?”
“Soon as we catch a case, you’ll be out there. Everyone does crime scenes.”
“Good. There’s something more… satisfying about going after killers than tax evaders.”
That got a smile out of Gibbs.
“Yeah, there is,” Tim says. “I turned the IRS down for exactly that reason.”

Shards To A Whole: Chapter 194

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

Chapter 194: My Little Dragons

He was only three minutes early, which was, by Team Gibbs standards, two minutes late.
"Hopin' we'll start without you?" Gibbs asks as he drops his bag by the ring and toes off his shoes.
"By all means, you want to have a go at Jimmy, I'll hang out and watch," Tim says pulling out the tape and getting started on his hands.
Gibbs looks at Jimmy and seems to think about it. Then he nods. "Tim, pay attention. Jimmy, you're on defense."
"Again?" Jimmy's getting bored on defense. It's not playing to his strengths, and he finds it frustrating.
"You're on defense until you can figure out how to read someone's moves. You're so used to doing this with Tim you're getting lazy. No more of that."
"So, I'm on defense until I can read a fight. I finally get to the point where I've got a guy I can read, and you sub him out."
"You're not reading Tim. You've memorized how he fights."
"Tomato, tomahto."
Gibbs gives him the enough sass, get the hell in the ring and let's fight look. "Tim, watch, pay attention. You're getting lazy, too. You've got a routine, and he's got it memorized, so learn some new tricks."
Tim nods, leaning against the ropes, and settles in to watch and learn.


Having done this for two and a half months now, Tim's come to the conclusion that, as exercise goes, he actually likes Bootcamp. It's not boring. He's honing useful skills. The endorphin rush is nice. It's time with Jimmy and Gibbs, which is good, too. And it burns more than enough calories so he can have some sort of sugary treat after.
Just because he didn't use the dark chocolate fudge ice cream topping for the poem doesn't mean he doesn't have some ideas for it for later tonight.
He's thinking the reason he likes Bootcamp now, because it was just as much of a work out when he started at NCIS, is that he's finally doing it with someone who's about evenly matched to him. Or maybe it's the fact that he's relaxed enough with Gibbs now that he's not terrified of looking like an idiot.
Either way, as he, Jimmy, and Gibbs hit the showers, he's soaking wet with sweat, tired, a little sore, and all in all feeling really good.
Really, he doesn't remember what they were talking about. And by they he means he and Jimmy, Gibbs was mostly quietly listening, adding an occasional word.
But he does know that he pulled his shirt over his head, starting to strip off for the showers when he hears Jimmy say, "That's cute."
Which was when he remembered he had a whole lot more skin art than usual. "Yeah, thanks."
Gibbs looked up from unlocking his locker, but by that point Tim's back was to the lockers. One look from Gibbs got him to turn around. When he turned back, now sans pants and towel wrapped around his hips, Gibbs was shaking his head, looking like he was about to roll his eyes.
"It's not real, is it?" Jimmy asks.
"Abby drew it on me this afternoon."
"This is what you do when you're home alone?" Jimmy's got a sort of cocky my god you're such nerds look on his face.
"I wrote a poem for Kelly on her. We got talking skin ink to celebrate the baby. This was her idea for me."
"That supposed to be you and Kelly?" Jimmy asks.
Tim nods.
"You're so not a dragon."
"Uh huh. Okay, what am I?"
"I don't know," Jimmy shrugs, thinks for a moment, then grins, "a koala?"
"You want koalas, look in the mirror. I'm not that cute or fuzzy-"
"Especially not today," Jimmy broke in with smirk. Yes, his body hair is growing back in, and thank all that's good and holy, is past the god-awful itchy phase, but it's still pretty clear he shaved it all off.
"Not ever, really. Cute and fuzzy, that's you and Breena. If Abby thinks I'm a dragon, I get to be a dragon."
"Uh huh…"
Gibbs is still looking at his back. "When Kelly was little she had My Little Ponies." Jimmy's grinning, he knows what they are and where this is going. "That thing on your back is a My Little Dragon."
Jimmy and Gibbs laughed. Tim flashed them a I am so done with you idiots look and headed for the shower.


Twenty minutes later, he's out, drying off (carefully, he doesn't want to smudge the dragons too much). Yeah, they're cute. Sure, he doesn't want them burned into his skin forever. But Abby did spend two hours drawing them on, so he'll do what he can to keep them in good shape for as long as possible.
"So how long would that take?" Jimmy asks.
"Oh, god, no. Not actually getting this tattooed on. Just the outline was two hours with a Sharpie. It'd be even longer with a tattoo gun." He touches the knot on his right arm. "That was four hours and nine minutes, and that was long enough."
Jimmy looks at Gibbs, who is sitting down on the bench, putting his briefs on, and thus, very naked. "Why don't you have any? Getting them is traditional military, right?"
"Nothing I ever wanted burned into my skin."
"Not your unit insignia?" Tim asks.
"Thought about it. Never got drunk enough to do it. Shannon didn't like 'em, either."
"Breena likes them. You ever going to get one?" Tim asks Jimmy, while pulling on his boxers.
"Nope. My body already has a hard time fighting off infections. Last thing I need to do is open myself up to one by getting an intentional flesh wound."
"Good point."
"I liked the way the henna one looked before my skin broke out in hives."
Tim buttoned his shirt. "Sharpies might be an option."
"Got enough on my plate, don't have time for lying around letting her draw on me."
Tim shrugs. "Feels nice. Doesn't have to take hours."
Gibbs is just watching the two of them have this conversation, pretty stunned to see them actually talking about this. It occurs to Tim that this is the first time Jethro's actually worked out hard enough with them to join in on the locker room conversation after.
"How nice?" Jimmy asks, grabbing his jeans from the locker.
"I've got My Little Dragons on my back. How nice do you think?"
Jimmy nods, pulling his pants up. "So, you let her shave you, or you do it yourself?"
"Both of us. And you were right, totally worth it."
Gibbs has a look on his face best described as, mildly surprised but feeling like he should have known Palmer would be into that, too.
Now Jimmy's nodding sagely, slipping on his socks. "You get Abby to tell you what she put in Tony's present?"
Tim smirks, reaching for his wrist cuff, enjoying the memory of that. "Yep."
"Gonna tell?" Jimmy looks up at him, pausing in his dressing to pay attention to the answer.
"Can't. Sworn to secrecy. Breena tell you what she put in?" Tim asks, fastening his wrist cuff.
Big, wide, somewhat condescending but very happy smile on Jimmy's face. "Oh yeah."
"You got sworn to secrecy too, didn't you?" Tim asks as he grabs his jeans out of the locker.
"Yep."
Tim's combing his hair when he notices something, Jimmy's getting ready to leave, with no glasses. Then it hits him, Jimmy wears contacts to fight, and he must have kept them in.
Then something else hit him. "Which do you like better, glasses or contacts?" He wears the glasses at work, but as Tim thinks about it, he's noticed that Jimmy's been wearing the contacts on weekends and off time.
"Why are you asking?"
"Got my eyes checked Friday. Twenty/thirty in the left, twenty/thirty-five in the right. I don't need them yet, but corrective lenses are on the horizon for me."
"Once I could get them in and out fast, I liked the contacts better, but, when I'm at work, I never know what we're going to run into, and I like the extra layer of protection the glasses offer. Plus, I get something on them, and I can get them off in a tenth of a second."
That made sense to Tim. "You don't wear contacts, do you?" he asked Gibbs. They've all seen Gibbs' glasses for close up work, but he's not sure if Gibbs has distance vision issues yet or not.
Gibbs shakes his head and hands Tim his glasses. He squints through them, noticing that Gibbs is awfully farsighted. "They're trifocals. Top does distance. Bottom close up. Middle's plain glass. And I don't usually wear them because anything further than eight feet and closer than fifty is still in sharp focus."
"Add sniper to the list of skills we're replacing."
Gibbs glares a little at that, not enjoying being faced with the fact that he can no longer hit a target at 3000 meters, but nods because it's true. "We're seeing the first of the FLETC candidates Monday, right?"
"Yeah. Karen Howard."
"Can she shoot?"
"Don't think so. Not like that, at least. She's the computer wizard."
"The baby out of CalTech?" Before the wedding the four of them had gone through the five names Tim's contact at FLETC had sent over, and decided on three to get to know better.
"Yeah."
Gibbs nods, takes his glasses back from Tim, and says, "See you Monday."
The three of them were dressed by that point, so they headed out of the locker room and went their own ways.

Shards To A Whole: Chapter 193

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

Chapter 193: Poems and Dragons

Long, lazy Saturday at home.
Tim sat as his desk, paper in front of him, pen in hand and started writing.

For Kelly:
You are:love made breathdesire given formecstasy set free to walk the earthFrom joy you cameand joy you return

He’s staring at it, tapping his pen against the paper. Not really loving the last bit. It’s the right idea, the circle of joy, how it was their joy that made her and how she brings joy to them… but it’s still clunky.
It also doesn’t look right.
He crossed out You are… and spent another moment staring at it.  Better.
And joy you bring
Nah.
He snagged a new page, wrote Kelly at the top of it, and circled the other lines around it. 
Okay, that looked good. Began and ended with Kelly. He’s still not loving the last bit.
There needs to be something about joy in there. But it needs to be parallel construction with the first four lines.

Kellylove made breathdesire given formecstasy set freehope made joy

He stares at that, nodding. Then grabs another piece of paper and writes it in a circle. Yep. Much better. Still not right. Too many mades.

Kellylove into breathdesire into fleshecstasy into mindjoy into life

Nope. Maybe not enough mades…

Kellylove made breathdesire made heartecstasy made mindjoy made life

Closer.  Not mind… But mind is important. Yeah, but not for this. Breath, heart, life are intangibles. So’s mind. Not the same sort of intangible. Really, heart is less tangible than mind… Okay, not intangible… feeling type things. They’re all feelings into physical representations of feelings.
Ecstasy made soul…

Kellylove made breathdesire made heartecstasy made souljoy made life

He wrote that in a circle and looked at it for a long minute, almost… not quite there.

love made breathdesire made heart ecstasy made souljoy made Kelly

He circled that around, looked at it, tapped his pen on the side of the paper, and decided he liked that a whole lot.
He found a paintbrush, warmed up the dark chocolate fudge with sea salt ice cream topping, and found Abby.
“Can I borrow your tummy for a few minutes?”
She looked up from the Journal of Chemical Forensics. “Okay. Do you need the rest of me as well?”
“Wouldn’t hurt, but you can keep reading if you like. Really just need Kelly.”
Abby eyeballs the small paintbrush and the ice cream topping in his hand.
“What are you doing?”
“Poem.”
“In fudge on my tummy?”
“I could do ink if you like. Thought the clean up on this might be more fun.”
She smiled at that. “You got it on paper or in your head?”
“Head.”
“Tell it to me. I might want it on my skin for more than a few minutes.”
He sat next to her, lifted up her t-shirt and laid his fingers three inches above her belly button. “It’ll go in a circle, here.” He traced the circle on her skin. “love made breath/desire made heart/ecstasy made soul/joy made Kelly. Once written on there, I figured I’d get some pictures.”
That made Abby smile. “Get a Sharpie. I want to keep that. Can I add to it?”
“What do you want to add?”
“Not sure. Let me see how it looks, might be inspired.”
He’s nodding as he heads off in search of the Sharpies.


It’s true that Abby has a five by eight by three jade box that lives on her dresser. It’s true that in that box is a collection of poems Tim has written her. It’s also true that the majority of those poems are words on paper written by hand from him to her. But not all of them. Some of those poems are photos of his words written across her skin.
Some in ink.
Some in chocolate.
But if it’s a photo, the actual poem is also written on the back, pen on paper.
Since they got back together again in October of ’12, he’s written forty-six of them.
They’re overwhelmingly blank verse, though there is the occasional haiku, and one sonnet. They range from very good to okay and sincere to silly. Some have made her laugh, others cry, and they’ve all made her smile.
She loves all of them. And though Tim doesn’t know this, there is only one thing she wants to be buried with, and it’s those poems.
If the house is on fire, the baby and the poems are the two things she’s carrying out.


LinkSo, a while back, he’s not sure how far, Tim saw The Pillow Book. He doesn’t even remember why he saw it. But somehow, he ended up watching it.
And it turns out that it was a good choice.
He really liked that movie.
No, he couldn’t tell you what the plot was or the names of any of the characters (though he vaguely remembers Ewan McGregor was in it). What he does remember was how hard the idea of slowly, carefully stroking someone with a calligraphy brush made him, and how much he really wanted to do that/have it done to him.
So, in 2001 he finally had a real girlfriend, someone who was willing to play with him, and he wanted to try it out. Which was when he found out that if you do not, in fact, actually know how to write with a calligraphy brush, you end up with a VERY big mess, and an extremely irate girlfriend who is monumentally less than thrilled by the black ink you got all over her bed.
Eleven years later, he tried it with Abby, this time on the receiving end, and yeah, he liked it, a whole lot.
But Abby can paint. She can draw. She’s good with a brush or a pen or a marker. And if the scene she drew from his ankle to the nape of his neck was a little smudged in some spots when he wriggled because it tickled, well, she didn’t mind.
When he tried it on her, he made a mess.
Which was a problem, because for him, it’s not just the application of ink to skin, but of words to flesh. For him, the words mattered, and a drippy, spotty, streaky illegible mess wasn’t the end goal he was looking for.
So the next time he tried, he subbed out ink for liquid chocolate, which had the advantage of being tasty and thick enough that he didn’t drip it all over the place. He can’t make the letters as small as he might like, but still, it worked pretty well, and everyone was happy with the result.
The time after that, he wanted the words to snake across her whole front. Which was when Abby reminded him that chocolate might be tasty, but yeast infections aren’t, so anything with sugar doesn’t go anywhere near her pussy.
But she did have markers.
And markers were good, too. He had better control. His letters were small enough he could get a whole poem on her. Tidy enough they could both read the words. All in all for anything with more than 100 characters they would do the job just fine.
Which is why they own one of those massive, every color they make, Sharpie packs.


He snagged it, drug all 100 markers back to the sofa where Abby was reading, and spent a while contemplating colors.
And, like always, he went with black.
Sometimes, rarely, (okay, once) if he’s feeling really into the work, he might add red highlights. He’s seen enough pictures of illuminated letters to know how that works. And it looked okay.
But really, it’s the words. And they’re clearest, easiest to read in black.
So, the ninety-nine other colors hang out in the pack, and he takes the lid off the black one, kneels in front of Abby, and contemplates the easiest way to do this.
“Think you can lay on your back for a few minutes?”
Last week she started feeling like it was hard to breathe and heartburn-y on her back. According to Breena being able to lie on your back for twenty-one weeks is something of a record, but since it’s the position that feels best for her back after a long day standing, having to say goodbye to it was not making Abby happy.
“How many is a few?”
“I think I can have this done in less than two.”
“I can do that.”
He held the marker between his teeth and gave her a hand getting horizontal. Yes, she can still lie down and get back up again without help, but it’s nice, and makes things easier for her, so he might as well do it. Especially since she’s going out of her way and doing something uncomfortable to humor him.
Once she was down, he got writing, fast. Sure, he’d like this to be a sensual experience, but he’d also like to get it done and let her breathe. So he wrote as fast as he could, while keeping his letters clear, shifting around her to get the angles right, and in less than a minute he had a perfect circle of legible black words slipping around her belly building on each other.
He helped her back up and she looked down, nodding.
“You feeling inspired to add to it?”
She shook her head. “It’s done.”
He pulled out his cell and began to take pictures of her.
“How are you going to give it to her?” Abby asks, looking at the markers.
“No idea. Are we going to do baby books?”
“Uh…” Abby looks alarmed by that thought. “Are you expecting either of us to have time for something like that?”
Tim sighs. “Not really. But we will give it to her, when she’s old enough to understand it. Maybe when we become grandparents?” He grins as he says that and sees Abby start to tear up. “Oh no. Nononononono! We’re not crying about that.” He kisses her, petting her tummy and face. “That’s a happy thought.”
“They’re happy tears.” Abby sniffles a little, kissing his hand which is resting against her cheek. “Thirty years from now, we might be showing her this.”
“Yeah, we might.” His thumb strokes over her cheek, wiping away a tear. He smiles again, and scoots back a few inches. “Let me get a few more shots, make sure it’s clear.”
She nods. “You want to get some new ink to commemorate this?”
Tim looks up from her tummy. “Hadn’t thought about that, really. Like what?”
“Not sure.” She’s playing with the sharpies. “We got tattoos when we got serious, got another when we got married, seems like having a baby would warrant some new ink.”
“Probably right about that. Granted, having a new baby also probably precludes spending hours in a tattoo studio or dealing with the upkeep they need as they heal up.”
“Good point.” She’s picking out the green sharpies, the black one, and a few blues.
“You look like you might be getting an idea.”
“Maybe. It’d be really big.”
“How big is really big?”
“Your whole back.”
“You want me to wander off for twenty hours when we’ve got a new baby and spend a month rubbing lotion on me while it heals up?”
“You could get it before she’s born.”
“Huh.” Somehow that hadn’t occurred to him. “What is it?”
“Get naked, lay down on the sofa, and you can see what I’m thinking,” Abby’s grinning now, looking like this’ll be fun, and well, he’ll happily be a canvas for her anytime she likes. Not like he’s got to be anywhere in the next three hours.
He pulls his shirt over his head while asking, “So, how big are you thinking? Am I getting naked because this’ll be on my legs, too?” He’s got three tattoos now, so he can pretty definitively say he doesn’t want one on his ass or the backs of his thighs. Anything he’s got to sit on is staying ink free.
“Nah. Just want that inch or two of your back below your waistband.”
“Okay.” His pants and boxers hit the floor next to the shirt.
He lays down, and she drapes a blanket over his legs and tush, which he appreciates because it’s a little cool out. April is rapidly warming up, and real spring seems to have come to DC, but that’s still about twenty degrees cooler than what he considers comfortable hanging out naked weather.
They spend two hours chatting, her drawing, him relaxing. He dozes a little, when she’s concentrating hard, enjoying the feel of the markers on his back. Some of it is a little ticklish, but mostly it’s just a very pleasant tingly sensation. She started the drawing up by his right shoulder and finished it by his right hip.
He started to get up but Abby said, “Stay put, just a little longer. Want to make sure it’s good and dry before you go scooting around.”
“Okay. Take a picture, let me see it.”
She did, showing him his back a second later.
Tim's idea of himself as a dragonIt’s a dragon. European style, wings and claws and longer front legs than back ones. The drawing is a cartoon outline type of thing, no shading or shadows, no scales or real details. It’s mostly light green, with darker green eyes and darker green wings. The head is on his right shoulder, and the tail starts on the left side of his back, curling around the dragon’s legs and ending on the right hip. The wings are down, relaxed, and if a dragon can smile, it’s smiling, looking down, at the very small, mostly light blue (she’s got little green wings) dragon sleeping, head on the big dragon’s tail.
He’s propped on his elbows, expanding the picture so he can see it better, and smiling at it.
“I left room for other baby dragons,” Abby says, sitting on the sofa next to him.
Tim nods, seeing that there was extra tail space, room on the neck, and a spot between the front legs where other babies could be added.
“I love it,” he says kissing her. Then adds, “But I thought I was an Asian style dragon.” She’s been working on the headboard for Kelly’s crib, and there’s a sort of stylized family portrait on there. The guys are all dragons, and he’s a jade-green, Asian-style one.
She touches his face, looking into his eyes. “Your eyes are the color of jade. So they make me think of the carved jade dragons. But your back works better with an European dragon shape. More room for baby dragons to play, too. Either way, you’re still green.”
“Am I dry enough to get up and see it in a mirror?”
She tentatively swiped her finger over one of the spines on the dragon’s neck. “Yep.”
“Good.” He heads into their bedroom, opens her closet door, and hops onto the dresser. One other good thing about the mirrors being set for sex is that no matter what part of yourself you want to look at, there’s a way to set the mirrors in their room to do it.
Up close, personal, and a lot bigger, he still likes it. But it’s not something he necessarily wants on his back for the rest of his life. It’s cute, really cute.  And big. It does cover his whole back, and that’s just the outline version, colored in and shaded and this would be literally days of tattooing. A few hours is one thing. Days of ink work, something else all-together.
Mostly though, it’s really cute. It’s vastly cuter than anything he wants burned into his skin for the rest of his life.
Abby's version of Dragon Tim“Will you hate me if I say that’s way more work than I want done?” Which is both true and doesn’t hurt her feelings about how cute it is and how he just can’t take that much cute on his skin.
“No.”
“Thank you.” He kisses her. “But if that ever found its way to paper. I’d happily mount and frame it and put it up in Kelly’s nursery.”
“I like that.” Abby glances at the clock. “Don’t you have bootcamp in forty minutes?”

He looked over, jumping off the dresser. “Yeah. Gotta get dressed and go!”  

Shards To A Whole: Chapter 192

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

Chapter 192: Shopping

Grocery shopping is traditionally a team sport for the McGee family. There is a very good reason for this: impulse control.
Non-pregnant Abby generally has no problems going into the grocery store, getting what she needs and leaving. Pregnant Abby is a somewhat different story. She has a very difficult time walking past the frozen food aisle and not buying every flavor of Ben and Jerry’s. As for Tim, well, a big part of his staying in good shape diet strategy is not being around large quantities of delicious, fatty, sugary foods.
Once again, it is vastly easier to not eat a pack of Nutterbutters if there is no pack of Nutterbutters to eat.
Plus, it’s a lot faster to split the list, which Tim has organized by aisle, grab everything on the list, and get out of there.
So, he handles the food on the outside ring of the store, meat, veg, bakery, dairy. She gets the inside area.

Then they meet back up, take the stuff out of each other’s carts that they don’t actually need, make sure they got everything on each other’s list, and out they go, all the food they need for the next week.
It takes about an hour.
It also happens, traditionally, on Saturday morning after breakfast (or lunch, if they had a lay in) when neither of them are hungry.
So, it is with a sense of trepidation that Tim is entering the grocery store, alone, on a Tuesday night, not yet having eaten anything.
With all of the wedding stuff this weekend, they didn’t get any shopping done, and while it’s true they’re not unused to eating out, they’re also down to a quarter inch of milk, one serving of decaf coffee, no fruit, and no breakfast food.
So, shopping really does have to happen.
And Abby’s got about another hour of work to go. (The upside of long-term surveillance is regular hours. Eight to five for two more days, they’ll be sitting in a van.)
So he’s grabbing a cart and checking the list, hoping he doesn’t go too far off the reservation with this.


An hour and a half later he pulled into the Navy Yard parking lot, and Abby hopped into the car. She kissed him, buckled in, and then looked around in confusion.
“Thought you said you were going to get groceries.”
“I did.”
Traditionally I-got-groceries in her roadster means grocery bags in the tiny little back seat. She looks behind her to make sure she didn’t somehow miss them.
“Trunk?”
“Not exactly.”
And suddenly she knew exactly why he’s twenty minutes late getting to her. He’d gotten the groceries and taken them home. “Did you get five hundred dollars worth of groceries again?”
“No.” He’s staring, very resolutely, at the road in front of him.
“Tim?”
“Four eighty-six.”
He can feel her roll her eyes. “Oh, Lord.”
“You’ll like them.”
“Not liking the groceries has never been the problem. Not eating all of them over the course of two days is the issue.”
“It’s mostly organic and healthy.”
“Yeah, I remember you shopping organic and healthy last time. Just because it’s organic, responsibly sourced dark chocolate-fudge with sea salt ice cream topping doesn’t mean we need a ton of it.”
He shrugs. They’d run out of that two weeks ago, and yeah, he did get more.  No ice cream, though. They don’t eat it with ice cream.  


When he’d gotten home with the groceries he’d done two things. A: he put some rice on to cook. B: he tossed the cold stuff in the fridge and freezer, and then, having freed up enough space in her car to pick her up, back to the Navy Yard he went.
So, all of the grocery bags were still on the kitchen table when they walked in.
It was an awfully impressive mound of grocery bags.
Abby took one look at it and said, “Oh, God, Tim! What did you get?”
“Stuff we need.”
She’s staring at the mountain of bags on the table as he grabbed oil, steak, salt, pepper, ginger, and broccoli, and started on dinner.
“What could we possibly need this much of?”
Traditionally, he lugs the groceries in and then gets making whatever they’re going to eat next. She puts them away.
He was cutting the steak into small pieces for the stir fry when he heard her open the first bag.
“Oh.”
He looked over at her and grinned.
Apparently there are ways to sublimate the desire to buy every snack food in the entire grocery store.
See, Tim has always been vaguely aware of the fact that diapers, bottles, pacifiers, etc. had to come from somewhere. He’s even put together the idea that people buy these things and grocery stores sell them. But since he’s the guy who does the outside ring of shopping, he’d never actually been in the aisle with the baby stuff before.
And yes, he did get more snacks than were strictly necessary. (They don't actually need five kinds of Pepridge Farms cookies.) But he didn’t buy every snack food in the store. He did, however, go a bit bonkers in the baby aisle.
And by a bit bonkers, well, he bought basically two of everything a newborn could possibly need.
He did leave most of it in the bags for her to open up and discover. But there was one thing he had in his pocket, and he wanted to show her special.
“Hey.”
Abby looked up from a package of preemie diapers. (Because, just in case, you know. And if they don’t need them, they can return them.)
He crooked his finger at her, signaling come here. So she did, big, wide smile on her face.
“I thought you’d like this.”
“Like what?”
“It’s in my pocket. Don’t want to touch it with raw steak on my hands.”
LinkSo she reached into his pocket, petted him a bit more than was strictly necessary, but he enjoyed it, and pulled it out, and, well, squeed, is probably the right word. It was a loud, very excited, and very cute, joyful shriek of a sound.
He laughed and kissed her forehead as she looked at the tiny, sparkly, pink pacifier with a skull with a bow on it.
“Saw that and couldn’t not buy it.”
She kissed him, grinning, bouncing. “Looks like you saw that and bought out the baby aisle.”
He nods, little sheepish. They probably don’t need three different kinds of diaper rash ointment or both baby Tylenol and baby Motrin. But, still, the basics are all in there. “We really will need most of it sooner or later.”
“I know. Just, wow, that’s a lot of stuff.”
“Yeah.”

Shards To A Whole: Chapter 191

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

Chapter 191: Surveillance

Having half of your team gone means you spend a lot of time on rotation. Tim and Gibbs are playing backup for the other teams or doing paperwork until Tony and Ziva get back.
And backup means they're sitting in a van on stakeout.
And stakeout is boring enough normally, but today it's god awful torture because it's not interesting enough to distract Tim.
Okay, so by this point in his life, Tim should know that endorphins make him do stupid things. They certainly shoot his ability to determine if immediate pleasure is worth longer term consequences to hell and gone. But, God the shaving was so worth it, and they are definitely doing that again.
But apparently he's squirming because Gibbs finally says to him, "You go roll around in poison ivy again?"
Actually that's a pretty accurate comparison. The last time he felt like this he did have that case of extremely unfortunately located poison ivy. Though best he can figure baking soda paste won't help this. (Though if he was at the Navy Yard instead of in a van listening in on a smuggling ring, he'd try just to see if it would help.)
"No."
"Gotta use the head?"
He's staring at Gibbs like he's insane for asking. "No!"
"Then quit squirming like a barely potty-trained kid."
And for what he thought was a good half hour, he focused on the case, kept an ear on the stuff they were recording, but, well, it's boring. Really boring. Yes, this is important intel. Collin's team has been working on this smuggling ring for eight months, slowly building up a mountain of evidence to take at least twenty-five people down, and they're all thrilled to have two extra bodies to keep an eye on things and get them a bit of down time, but God, it's boring!
So, he starts squirming again because he can swear he can feel it growing back in. Every single hair, and by now he's pretty well convinced he's got fifteen million of them on his balls alone, and they are all razor sharp and slowly creeping through his skin.
He felt the hand connect with the back of his head a split second before he hear Gibbs say, "Focus."
"Focusing, Boss."
Unfortunately he was focusing on the hair growing back in.
Jimmy was dead right, this is like wearing a coat of liquid sandpaper. Sharp sandpaper.
But he's trying. He's keeping at least a quarter of an ear on the discussion the mic is picking up, but right now they're talking about getting groceries. Nothing even remotely interesting. Though it does remind him they're getting low on tea (in addition to everything else, they didn't do their usual Saturday morning grocery run this weekend), so he flashes Abby a quick text about that.
So, all in all, there was a good forty-five seconds he wasn't thinking about it, but as soon as the text was done, there was nothing else to pay attention to, so the scratchy, irritated, squirmy sensation came back.
Three minutes later, Gibbs stood up, kicked the swivel chair Tim was in so he was facing him, and leaned down toward him, hands on the arms of the chair, more or less the only position where Gibbs can tower over him.
"What the fuck did you do?"
Okay, Tim knows that's the Fear of Dad coming out, but he's got no clue why. Okay, yeah, him squirming around is probably annoying, but he doesn't think he needs this.
"Jethro?"
"There's only one reason a guy squirms like that, and it's a fresh case of crabs. What did you do!"
"Woah! No!" He's pushing the chair back, but can't get any further away from Gibbs because the chair is back against the desk, and waving his hands in front of him in a don't attack gesture. "Nothing like that, at all! Shaved all my hair off."
Gibbs stepped back, looking really confused. "What?"
Tim rubs his eyes, looking horrendously embarrassed, though he'll take this over Gibbs killing him for fooling around on Abby.
"We like to really celebrate weddings, so, Abby and I shaved it all off." He pulled up his pant leg a few inches, showing off a very smooth calf.
"Why would you do that?" Gibbs is somewhere between horrified, stupefied, and Tim thinks there might be a hint of titillated curious in there, too.
"It felt really good." He shrugs a little. "You know how her skin feels really good right after she shaves or waxes?" Gibbs nods. "Well, yours does, too. It's… um… really soft and smooth, and girls really like soft and smooth, too, so… yeah… anyway… Good weekend." Tim sighs. "This part now, growing back in, not so much fun."
Gibbs nods at that, too. "Save it for the beginning of the long weekend next time."
"Yes, Boss."
Another minute passes, and with it the adrenaline edge of Gibbs about to attack. And when that passed, Tim starts to get pissed. He looks at Gibbs and says, "Crabs? Why the hell would you go there? You really think I'd fuck around on Abby?"
Gibbs looks embarrassed, and Tim thinks that's the first time he's ever seen that expression on Jethro's face. "This is why you don't assume. Seen the way you're squirming more than a few times back on active duty, and it was always the same thing. First two guesses were wrong, so…"
"Well, not this time." His eyes are narrowed and he's feeling really insulted. "I love her, you know that, right?"
"Yeah."
"So…"
"Guys do dumb things when they're scared. Even guys in love. Kid on the way, less sex at home, wife's changing. It can be scary."
"I'm fine. Not scared, at all. I love the way she looks right now, and judging by the fact you won't let me be alone with her for more than three minutes when we're at work, I figured you had noticed that, too. As for sex, I'm the most-fucked guy you know. Got laid seven times over the weekend. Friday morning, Saturday night, Sunday morning, at the wedding, and three times yesterday. Tony, who is on his honeymoon with enough Viagra to put him into a coma, doesn't have those kind of numbers. When would I have even had time fuck someone else? Been a bit busy this weekend."
Gibbs nods.
Tim thinks about it. "Did you fuck around on Shannon when she was pregnant? Is that why you thought that?"
That got the Gibbs glare of death aimed at him.
"And me even asking it is pissing you off, isn't it?"
Gibbs nods.
"Back at ya."
"I'm sorry I asked."
"Damn right."


They were sitting in the van, staring at the monitors, listening to more random chatter.
"Why'd you become a cop?"
"Huh?" Tim wasn't paying attention to Gibbs so he missed the question the first time he asked.
So Gibbs asked again. "Why'd you become a cop? You didn't train for it. No one in your family is a cop. You had options that paid better and would have been a lot easier."
"Jethro?" He doesn't know why Gibbs is wondering this. Seems pretty random given where they are and what they're doing. Granted stakeouts tend to lead to pretty random conversations.
"Fornell asked me a while back, and I realized I didn't know. I know why Tony's a cop. I know why Ziva is. I know why Abby's in her lab, and why Ducky's in Autopsy. I know why I'm here. But I don't know why you are, or Jimmy for that matter."
"Jimmy's here because he really likes it. When he started here, it was a gig to help pay for med school. He stayed when he graduated because he likes it here."
"Oh."
"I'm here because I didn't have the balls to break the law."
"Tim?"
"I figured out really quick that what I liked about computers was the fact that I was better at them than almost anyone else. It was the first time in my life that was true about anything. And at my level, you don't keep score by money, it's about what systems you can crack, who you can take down. You've got two options, you can be Anonymous, breaking into other people's systems, blowing secrets away, or you can be me, keeping the secrets safe, going after guys like Anonymous.
"I'm a realist. I'm good. I'm damn good. I'm probably in the top 1000 hackers on the planet. And if I did it full time, I'd probably be in the top hundred. But that meant there'd still be plenty other guys who could catch me.
"And catching each other is also how to keep score. The guy who takes out Anonymous wins the big prize. And I didn't have the balls for it. But stick a badge in my pocket, and suddenly I can do what I like, and not have to worry about going to prison for it. Sure, there's still a target on my back, but it's pretty small because no one knows who Tim McGee is. But since I've been at NCIS, the number of times our systems get hit has gone way up because they have noticed that someone at NCIS knows what he's doing. Eventually someone will take me down, count coup on me. But I've got a badge, so I'm on the side of the angels."
Gibbs just stares at him, amazed.
Tim shrugged a little. "Eventually, once I got out in the field, started working with you guys, it became about saving people. Originally, it was about not going to jail for doing what I liked to do. That's probably true for a lot of the guys down in Cybercrime."
He smiled at Gibbs. "Like in the westerns. The guy who puts on the badge doesn't much care about law, he just doesn't want to hang for his crimes. And eventually he decides that justice thing is important, and the badge changes him, but that's not why he got it in the first place."


Two more hours creep by. Tim's back with fresh coffee for both of them. He's been wondering something, and since Gibbs just asked him about his life…
"Why didn't the shaving thing freak you out?"
"Tim?"
"If I told Tony that, he'd be cracking jokes right and left, watching me out of the corner of his eyes like I'm radioactive, and almost as squirmy as I am. It just rolls off of you. I get the fact that nothing I do bugs Jimmy, nothing bugs him period, but… why doesn't it bug you?"
Gibbs shrugs. The look on his face saying, It just doesn't.
"Would have bugged my dad."
Gibbs shrugs at that, too.
He touched the cuff on his wrist. "Those bruises didn't bug you, either."
"Wouldn't say that."
"You know what I mean. You were concerned, not disgusted. Only time I've seen you disgusted when it comes to sex was Tony using those girls."
"That's disgusting." Gibbs takes a sip of the coffee, gives Tim a pay better attention look, and hands the cup back to him, taking the one Tim was about to drink from.
"Not disagreeing. But get a hundred guys together, ask them which is gross, taking all the hair below your eyelashes off or having sex with a fourteen-year-old who wants to have sex with you and snuck into a frat party to do it, and my guess is eighty or more of them will side with taking all the hair off over the girl."
"Tim, what are you actually asking me?"
Tim thought about that; he is kind of beating around the bush here. But he's also having a kind of hard time figuring out how to get closer to what he's wondering about. "I'm not sure if I really am."
"Try it. I don't like the question, I won't answer."
"How did you know about padding the cuffs?" Okay, still not on target, but a lot closer.
Gibbs smiles at that. "Became a cop in '91. Worked with guys who came up in the '70s and '80s. Rules were a bit different then, but one thing stays the same, leave no bruises."
"Oh."
"Expecting something else?"
"Yeah."
"Didn't even own my own cuffs until after Shannon passed. The thing with the ropes I learned with her."
Tim raised an eyebrow.
"Her parents had a place in the mountains. We had some good weekends up there. Bed was metal, tended to squeak if you pulled on it too hard, wasn't as sturdy as I would have liked. We tried a few things, and she figured that if you put the rope under the mattress, that worked just fine."
Tim chuckles at that, smiling. "That why you don't get freaked out? Been there, done that?"
Gibbs shrugs at that, too. It's probably related to why it doesn't bug him, though he suspects he's been there and done that because it doesn't bother him, not the other way around. "Always figured bodies were bodies and it didn't matter what you did with them as long as you got the job done. Back in basic, I had a friend, Mattheson, and she—"
"She?" Tim's eye's shoot up. Best he knows Gibbs was in basic back in '76-'77, before there were women on active duty.
"Yes. One of the first female Marines. She was a damn good Marine, fast, strong, knew what she was doing, took a ton of shit from the other guys and just kept going. She didn't much like me at first, either, thought I was hitting on her, just being subtle about it—"
"Were you?"
Gibbs shrugs at that, too. "Already loved Shannon. Knew I was going to marry her. But she was far away and letters didn't come every day, and Mattheson was there. I just… liked talking to her." There's a soft look on Gibbs' face as he remembers his friend.
"Liked the fact she was there and not a guy?"
Gibbs nods.
"I get that." And Tim does. For as much of his life as he's spent in male-oriented activities, he genuinely likes women, and just having them near is nice.
"But, point is, she was a good Marine. And it didn't matter that she didn't have the same kind of body I did. And ever since then, guy, girl, gay, straight, whatever, just didn't matter if you did your job the way it needed to be done."
"What happened with her? She a general somewhere?"
Gibbs shook his head sadly. "No. KIA."
"Oh, I'm sorry."
"I was, too. Got the news two days before leave. Couldn't even tell Shannon why I was so down. My other girlfriend got killed? Finally told her a buddy bit it, never told her the buddy's first name."
"Would it have bugged her?"
"I don't know. Didn't want to risk it. Things were going so good; I wasn't about to do anything that might have messed that up."
Tim thinks there's some warning in that sentence, maybe his conversation with Abby last night has him primed for that, or maybe Gibbs really does know and see all that happens to those he cares about.
"You still talking about you and Shannon?"
"Mostly." For once Tim's having a hard time reading the look on Gibbs' face.
"You talking about me and Abby, too?"
"Am I?" And Tim gets the sense that he can't read the look on Gibbs' face, because Gibbs also isn't entirely sure what's going on.
"This part of why you were thinking crabs?"
"No. Just a feeling."
Keep talking, Tim's expression says.
Gibbs shrugs.
"Okay, this won't work if neither of us talks. What's the gut sensing?"
"Just, not blind. I know you" And Tim understands he means him and Abby, not just him personally, "and the Palmers get on well. Get on a whole lot better than most couples ever will. Saw the way you and Jimmy watch the girls. Saw the way the four of you dance."
Tim nods, drinks some of his coffee, realizes at the wedding was probably the first time Gibbs ever saw the four of them play with each other, and goes back to listening to the feed. Lots to process all right.
One of the reasons he loves Gibbs is that Gibbs just lets him think. Sure he'll pressure Tim for answers, fast, if it's about a case. On the case he's Scotty, Gibbs is Kirk, and it's his job to get the Enterprise flying in three minutes flat. But if it's personal, he doesn't have to come up with snap opinions and decisions, he can take the time to weigh out what's happening and try to really wrap his head around it.
More than two years ago, when he was getting ready to start courting Abby, Tim hunted down advice to do a good job of it.
And he's not done processing. Lots of thoughts still bopping around. But maybe some advice would be a good thing, too.
"We do get on well. I love Jimmy and Breena and they love us. And I love Abby. She's my world. And we don't want to mess it up. This is beyond really good. It's excellent. Living the dream. Got the happily ever after, you know?"
Gibbs nods.
"We talk about it… you know?  With them." Tim's expression silently asks if Gibbs is getting what he's saying.
The look on Gibbs face lets Tim know he's following along without Tim having to be more explicit.
"And until yesterday that was just a game. Hot stories for each other. But, it turns out that Abby and Breena talk about it, too. In a maybe-we'll-actually-do-it sort of way."
Gibbs' eyes widen a little at that, and Tim nods.
"And look, I've got everything, I mean everything, I could have ever possibly wanted. And more than that, I know I have it. I've got the cake, the ice cream, the whipped cream on top, with the cherry and sprinkles, but, it looks like there might be a possibility of coffee to go with it.
"And I do not want to fuck this up. At all. I mean, how often do we get called in because some moron couldn't just be happy with what he had?"
Gibbs nods at that, too.
"But I'd be lying if I said I don't want it. It's my two favorite women on earth, together… What guy doesn't want that? And if it works… I mean… amazing sex with two gloriously beautiful women who love me… But if it doesn't…" Tim's shaking his head. "You got any advice?"
Gibbs' turn to think, and he does. Tim gets the sense that this is miles beyond the sort of providing fatherly advice he ever expected he'd have to deal with.
But after about ten minutes he asks, "This wouldn't just be sex, would it? There's a big difference between the girls do something special for your birthday, and making this a real relationship."
"I don't know. But, I kind of feel like if we could do it once, then we'd probably want to do it a whole lot. And I feel like if we could do it… then yeah, it'd be more than just a way to blow off steam on the weekends."
Gibbs smiles at that, sighs, and says, "Go slow. You guys become a foursome, none of us are going to care. Have fun, enjoy it. If it blows up, we're all gonna care. It goes sour, and you might rip our whole family apart. And if it goes great, we'll be happy for you.
"Wait until after Kelly's on the outside and you're settled into being parents, and Jimmy and Breena know the new baby is healthy."
Tim's eyebrows shoot up.
"Any of the girls suddenly stop drinking at celebrations and the gig is up. I take it they aren't telling anyone yet?"
"Just us, Ducky, and Penny. If things aren't right, and they have to terminate; they don't want to have to tell everyone."
Gibbs nods, that makes sense to him. "When'll they know?"
Tim does some quick math. "Middle to late June."
Gibbs seems to file that information and gets back on target. "Biggest problem I can see is you flip out when Abby flirts with someone else, and she does it for you. I can see you're generally okay with her snuggling with him. And I can see she doesn't mind Breena cuddling on you. And I could see both of you were happy as clams at the idea of the girls with each other."
Tim nods at that. He and Jimmy had spent a good five minutes just watching them dance with each other at the wedding, enjoying it a whole lot. Anyone who was watching could have seen that, and apparently Gibbs did.
"So, if you're gonna do this, have him kiss Abby, really kiss her, and you watch. You don't want to deck him; you kiss Breena. He doesn't want to hit you; maybe you can do it. Same for the girls. Make them watch. And then take the time to really think about it. Make sure you're really okay."
Tim gives him a self-depreciating look. "Good to get input from someone who can think about it with his brain."
Gibbs snorts a short laugh at that. "Tim, whatever you do, take your time and don't be stupid about it. You've got good instincts, trust 'em."
"Thanks."

Shards To A Whole: Chapter 190

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

Chapter 190: Date Night

By the time he was up, showered, and more or less himself again, dinner was looming on the horizon, so instead of a second round, getting dressed and going out became the next thing on the list.
When the idea of romantic Monday started to solidify in his mind, he hadn't had anything planned beyond lots of naked skin and sex. But when Abby started talking about the suit/kilt combo something beyond just playing at home went on the menu.
And before Abby left to go out, before he cleaned up or fired up the trimmers, he had made reservations for them to go out to dinner. After all, a good chunk of the fun of getting dressed up is going out wearing whatever it is you just put on.
So, out of the shower, towel around his hips, he's feeling very relaxed, very, very good, and awfully sassy. Kilt and top half of the suit are a must. Rock and roll vibe was definitely going to be part of this, too.
So, first things first, nail polish. He wishes there was a faster way to do this. Or given that it takes him a good fifteen minutes to get it on and properly dry, that he could wear it for more than a day at a time. But, while he's willing to push the edge on the NCIS dress code with his wrist cuff, showing up with nail polish on is a step too far.
Though it occurs to him, when he's head of his own department, he might be able to get some more wiggle room on the whole dress code thing.
Abby's putting her hair up while he waits for his nails to dry, so he asks, "How'd you go about getting out of the dress code?"
She turned to him. "What has you thinking about that?"
"If I'm going to take this much time to get polish on my nails, it'd be nice to keep it there for more than two hours."
"Ahhh… I told Jenny that khaki makes me break out in hives and cried on her until I got a life-long dress code exemption."
He laughs at that. "Somehow I don't see that approach working for me."
"Vance might believe you're allergic to office casual."
"Yes, but he won't care."
"True."


Once the polish was set, came dressing.
He never wears underwear with the kilt. That's just not how you wear them. So, he's got an idea of how a kilt is supposed to feel, and today it's a rather different sensation. Rough, slightly nubby, it's not bad, but it's not normal either. He's a hell of a lot more aware of the fabric than usual.
Shirt, vest, he was looking for a tie. The black one that came with the suit is fine, but he's got a hunter green one that goes with the tartan really well. He was figuring he'd tie it loosely, leave the top button undone and then have Abby do his makeup when he noticed she wasn't wearing a collar yet and another idea hit.
On her dresser she's got a t-shaped stand that all the collars, bracelets, and cuffs live on. He spent a moment sorting through them and found the collar that goes with his cuff. She saw what he was doing and grinned.
"Oh… I like that idea."
"Thanks. Let's see if it looks as good for real as it does in my head." He handed it to her. "Put it on me?"
She kissed the nape of his neck. "Anytime you want, baby."
He's always liked the way it feels when she puts one of her collars on him. Sure, he knows what it's supposed to be about, and for them it's not really, but there's still the soft weight of it, and the smooth sensation of leather drawing tight on his throat. It's just… nice, in a tingly sort of way.
The collar's fairly subtle. Like the cuff, it's just a strap of black leather embossed with an arabesque. Black on black. It's under his shirt collar, so all anyone can see is an inch or so of a band of black at the base of his throat.
"Good?"
"Yeah, it is." She looked him up and down. "You still have Ducky's hat?"
"Uh… yeah, I think so. Why?" Okay, yeah, he still doesn't love himself in hats, but she'd certainly enjoyed him in the fedora. And a decent dose of enthusiastic compliments and petting as a result of the hat was softening his opinion of how he looked in them. (To the point where he kept it on all night after the signing of the Ketubah.)
"Where would it be?"
"Downstairs, closet."
"Okay. Put the jacket on and push the sleeves up a bit."
"All right."
He's still messing with his sleeves when she gets back up with the fedora. They look good scrunched up a bit, but it's hard to make them stay that way.
It's just a basic black hat, lighter gray hat band. Abby sets it on his head and steps back. "Oh yeah."
He checks himself in the mirror, polished black leather boots, McGee tartan, white dress shirt, top three buttons undone, black leather collar visible under it, black vest, buttoned up, black tux jacket, sleeves pushed up enough so his wrist cuff is visible, black nail polish, and a black fedora.
Oh yeah. Is certainly right.
"Eye makeup?" he asks Abby. He's liking this look a whole lot, and doesn't want to venture into overkill land.
She's nodding. "Yeah. Sit down; I'll do it subtle."
He's sitting on the bed and notices the eyeliner in her hand isn't his usual one.
"What's that?"
"Green."
"I thought you said subtle."
"It will be. Look up."
He does, and feels her color his waterline. A second later she's done the other eye. This is usually when she's finished, but she turns and grabs another pencil and a little brush.
"Okay, what are you doing?"
"It'll look good. Hold still." He can feel the pencil smoothing under his eyelashes, and then the brush slipping back and forth.
"What color is it." It's too close to his eye to focus on, and all he can see is a gray blur.
"Medium gray."
"My eyes aren't going to swell shut, are they?"
"Nope. Bought these for you."
He hadn't known that. "Thank you."
"No problem. Okay, almost done, mascara."
"This really doesn't sound subtle."
"It will be; it's brown."
Tim's eyelashes, like his eyebrows, aren't actually black; they're dark brown. So when he wears black eyeliner or mascara it's not subtle at all. It's very clear that something is different. Meanwhile, dark brown does draw more attention to his eyes without making a clear "Look, I've Got On Eye Makeup!" kind of statement.
He holds perfectly still for another minute while she finishes up.
"All pretty?" he asks, something of a wry smile on his face.
She kisses the tip of his nose. "You're lovely." Then gets up from his lap. "Go look."
Okay, she was right, it's subtle, and he's surprised at this, not very girly, either. His eyes just look bigger and greener.
She's standing behind him with her chin on his shoulder. "You like it?"
He's nodding. "Yeah, I do. It's cool."
"Yes, it is. Now, out of here. I'm going to get dressed and want it to be a surprise."


He whistled when she stepped into his office, eyes tracing her body from head to toe. "Oh Abby!"
A surprise was a black cheongsam with green and silver dragons worked over the… it can't be silk, it's stretchy over her belly, but it's got a silk sheen and looks silky. Her hair's up in a bun, and she's got black lacquered chop sticks in it. She's done something with her eye makeup so they look more almond shaped than normal. And to top it all off, (bottom it all under?) is a pair of dainty, little, black silk slippers.
He more or less leapt to his feet, closing on her fast, licking his lips, wrapping his hands around her waist.
"God, you're so beautiful."
She grins widely at that, the gasps when he picked her up and set her on his desk.
"Tim?" she asks as he's kneeling in front of her, pushing the skirt of the dress up.
"Dinner can wait, this can't! Look so good, got to taste you."


So, they were running fifteen minutes late as they walked, (both of them looking awfully relaxed, slightly rumpled, and very sassy) from the Metro stop to the restaurant.
They had paused at the door, waiting for the people inside to come out. Tim was barely paying any attention to them, he's looking at Abby. But she was, so she saw who was coming out before he did.
"Sarah!"
Tim's sister looked away from her friend, saw Abby, saw Abby's tummy and said, "Abby, oh my God! Look at you! Tim posts pics, but…" Her hand is hovering over Abby's tummy, waiting for permission. Abby nods. "She's really in there," Sarah says as she feels Kelly moving.
Abby and Tim are grinning at this. "Yeah, she really is," Abby answers.
Sarah's still looking at Abby's tummy as she says, "I can feel her kicking! That's so cool." Then she seems to notice there are other people with them. "Abby McGee, this is Amber Greenwalt, my editor. Amber, this is my sister-in-law." Abby offers her hand and shakes, wondering why Sarah didn't introduce Tim, but that question is very rapidly answered as Sarah says, still focusing on Kelly, "You going to introduce your friend?"
Tim laughs at that, and the sound of his voice causes Sarah to jerk, looking up and really seeing him. "You've known me your whole life, Sarah."
"Holy shit, Tim!" Granted the lighting isn't too bright, and he is wearing a hat, and she didn't really pay all that much attention to the guy next to Abby, having homed in on the pregnant belly, but still, not recognizing her brother felt really weird. "Are you wearing a kilt?"
"Yes. I do get dressed up for date night, you know."
"Oh my god!" Her eyes are on the verge of falling out of her head they're so wide open right now, and he's smiling, a second from laughing.
"Good oh-my-god or the whole-world-is-about-to-implode oh-my-god?"
"Who the hell are you and what did you do with Tim?"
"It's really me."
"No, it's not. Tim tries to be cool and ends up looking like a dork who's trying too hard. Pseudo Tim or whoever you are actually looks cool, thus, who the hell are you?"
He laughs at that. "So, where's that man of yours?"
She smiles. "At home, this was a working dinner for me."
"Working how?"
"Oh God, sorry. Amber, Tim McGee, my brother. You know him as Thom Gemcity."
He shakes Amber's hand. "Final edits?"
Sarah shook her head. "Super top secret writer stuff. If it works, I'll tell you about it."
"Uh huh… And when will you know if it worked?"
"Round about Christmas-time. This works out, and I'll have a big announcement for all of you."
"Cool."
She steps back and really looks at him again, nodding. "Looks good."
"Thanks."


They're tucking into some really delicious miso soup when Tim asks, "So, what did you add to the honeymoon pack?"
Abby grins. "Not sure I should tell you."
"Really?" Tim's grinning and very intrigued, soup forgotten.
"Yeah, I'm fairly sure that's not the sort of thing Ziva told Breena and I about to have it blabbed around."
He sighs, exaggeratedly loud. "Well, if you shouldn't tell… You shouldn't tell… But you know, he is the guy who picked the lock to my apartment, heard us having sex, and still walked in on us so he could see the action. He's got a lot of bad privacy karma to work off, you know…"
Her smile widens. "Yeah. I do. Okay, you cannot say anything about this."
He's grinning. "I never do. What was it?"
She takes another sip of the soup, then says, "Everything you ever wanted to know about oral sex. You said it had to fit into the bag, so it's three mini books of basic, intermediate, and advanced technique. He, like a lot of guys, isn't nearly as good at it as he thinks he is."
Tim laughs, really, really hard at that. He's practically crying by the time he calms down. "Tony Motormouth DiNozzo's not all that hot with oral?"
Abby nods.
Tim starts laughing again.
"It's not that uncommon of a problem, lots of guys think they're a lot better at it than they actually are."
That stops Tim cold. He's staring at her, voice sounding very wary as he asks, "What do you mean by lots of guys?"
That makes her laugh. "Not you."
His look is questioning.
"Really, not you."
"But you'd tell me, right, if it was me?"
That makes her laugh even harder. "Have I ever had any trouble telling you how to get me off?"
"No."
They stop talking for a few seconds as the server clears away the soup and puts several sushi rolls in front of them. Abby takes that break to switch from sitting across from Tim to next to him. Not only is it easier to share food that way, but they can talk a little more quietly.
Once settled, she says, "Look, back the first time we dated, you mainly had enthusiasm and a willingness to take orders going for you. And that'll get you pretty far. I've yet to meet a woman who wasn't thrilled by a guy who'll dive in and eat pussy like he's starving and it's every favorite meal he's ever had, and who doesn't act like it's a fatal insult to his masculinity to be told that he needs to adjust his technique. But, you might remember, I was telling you a lot of left, right, harder, up, use fingers, sorts of things, too."
He nods, chewing. He does remember the first few times he went down on her that yep, she did give him a lot of directions, and he was more than cool with that, because the idea was get-Abby-off, and anything that made that more likely was something he was in favor of.
"Am I still doing that?"
"Nope."
She picks up a piece of their Tokyo roll. "Between then and the second time we got together, you got some technique to go with enthusiasm, and baby, you give head like a woman… Like a lesbian."
He thinks about that for a second, taking a sip of his sake. "That's a compliment, right?"
"Oh yeah." She grins and nods.
That got both of them thinking, which meant they both started their questions at the same time, followed by a few seconds of you-go-first-no-you, finally they settled on Abby going first.
"So, you didn't really date, not a whole lot, how did you get that good?"
"I didn't get a lot of hands… mouth on practice, but I did research the hell out of it."
"Research?"
"I'm not a woman, and when I wrote the T.M. Gee books I needed to convincingly write one, so… I watched and read a ton of porn by and for women. Lots and lots and lots of it. For a few years there, I had a lesbian porn collection that would have made Tony jealous. Or maybe not, cause it was real lesbian porn, not lesbian porn for men, which is, well, not really the same at all."
She's laughing at that. "And you would know."
He's nodding, grinning. "Oh yeah, I would know! Anyway, lots and lots of lesbian porn and the main thing I learned about oral was: your tongue isn't a dick, so don't use it like one; no woman ever got off from tongue thrusting. If you're a guy, and you're doing that, it's because it gets you off. Also, there's a whole lot more to a pussy than just a clit, so play with all of it, and don't narrow focus until you've hit endgame. Once I had the theory down, practice kind of took care of itself."
"Ah… So, what did you want to ask me?"
He's looking a little sheepish at this, but he is curious, and he's never actually asked… He eats another bite of their dinner, putting it off for another few seconds.
So, the thing is, Tim knows Abby likes girls, at least on a theoretical level. They occasionally check out the same girl at a club, and tag team story telling sometimes involves other women. (Like Breena for example, or the girl they're both checking out at the club, especially if they happen to be at the club while telling the story.) But he's never flat out asked if she's had sex with another woman, and she's never flat out said.
So he smiles, hopes learning the answer to this isn't going to bite him in the ass, and asks, "How do you know?"
"How do I know what?" She licks a drop of the sauce off the tip of her chopstick.
"That I give head like a lesbian."
Her eyebrows shoot up, and she looks shocked. "Did you not know that?"
He rolls his eyes a little. "Would I be asking if I knew?"
"Practical experience."
He nods, noticing a complete and utter lack of jealousy, files that under interesting things he'll think about later, and says, "So you've had girlfriends, too?"
"Never with one of them long enough to qualify as a girlfriend. Not that I was ever great with relationships before you, but… basically, I like sex with girls and boys, but do friendships better with girls and relationships better with guys."
"So, you really are bi?"
"I couldn't care less about the label. It's just skin, you know? And it feels good rubbing against mine, so if I like the person inside the skin, we're good. And about one out of five times that skin was shaped like mine. I guess whatever you are is your default idea of normal, because, like, I can see you don't like guys, but I can't figure out why."
"Just don't."
"Yeah I know." She'll looking a little perplexed by this, but settled at the same time. Like she's talking about a puzzle she's come to terms with never solving. "You love Jimmy. He's objectively attractive. You're both good at and very enthusiastic about sex. And, nothing, from either of you."
"Yep." Tim's nodding away at that, because, well, yeah, he agrees with it. He's never felt even the slightest desire to do anything sexual with Jimmy even though he does A: love him, and B: as guys go, Jimmy's in really good shape.
"You'd rather watch Breena and I make out, no touching on your part, just frustrated watching, than have him get you off, even though that would actually result in an orgasm."
"Again, yep."
"And somehow that makes sense to you," she says sipping her tea.
Tim shrugs. "I'm not sure it makes sense. It's probably not logical. It just is how it is. I mean, I read things, back in college, about how we're born bisexual, and get shaped into straight or gay, but if that's true, I can't ever remember a time where I felt that way. I can; however, remember being three and having a crush on one of the girls in my preschool."
Abby smiles at that.
"So, yeah, like girls. Love girls." He stroked her face. "Love you. And yeah, I'm well aware of what we did this afternoon and the fact that I've got on eyeliner, nail polish, no body hair below my eye lashes, and am wearing a skirt as I say this, which means I'm probably the swishiest straight guy you know. I'm certainly the swishiest straight guy I know. But, yeah, no interest in guys. Just, none. And given how my first semester of college went, if I had had any interest in guys, at all, I probably would have been sleeping with them just to piss my dad off."
That makes her chuckle, and he kisses her gently, enjoying this conversation.
"But you don't think it's icky?" Abby asks.
He thought about that. "Not sure what you mean."
"You got a really uncomfortable look on your face when the idea of putting my clothing on came up."
"Okay, yeah." That does it for him. He knows what she means by icky. "And honestly, I don't know. If I've ever been hit on by a guy, it was subtle enough I didn't notice it."
"You got felt up by one when we were in New Orleans."
"Okay, true, and yeah, I remember that feeling weird. Mostly because it took me so damn long to figure out it wasn't you doing it. But I was also kind of drunk, insanely turned on, and in a serious party mood. Hit me with that sober, and I might not be so cool about it." He thought about that some more. "Okay, honestly, it was about on par with hugging Diane."
"Gibbs' Diane?"
"Yeah. It was just weird. Someone I didn't want in my personal space pressed against my body. Not fun. It wasn't gross or anything. Like, I think Tony threw up after he kissed that guy, and there was nothing like that. I just didn't like it."
"Fair enough. I'm just glad you don't think it's icky that I like girls."
"You know, I don't think that's ever going to be a problem for me. Not sure I want you bringing any real live ones home…" He thinks about that and the fantasies they tell each other. "Okay, yeah, I want you to do that… But when my dick isn't doing the thinking, I realize that might end up being a lot messier than I'd like."
Abby nods and smiles. "I love you. That's never, ever going to change. If just us is what makes you happy and comfortable, then just us is fine. But, the offer for more is always open. It's just got to be a two way street. Any time you're willing to play with a guy; I'm all for bringing home a girl. Or both at once: Jimmy and Breena would be willing to play with us."
His eyebrows shot up. He's not entirely sure what that feeling surging through him is. A whole lot of surprise, but there's something else there, too, and he doesn't know what it is. Finally he pulls himself together enough to say, "You know that for a fact?"
She wiggles her hand a little, signaling sort of. "Breena's interested. Like you, I'm not sure if Jimmy's cool with it. We've talked about it, but I don't think she's talked to him about it."
"Oh." That idea, Breena and Abby talking about the four of them having sex together makes his mouth go dry and his dick twitch. "You two talk about us…" He's not sure what the right word is, not even sure what precisely they're talking about, so he tries a few. "Foursoming? Swapping? Swinging?"
"A few times. And as a foursome. Either all of us or none of us."
The flash of that image, all four of them tangled together in bed is simultaneous very sexy and terrifying. "Like just messing around talking, or like talking?"
Abby's eyebrows furrow, and she eats another bite of her sushi. "I don't understand what you're asking."
"Are you guys serious about it?"
"Enough to have figured out that it would have to be all four of us together. If it's all four of us, well… On the good side, we all get to see and touch and play. On avoiding the bad side: no jealousy, no wondering, we'd all know exactly what the others are doing."
Tim swallows hard, takes a drink of his water, swallows again. He's honestly not sure if he's so turned on he's going to fuck her through the wall here and now, or if he's so scared he's going to wet his kilt.
Abby strokes his face. "What's going on? I have no idea what that expression on your face means."
"Probably because I don't, either. You two really talk about this?" There's a hefty dose of amazement in his voice.
"We talk about lots of stuff."
"Yeah, but… Do you talk with Ziva about stuff like that?"
Abby smiles at that. "No. Though she's the one who got the conversation between Breena and I started. She saw how we were playing with each other to wind you guys up and asked if the four of us were sleeping together."
"When was that?"
"Remember the girl scout fantasy?"
He nods. Yes he remembers that, fondly.
"Remember how we were dancing with each other before that?"
He nods at that, too. Yep, he liked that a lot, as well. All three girls all close up and rubbing against each other. He could be dead, and he'd still like that.
"So, we're dancing, you're looking like you want to eat us alive, and she asked."
"Oh."
"Next day Breena and I got talking with each other about it."
"Huh. That was almost a year ago. You're just mentioning it now?"
"Didn't come up before now. Not like there's any rush, is there?"
"What? No… At least, I don't think so… No. Shit..." He spends a long minute just looking at her, kind of confused, partially wondering if this is a game to wind him up. "Really, you two talk about this?"
"Yeah, we do. Last time was when we were getting Tony's presents. You look really confused."
"That's probably a good word for it." He feels like, maybe, if he could get some more rules in place, some more of an idea of exactly what's going on, he can find his footing again. "So, like a one off thing, or regular, like, just playing or… what, becoming a…" he flounders around for a word that would cover this, "quadruple?"
"We were talking about it as a one off thing, with an understanding that if it was fun, we'd probably do it again."
The fact that Abby and Breena have it this far planned out stuns him. Then he realizes what she said, and he's able to identify part of why this scares the hell out of him. "What if it's not fun?"
She smiles, and he can see that's a concern for her, as well. "And that's why we're not in any rush. That's why we talk about it. Do you think it'd be fun?"
"God, I don't know! Yes? Have your best, hottest fantasy come true, sure, that's good. Assuming Jimmy or I didn't freak out. Big fucking assumption there. I mean, you and Breena and… But Jimmy'd be there too… Really, I don't feel any need, at all, to have sex with him watching. Joking around about it or talking is one thing, doing it with him… I don't know. I mean, yeah, I love Breena and… but…" He's gesturing with his hands like they can somehow fill in the blanks in his sentences. "Okay, the night before we got married, he was joking about sleeping with you, and I almost hit him. Seriously, my hand was in a fist, and I was going to punch the shit out of him. And, I'm not feeling that right now, but he's also not actually here."
Abby nods. "I think when they lost Jon, something shifted with you two."
Tim thinks about that, remembering holding Jimmy as he cried, and realized that that's the most intimate he's ever been with another guy, and not only did it not freak him out, but it felt really right. Same thing with sleeping with him and Breena when they got home. Someone he loved was hurting, and touch is comfort, so it didn't matter that the body in question was male. "I think you're right about that, but… still… that's a huge leap."
"I know. And look, nothing we do is going to upset this. We love them. They love us. We love each other. They love each other. Anything ever happens it'll be because of that love, not in spite of it." She touched his face again. "You okay?"
"Yeah. I am. Just, lots to process."
"Well, don't think about it too hard. Still got stuff to do tonight." Her hand slipped up his leg. "Oh. Hard might be the operative word. Seems like at least part of you likes this idea."
"Yeah, well that part of me isn't in charge for a good reason. It likes lots of stuff that might not be great ideas."
That got a laugh out of Abby. She leaned in close, licked his ear lobe, and said, "And it really likes the idea of me and Breena, sitting on the sofa, talking about sex with each other and our favorite guys, doesn't it."
He groaned at the idea of that. "Oh, fuck yes!"
"Wanna hear more about it?"
"Yes, but not right this second. We took the metro here, and I'm wearing a kilt. Everyone in DC doesn't need to see me with a hard on."