Keryl Raist's Blog, page 34

Shards To A Whole: An NCIS Fanfiction

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

Chapter 75: The Ring


Since the move, Gibbs’ place has been on the way home. It’s only about six minutes, round trip, out of his way.
So, yeah, he’ll be a little late getting home.  And sure, Abby probably knows something is up, ‘cause it’s not like he couldn’t have given Gibbs the coffees at work. But as cover lies go, coffee delivery is plausible.
He knocks (Tim always knocks. Yes, Gibbs has an open door policy, but he always knocks anyway. He doesn’t wait to be let in, but he also doesn’t feel comfortable just walking in unannounced.) and opens Gibbs’ door feeling... nervous? Probably not. There’s no fear here, just a somewhat pleasant buzz of energy. So, excited? Eager? Yeah, probably eager. He wants to show off what’s in the tiny black box in his pocket.
He heads down the steps and waits at the bottom one. Gibbs is doing something with what he thinks is a chisel, concentrating hard, and he’s not going to interrupt.
Finally Gibbs looks up. “McGee?”
Tim steps off the bottom stair. “I have something I wanted to show you.”
He slips the box out of his pocket and puts it on the piece of wood in front of Gibbs. “It’s for Abby, and since you’re practically her dad, and definitely the guy who’ll be giving her away, I wanted to talk to you about this first.”
He doesn’t look up at Gibbs while he says that. He keeps his eyes on the box while he opens it.
The jeweler had looked at Tim’s stones and started playing with them. Eventually, he laid one of the diamonds next to the garnet, fat sides close to it, and the other, on the opposite side and down a bit, creating something that looked like a rose with two black leaves. From there he started to sketch a setting: a delicate vine-like filigree of black titanium. And, once it’s on her, it should look like a red rose with black leaves wrapped around her finger.
Gibbs looks at it for a long time, taking it out of the box so he can see all of it from every angle. Tim’s on the verge of feeling nervous, until he notices a smile creeping onto Gibbs’ face.
Gibbs closes the box and hands it back to Tim. “You did good, Tim.”
“Thanks, Boss.”
They sit there quietly, while Gibbs goes to get the bourbon, pours them both a shot, and hands him a cup.
“I’m glad it’s going to be you.”
McGee is prouder of having earned those words than just about anything else in his life.
“Got any advice for me?”
Gibbs laughs a little at that. “Like I told Palmer, I’m the last person you want to go to for marriage advice.”
Tim shrugs, that’s probably fair enough. He sips his bourbon. “Got any honeymoon advice then? From what I’ve heard, you’ve been on more of them than anyone else I know.”
Gibbs laughs full out at that and takes a drink of his bourbon. Then he smiles, looking quite amused, and maybe a little surprised at Tim’s last comment. Tim realizes Gibbs might be about to make a joke.
“Leave the cuffs at home, cut your ropes twelve to fifteen feet long, thread them under the mattress or box spring if there’s enough room. That’ll give you plenty of room to play, and you won’t have to explain how you broke the bed the next morning.”
Okay, not a joke, but that was definitely good-natured teasing, and after a second’s thought, where Tim contemplated how few of the beds they ran into while traveling had any useful bits to tie things to, he realizes, that was also awfully good advice.
“I’ll keep that in mind.” Tim simultaneously shakes his head and laughs. Then he remembers something. “I’ll be back in a sec.”
He sprints up to the car and grabs the brown paper bag. Abby said he should wrap it, but he’s a guy, and wrapping presents for other guys just isn’t something he does. In fact, as a guy, he didn’t even own wrapping paper until he ended up with a half share in Abby’s. Then he runs back down to the basement and hands the bag to Gibbs.
“Here. I don’t know if you’ll like any of them, but when we were traveling I kept thinking you might.”
Gibbs opens it and looks inside, then pours the contents out. Four small vacu-sealed bags of coffee fall out. One is basic coffee with chicory from New Orleans. The next was from a roaster in Austin, he figured something called Black Death was probably a dark enough roast for Gibbs. The other two were from Portland and Seattle. In each city he told the guy at the roaster’s that he wanted the strongest, darkest, most stand up and eat the spoon while you try to stir it coffee, which resulted in these two bags.
“They might be terrible. I don’t know. I don’t like my coffee as strong as you do.”
Gibbs smiles at him. “Thanks, Tim.”
“Okay, I should get home. If Abby asks, I was giving you your coffee.”
Gibbs nods, holding the bag of Black Death in his hand, looking fairly interested in it.


“So...” Tony said.
Tony, Ziva, and Palmer were all waiting at his desk as he walked in the next morning.
“None of you can say anything about this. I’m asking tonight, so no wrecking it!”
“Our lips are sealed,” Ziva answered.
“I’ve been keeping this quiet for eight months, you think one more day is going to break me?” Jimmy said.
“Come on McLovin, show it to us!”
“McLovin?” Tim’s sure it’s a reference to something movie related, but he doesn’t know what.
“Movie trivia later. Get that bad boy out of your pocket and show us!” Palmer said, and then blushed scarlet when Tony began laughing hysterically.
Tim slipped it out of his pocket. He’d ditched the box in favor of the small velvet bag it came with. On the off chance, and by chance he means utter certainty, he ends up hugging Abby, he doesn’t want her wondering what that small, hard, square thing in his pocket is.
He opened the bag and then slipped it onto his own index finger, twisting his hand so they could see it from all angles. “Ta da!”
Ziva did that thing where she inhaled sharply and went quite. Which was the reaction he was hoping for. Tony went oddly quiet, too, just staring at it.
Palmer nodded and took it off his finger, studying it carefully. “This is beautiful, Tim. She’s gonna love it.”
“I really hope so.”
Ziva took it from Palmer, and slipped it onto her right ring finger, seeing how it would look on a hand. “It’s stunning, McGee.”
Ziva was staring at it when Gibbs walked up and gently slapped him upside the back of the head. “Wrong girl, McGee. That one’s waiting for DiNozzo to get his ass in gear.”
Tim laughed so hard he felt like he was going to hurt something while Tony stared at Gibbs like he’d just been stabbed in the back. When he calmed down, he took it back from Ziva, tucked it into the bag, and slipped it back into his pocket.

Shards To A Whole: An NCIS Fanfiction

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

Chapter 73: Home Again


The downside of vacation is that you get back and find out work didn’t stop while you were away. So, walking into the Bullpen, staring at his desk, he saw what looked like a literal ton of mail and reports.
It took four hours to get through it.
And for some reason, Tony and Ziva kept looking up at him and smirking.
“What?”
“Keep looking. You’ll find it eventually,” Tony said.
“Six or so more inches down,” Ziva added.
He felt a thrill when he finally saw it. There was only one thing that he was waiting for in a Fed Ex envelope, at least, only one thing he wasn’t sending to their home.
Tony and Ziva were watching him, and both of them were grinning at him when he found that envelope.
“Come on, open it!” Tony said.
Ziva came over to his desk.  If she could have opened that envelope by looking at it, the ring inside would have been in full view.
He stared at the overnighted package in his hands, and looked at them. “You can see it tomorrow. I’ve got to talk to Gibbs before you two see it.”
“Talk to me about what?” Gibbs asked, coffee in hand, heading toward his desk.
Tim put the package down and shook his head. “Not for now. Tonight, after work?”
“Fine. You two, back to work. Those reports aren’t gonna fill out themselves.”


He heads down to autopsy at close to the end of business that day. A good six inches of paperwork needed to be at least initialed by Jimmy.
“Where are you going?” Tony asks as he got up with the piles of paper.
“Autopsy.”
Tony gets up, too. “I’ve got some, too.”
Tim raises an eyebrow at him. Asking him to take his papers down made sense. Going with him, not so much so.
Once they were in the elevator Tony flicks it off and says, “Okay, come on, show me.”
“No.”
“You took Ziva with you when you got the stones. You showed Jimmy the sketch when you used him as cover to see the jeweler. You can at least let me see the finished ring first.”
Tim thinks about that for a moment. It’s not that Tony’s wrong so much as that he’s just not right, either. There’s a way these things get done, and Tony’s just not the guy who gets to see this first. So, Tim sounds a little regretful as he says, “No. I really can’t. Gibbs sees this first.” Then he smiles at Tony brightly, “But I can ask you to be my best man and stand up with me when I marry her.”
Tony grins. “I’ll take that. First thing tomorrow though?”
“First thing.”
Tony flicks on the elevator and they continued down.

A minute later, while Palmer was initialing away, he asks, “So, the kilt, is it comfortable?”
“Yeah.”
“Not too drafty?”
“Didn’t bother me.”
Jimmy just nods and keeps initialing papers.
Tony’s staring at him. “Don’t tell me you’re thinking of one.”
Jimmy shrugs. “Looked good on Tim. Breena thought it was cool. Everyone tells me they’re comfy.”
“Who is everyone? McScott over there is the only person I know with one.”
“Are you sure about that, Anthony?” Ducky adds, coming up behind them. The ten minute long soliloquy on the history of skirts as menswear and the warrior tradition of kilts, from the Roman Legions to the Scottish troops in World War I wearing their kilts in the trenches was on point, informative, and set Tim to smirking widely at Tony.
“And of course,” Ducky begins to wrap up, “with the current, and tragically narrow, American understanding of masculine identity, absolutely nothing says I-have-testicles-the-size-of-cantaloupes like wearing one.”
Tony drops his papers. Jimmy and Tim laugh. And Ducky settles into a pleased smirk.


Back in the elevator Tony says, “So they’re comfy?”
“Yeah.”
“Come on, I’ve seen you naked. No matter what Ducky says, they aren’t the size of cantaloupes, and you don’t need that much room to swing around.”
Tim gives him a mildly exasperated look that says, You’re missing the point.
“But that’s not the whole reason for wearing one, is it? I mean, you’re wearing it in like a third of the pictures Abby posted.”
Tim flips off the elevator. “Just one of them. First off, kind of short on space. Traveling with Abby and practically a portable MTAC meant that everything I took with me had to be worn over and over. Secondly,” He debates how to, or if, he should say something like this to Tony, and decides going too into it isn’t a great idea. But in general... “I imagine it’s like how you’d feel in five thousand dollar hand-tailored suit. You wear something like that, you feel good.” Tony nods, he gets that. Maybe not how a kilt might make you feel that way, but he certainly gets it for a suit. “Third, you own anything Ziva really likes you in?”
Tony seems to think about that for a moment. Which makes Tim think the answer is no. Because the level of ‘likes you in’ he’s thinking of should not require thought.
But finally Tony says, “Yeah.”
“You wear it more often because she likes it?”
Tony smiles. “And Abby likes you in a kilt?”
“Yeah. She does. She really likes me in a kilt. You like Ziva in a skirt?”
“Yeah, who doesn’t?”
“Why?”
“Why?” Tony seems deeply puzzled that anyone would ever ask him that. Ziva in a skirt is so obviously a good thing on so many different levels he’s having a hard time figuring out how to break that down for Tim.
“Yeah, what about her in a skirt makes you happy?” Tim adds.
“I like the way she looks in one.”
“Good. Anything more than that?”
Tony smirks. Tim considers that answer enough and gives him a meaningful look. “Well, Tony, that works both ways.”
Tony seems to think about that. “So, you’re saying there’s a certain ease of access.”
“Yeah. Ever get a blow job when you’re driving?”
Tony nods, looking surprised. And Tim’s not sure if he’s surprised that Tim would ask or that he’s had at least one, too.
“What? I do vanilla sex.”
Tony shakes his head slowly. “Blow job while driving is your idea of vanilla sex?”
“Not if I’m going over sixty.” And Tim is very pleased that he managed to say that with a straight face,  because the way Tony responded to it was just perfect.
Tony closes his eyes and sighs, then opens them slowly. “Okay, I’m sure you had a point before that deluge of TMI.”
“Just, think about it.”
“This really isn’t the place to be thinking about blow jobs.”
“Not that kind of thinking. The mechanics of it. I mean, it’s great, as long as she’s really careful, otherwise the zipper gets you. And you can’t really spread your legs, so she can’t get to everything. Kilts don’t have zippers and they don’t limit your mobility.”
“Hmmm.” Tony appears to be appreciating that idea.
“Exactly.” Tim looks at Tony for a few seconds, thinking about what Tony’s been wearing over the last six months. “What does she like you in? You aren’t wearing anything more often than usual.”
Tony smiles. “Something you don’t get to see.”
“Ahhh...”

Shards To A Whole: An NCIS Fanfiction

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



73. Portland, North Dakota, Kansas
The dream of the nineties might still be alive in Portland, but neither of them saw any proof of that.
What Abby did learn, and granted this was something she had a somewhat firm handle on, but had never really seen in action, is the fact that Tim might be a certifiable genius.
It’s not a shock or anything. The guy’s a federal agent, bestselling author, and a computer wizard. Tim is not, by any stretch of the imagination, an intellectual lightweight.
But there’s the two of them talking geek to each other, which usually leaves the rest of team NCIS in the dust, and then there’s Tim with Steve and Dan.
They lived together for a year while at MIT. Tim getting his MS in forensic computing, Steve was getting his PhD in pure mathematics, and Dan was working on a MS in computer learning.
About ten minutes into a mind-blowing dinner (and not just for the conversation. The sushi and sake is beyond excellent. Abby’s not the only one who looks like she wants to lick the plate.) the conversation’s ranging from Beal’s Conjecture to machine learning, to Tim’s own sandbox, forensic computing, and back again into esoteric math, with a smattering of string theory, and some astrophysics to round things out before they got into the intricacies of MMORGing.
Abby’s no slouch in the science department, and she’s got brains coming out the ears (and the MENSA certification to prove it.) But even she got a little lost when the three of them got talking about Dan’s current project. She understood they all thought it was sexy as hell and beyond awesome, and she got the basic idea, feed the program a problem with a ton of variables. Then the program crunches the numbers in a bunch of different ways. Pretty straightforward. Then it somehow figures out which of the answers were the best. So it combines the programs that got the best answers, mates them with each other to come up with even better answers. And keeps doing that. On its own. Supposedly, eventually coming up with the ultimate version of whatever formula would answer the question it had originally been asked.  But when Tim and Dan got talking shop on the actual programming she and Steve just sat there and stared.
Finally Steve said, “They used to do this for hours. I’d finish my homework, they’d be talking and messing with their computers. I’d go to bed. I’d get up the next morning, they’d still be at it.”
“Nah, we just did that to mess with you,” Dan said. “We’d break off for Warcraft when you went to sleep. That’s why we always had better gear.”
Tim just smiled, and the conversation slipped to life in academia, which Tim and Abby didn’t know much about first hand, but didn’t have any trouble keeping up with.
Finally Dan asked, “So how’s being a Fed? Did it work the way they promised?”
Tim nods. “Pretty much. Better really. Met her my first year.”
Steve just stared at her for a moment and then said, “You’re a cop?”
“No. I’m a forensic specialist.”
“She runs our lab.”
Steve grins. “Good, the world makes sense again. No one as smart and sexy as you should be a cop.”
Abby smiles at Tim, “He’s a cop.”
“And he’s nowhere near as sexy as you are,” Dan finishes.
Tim whips out his cell phone. “Lots of sexy at NCIS.” And shows them pictures of Ziva and several other co-workers.
“Damn, if I had known all the beautiful women were Feds, I would have taken them up on their offer,” Dan said.
“We both got offers from Federal Agencies,” Tim adds to explain Dan’s comment.
“Machine learning was pretty hot for the FAA and all four branches of the military. But CMU gave me a better deal, so I went with them. I’m still surprised Tim didn’t end up with the CIA or IRS, they gave him way better offers than NCIS.”
He shrugs a little, Abby staring at him. “The CIA was willing to pay for my doctorate as long as I got it overseas and paid close attention to the people around me while I did it. IRS offered a ton of money and a car.”
“Why did you take NCIS?” Abby asks. She knows about the thing with his Dad, and wonders how it actually went down.
“You ever meet Nick Armstrong?” Tim asks.               
She nods, he was an agent out of the Mike Franks mold. After he lost an eye and was taken out of field work, he became a recruiter for NCIS.
“He asked me if I was John McGee’s kid. I said yes. And he said, ‘Screw this behind a desk bullshit. Come with me, you’ll put real bad guys in jail, carry a gun, and get the girl, while using your computer skills.’”
Abby looked amused. “Yeah, he would have said something like that.”
“It took ten years, but he was right.”
“So they do let you carry a gun?” Steve asks.
“Yeah. I’m actually really good with one now.”
“Huh.” Dan looks really surprised. “We took him shooting once, and he flinched every time the gun fired. He did manage to hit a target, but not his own.”
He looks at Abby, “Remember when I told you that Jim Nelson got me through FLETC? That was the help I needed. I couldn’t shoot to save my life.”
“Not a problem anymore,” she says with a little smile.
“Nope.”
“If he’s showing off, he’ll shoot a smiley face in the target at 200 meters.”
Dan and Steve just stare at him, and he can see the image of him they have in his mind, twenty-three years old, all three of them at the range, flinching each time anyone fired, and not having anything that anyone would ever consider a good time.
Tim shrugs. “You get to a point where just head shots aren’t very challenging.”
Dan’s shaking his head. “Wow.”
Tim grins. “So tell us about Tokyo, you did a fellowship there, right?”


“Where are you?” Tony asks the next day over the video connection. It always surprises Tim how different MTAC looks from this side of the connection.
“Montana.”
“What the hell is in Montana?”
“No speed limits.” Tony looks irked by that, but Ziva smiles. “So what’s up?”
Tony begins to fill him in on the case and how they’d hit a snag trying to get through the suspect’s firewall.
“Okay, let me patch into my work computer. I’ll have something for you in a few hours.”
“Thanks, McGee.”


“Damn, it’s cold,” Tim says as they step out of the car, facing Amerly, ND.
DC in January has nothing on North Dakota in October. There were a few ghost towns Abby wanted to see, so, since they had the time, and it was in the right general direction, North Dakota went on the itinerary. Real ghost towns, the stuff of so many legends, how could that not be awesome?
But he’s not exactly having a grand time. It’s too cold, too dead, too ruined, and with the wind howling away, not nearly quiet enough.
As they stood on a windswept plain, flurries dancing around them, a barn, a church, a feed lot, two houses, and a forgotten crossroads all slowly being eaten by the prairie, Abby said, “How about we head south from here?”
“That sounds like a really good idea to me.”


They were sitting on a bed in a hotel room in Aberdeen, South Dakota, Tim writing an email, Abby updating their Picasa album, when she said, “I got a good one of you.”
He came to a stop a minute or so later and looked up. “Let me see.”
She flips her computer around to him, and he looks. “Not bad.” It’s not so much of him, as a picture he happens to be in. It’s from the second ghost town they had seen, Reslin. Once upon a time, round about 1900 close to three hundred people had lived there. Now it was just wind, a few buildings, and grass that spread out forever.
He’s standing in front of the church, because all of these little towns had churches, and though the homes and barns and farms and schools all slowly fell apart, people kept going to the churches. Every one of those towns they saw, the church was the building in the best upkeep, because it was the last thing abandoned.But no one had lived in this town since 1952, and even the church was listing about thirty degrees shy of vertical.
He’s standing in front of it, the only thing in the shot upright. The church, the ground, rolling in long soft swells, and the three houses still standing in the background were all at different sloping angles. The wind was whipping around, fast and hard, pulling on his coat. Standing there, staring into what looked like endless of miles of nothing that had ever been touched by the hand of another man, he could understand how wind could drive a person mad.
So, it’s not any sort of happy picture. It’s mostly shades of weather beaten gray and brown, dead grass yellow. His coat is khaki, so he sort of blends into the color scheme. And he’s not looking at her as she took it, his face is in profile, eyes far away as he scans the horizon. But yeah, it’s a good picture.
“I like it.”
She smiles at him. “Thanks.”
“Any other good ones?”
She flicks through a few of the other shots, mostly the prairie going on forever and ever with tiny little hints that humans had been there, and vanished, sticking out like wind beaten tombstones.
He goes back to his email, updating Sarah as to how the trip was going, and then finished up. He stands up, stretches, and looks out the window. Downtown Aberdeen isn’t precisely a metropolis.
“So, what are you thinking, check out and hit the road, or have some dinner and sleep here?”
Once they got east of the mountains they went back to driving at night. With the moon only a few days past full, the views of the sky were amazing, even if the actual prairie was a bit dull.
“How about we head on? Maybe make St. Louis by morning?”
“Sounds good.” He closes up his computer and begins to pack up his gear. When he finished, he sat next to her, and saw she still had that picture up on her computer.
She looks at him looking at it and kisses his cheek.

“What time is it?” Abby asks.
He gets her asking, they’re tearing along an empty road, millions of acres of dried corn stalks all around, top down, sky wide and bright above them, full moon waning amid millions of stars, now is not a good time for her to look away from the road to check the clock.
“11:23.”
“Good.” She hits the break and pulls them over.
“Okay,” he says, wondering what was going on. There isn’t anything special he could think of for this time of night.
Once the car stops, she unbuckles and crawls into his lap, straddling his legs and wrapping her arms around his neck.
“Hi,” Tim says, looking fairly puzzled.
“It’s 11:24, October 23rd.”
“Yep.” He’s nodding, hoping she’ll let him in on what’s up soon.
“You have no clue why this is important, do you?”
He’s shaking his head. “Not a one.”
She laughs. “Think hard.”
An idea hits, and he squints a little. “I thought that was next week.”
“It’s today. This time a year ago, you were telling me you loved me over a milk shake.”
He smiles. “Best decision I ever made.”
“I’ll second that. I have something for you.”
“Really?” His eyebrows shoot up.
“Yeah.” She tugs her purse out from behind his seat.
“I don’t have anything for you. Thought I still had a week.”
“You think our anniversary is Halloween?”
He shrugs. “Well, for the sex part of it. I guess the date part happened on the 30th.”
She looks like she wonders how he could have lost a week, so he says, “We got dressed up in costumes; we went out. I wasn’t paying all that much attention to the date. Paying much more attention to the beautiful woman I was with.”
“You are forgiven. For the record, it’s the 23rd into the 24th.”
“Am making a mental note.”
She found her MP3 player. Then took a moment to disconnect his and hook hers up to the car stereo. A second after that she noticed that it wasn’t going to play with the key in the off position, so she reached over to turn it to on.
“It’s nothing big. Just… I suck at poems, and this said it better than I did the nine times I tried. So…”
“You wrote me a poem?”
“I tried. Then I set them on fire.”
“No.” He sounds pained at that. The idea that Abby wrote him a poem really appeals to him. “Don’t do that. I would have liked to have seen them.”
“They were bad, really, really bad.”
“They were yours.” He pets her face and kisses her.
“They were still really bad.”
“So was the first one I gave you.”
“No, Tim, it wasn’t. It was just young and enthusiastic. And the stuff I was coming up with, it was bad, really bad, objectively bad. Breena and Ziva both told me they were bad, too. And not, oh-that’s-so-cute-bad, but oh-god-what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-you-that-you’d-even-try-that-bad.”
“I doubt that.”
“I bounced the last one off Jimmy, and he winced.”
“Ewww.” Okay, that probably meant it really was bad. “I still would have liked to have seen them.”
“If I ever try again, I’ll keep that in mind. Anyway, this isn’t bad.” She shifts so she’s sitting across his lap, feet in the driver’s seat, her head on his shoulder, his arms around her, and hit the play button.
Music that was very un-Abby eases out of the speakers. Though, as he listens he thinks it’s not so much un-Abby as just not something she’d usually listen to. There’s a sweetness to it that does remind him of her. Soft piano, gentle and almost tentative sounding. A woman’s voice, breathy with a bit of country sound began to sing.
Inside my skinThere is this spaceIt twists and turnsIt bleeds and aches
Inside my heart there’s an empty roomIt’s waiting for lightningIt’s waiting for you
And I am wantingI am needing you hereInside the absence of fear
Muscle and sinewVelvet and stoneThis vessel is hauntedIt creeks and moansMy bones call to youIn a separate skinMake myself translucentTo let you in, boy
I am wantingI am needing you hereInside the absence of fearThere is this hungerThis restlessness inside of meAnd it knows that you’re no strangerYou’re my gravity.
My hands will adore you through all darkness andThey will lay you out in moonlightAnd reinvent your nameFor I am wanting I am needing you hereI need you nearInside the absence of fear.
And then the song drifted off, leaving them on a quiet road in the middle of Kansas, a bit of wind and dried corn stalks rustling against each other in the background.
“I still have all of them, you know? Every poem you’ve ever written me. They all live in that little mahogany box with the jade rim. And I wanted to do that for you, or something like it. I wanted to give you that feeling, that someone loved you enough to find the right words and lay them at your feet. But my own words weren’t working and the harder I tried the worse they got and--”
“Shhhh.” He kisses her lips, stilling her flood of nervous words. Then he took the MP3 player from her and hit the repeat button. “It’s beautiful. What is it?”
“Jewel, Absence of Fear.” She kisses him. “You make me fearless, Tim.”
He kisses her. “Thank you.” He smiles, glowing at her with the joy of this. “And those are the perfect words.”


For Abby: Fearless Under the Stars
We drive at nightBecause we belong there.In cool darkand gleaming starlighttouched by time eternalGlistening silver and blue
The stars are fireCollected and shared with us by the moonAnd the car is earth shaped by manWe are water given form and set walkingAnd the wind dances around us, flows over your skin
We are not eternalWill not beCannot beThough the light isTraveling millions of yearsMillions of milesTo touch your face
I would be the light for youBorn of a starTraveling to the end of the galaxy and beyondTo touch your skin
And you the moon for meSharing that caressLetting the rest of the universe see love made light
Together we’ll light the darkAnd find a few seconds of immortality.

The last day of the trip saw them going over the Blue Ridge Mountains. Sunset into night, a crescent moon hanging over hundreds of miles of flame colored leaves.
It was a very good way to end the trip. 

Shards To A Whole: An NCIS Fanfiction

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

72. Home


Like with Abby in the graveyard, getting oriented takes Tim a little while. The neighborhood is fairly similar, but landmarks he used to know, like the white house with swing set in the front yard is now blue and the swing set has been replaced by weeping willows, are gone or changed.
But he still knows this neighborhood, knows it in his bones, even if the landscape has shifted a bit.
He could just punch the address into the GPS, but he wants to find this on his own.
Wants to make sure it’s still there, inside him, somewhere.
And it is.
“Haven’t been back since ’97,” he says to Abby as they turn onto yet another residential street in maze of residential streets.
“What happened in ‘97?”
“Lots of things. My mom and dad finally divorced, and she moved back here for a few months. It was the last summer I came ‘home’ from college, so I also ended up here for a few months. I hadn’t planned on coming back. I didn’t summer after freshman year. But Pop was sick, and Mom was trying to get resettled with Sarah, so an extra set of hands was useful.”
He pulls up in front of a clearly empty, but cared for, house. It’s old. Built around the turn of the last century, maybe a little before. It’s light blue with darker blue trim, a large wrap around porch, and Victorian lines.
“My mom grew up in this house. Pop and Gran got it right after World War II.”
As they get out of the car Abby says, “What do you think? Maybe some place like this for us?”
He nods. It’s aesthetically pleasing, and this sort of structure has good memories of family attached to it in his mind. “We can’t go in. I didn’t think to ask for a key before we left Texas.”
“Don’t want to break in?”
“Nah. Didn’t bring my picks, either. And there’s nothing inside. They’ve been holding onto it since my grandmother died. Between the market being lousy and this being a fairly nice neighborhood, they keep talking about maybe using it as a summer home after they retire. I think mostly my mom just doesn’t want to really let it go. If she sells it, her childhood, and a lot of ours, is really gone.”
He sits on the porch steps, and she sits next to him. He points to the far end of the porch. “There used to be a swing there. I’d sit next to Pop, and we’d rock, watch the sun set, talk. A lot of my better childhood memories are of this porch.” He points to the spot just behind where they parked and smiles a little. “Got my first driving lesson there.” He pats the step right next to her and smiles. “First kiss here.”
“How old were you?”
“Thirteen. It was summer. Jessie Malone lived,” he points three houses down the street, “there. My dad was away. I’m sure my mom found being in a house with just us lonely. So we stayed up here that summer. Jessie and I were both too smart, too bored, too shy, and liked astronomy. Pop let us play with his telescope. Spent a lot of nights watching the stars, so nervous I felt like I was going to explode, and floating on a cloud every time her hand brushed mine. Last night of summer, she leaned over and kissed me before running home.”
She smiles at that story. “What happened after that?”
“We wrote each other for a while. Then the Admiral got home for two years on land, so I spent a lot of time fighting with him, so my letters to her got further and further apart. I didn’t like writing about that. And I don’t know what was going on in her life, but her letters to me cooled down, as well. Next summer, I came back here, and by then her family had moved.”
“Was she pretty?”
He smiles. “Her hair was long and brown, and she’d wear it in two ponytails.”
She grins back at that.
He stands up and offers her his hand. “Here. Wanna see something cute?”
“Sure.”
Still holding her hand he leads her to the backyard. And while it’s true that he hasn’t thought of this in years, probably decades at this point, his body knows where it’s going. In the far backyard was an old oak tree with a long branch perfect for sitting on about four feet up.
“It seemed higher when I was a kid.” He boosts himself up, and she follows. “I don’t think the next level up will hold us, but see that branch there?” He points to one about four more feet above them and she nods. “Okay, look on the trunk about three feet above that.”
She does, seeing the heart with TM+JM carved into it, and smiles brightly at him. “You’re right, that’s so cute.”
He smiles. “I really liked her.”
“You spend a lot of time in this tree?”
“Yeah. I’d sit up there, lean against the trunk, and read.”
They sit there for a few more minutes. He’s swinging his feet, something else that brings back memories of being a kid. Finally he says, “We should probably get back on the road if we want to make Portland by sundown.”
“Okay. Thanks for showing this to me.”
“Not a problem.”
“I like having images to go with the idea of you as a kid.”
They’re about ten feet away when she turns around and takes a shot of the tree, and then as they head toward the car she gets one of the porch.
Once they get in the car she says, “You’d prefer I didn’t put this on Facebook, right?”
He nods.
“No problem. I just want them for me, and one day, our kids.”
He smiles gently at that, liking the idea of telling their kids about his grandfather.

Shards To A Whole: An NCIS Fanfiction

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


Two days later, Tony looked over Ziva’s shoulder at her Facebook feed. “You see, that makes sense to me.”
Abby in a cocktail dress, leaning over Tim’s hand, blowing gently on dice. Tim’s wearing what Tony considers a surprisingly nice suit, dice in one hand, the other on Abby’s hip.  
The next shot, the two of them with Penn and Teller got a smile of approval from Tony, as well. He’s not a huge magic fan, but those two are hilarious. Good to see Tim and Abby got to see a cool show. He wonders a little at how much backstage passes must have cost.
The shot after that, Abby dancing with Teller, has Tony reaching for his cell phone.
“McGee, why is Abby dancing with Teller?”
“Tony?”
Tim sounds sleepy, and Tony realizes that it’s 7:00 AM Mountain, 6:00 AM Pacific, and he has no idea which one of those time zones they happen to be in.
“We’re looking at Abby’s Facebook feed. She’s dancing with Teller. How did that happen?”
He can hear Tim sitting up, and waking up a little. “That was our dinner date. He’s a fan, Tony. Five years ago he sent me a letter, saying if I ever got to Vegas to look him up. We got there. We looked him up. Saw the show, which was awesome, and had dinner with him, Penn, and both of their wives. It was a blast.”
“Huh.”
“Can I go back to sleep now?”
“Yeah, sure. Sorry.”
He looks at Ziva, completely stunned by that, and then tells her what McGee had told him, wrapping up with, “You know, people really read his books.”
“Yes, Tony. I know that. I read his books.”
“But the second one was so... undefined.”
“It was an unfinished rough draft. Did you ever read the version he published?”
“No.”
She gets up, walks to her bookshelf, grabs a copy and tosses it to him. “Give it a try.”
Four hours and three quarters of the book later, Tony looks up. “You just like this because you’re all super-bad-ass-assassin, killing people right and left and looking mega-hot while you do it.”
She smiles a little at that. “I do not mind that. It is a good story, too. And once I got over ‘Lisa’ and ‘Lisa and Tommy’ it was interesting to see how McGee understood who I was and am. He doesn’t see everything or understand everything he sees, but he does sees different things about us, probably that we don’t see, or don’t want to see, about ourselves. I do not know if he’s right about the things he writes about Gibbs, but I felt like I understood him better after reading these.”
Tony nods; he can see that. “So, there’s another one after this?”
“Yes. And he finished the fourth one about a month ago. Abby tells me there’ll be a fifth one, and that he’s got a contract for three more after that.”
“You guys talk about his books?”
“We talk about all sorts of things. But yes, his books as well. Breena’s read them, too.”
Tony smiles, remembering Pimmy Jalmer. “How’d she take that?”
“She thought it was funny, and enjoyed the symbolism of being intractably attracted to and repulsed by the finality of death, and the futility of trying to overcome it with the actions of life.”
“Uh...” He’d read that scene and just about wet his pants he was laughing so hard at the idea of Jimmy wanting to have sex with dead people. He’d completely missed there was anything besides his Probie messing with the Autopsy Gremlin.
“She’s a very deep reader. But once she said that, I re-read it, and yes, that’s in there.”
“Okay.”
“And according to McGee, that’s what he was going for in that scene, so he was pretty happy that at least one other person read past the sex with dead people into what it meant.” 
“Kinky bastard.”
“That, too. But he’s also a good writer.”
Tony stares at Ziva, eyes slightly narrowed. Okay, he knows about some of Tim’s interests, but how does she know that? It’s certainly not anything he’s ever mentioned.
“How do you know that?”
Ziva laughs at the way he’s looking at her. “I thought you knew? When Vance showed up, and reassigned all of us, McGee and I spent the weekend together, consoling each other. We got to know each other very well.”
Tony drops the book. Ziva laughs harder. “I’m sorry Tony, no, nothing like that. When I have lunch with Abby and Breena, the conversation can get a little...” she stops and thinks, “personal. I know a lot about Jimmy, too.”
Tony goes white. “Oh God. So they know...”
Ziva smiles. “Nothing you would not want them to know. And just like I’ve never mentioned what it is that I know about Jimmy or McGee to you, Abby and Breena do not blab to them.”
“So, you talk with them about sex?”
“Yes, and I know you talk with McGee about it, too.”
“We’re guys, talking about sex is something we do.”
“We are girls, talking about sex is something we do.”
“Yeah, but you don’t do the whole, guess how many times I got laid last week, sort of thing.”
A small mischievous smile crosses Ziva’s face. “Are you certain about that?”
“I was… Do you do that?”
“Rarely, and neither do you and McGee, not anymore.”
“Not ever really. It’s not fair when one of you is so far above the other. If I come up with three in  a week and he’s got three in a year, it’s just sort of sad.”
“Is that why you were so off when he and Abby started dating? You were in a dry spell and he was racking up seven or eight  a week.”
Tony shakes his head looking incredulous. “Seven or eight? What does he, run on batteries?” Ziva just smiles. He sighs. “No. That wasn’t it. He had the balls to say, screw twelve, I’m getting Abby. He was ready to move forward with her. And she was ready for him.” He touches her face, gently, “And I was dreaming of you, and neither of us were ready, yet. And it was frustrating. And I was jealous as hell. And none of you told me, which was worse. And he did talk to someone, but it was Palmer. And I didn’t notice what was going on, but you did, which made me feel like an idiot. Add in walking in on him and Abby, and it was just a bad week.”
She nods. “I’m sorry you found out like that.”
He shrugs a little. Not like Ziva didn’t tell him to mind his own business. “So, what did I miss? How did you figure it out?”
“Nothing you could have picked up on, at first. Your sense of smell isn’t as good as mine. He’d come up from the lab smelling like her, and it only happened when he was down there on his own. Then at Jimmy’s wedding, as we were going in, he saw a ‘friend’ at the front desk and told me to go in while he said hi. If he had seen a friend, he would have introduced me. If he was getting a room, he would not have. He was staring at her during the vows. I don’t read lips well enough to know what he mouthed at her, and I’m honestly not sure he knew he was doing it, but he was. They both vanished for about twenty minutes during the wedding, and when we saw him again, he smelled like her and was looking very relaxed. By that point I was certain enough to tell him he didn’t need to give me a ride home. He gave me his keys, I drove the Porsche up to the Blue Ridge Mountains, which was fun, and then we talked about it on Monday when he picked up his car.”
He thinks about that and then says, “So, besides talking about sex, what do you and Abby and Breena do?”
“You mean, do we gossip, try on makeup, and do each other’s hair?”
Tony seems to appreciate that image, he’s certainly grinning happily at it. “Something like that.”
“We eat, we talk, we usually split some insanely calorie rich chocolate-based dessert. Sometimes we go shooting.”
“Of course.”
She smiles. “How else are we going to wipe the floor with you guys every time we play laser tag if we do not practice? You, Palmer, and McGee keep getting better, so we have to as well."

Shards To A Whole: An NCIS Fanfiction

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

70. Arizona


In retrospect, driving through Arizona, at night, in a Porsche, with no lights on was probably a bad idea.
But the moon is edging toward full, the stars are a million miles closer out here than they are back in DC and with the headlights on you just can’t see the desert all that well. It’s more than light enough to drive, and he’s got the running lights on so other drivers (not that there are any) can see him well enough.
The only good luck on this was that when he saw the flashers in his rearview mirror that he had only been going ten over the limit.
The cop who pulled them over looks to be, maybe, and Tim thinks this is a generous assessment, seventeen-years-old.
This is probably what he looked like to Tony when they first started working together.
He rolls down the window and sees the cop, Jeffery, according to his name tag, but for some perverse reason Tim’s thinking of him as Opie, do a double take. Whatever he was expecting to see in that car, it wasn’t Tim and Abby.
He stammers a little. “License and registration.”
Tim hands them over, and Opie checks them out. “Excuse me, sir, do you know how fast you were going?”
“Eighty-five.”
Opie blinks, not expecting that. “And did you know you were driving with no lights?”
“Yes. You can see better without them.”
Apparently that also wasn’t the answer he was expecting. He stares at the car, sees Abby grinning at him, and says, “Can I check your trunk?”
Tim sighs. “No.”
Opie’s not happy about that.
There’s nothing illegal in the trunk. But he doesn’t want this wet behind the ears noob going through his computers or sex toys. Let alone having to deal with getting everything repacked.
He didn’t bring his badge or gun with him. It’s a crime to use his badge for anything other than ID, like to try and get free stuff, and he’s sensitive to how people react to seeing his badge, so unless he’s on duty he doesn’t keep it on him.
“Do you have a computer in your car?”
That also threw Opie—Jeffrey—for a loop.
“Yes.”
“Go onto the Federal Agent Database. I’m Special Agent Tim McGee, NCIS, badge number,” and he rattled off the digits.
“If you’re a Federal Agent, where’s your badge?”
“Not here, for the same reason you don’t get to look in my trunk.” Okay, sure that reason would be, I’m on vacation, but he doesn’t much mind if Opie thinks it’s some sort of special op.”
“Who’s she?”
“Abby Sciuto. I don’t have a badge, but I’m in the Federal Employee Database as well, S-C-I-U-T-O, NCIS, Lead Forensic Specialist.”
Opie heads over to his computer and twenty minutes later, he comes back. “Okay, you two check out. Please, turn your lights on.”
“Fine.” Tim flicks them on.
“You can go.”
And he drove off.


“Someone better be dead,” Tim said as one lone eyeball opened just enough to confirm that yes, Tony was calling him at 5:22 in the morning, or, more relevant, nine minutes after he and Abby went to bed.
“That someone’ll be you if I don’t have an answer for Vance immediately as to why a LEO out of Dolan Springs, AZ was looking you up last night.”
“I didn’t bring my badge along, and I didn’t want Opie looking through the trunk.”
“Opie?” He lost Tony on that one.
“Could we maybe do this when I’ve had more than three minutes of sleep?”
“Where are you?”
“Vegas.”
“Okay. Just give me the really fast version. What happened?”
“Traffic stop. LEO wanted to search my car. I didn’t want him doing it. Told him I was an officer. He checked. He backed off. And we went on our way.”
“Fine. I’ll let Vance know, and he can calm back down.”
“Good.” Tim hung up and went back to sleep.


“Are you awake now?” Tony asks.
Tim’s watching him on Skype. “Yeah.” It was five in the afternoon where they were, eight where Tony was. They’d decided to spend the day sleeping, and then get ready for the evening.
 Ziva pops into the picture. “Hello, McGee.”
“Hey, Ziva.”
“So, what’s the story? Why was Opie checking you out?” Tony asks.
Tim tells him and wraps up with, “And that’s why you don’t drive a Porsche though Arizona at night with no lights on.”
“What do you have in your car you don’t want a cop going through?” Tony asks.
Tim smiles. “The sorts of things I’m not telling you about, either.”
“Why are you driving at night?” Ziva wants to know.
“Better view, no traffic. Oh, by the way, if you thought it was good at one twenty, one forty is amazing.”
“You were driving the Porsche at one hundred and forty miles an hour?” Ziva looks stunned, and Tony’s jaw has dropped.
Abby, just getting out of the shower, wrapped in a towel, crouches next to the screen. “Hey. No, that was me. He didn’t get over one thirty.”
He kissed the tip of her nose. “I might have gotten over a hundred and thirty, but you distracted me.”
“Okay, that’s enough of that!” Tony cuts in, “Did Opie get you going that fast?”
“Nah. We did that in Texas. McGee made sure we knew where the speed traps were going to be so we didn’t get caught. But that was the night before, last night we were going kind of slow.”
“Yeah, not driving one hundred and thirty miles an hour or more with no lights. I wasn’t trying to get out of a ticket. I just didn’t want Opie messing with our stuff. We were going eighty-five.”
“Pretty zippy, McSpeedracer.”
“Speed limit’s seventy-five out there. Not too fast.”
Abby turns the computer to the side a bit so her getting dressed isn’t in view, and Tim moves with it. “Anyway, is Vance pissed?”
“No. There was no complaint or anything. He just wanted to know why you and Abby got looked up last night.”
“That’s why.”
“And you’re in Vegas now?”
“Yeah. Figure we’ll spend a few days messing around here, then head north and west. Hit Portland and Seattle, then back east again.”
“Going to come home married?” Tony asked.
Abby’s not dressed enough to get back into frame, but they hear her say, “Oh no, we’re making all of you come to our wedding.”
“And Gibbs would pout if you got married without him,” Ziva added to Abby.
Abby laughs at that idea. “There’s something I’d love to see. Gibbs pout.” She looks at Tim, smiling. “Think it’s worth it?”
“No, because if he’s going to start pouting, he’s also going to headslap me with a brick. Gibbs likes to spread unhappy all over the place. Plus Jimmy and Breena really would pout.”
“Good point.” Abby nods.
“And so would Harper,” Tim added.
“Another good point.”
“Who’s Harper?” Tony asked.
“Abby’s niece. Got to meet her in New Orleans.”
“You have a niece?”
“Luca and Melody’s daughter. She’s fourteen. Tim’s got three step-brothers and like seven nieces and nephews.”
“Really?” Ziva asks.
“Yeah.”
“And you have never mentioned them?” Ziva asks.
Tim shrugs. “I’ve only ever seen one of them. They aren’t family so much as a bunch of kids who call my mom, Granma.”
“Okay.” Tony gets that. He has no idea how many nephews or nieces he might have if he was to count the kids of all his step-brothers and sisters. He shifts the topic, “So, Vegas, then what?”
“Portland, Seattle, thinking North Dakota—“ Abby says, popping back into view, wearing a cute black lace cocktail dress.
“Abby, what on earth is in North Dakota?” Tony asks.
“Cool ghost towns.” Ziva and Tony look at each other, both of them silently saying, ‘Of course’ with their expression. “And then back east again.”
“Sounds good. Keep posting pictures, we’re enjoying them,” Ziva says.
“You should have seen Gibbs looking at the ones from the Goth club. You’ll appreciate this, McGeek, he was quoting Firefly.”
Tim grins for a moment, then thinks about that. “Tony, why can you recognize Firefly quotes?”
“Palmer held a gun to my head and made me watch it.”
Tim narrows his eyes, disbelief in his gaze. “Nope, not buying that.”
“Fine, I like movies, and if you like movies you’re at least vaguely aware of Joss Whedon, and if you’ve run into Joss Whedon, then you’re more or less required by law to watch Firefly.”
“Uh huh… We’ll talk more about this later. When we don’t have a dinner date,” Tim says.
“You have a date?” Ziva asks.
“Yeah, and I still need to get ready.”
“Who do you even know in Vegas?” Tony asks.
“Big surprise, talk about it later,” Abby finishes, grinning, and switched off Skype.

Shards To A Whole: An NCIS Fanfiction

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

69. Sunrise


They spent a day and a half in Austin, mostly hitting different music clubs, but after lunch on the second day, he suggested they go back to the hotel for a nap.  She woke about three hours later and found Tim sitting in front of his laptop looking at some sort of map.
“What’s that?”
“Every speed trap on an interstate in the West.”
“Every speed trap in the West?”
“On an interstate.”
“Okay. And why do we need to know this?”
He turns, grins up at her, and kisses her. “According to Ziva my car handles amazingly at one twenty. I’ve never had it over ninety. And sitting in front of us is hundreds of miles of pretty much nothing.”
“So, you want to get out there and drive like a maniac?”
“Yeah. You me, hundreds of miles of nothing, the moon rising over us, see if we can blow past El Paso in less than six hours, that sound good?”
“Oh yeah!”


Tearing through West Texas, moon rising high in the sky over the desert, music on loud, Abby at the wheel, racing the good ol’boys in pickups goes into Tim’s I’ve-got-to-remember-this-forever file.
“How did you learn to drive like this?”
“Southern boys love their cars, and my daddy was one of ‘em. You should see what I can do with a pickup.”
“?”
“Oh yeah. Someone had to teach Gibbs how to do a bootleggers turn.”
Tim looks very startled by that idea, and Abby laughs, cranking the music and flooring the gas.



At the age of thirty-five Tim McGee thought he had figured out everything that turned him on. So he was a little surprised at how driving insanely fast with Abby by his side affected him. Not displeased by this, mind you, but definitely surprised.
It was only when he was driving. Her driving was lots of fun, but didn’t make him hard. Maybe it was some deep seeded James Bond thing. Something about going insanely fast in a smoking hot car with a smoking hot girl next to him. Or maybe it was just the adrenaline rush flowing through his veins and making his skin buzz; he knows he read something somewhere about danger being an aphrodisiac. Possibly it was because of the focus required to do it. Driving fast is like hardcore coding, while doing it he was entirely in the zone, but this zone included the car, the road, the clutch, gas, gearshift, Abby’s left leg in a fishnet stocking, and her hand on his right thigh.
But eventually that hand drifted further up his leg, under the kilt, seeming to notice that he was enjoying this a bit more than he had while she was driving.
Which is when his foot hit the break. Not so fast as to cause them to skid out or anything, but there was a certain urgency to it none the less. While he might indeed be enjoying this, he also didn’t want to die for it. Back in grad school he had seen Swordfish with a few of his buddies, and had come to the conclusion that the odds were probably fifty-fifty that if he had a gun held to his head while getting a blow job that he’d be able to crack the code or die with a smile on his face.
And since he doesn’t have to drive as Abby’s hand closes around him, he’s thinking now is a good time to stop the car.
About two seconds after the car came to a stop, Abby was in his lap, and a second after that it occurred to both of them that they were just too damn tall to do this with the top up. So a quick break in the action took place while he got the roof of the car tucked back, and pulled them off the road.
There’s an image, a feeling, he has burned into his mind from this. Sitting in the passenger seat, still buzzing from the adrenaline, Abby on his lap, hands on his shoulders, with her head back, moving fast against him, one of his hands under her shirt, on her breast, the thumb of his other hand on her clit, the sun rising behind them, lighting her yellow-pink, cold air and hot sex flushing her cheeks, while they both moaned and greeted the sun with loud, shuddering orgasms.
Making love in the Porsche as the sun came up over the desert was definitely a treat.


By the time the sun was full up, they were both pretty relaxed and sleepy, so they eased into Bowie, Arizona at a very relaxed place, and crashed for ten hours at the first hotel they came to.

Shards To A Whole: An NCIS Fanfiction

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

68: Back At Home


Ziva flicked on her computer and loaded up Facebook. She was having a bite of lunch at her desk. For a few minutes she just scanned the feed, clicking share on a few cute photos, adding a like here and there, not paying too much attention.
And then she just stopped and stared.
Her jaw must have fallen open because she felt Tony use one finger to gently shut it.
He stared over her shoulder, looking at the picture on her screen. “Okay, I know McGee’s a lot more laid back about this sort of thing than I am, but I can’t believe he took a picture of her sitting on some other guy’s lap.”
The picture in question was Abby, perched on the lap of a Goth in a black kilt.
“Tony, that isMcGee.”
“No...” He looked at the photo a moment longer and saw the tattoo on his right arm. “Oh my God!”
“What are you two staring at?” Gibbs asked as he breezed back to his desk.
Tony looked up. “I’m honestly not sure. I think they went home to the Goth mothership.”
Gibbs drifted over, stared for a second, tilted his head to the side a little. “Is he wearing lipstick?”
Ziva stared at it. “I think Abby was. He’s just got some transfer.”
She flicked to the next picture. Abby still in his lap, his one hand on her hip the other on her knee, and her leaning, fingers in his hair, in to kiss him. “Yes, the lipstick is transfer.”
Gibbs looked, nodded, thought for a moment what Tim was like ten years ago and said, “‘Man walks down the street in a hat like that, people know he’s fearless.’“
Tony stared up at Gibbs, not sure which was more surprising, the words that had just come out of his mouth, or Tim in a dress. “Boss, did you just quote a television show?”
Gibbs shrugged. Emily made Fornell watch Firefly, he liked it, brought it over one night, and then the two of them watched it. Okay, it wasn’t exactly a western, but it was close enough, so they both got into it.
“You did! McGee’s wearing a skirt. You’re quoting Joss Whedon shows. I woke up in Bizarro world this morning, didn’t I?”
Ziva laughed.


That night, while getting ready for bed, Tony noticed Ziva was still looking at her computer.  She didn’t usually take her computer to bed. Usually a book went with her.
He sat next to her and saw another picture of Tim and Abby up.
“Ummm... something you want to tell me?”
She smiles a little. “Do you ever feel the desire to dress up and play?”
He looks at the pic she has up. Tim and Abby, gothed to the nth degree, dancing, his leg between hers, her body plastered to his. He’s smiling, hands on her ass, she’s got her hands around his neck, head back, laughing.
“Not like that, no.” He looks closer. “He’s wearing eyeliner, isn’t he?” Tony shakes his head, some days he really just doesn’t get McGee. Ziva’s still staring at him, and he hasn’t really answered her question. “But, you, me, a tux, a cocktail dress, and a high end casino. That I could get into.”
“And which one of us is wearing the tuxedo?”
“I was thinking you would.” He winks at her. “I’d be smashing in a slinky little blue number.” He shimmies a little as he says that.
She laughs.
“So, would you like to get dressed up and go play someday?” he asks.
“Someday.”
“I’ve got vacation time to burn, and I bet you do, too.”
“Yes. I do. Have you ever been to Monte Carlo?”
Tony grins. That sounds like his perfect idea of

Shards To A Whole: An NCIS Fanfiction

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

66. Faith


Luca had provided breakfast for the next morning, and Tim decided beignets and coffee, at least when made by Luca, was the best possible thing on earth, and eating them on the porch, soft and warm fall breezes whispering around them, was even better.
“Think Gibbs would like this?” Abby looks curious as he puts down his coffee cup. “The coffee. It’s different, but good.”
“It’s got chickory in it.”
“And that would be...”
“Burnt roots.”
“Really?”
“Pretty much.”
“Huh... It’s tasty.”
“Yep.” She looks at her cup. “I don’t know if he’d like it, but he’d probably like the idea that you thought about it.”
Tim ponders that for a moment. “I’m not sure we have the kind of relationship where I get him presents. He’d probably like it from you.”
“Oh no. Your idea. You give it to him. He likes presents.” She says with a grin.
“When has anyone gotten him a present? I mean, besides you?”
“Tony got him that sex dust, right?”
“I don’t think that was intentional.”
“Rumor has it he liked it, though.”
Tim smiles. “You’re hooked into an entirely different rumor mill from me, aren’t you?”
She winks. “What, Diane didn’t tell you about that?”
He laughs. “I managed to keep her from talking about sex with any of her husbands. I’ve got to work with two of them, and with the way we keep bumping into each other, her current husband will likely come strolling through NCIS any day now.”
“And you don’t want the intimate details of any of their lives?”
“I don’t need to know any more about what Gibbs is like in bed than I already do. I just don’t,” Tim says, shaking his head a little.
Abby looks curious, she might be hooked into a very interesting rumor mill, but intimate details of Gibbs’ sex life are few and far between. “What do you already know about him?”
He flashes her a wry expression. “Mostly that the bruises on my wrists didn’t freak him out, and that he had really specific advice for how to pad my wrists. Also he built a bed that, according to him, you could hit with a truck and it’d still be in one piece, as a wedding present for Shannon.”
“Hit with a horny Marine on leave for the first time in six months, you mean.”
“He said, truck, but yeah, that was the subtext. Oh yeah. Taking me to Afghanistan was intentional. Something about appreciating coming home. And he’s going to do it to Tony as soon as he gets the chance.”
Abby nodded, giggling. “So, what do you want to do today?”
“Wander around? Show me your old haunts? See where you grew up? I’m flexible.” She sighed at that and looked sad. “Don’t want to go home without your parents there?” It was a good guess, it just happened to be wrong.
“I can’t go home. Literally. It’s gone. Katrina didn’t just wipe out the Ninth Ward, a lot of the development on the coast washed away, and where we lived with my parents washed away with it.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“It hadn’t been ours for a long time. After they died, Aunt Gert sold the house and the yard. Used the money to put me through college, and let Luca buy his first restaurant. The only thing that’s back there now is their graves.”
He’s not entirely sure how to respond to that. “Do you want to go see them?” He knows people do that from time to time. He doesn’t entirely understand it, but there are a lot of things in the world he doesn’t understand.
“Yeah, I would.”


“We were hoping to go over to St. Benedicts,” Abby says to Luca when they brought their plates in.
“See Mama and Papa?”
“Yeah.”
“Then you should take my truck. Your beautiful car doesn’t have enough clearance to handle the roads out there.”


Tim was certainly aware of the idea of Hurricane Katrina. He saw lots of coverage, watched it fairly intently, wrote a pretty big check to the Red Cross, and watched how it affected Abby, but with all of that it wasn’t real to him.
It was a bad thing that happened far away almost entirely to people he didn’t know and never would.
It’s a bit over eight years later and Beneaux, LA is a ghost town. And seeing it, empty buildings, roads half washed out, plants reclaiming the land, Katrina is becoming real to him.
They’re bumping over a road that had likely been paved before the storm, but now was about a fifty-fifty mix between rutted dirt and patches of blacktop.
“It was a pretty tidy, healthy little town until ‘88. But one of the big shrimpers got sold and moved their base about twenty miles to the east. There was a canning plant until ‘90. When those two went, a lot of the town went with them.
“Luca and I had moved on by then. But we had friends here, people we’d talk to, tell us how things went. People with skills moved on, found new jobs, new homes. Those who didn’t stayed, and kept things ghosting along.  A tired and poor little town on the coast, mostly just scraping by on shrimp.
“Then Katrina came, and it got hit from both the Gulf and the lake. By then I didn’t know anyone who lived here, but we saw the pictures. You could barely tell there was land under the water. It looked like a huge lake.”
She pulls the truck over into what Tim can still identify as a church parking lot, though grass and weeds are eating the gravel paving. The building doesn’t look like it’s in terrible shape, but it also doesn’t look like anyone’s done anything with it in close to ten years.
“Luca says a lot of these places are condemned. Black mold. Water damage. Rot. You can’t go in the buildings. But outside is safe enough, now.”
She gets out, and he follows. For a moment she stands next to the truck, staring at a small, weedy graveyard. He takes her hand in his and waits.
She looks at him and flashes a quick smile. Or at least lifts the corners of her lips, her eyes don’t look happy.
“You really want to do this?”
“Yeah. Haven’t been back in fifteen years. Just getting oriented.”
She starts off and he keeps pace. “Did you used to come a lot?”
“On their birthdays. On mine some years. Then I got the job in DC, and I haven’t been back here since.”
He nods, somewhat curious as to why she hasn’t come back, but not wanting to press. She’ll tell him if she wants him to know.
She stops them in front of a black granite stone.  This one, like a lot of the stones near it, is tidy. The weeds have taken over the ground around it, but the patch right in front, and around the stone, is trimmed. Tim thinks Luca is probably the person who left the small pile of white stones on the corner of the grave and maintains the bit of grass around it.
Gloria Marie Sciuto March 5, 1940-July 17, 1987. Thomas John Sciuto June 16, 1942-July 18, 1987. Tim sees the difference in the dates and realizes that her dad must have lingered for a while. That it wasn’t a quick and done affair.
He wraps his arm around her and kisses her hair.
“You’ve never asked me why I go to Mass,” she says without looking at him.
“True.” He looks away from the marker to her. He couldn’t ever think of a good way, a polite way to say, ‘So, come on, you’re a scientist, what gives?’
“I can feel you wonder about it, sometimes. Especially when we have sex Sunday morning and then go together.”
He nods. “It’s crossed my mind. Not having sex with people you aren’t married to, let alone living with them, was something they spent a lot of time beating into us when I was a teen.”
She half-smiles at that. “Yeah, Sister Murphy was a stickler for that.”
“Father Peter, too.”
She shrugs a little. He had told her about their conversation when it happened. He waits for her to say more than that. She crouches down, her fingers brushing her father’s name. He kneels next to her.
“Everything, everyone dies.”
He nods at that and wraps his arms around her again.
“We all stop. We rot, and we vanish. Eventually even the bones will be gone. The Earth will swallow us whole, leaving nothing.”
He kisses her.
“My parents are dead, Tim. I put them in the ground here almost twenty-five years ago. I’m a scientist. I work with Ducky and Jimmy. I know what happened to them down there. Less than two months ago, I almost put you in the ground. And if there’s no God, then it didn’t mean anything. It just happened, and now it’s over. Them in my memory, in Luca’s... The time we’ve had together. It isn’t enough. If there’s no God, then they’re really gone, and one day you’ll really be gone, and they can’t be really gone, and you can’t really go. I need them to still be there, somewhere.”
He holds her tighter and kisses her again. Feeling her tears on his cheek.
“So, anyway, that’s why I go to Mass. Faith in the promise that love is eternal and we will rise again.” She half-, eyes bright with tears, aware of how silly that might sound to him.
He kisses her again, and wipes away the tears with his thumb. “As long as you need it, I’ll go with you.”
“Thank you.”

Shards To A Whole: An NCIS Fanfiction

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

Chapter 62: Kids


“Have you talked to Ziva?” Tim asks as he steps into the bathroom. “Oh, God, that smells like toxic waste. How can you stand to have that on your head?”
Abby looks up from rubbing the dye into her hair.
“You get used to it after a few times, and for me, a few times was back in the mid-nineties.”
“Okay...” He opens the window. “So, have you?”
“I talked to Ziva today.”
“And...” It’d been a week since they got back from the beach and he doesn’t want to be constantly badgering Ziva, but he is certainly curious.
“No baby.”
He sighs with relief. “And Tony dodges the invisible bullet.”
“Something like that.”
“Is she going to tell him she might have been?” he asks.
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask. You aren’t, are you?”
“NO! The idea of you pregnant just about freaks him out. Ziva pregnant is probably a full on, curled into a ball, rocking back and forth, whimpering panic attack.”
“Me pregnant?”
“Yeah. We talked about it a little when he helped me move. He seemed pretty freaked out. He’ll be a friendly grown-up for Palmer’s kid. But he’ll be an uncle to ours, and that’s already one degree of separation too close for him right now.”
“Why do kids frighten him?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never asked.”
“Maybe you should.”
“Maybe. Could make for an entertaining next stakeout.”
“If she had been, you think he would have been okay?”
“Eventually. And if he needed something that scared him more than a baby to get him right, I would have held a gun to his head until he was.”
Abby starts to smile, and then notices that Tim isn’t joking.  
He shrugs a little—No way in Hell he’d let Tony walk away, no matter how scared he might be—and reaches for his toothbrush, ready to change the subject. “I got my yearly email from human resources telling me that if I don’t use up some of my vacation days, I’m going to lose them.”
NCIS does allow you to save up vacation days. It does not allow you to save them for more than three years at a go. So, in that he’s never used up a full year’s worth of vacation days, each year for the last six years they’ve sent him an email telling him his days from three years previous are about to expire.
“I’ve got forty-three vacation days saved up, and I’m willing to bet you’ve got even more. How about we use some of them to go somewhere?”
“What is this vacation thing of which you speak?”
“It’s this crazy idea that you take a little time, and don’t go to work. You go do something fun. How about it?  You, me, somewhere where the leaves change colors and fall actually happens.”
She thinks about that for a minute. “I’d have to give them enough notice to find someone to cover the lab for me.”
“So, say, I don’t know, a week, maybe two, just you and me, in October.”
“You think we could actually take ten days off?”
“I don’t think it’s impossible.” By which he means that they’ll both have their computers and likely end up working at least some. “Think about it, Tony and Gibbs used to solve crimes with only Kate. They can probably get along for two weeks without me. And if they can find someone who’s half decent with the lab—”
“Simmons out of Norfolk is pretty good.”
“Like Simmons, then maybe you could leave for a while, too.” 
“Where would we go?”
“I was thinking Texas. I’d like to introduce you to my mom and step-dad.”
“Taking me home to meet the parents?”
He smiles and puts the toothpaste on his brush. “One parent, one step-parent, and I’ve never lived in their house, so it’s not precisely home, but yeah, that’s the general idea.”
She smiles at that. “I’d like to meet your mom and step-dad.” She thinks about it. “If we got two weeks off, we could swing by New Orleans and you could meet Luca, Melody, and Harper.”
“That sounds good.”

Four days later he was on a stakeout with Tony, staring at yet another building where absolutely nothing was happening.
“So, what is it with you and kids?” Tim asked.
“That’s out of the blue.”
“Thinking about Palmer, and baby Palmer. And wondering if you can get all the way through the christening without a panic attack.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Good.” Tim sits there quietly, watching the building, hoping Tony will take the opening and just talk about it, because he’s not going to ask again.
“They don’t bug me as much as they used to.”
“That’s good. You still looked pretty creeped out seeing Breena’s tummy.”
“She’s got a person in there. It’s creepy.”
“We’re mammals, Tony. That’s just how it works.”
“I know that. Doesn’t make her having a kid in there any less weird.”
“I suppose.”
Tony’s staring out the window, using the binocs, not that he needs them really, the curtains are closed, so they can’t see in.
He doesn’t put them down or look away when he says, “They’re loud and messy and always sort of damp or sticky. And you never know what one of them is going to do. So you’ve always got to be watching.”
“True enough.” That matched his memories of when Sarah was little pretty well, but he’s fairly sure this is just Tony warming up to getting to the real reason.
“They smell bad, too.”
Tim shrugs. “Sometimes. All people do.”
“Kids need you.”
Tim nods. And there is it.
“They really need you. All the time, no matter what. You don’t get sick days or vacations. If you get bored or scared, you can’t leave because they still need you.”
Tim nods at that, too.
“Get bored and leave, get scared and leave, that’s sort of my MO. I don’t like being needed. That’s part of why Ziva and I work. She doesn’t need me. She loves me, she wants me, and if I screw this up, it’ll hurt, but it won’t break her. But you leave a kid, and you break them.”
Tim thinks that Tony might be selling himself short on that, but he’s not sure, and figures that by this point Tony knows Ziva better than he does. “You need her.”
“Yeah, I do, and that scares the hell out of me, too. But we’re talking kids, right?”
“Yeah.”
“If either of our dads had given a crap about us, do you think we’d be so tied to Gibbs?”
Tim shrugs, he knows for a fact that needing a dad is a big part of why he’s still at NCIS, and definitely why he’s still in the Major Case Response Team. “Abby adores him, and her dad was around.”
“But he’s not anymore.”
“True. At least your dad is trying.”  
“Yeah, he is. That scares me, too.”
“Why?”
“He’s seventy-eight. And if we get close, that means one day I’ll have to say goodbye to him for real.”
“It’ll hurt, no matter how it happens. Ziva hadn’t even seen her dad in two years when he died, and we both saw her when...” He lets that trail off, the memory of Ziva weeping over her father still bright in his mind. “You might as well try to get something you can enjoy now.”
“Probably. But anger would be easier than sorrow.” Tony lets that idea linger for a moment and then says, “Every time I see him lately, I see the man I’m afraid I’ll become. It’s not like I don’t see the similarities. Not like I look at him and can’t feel the part of me that’s like him.”
“How do you mean?”
“I know my mom was the love of his life. And I know he fucked around on her.”
Tim looks surprised, best he knows Tony was thirteen when his mom died, and that’s the sort of thing you hopefully don’t know about until you’re older. “How do you know that?”
“I caught him, once. At the time, I was too young to know what I had seen. He told me his secretary was helping him find something under his desk, but once I got older, learned what a blow job was, I figured it out.”
“Eww.”
“Yeah, that was nasty. A new step-mom every three years didn’t much help with that, either. And he fucked around on them, too. I don’t want to be him, but I can feel it. I’m out with Ziva, who is the most beautiful woman anyone has ever seen in real life. I mean, come on, who gets a Ziva in real life? Zivas exist on TV and in movies so that we can dream about them. And, though only God alone knows why, she loves me. But when I’m out with her, I still look. I still find myself thinking about the women around me. I go out with you and Palmer, and you aren’t looking. You’re all wrapped in clouds of eternal devotion and fidelity or whatever, and I feel like a horny idiot because I’m checking out the waitress.”
Tim pulls up his sleeve and takes his watch off. Then he takes Tony’s hand—Tony looks especially startled by that.—and places his fingers on his pulse. “Feel that?”
Tony nods, looking really disturbed.
“I might be devoted, but I’m not dead, let alone blind. I check out the waitress. So does Palmer. Hell, so does Abby if she’s hot enough.” Tony takes his hand back as his eyes go wide.
“Abby likes girls?”
Tim smiles. “Some of them.”
“Have you two ever...”
“Nah. Just the two of us, and it’ll stay that way. She tells me she’s okay with a girl joining in, as long as I’m okay with a guy, and, well, I’m not.”
Tony nods. “Yeah, that’d be a deal breaker for me, too.”
Tim nods and puts his watch back on. “Anyway, the point is, we all look, we all think, we don’t all do. It’s just part of being alive. Though it’s nice to know I’m subtle enough at it you haven’t noticed me doing it.”
“I feel like I’m out with a couple of married, Mormon, Boy Scouts when I’m with you and Palmer.”
“Jimmy and I spent high school and college getting shot down. And if you’re pretty sure a girl is going to respond to you checking her out by slapping your face, you get really good at looking and not getting caught.
“So you’re saying your stealth ogling technique is self-preservation?”
“Something like that. A woman catches me looking, it’s because I want her to. So, these days, only Abby catches me.” 
Tony thinks about that, seems to appreciate it.
“Still, I also try to limit temptation. Like, okay, I haven’t been in the break room for a while, because that’s where the cookies and candy are, and it’s a whole lot easier to not eat the cookies if I don’t see them.”
“Makes sense.”
“So I don’t go to bars by myself. I don’t flirt with anyone other than Abby. All of my female friends that I spend time alone with are married or so close it doesn’t matter. And sure, I’m still looking and still thinking—You might think pregnant Breena is creepy, but I sure as hell appreciated her in that bikini.—but I’m not going to do anything about it, and that’s all that matters.”
Tony’s giving him the are you insane look. “Breena in the bikini?”
“Oh yeah!” Tim nods enthusiastically.
“You are one sick puppy.”
“Did you somehow not see her boobs?” Tim is gesturing as he says this in a way that gets across exactly what about said boobs impressed him.
“You like them big?”
“Big, small, in between, they’re all good. I have yet to see a breast I didn’t like. And I noticed hers were especially fine in that little green bikini.”
“Okay, yeah, that was nice.”
“All of her is nice. And so is Ziva.”
“Yeah, she really is. Wait, you were checking out Ziva?”
Tim rolls his eyes. “Not blind, not dead.” He shakes his head a little. “Super-hot Israeli assassin turned Federal Agent playing in the surf in a wet bikini in front of me, let alone screwing on a recliner, and, yeah, I’m looking. You gonna tell me you weren’t looking at Abby naked on the beach?”
“I did not look at Abby naked on the beach. Mostly because Ziva was standing right next to me. I did however look at Abby, naked, sprinting down the steps, and I most certainly looked at Abby in a bathing suit on the beach.” Tony smiles. “I didn’t know she had that many tattoos.”
“I think there’s fourteen of them.”
Tony looks puzzled. “You don’t know?”
Tim shoves him gently. “I know exactly what she has on her skin, but like, she’s got the two little angels on her shoulders, they’re a matched set she got at the same time, so is that one tat or two? Or the stitch marks on her arm, there are nine of them, one tat or nine?”
“Got ya.”
They sit there quietly watching the house.
“You ever wonder if you have any kids?” Tony asks.
“Rarely. Every woman I’ve slept with has known how to get a hold of me if she wanted to. And I’ve always been careful.”
Tony nods. “I do. More than enough women who didn’t know how to get a hold of me later, not always careful, and even careful doesn’t work all the time.”
“Condoms work something like 98% of the time, and you’ve been dodging that bullet for years?”
“That too.”
More quiet. Tim gets the idea that Tony’s half-hoping someone will move in that house and kill what he’s saying, and half-hoping to get it out.
“I see kids, and I think about how many I may have failed. How many brown-haired, hazel-eyed people are out there without a dad? My first time, I was sixteen, snuck into a frat party, hooked up with a girl, both of us drunk, no condom, never got her name, never saw her again. For all I know there’s a twenty-eight-year-old out there somewhere with my eyes.”
Tim shrugs, not sure how to be comforting for something like this.
Tony shakes his head. “Hell, I’ve been at this long enough it’s possible I have grandkids. In college, my team made it to March Madness all four years, final four two of them. Girls all over the place. Two, three a night if I wanted them, and trust me, I did. Spring break, more orgies.
“Anyway, I was with Jeanne, and she took me to a baby shower for one of her girlfriends, and there were kids all over the place, and that’s when it finally hit me: sex makes babies. And babies are a ton of work. Dumb, right?”
Tim nods a little, not unkindly, but aware that Tony would deal better with a little teasing to break the intensity of this. “Yeah, I had that figured out by the age of nine.”
“And since then, kids have scared me, I’ve been much more careful, and my dad sleeping with every woman he can catch disgusts me. Because, for all I know, I’ve got a dozen half-brothers and sisters all over the world, also all without a dad.
“So that’s it. That’s the thing with me and kids.”
Tim nods. If this was Palmer, he’d probably give him a hug. But it’s Tony, and Tony would think that was weird, so he doesn’t know what to do besides hope that someone moves out of that house and gives them a way to get out of this.
Maybe God was listening, maybe it was just luck, either way a blue Suburban pulled up and three guys got out, which meant he and Tony had something else to think about.