Keryl Raist's Blog, page 8

Shards To A Whole: Retired

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


Chapter 343: Retired

On Friday Gibbs was…

He doesn't know.

Resigned is probably the best word for it.

All day people have been stopping by his desk to pat him on the back, wish him fair wind and following seas and tell him how much they're going to miss him, and... It's not really touching him, beyond feeling fairly proud of himself for not snapping at them or rolling his eyes, or storming off and hiding in the elevator all day.

He's got his stuff boxed up and is trying to not think too hard about NSA girl sitting at his desk, using his stuff, working on his team, doing his fucking JOB.

He closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, lets it out, and goes to get another cup of coffee (number six of the day, and it's only 10:37.)


After lunch, he heads down to HR. The slow route, which means taking the stairs and visiting the whole damn building.

So much history here. So much of his life is bound to this building, woven through the bricks, flowing through the air.

The HR lady is nattering away about how wonderful retirement must be, and how many plans she's got for when she goes, but he's not listening as he gives her his ID and begins to fill out the mound of release forms.

He's seeing Tony stepping out of interrogation, joking with Ziva, Tim sitting at his desk working on something, Abby dancing in the lab, Duck and Jimmy leaning over one of the tables talking in the morgue. He's in Vance's, Jen's, Morrow's office, talking with them about… whatever.

He's smelling the coffee that goes with those moments, feeling the purpose of knowing what he was doing and why he was doing it.

Nothing lasts forever, Probie. Mike's leaning against the desk he's sitting at, watching him fill out the forms. You had a good long run, and now it's time for something new.

I know, Mike.

Do ya?

Knowing doesn't mean liking.

Mike laughs. Don't I know that!


"Sturm."

"Boss?"

"Hold down the fort. If the batphone rings," Tim jerks his finger toward his phone on his desk, "give me a call, okay?"

She nods. "If someone needs you?"

"You've all got my cell number. I'll be taking texts."

"Where are you going?"

"Upstairs, probably be an hour or so."

"Case?"

"Nah. Just offering some moral support."

She looks at him curiously, and he smiles. "Text if you need me."


Tim timed it right. He gets out of the elevator just as Gibbs is getting ready to step in.

"Here for Leon?"

"No." He steps back into the elevator with Gibbs. "Here for you. How'd it go?" Gibbs shakes his head. Tim pulls him into a hug. "Yeah, I know."

Several moments later, he pulls back. "Now what?"

Gibbs rolls his eyes, wipes them off, and looks at the ceiling. "Grab my boxes and go."

"Want a hand?"

"Nah. Tony and Ziva'll have that. They're waiting for me to get down and 'help me to my car.'" Gibbs knows that's code for get out of the building so they can cry a bit with him, too.

"Then I'll see you at the diner, later." Tim says, nodding, blinking, hard.

"Yeah." Gibbs takes a deep breath, and lets it out slowly. As of 16:30, Leroy Jethro Gibbs is no longer a NCIS Agent.


It's a bizarre party. Usually parties are to celebrate something, and this… There are people celebrating. And it is fun to get everyone together. But the guest of honor is basically going through the motions.

New plan or not, he's not relishing giving up being a cop, and plastering a smile on his face about it is proving even harder than giving up his badge and gun two hours ago.

But, you retire, after twenty plus years, and everyone you've ever worked for or with wants a chance to suck down some free drinks, say a few vaguely true but complimentary words, and pat you on the back before putting you out to pasture.

So, he's there, at the diner, half-sitting on one of the stools, greeting people as they come in and out.

Apparently, Tony and Ziva did a great job of making sure everyone in the entire universe knew he was going. Even Tom Morrow's dropped by to pat him on the back, commiserate on the whole retirement thing (he gave it up last year), and wish him luck. Jarvis has been by, joking about how he's going to have to actually start showing up for those distinguished service medal ceremonies, because the guy who wins them now'll also probably show up to collect them.

Borin's been in. Only for a minute, she got a call before she even got the drink to her lips, but she promised to make sure they got together, soon. He's actually pretty interested in seeing her for more than a minute. Still no ring on her finger. And she did kiss his cheek on the way out.

Burley flew in from Pearl. Cassius Pride, who he hasn't seen in at least a decade, is here from New Orleans. Callen's here, telling stories of Russia. Those three are getting along great, and he's made sure that he'll get a shot to spend some more time with them later. (The idea of the post-party party is actually cheering him up a bit.)

Fornell and Diane have both dropped in. (Not at the same time.) Leyla and Amira. Slater cousins, whose names he doesn't remember, are here to wish him well. (Along with Ed and Jeanie.) The whole extended family is here.

Leon, Lara, and the kids are here. And at some point, Vance'll make some sort of dryly amusing speech about how Jethro's been a pain in his ass for a decade now.

Rachel stops by for half an hour or so. He's not sure if she's watching to see how he handles it, or is offering support to get through it. Either way, and even with not seeing her anymore, he finds it comforting. She smiles and nods at him as she leaves, and he can feel the, 'You're going to be fine' she's thinking at him. He smiles back; he will. Just, not today, and probably not tomorrow or the next day.

Emily, Kyla, and Amira are in the booth in the corner, giggling with each other, eyeballing James, Elaine's youngest son, who's tending bar for this. Amira's really too young for that, but she idolizes Emily, has for years, so she glommed onto her as soon as she got in. Vance's son is glued to his phone, texting rapidly, visible 'why did you drag me to this' rays vibrating off of him.

The food and booze are good. Vance's speech is mercifully short (and genuinely funny).

In only four excruciatingly long hour, the send-off is done.

And Leroy Jethro Gibbs is officially, retired.

Next

Shards To A Whole: Three Days Left

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

Chapter 342: Three Days Left

On Wednesday, Gibbs is bored.

He hasn't felt this edgy without a case in years and he knows why. Three days left.

On Friday, they'll put him out to pasture, and…

And filling out paperwork isn't doing the job. It's not keeping his attention.

He finally gets the all clear for full duty from his doctor and suddenly everything goes silent. No cases. Nothing, at all. Not even a decent theft. Tony's phone might as well be disconnected for all the ringing it's done.

He'd be suspicious that Tony had worked some sort of deal with dispatch, but three of the other four teams out of the Navy Yard are also sitting at their desks filling out paperwork. It's like every sailor and Marine from Baltimore to Norfolk, DC to Charleston, WV, all decided, simultaneously, to go on the straight and narrow.

He glares at his paperwork, grabs his coffee cup, tosses it into the trash, and heads off to get a new one.


It doesn't help. Coffee, which usually quiets his mind and makes him more alert, more able to focus, more able to do pretty much whatever he wants, isn't doing the job today. Probably can't do the job today. Only so much you can ask ground, roasted beans to do.

He's about to head back to the bullpen when he decides there's no rush. It's not like he's got to race to get that paperwork done. What's Tony going to do if he doesn't get it done soon, fire him? He finds that mildly amusing for about ten seconds and then jittery comes back.

Going to his own desk isn't going to help.

So, instead of hitting the up button on the elevator, he hits the B for basement.

He hasn't been down here since the last time Tim worked Cybercrime. He did intend to go down at some point, but he was figuring he'd give Tim some time to get settled in (he knows Tony's doing the same thing, making sure Tim's secure in his own Boss role before anyone else who has that claim on him heads down), but he's not feeling very Bossish, past or present, right now.

And… if he's being honest, he's missing Tim.

The elevator doors slide open, and the first thing Gibbs notices is that it's not dark down there anymore. It was dark the last time he was down here. Just the glow of the computers keeping people from crashing into things.

It's not dark now. The walls and floor are still gray, the cubicle walls are black and lighter gray, which leads to a feeling of dark, but it's not actually dark. It's the idea of dark.

He heads in, noticing the coffee station Tim had been talking about. Looks like more of his goodies showed up yesterday. There's a coffee maker, a bunch of cups, microwave, fridge, two vending machines, a soda machine, and… The Caf-Pow dispenser he was talking about... It's not there yet, but the space is there for it, and Gibbs knows it'll be there soon, all clustered against one wall.

He's walking past a big screen plasma, which he thought was Tim's conferencing area, until he noticed two sofas (black) and three bean bags chairs (dark blue) in front of it, along with a coffee table, and several remotes that look really familiar.

He's not sure, because he's not seeing anyone using it, but he's thinking Tim's got a game station set up there.

He shakes his head at that. But, apparently, if you get to the level of Director, you can mess around with your set up however you like. (It occurs to Gibbs that if he was in charge of the field agents, he probably would have wanted to make sure there was a spot for them to crash, too. Sleeping at your desk or in the morgue isn't a good plan. Of course, Leon appears to be under the impression that you're supposed to take breaks and go home, even when working a hot case, which is probably why there aren't any nap stations…)

There's a divider wall between the tv area and the next section, four collections of desks in little triangles, also walled off into their own sections, two really casual looking techs working away in one of them. In between the desk units is the conferencing area, long table, lots of chairs, whiteboards at the ready.

He sees two of the techs standing next to the whiteboard, writing something, while a third one sits in front of them on the table, talking and pointing things out.

To the left he sees what had been a cinderblock wall switch to glass, and then an open door.

The "office" Jimmy had mentioned.

And Jimmy wasn't kidding. It's a real office. With bookshelves, and a door, and chairs, and blinds that close so you can have a private conversation.

Right next to the door, on the cinderblock wall, is a whiteboard that says:

Rules:1. Never be unreachable.2. Never screw your team.3. Verify.4. Trust your instincts.5. Work hard, play hard.6. Fix it first, apologize later.7. Own it when you screw up.
Gibbs smiles at that. It's very much Tim's little kingdom in the basement. It feels like him. He's been here a week and a half and he's already got his fingerprints on everything.

As Gibbs looks around at everything, he isn't sure what the emotions going through him are. Part of it is the awareness that Tim was beyond ready to go. That they held onto him for too long. He should have been running his own team for years by now.

Part of it is pride. No help. No direction. No double thinking or nervousness. Hell, he didn't even know what the damn job was, but he's got it. And it's absolutely clear that he owns this. It'll take time to get it all ironed out, but this is Tim's team, hell, his department and he's going to be amazing at running it.

Part of it is regret. Day after tomorrow he's gone. He won't be here to see Tim do it. He won't be able to just drop on down and catch up. He assumes this is like when your kid goes off to college, you're happy for them, proud of them, you know it's good for them, you know they need it to be happy, to be the people they want to be, are meant to be, but you know you're going to miss having them in your life every single day.

He watches Tim at his desk. He's focused, typing away at something, fast, eyes scanning over the screen. Whatever he's doing, it has his full attention. Gibbs sighs. No matter how this works, that's gone. Tim won't be part of his daily life, not anymore. None of them will be. Gibbs takes a deep breath at that.

"Hey!" Tim's looking up from his computer, waving him in, smiling at him, cutting his musings short. "What bring you down here? Draga in the weeds?"

"Nah. He's filling out forms like a champ. Just wanted to see you, see your stuff."

"Come on in." Tim stands up and closes the door behind him, offering him one of the chairs, sitting on the corner of his desk. "What do you think?" Once that question would have been begging for approval, the combination of knowing it's a good job, but desperately needing confirmation of that. Now it's just the excitement of sharing something good with someone you love.

Gibbs nods, smiles a bit, turning to see the department behind him. "Lot better than the last time I was down here."

Tim nods with that. "Yeah. It really it. Be better yet, soon. IT's balking a little bit, but they tell me I'll get my new stations for group work or solo work in the next two weeks, and Physical Plant's trying to get out of doing it, but rumor has it they'll be moving the filing cabinets out of here and replacing them with work benches and some actual tools eventually."

"Faster than light bulbs?" Gibbs had been appalled to hear about not being able to change your own bulbs.

"Probably not. They won't give me a firm date. Just, 'I'm on the list,' whatever that means."

"Where are the filing cabinets going?"

Tim shrugs. "Don't know, don't care. Evidence lock up, maybe? Deep storage? I went through the regs, and found out that there's nothing that says I have to have copies of the paperwork on literal paper." Tim points to the glass bowl on his bookshelf that he's got filled with thumb drives. "Until we get the paperwork database up and running, I've got them saving the forms on their computer and to these. They're all coded for each sort of form. I'll get second and third copies, make sure we've got them in storage, and if we ever need any of this crap again, I'll print it out."

"You can do that?"

Tim shrugs. "Legal may have a different interpretation of how paperwork works, but as I said, I checked the rules, and they do not specifically say that I have to have paper copies, just that I have to have copies, that those copies must be secure on and off site, and that I cannot destroy those copies. Same as the regs for emails."

Gibbs smiles. "Eighteen?"

Tim grins back at him. "Exactly."

"Legal's gonna love you."

"If I do my job right, they're never going to notice me, at least, not for this. I've got a conversation coming up with one of them about hiring. But, for this, it's not exactly like I'm going to run up there and say, 'No more paper copies for me!'"

Gibbs nods, looks around, hearing the hum of the computer, a few voices, and what he guesses is probably the ever-present tapping of fingers on keys.

He looks at Tim, half-sitting, half-leaning against his desk, posture relaxed, black leather jacket, red button down, and, Gibbs doesn't shake his head, but having seen the dress code Tim wrote up, he's not surprised, black nail polish. Right now, everything about him is radiating comfortable.

He smiles at Tim. "You're finally home, aren't you?"

Tim nods a bit. "Upstairs was home, too."

Gibbs shakes his head. No, it wasn't. Not like this. He's happier, more satisfied looking than Gibbs has ever seen him at work. "Upstairs was what you needed to do, to be, to get to be the man who could find this home."

Tim inclines his head. Gibbs knows that means probably.

Gibbs stands up, looking around at the office, at the rest of the basement, at the techs working away. There's this huge bubble of feelings, there's pride, and joy, and the sense of loss from not being here, and love and more happy to go with joy, and… and when it comes down to it, he couldn't find the words for it if his life depended on it.

But it must be coming across in his face, because Tim nods at him, smiles, acknowledging it.

"It's good, Tim. You've done good."

"Yeah, it is."

He's half tempted to hug Tim, but they're at work, and he can feel some of the techs are watching… And sure, that likely wouldn't bother Tim, but it feels weird to him, so he pats his back and says, "Okay. I'll let you get back to it. I know you're busy."

Tim nods at that, too. "Job scheduling system went live upstairs yesterday, and Hemmer's team has already found a way to break it." He sounds significantly more excited by that prospect than Gibbs would have expected, but he's guessing that figuring out how to fix it is Tim's current mystery.

Gibbs shakes his head, walking out, hearing Tim's fingers clicking away behind him.


The elevator doors open just as Tony's putting the phone down. Gibbs knows that look, knows the gestures, and heads straight to his desk to grab his bag.

"Murdered sailor in Arlington," Tony says.

And with that, jittery flees and Gibbs settles back into case mode.


Processing away (he's on photos) Gibbs thinks that his first case was like this. A murdered sailor in… It wasn't a suburban home, but it was a home, an apartment, but someone called it home. And it wasn't daytime, it was night. And… actually it wasn't much like this at all.

He was taking pictures. That he remembers. Franks was moderately sure he could handle photographing the scene without messing anything up, so that was his first job.

Franks had been sure that he was good, and that he'd eventually be useful, but Gibbs knows, back in the beginning, that Mike wasn't sure he could put enough of himself aside to do the job. He knows, those first few cases especially, that Mike worried he'd get too caught in what they were doing, get lost in his own experience from the other side. He knows Mike was nervous that Gibbs would blow up and kill someone, but he also didn't mind, too much, as long as that someone was one of the 'bad guys.'

He had been nervous that first day. Didn't know what the hell he was doing. Hadn't felt that way about anything in decades, since being a recruit stepping off the bus. Hadn't felt much of anything about anything for months by that point, so at least nervous was a step in the right direction.

He catches Tony watching out of the corner of his eye, realizes he's just standing there, not taking any shots, and gets to it. Crime scene isn't going to document itself.


"What do you got for me, Abbs?"

The LabRat (He hasn't bothered to learn their names. He should. They work here. They're good at their jobs. But they aren't Abby. It's the male one in his late forties. He ran the lab in Norfolk.) looks up at him and Gibbs mentally kicks himself. They processed the scene, got on their secondary work, (he was on witness statements) reconnoitered back at the Navy Yard, got Ducky's preliminary autopsy report (yes, the knife sticking out of the vic's chest was indeed what killed him), and now he was in the Lab, with the Caf-Pow, wanting to know what was up with the trace.

But it's 23:42. Abby's probably been home for hours now. She only sticks around after 18:00 for floods of trace, and this isn't that sort of case.

"Abby's not here right now."

Gibbs nods, feeling a little embarrassed. "What do you have, then?" He hands over the Caf-Pow and the tech (Corwin? Something like that…) looks at it curiously and puts it on the desk.

"Finger prints. Wife's prints were all over the knife."

"Kitchen knife from her home. It'd be weird if she didn't have prints on it."

"Prints in Duncan's blood." That's not the sort of thing that's common on kitchen gear. "We've also got a second blood sample on the knife. If we can get a sample…" Gibbs knows how that works. A breastbone is hard, stab a knife through it, and if you don't have a good grip, you'll cut yourself, too. Happens all the time.

"We'll hunt her down, see if she's got cuts on her hands. Anything else interesting?"

"No. Looks awfully straight forward. He was in a fight with whomever stabbed him. Ducky sent hair, blood, and skin samples from under the vic's fingernails, and they're all the same DNA. So, you don't have the wife in custody?"

"Missing since this morning. Neighbors heard a fight, called the cops, by the time they got there she was gone, and he was dead. Draga's hunting her by phone and financials."

The tech nods.


It was Thursday morning when Draga got the alert. Credit card activity.

Took them less than an hour to find her. Shelby Duncan wasn't exactly running. She was having coffee at a Starbucks. Was still there, sitting in a comfy chair, reading something on her phone, sipping a latte.

They watched the scene for a minute.

Ziva looks at them, nods to Shelby, takes her NCIS jacket off, she doesn't want to spook her, and heads in. Gibbs and Tony keep an eye on the front. Draga's in the back. When she sees Tony nod at her, she approaches Shelby and quietly says, "Shelby Duncan?"

Shelby looks up, split lip and black eye very visible under some haphazard makeup.

"I'm Ziva David, NCIS," she shows her badge, "I'd like you to come with me."

"Okay." Shelby goes to tuck her phone into her purse, and Ziva tenses, hand hovering over her gun, but all she does is put her phone in her bag and stand up, slowly. As she gets to the van, it's easy to see the bandages on her hands.

"This is about Paul, isn't it?"

Ziva nods, ushering her into their van.

"He's not gonna be okay, is he?"

"No ma'am, he's not," Tony says.

There had been a fragile, holding together by cobwebs sort of feel to Shelby. That's why Ziva had gone in soft and gentle. But that air of helpless damage fled before a brilliant burst of savage joy when Shelby said, "Good. Son of a bitch deserved everything he ever got."


Ziva's on point. She's in the interrogation room, gently pulling the story out of Shelby. Gibbs and Tony stand behind the two way mirror, listening.

It's a bad story, one he's heard too many times.

Awful marriage. The wife who took all she could take, and finally quit, got out, got help, got the restraining order, but just like too many other women learned the hard way, a restraining order is just a piece of paper. And a piece of paper has never, ever, in the history of paper, stopped a man who wanted to make trouble.

But a ten-inch chef's knife can and will and did.


They've got the case wrapped by lunch.

Gibbs wishes he could feel some sort of triumph, go out on a high note. (He supposes there's always tomorrow, or even this afternoon for that, but he's not feeling it.)

But maybe going out on a case like this is fitting.

Maybe keeping in mind that they aren't all wins, that sometimes justice isn't in the cards, sometimes all you could do is hope, and maybe pray some, that the perp gets the best damn lawyer on the East Coast and squirms out of it.

Maybe that'll help ease him out.

Keep him focused on how he'll never have to put another battered woman behind bars.

And it does help, for maybe five minutes, long enough to fill out the first form and stick his name on the bottom, but as his pen scratches the last s on his signature, it fades.

Unless his gut is wrong, and it may be, he certainly hopes it is, this is it. He's never going to bust anyone again. He's never going to put away another murderer, pull lies out of a thief, he'll never find another missing kid, he'll never say to another victim's family, 'We've got him.'

That hits hard enough he has to get up and head to the restroom to get control of himself again.


Ziva's kept one eye on her paperwork, and the other eye on Gibbs since she got out of interrogation.

It's clear he's not in a good place right now, at all.

And when he slams down his pen, and storms off in the direction of the men's room, she glances up at Tony, he nods at her, and she follows Gibbs.

She's probably about fifty seconds behind him, and isn't sure what she'll see when she gets in there. Nothing good. She stops at the door, listening, but doesn't hear anything, and then heads in.

He's leaning against the back wall, jacket folded over the wall of the nearest stall, ripping his undershirt to shreds.

He's got the polo shirt on, but his usual white undershirt is already in about four pieces. He's working on five as she watches.

Ziva gets this. Understands it on a visceral level. Anger is always easier than sorrow. And if you can't kill the sorrow, you might as well revel in anger.

He doesn't look up when she comes in. Or when she gently lays a hand on his shoulder. His shirt makes a very satisfying ripping sound.

She doesn't try to stop him, but just stands there, quiet, present, and about half an hour later, when he's got a huge, fluffy mass of shirt shreds she finally says to him, "Better?"

"A little."

"We can hit the gym next time. You are cleared to fight now."

He nods. That would have helped, too.

"I don't want to go." His voice broke on go.

She wraps him in a hug, stroking the back of his neck. "I know."

Next

Shards To A Whole: Monday Morning

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

Chapter 341: Monday Morning

On Monday, first day of the twenty-four hour shifts, Tim knows he's heading in early and leaving late.

He got in at 04:00, three quarters asleep, but determined to fake awake. He's the Boss, so sure, he doesn't have to work every shift, but he's at least got to be willing to show up for them on occasion.

He's not surprised to see that Ngyn chose a 22:00 to 06:00 shift. When he gets in at four, it's just her and Connon, and everything is awfully quiet.

He heads to the coffee machine, grabs a cup, pops in a Black Death Kcup. (Of course they make Kcups, and as Boss he's thinking that he might begin to appreciate the wonder that is super dark, ultra-caffeinated coffee. It wanders through his sleepy mind that Abby may be pregnant again, and if she is, this week's coffee might be his last caffeine for quite a while… Oh well, he'll buy some toothpicks to prop his eyelids open if necessary.) He winces as he drinks, the stuff tastes awful, but it's got a kick, so his heart speeds up and the sleepiness vanishes.

"Report?" he says, cup in hand, looking at his two overnight techs.

"All quiet, Boss," Connon replies. "My notes on the new job system are in your inbox."

Tim nods. "Ngyn?"

She nods back at him. "Wrapping up Trevet's case so he's free for paperwork database construction."

"Good."

"You need me; I'm in my office."

They both nod, and get back to what they were doing.


For the first hour, he's working on waking up, and reading through Jenner's files on… pretty much everything. He's got a good idea of how to be a Team Leader, and obviously, he's got some ideas on tap for how to change NCIS Cybercrime operations to streamline things, but there's got to be more to the job of Director of Cybercrime than that.

And there is.

His field teams work pretty much on their own most of the time. As adjuncts to the in-the-Field-Teams, (he really needs some new terms for this) they usually work in house on local issues. And for that, they've got almost complete autonomy. Each Team Leader is in charge of that.

It's bigger issues where they all work with him. Terrorism is one of NCIS's big concerns, and when they are working on Cybercrime Terror issues, the whole department works together, under him. Apparently, for those sorts of cases, Jenner did use a system similar to what he's setting up for the run of the mill cases. Whoever was best at it, no matter where they were, got set on the job.

(Though the travel vouchers seem to show that he was actually sending techs to… here apparently… to do the work. Tim's not loving that. Traveling is a waste of time and money unless there's an actual, physical computer in play, and if there is, the techs should go to it.)


In the second hour, when he's feeling a bit more alert, he heads over to Ngyn's cubicle. Like last time, she's bopping away, fingers moving fast, and once again, she's on paperwork, wrap up for Trevet's case from the looks of it.

"Hi."

She jerks a little at that, and looks back at him, "Hi." She's got that nervous, am I in trouble? look on her face.

"So…" He's not entirely sure how to get into this. "I'm wondering… Is it that you prefer to work alone because you're shy, or because you're quite a bit better than the other techs down here and don't like explaining what you're doing and why?" He's fairly sure both of those things are true about her, but he's also sure that this group needs to be able to work as a team, which means she can't be constantly hiding out.

Ngyn blushes scarlet from her forehead to her throat, but doesn't say anything.

"Whichever, or both, it's okay." He's talking quietly. Connon's also got earbuds in, and is on the other side of the conference area, but he doesn't want a shot of him listening in. "I've got first-hand experience in both."

"You're shy?" she doesn't look like she believes that.

"My wife's referred to me as the nervous, little introvert on occasion."

Her eyebrows shoot up at that and she looks like she might want to laugh. He nods and smiles.

"So, I really do get it. But I also get that no matter how good you are, and you are good, this isn't going to be a place for Lone Ranger work styles. We're going to be working with each other here."

She's looks pleased at the praise and nervous about the Lone Ranger bit.

"So, what can we do to make this work for you? I want you to stay. I don't want you having a nervous breakdown because working here is so uncomfortable for you. How can we get you teamed up but still alone enough that you don't feel overwhelmed?"

She thinks about it. "This…" she looks around indicating that she's here pretty much on her own, "helps. And, it's easier to do it online. Just words on a screen."

Tim nods at that, agreeing. "Yeah, it is. Love chat boxes."

She nods, looking eager.

"As long as you've got this shift, it probably will be a lot of email and chat box work."

She looks reassured by that.

"But there will still be times when the other best person for the job is in this room with you and you will need to physically talk to them, or times when you and whoever will need to schedule things so you're in the same place at the same time so you can brainstorm together. So, can you go over and actually talk to someone about a job? You've got great skills; you've got lots of ideas; I'm sure that if you lead a team on a job, that job will be well done. But you've got to step up and talk."

She closes her eyes and bites her lip. It feels a little bizarre to see it from the other side, because obviously, Tim knows what it's like to be on the closed-eyes-and-biting-lip side of the equation. Then she nods.

He smiles. "Good. Okay, I'll let you get back to it."

She nods again.


At 07:00, when Connon leaves, and his next shift starts heading in, he starts to see his change in dress code coming into play. (Tim's planning on shifting his own wardrobe, some, lead by example and all. He's still debating exactly what that'll mean; he wants to make sure the rest of them know it's okay to be whatever form of possible counter culture they may, or may not, be, but at the same time he's the Director of Cybercrime… Either way, today it's a moot point, he's going to wait for a morning where he's awake enough to actually know what he's putting on.) Manner and Hepple are still in office casual. That's probably what they're genuinely comfortable in. But, he's also seeing more jeans, more t-shirts, some flannel button downs, a knit cap and Dr. Who scarf, and several members of both sexes with non-standard nail polish. Two of the male Minions apparently decided shaving was overrated.

From the looks of it, this is the group that most closely matches him. Middle aged, kids at home, spouses they want to see regularly, so they're trying to pretty much match in school hours, 08:00 to 17:00, 09:00 to 18:00, something like that.

He heads out, chats with everyone for a minute or two, checking in on how the new jobs are going, and notices that this is starting to look more and more like a place where actual computer people work.

He smiles at that.


12:00. You up for some lunch? When he gets yesses back from the team upstairs, he heads up to see what they've been doing for the last week.


16:00, the next wave of Minions begins heading in. He's guessing the ones who opt to start around now are his children of the night. He sees one outfit Abby would envy, a nose ring, more jeans and t-shirts, but not a single twinset or polo shirt in sight.

He's also noticing this is the shift his younger workers are on. That makes some sense to him. The part of the crew with no kids is showing up now.

He's got a feeling these are the guys who aren't really even moving before 17:00 if they get to set their own schedules. Patil, for example, certainly looks perkier rolling in at 18:00, ripped jeans, combat boots, a black t-shirt and black leather jacket, than he's ever seen him before.

And as they all head in, one more thing hits him, if he can get this job scheduling thing actually working for all of Cybercrime, it won't matter anymore when anyone is in the office, because he'll have the whole crew, worldwide, working, which means someone will always be available.

That feels pretty good.

So, one more cup of Black Death in his system, he heads back to his computer to read over the notes he's gotten from the Minions who've already taken a stab at his new system, and begins to make changes.


On Monday morning, Gibbs whacks his alarm clock three minutes before it went off. He's done this every morning for the last three years. (Since he started sleeping in his bed again.) He's not even sure, why, beyond habit, that he still sets the damn thing every night, but he does.

Hit the head, brush teeth, put on jammies, set alarm, and go to sleep. That's how every day ends for him.
And, like usual, in full-on habit mode, he's starting off his morning.

Whack alarm, lay in bed for two minutes, get up, hit the head, wander downstairs, heat water, put coffee in the French press, make coffee, stand around kitchen staring into space. (He's not good for much beyond cursing pre-coffee.) drink some coffee, start to feel vaguely human, debate making breakfast for himself, (he used to go visit Elaine three out of four days, but back when he decided he was going to get into better shape, he cut that down to two out of five, and these days at least one of those mornings will be Sunday) apply frying pan to heat, and eggs to frying pan, oatmeal into the microwave, eat breakfast, drink more coffee.

Then exercise.

When he decided that he was going to get into better shape, the plan was start hitting the gym until he could find his abs again. He rapidly came to the conclusion that that was a huge waste of time. (Not the exercising, the getting there and back bit.) So, he'd eat breakfast, and then do his workout at home. (He even installed a chin-up bar in the doorway of the spare bedroom.) He does hit the gym some evenings, and with the kids at Bootcamp, but until he ripped his knee out, he was doing his Marine calisthenics routine every morning at home, followed by a three mile jog.

And then he ripped his knee up.

And then came physical therapy, which he's been doing every morning instead. Then Jimmy and Ziva added the stretching stuff, which, okay, it's hard. It's really hard. It's way harder than anything that doesn't involve moving fast or heavy weights has any business being. But he's doing it. Even though it's hard (and he thinks the positions look dumb as hell, if not a bit beyond that) because his knee does seem to be doing better for it, and his range of motion is getting better, and Jimmy's 'once you get running again' you'll injure yourself less often and you'll go faster, and there's absolutely nothing in your life that benefits from tight hips, back, glutes, or thighs, all makes a distressing amount of sense.

On top of it, the stretching stuff did seem to be good for keeping his weight down, too. Not as good as the running he'd been doing, but better than the nothing he was doing right after he hurt himself.

And somewhere along the line Jimmy got him to explain what he'd been doing (Marine calisthenics circa 1976) and once he stopped shuddering, he re-wrote his whole exercise routine, modified to work with his steadily (but slowly) healing knee. And it's… effective.

He doesn't know why he feels like that should be a surprise. He's seen Jimmy naked. If there's a guy who actually knows how to do this stuff, it's Jimmy. But for whatever reason, the idea that Jimmy knows how to do stuff like this refuses to settle in his mind.

So, upon finishing up breakfast, he's starting with the stretches, twisting himself into every sort of pretzel he can think of, (and a few that, without help, he couldn't have) then comes the sit ups, and the push-ups (all of his weight on his good leg, ankle of the bum one resting on the ankle of the good one.) Something called planking (once again, one legged, though this time he holds the position and switches between the legs. When his left leg gets the all-clear he's supposed to start doing that with the push-ups too.) There's some sort of tricep thing. Pull ups. More stretches. Some sort of vastly oversized rubber band is involved.

And he would tell you it's all pretty damn silly, except for the whole he's lost another three pounds this month and no longer needs to use his nipples to locate his pecs.

It's even possible that he may, at some point, in the next six months or so, if he keeps this up and doesn't eat like a maniac, locate his abs again.


Compared to what he does with himself at home, the exercises Dr. Klenn has him doing are a piece of cake.

And with any luck it's also the last time he's got to eat this particular cake.

He finishes his last squat, shows off, yet again, that he's got full range of weight bearing motion with his knee, and Klenn nods approvingly.

He puts up the MRI results on his computer and looks them over again.

"I think you're healed."

"Good."

"Doesn't mean I want you running marathons any time soon. That knee is always going to be a bit weaker than the right one. So, build it up gentle and easy before jumping into anything strenuous, but you're good for back in the field."

He thought he'd feel… happier… to hear that, but it's kind of flat.

Klenn also looks surprised to hear that. Gibbs has been breathing down his neck for how to get healed up as fast as possible, and this is two weeks earlier than he thought he'd be able to do it.

"This is good news."

"Yeah. I know it is. Just… Friday's my last day. And the likelihood they'll even let me out of the building between now and then is just about non-existent."

Klenn nods, nothing he can do about that. "Then at least you're starting retirement with all of you at full strength. Maybe it is time to start training for a marathon?"

"I don't like running." And he doesn't. He likes what running can get him, speed, endurance, the ability to eat whatever he likes.

"Then try ballroom dance. Whatever you like. Your knee's ready to ease into it."

Gibbs buckles his belt and nods. The problem is, while he's got some possible big plans, he's awfully short of day to day small stuff that he wants to do.


On Monday morning, Tony was feeling a bit apprehensive.

He could say to McGee that Abby had told him she was going to do unspeakable things to him if he got out of the building and got hurt, and that would be that.

But Gibbs isn't McGee, and the threat of bodily harm from the girls if he gets hurt is unlikely to keep Gibbs in line.

So, right now, the only thing he's hoping is that Gibbs won't get cleared for duty.

It's not that he thinks Gibbs isn't ready for duty, (even at a casual glance, it's clear that he's moving the way he's supposed to be moving again) or that he really believes the superstition, but… Okay, honestly… He's talked to Ziva a little about this, and he's a bit worried that Gibbs… doesn't have death wish per se, but that he might be less careful than he should.

That's probably it. Not that he'd be chasing any sort of end, but that fear of what's coming up, not wanting to have to deal with post-retirement life might make him just a hair more reckless, or a few seconds slower, or… just that he'd do something… not stupid, not the way he was back when Tony started working with him and he really didn't care if he woke up the next day or not, but just not as careful as he should be.

He gets in and finds Gibbs already at his desk, working his way through the never-ending slog of paperwork.
"Morning."

Gibbs nods to him and Ziva.

"How'd the doc's appointment go?"

Gibbs looks at Tony's desk, and Tony sees the filled out Fitness Eval. "You passed! Great!" Tony thinks he even managed to sound almost convincing on that.

"For all the good it'll do me." Gibbs not only didn't buy it, but the more he's been thinking about the whole last week thing, the more grumpy he's getting. "You going to let me out of the building this week?"

Tony sighs. Bear Gibbs has come to NCIS today. "Depends, are you going to do the job like Friday's your last day, or are you going to do the job like you know there's a kidnapping coming on Monday and you've got to be here to solve it?"

Gibbs doesn't glare at him, but he doesn't answer either. Tony gets the sense that he's not sure what the answer is.

Tony scoops up the eval, signs it, and puts it in the to-be-filed pile.

Draga came in five minutes later, coffees and treats in hand. "So, are we having a good morning?"

"Enough." Gibbs says as he takes the coffee from Draga, sounding a bit less Grizzly. "Thanks."

"No problem."


McGee heads up at lunchtime.

"Missing us already, Probie?" Tony asks.

"That's Director Probie, to you, Tony," Tim says with a sassy smile. The case that started on Thursday ran long, into early Sunday, so none of them have heard his news.

"Look at you, getting all high and mighty with your new position. Next thing we know, you're gonna want us to call you, sir."

Tim grins in response, looking forward to telling Tony what's really up. "Only you, Tony. Everyone else calls me Boss or McGee. You're in luck though, I'm feeling generous in addition to high and mighty. So, food? I'm buying."

"Sure," Tony says. Gibbs nods. "Certainly, McGee," Ziva replies. "Sounds great," comes from Draga.


So, over lunch he gets caught up on their case, and then tells them about his first week down in the basement. At first he was just talking about what he was doing, moving things around, getting Manner beaten into submission.

"I think I've got him in the right place. Probably more friction in the future, I'm yanking him way out of his comfort zone, so I can't imagine it'll all be smooth sailing from here on out, but at least right now, he's working on proving he can do the job."

"Good for you, Tim," Tony says.

"I would have paid good money to have seen his face after you told him not to call you, Sir," Ziva adds.

Tim's smiling. "It was pretty funny. What I didn't know when I said that is that…" He wants to tell them, but there is a sort of embarrassed silliness that goes with this, so he fumbles a bit getting it out. "Yeah… Um… That actually is my title. That's probably what most of them were calling Jenner. Vance, Craig, Severin, McGee. I'm the Director of Cybercrime. All of Cybercrime. I've got… um… about one hundred and fifty people under me."

They stare at him, stunned. They'd been hearing about his plans, and what he was hoping to do, and how he understood the job: ie NCIS Navy Yard Cybercrime Team Leader for months. The idea that he'd have all of Cybercrime under him had never entered into those plans.

"What?" Tony asks, first one to get his words back. "Back up. Last Monday you were heading down to whip the DC Cybercrime Team into shape, and now you run the whole department?"

Tim nods. "Vance has a sick sense of humor. He knew what I was asking for, knew what I thought the job was, and decided that it'd be fun to sit back and see how long it would take me to figure out I had an entire division under my command."

Tony's got his mouth open, and is blinking at him, but finally says, "So, you weren't kidding? You honestly are Sir to us now?"

"Yeah. I mean, no, don't you dare go calling me Sir, but… yeah." Tim nods, grinning, feeling really cocky and happy.

Draga, who's sitting next to him, breaks into a big smile, shoves him gently with his shoulder, and says, "You are so paying for lunch from now on."

Tim laughs. "I can handle that."

"Director McGee," Ziva says, also smiling warmly. "Congratulations. Are you… okay with this?"

"Yeah. I am. Been there less than a week and I've got two projects cooking to roll out to the whole agency. I mean, it's a little overwhelming, but it feels right, too. I've got… so many more options than I thought I did. Like, you know you want to draw something, and you planned on having the eight crayon pack, and then you see you've got the 124 crayon pack. That's pretty awesome."

"Feels good?" Tony asks.

"Yeah, it really does. So many options, so many ideas, and I've got the power to do most of them. Can't change my own light bulbs, but…" he's shaking his head in wonder… "It's just really cool. Feels like every day I've got more ideas of what we're doing next, and I can do them. Like, okay… This hasn't left Cybercrime yet, haven't even mentioned it to Vance, so, you're not mentioning it, either, okay?" They all nod. "Good…" and he gets talking about the paperwork program he's got them working on.

As he's wrapping that up, Tim notices that Gibbs hasn't said anything, and Tim's wondering about that, but he sees the look, gentle, proud, satisfied, and knows that Gibbs is holding whatever it is he's got for when they're alone.


When they get up to head back to work, Tony hugs him, "My Probie's all grown up. Running his own department." He pets the back of Tim's head. His voice is teasing, but there's real pleasure and pride, as well. "So, you think I need to go check and make sure Vance isn't sitting around, waiting for me to figure out that I'm taking over for him?" Tony asks with a laugh.

"Depends, Tony, when you got your new ID, did it say Team Leader or Director of NCIS?"

Tony pulls it out, looks at it, and shakes his head. "God, damnit! I really need to read more carefully. This says, President of the United States on it!"

Everyone laughs at that.

NCIS

Shards To A Whole: And That Was The First Week

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

Chapter 340: And That Was The First Week

Tim got in early on Friday, but not, today, for the job. He wants to head to Autopsy before going to his own office.

And once he gets there, he sees what he's expecting, Jimmy and Ducky, working away. Apparently they aren't done with yesterday's hot case, because they're working on an actual body.

It's probably a horrible thing, but he's glad there's a case. Glad that there's something besides paperwork for Jimmy today.

He doesn't want to interrupt them, and assuming all goes well, Shabbos is on for tonight, with a special yarhtzeit celebration… remembrance… He's not sure what all that entails, but… It's been a year since Jon died, and they need to do something for it.

He heads in for a moment, squeezes Jimmy's shoulder, he looks over to Tim and nods, knowing why he's here. They don't need to say anything. Ducky nods at him too, looking pleased that he came in.

"Lunch?" Tim asks.

"If we've got time," Jimmy answers. "I'll text."

"Okay."


They'd wrapped up the autopsy, consulted with Tony, and were working on the paperwork. Jimmy's filling forms out with a vengeance.

Ducky's been keeping track of the time. It's getting onto lunch. He puts his own pen down, and gently touches Jimmy's forearm. "Do you want to get lunch out? Text Timothy, take a quiet afternoon, go home early? There's nothing here that I can't handle on my own."

"I don't know."

"It's fine if you want to work through. It's fine if you want to go home. Commander Breen," their current guest, "does not need both of us here."

Jimmy nods, he knows that. He knows that right now, whatever he and Breena need, they'll support. He takes his glasses off and squeezes the bridge of his nose, then rubs his eyes.

"I had the four AM feed this morning." Ducky squeezes his hand, knowing that'd be the acid hour. "I fed Anna her bottle, told her about her older brother. Managed to not turn into a complete bawling mess. But I couldn't put her back in her crib when she was done. Held onto her until it was time to give her to Breena for her next feed."

Ducky nods along with that.

"Not sure I want to do Shabbos tonight. I know Ziva's got… something, planned, but…"

"Ziva will understand if you'd rather be alone."

"Yeah…" Jimmy sighs. "I know. I know they all will. I think Breena wants to get out of the house."

"What do you want?"

Jimmy shakes his head, not saying the jumbled thoughts of how much he had wanted Jon, wanted him strong and healthy, wanted to never have even imagined all of this pain, but if that had happened, they wouldn't have Anna, and his beautiful girl wouldn't be here and... And Jon would have been about eight months old now, he'd be round and plump and grabbing for things with a big, drool-y two tooth smile, and maybe thinking about starting to crawl soon, or not, Molly didn't crawl until she was a year old. And Anna's a month old, and she's tiny and sweet and perfect and… He doesn't know how to sort out the grief for the life that didn't happen, or deal with the tinge of guilt for feeling that while looking at the life that did. "Tomorrow…" He takes a breath, and says, with a sad smile, "I want tomorrow."

Ducky smiles kindly at him. "Tomorrow is the one thing I can assure you will happen."

"Yeah." He pulls out his cell. "You really good with the paperwork?"

"I am fine, Jimmy. I'm here to answer whatever questions Anthony or Jethro may come up with, and any forms I do not get filled out will still be here on Monday, waiting for us. Go. Have a good lunch. Spend some time with your girls."

Jimmy nods, flashing a text to Tim, and heading down to Cybercrime.


Tim's phone buzzes and he sees, Lunch?

Yes!

Good, I'm in halfway down to you. Abby?

Already checked, got trace coming out of her ears. We're bringing her something to munch while she works.

"Okay."

Tim looks up and sees Jimmy standing at his door. "You weren't kidding about halfway down."

Jimmy shakes his head. "Nope." He steps in and looks around. "Nice."

It's still pretty empty. There's nothing but a few pictures on the book shelves for example, and his desk has three monitors, a keyboard, and a few more pictures, but otherwise it's clean. He notices that, a perfectly clean expanse of matte black, where something else is supposed to be. No phone. "One sec." Tim types a quick note to himself to get a phone down here, then realizes he doesn't have any office supplies either, and needs to get them, too. "Okay. Just noticed I don't have a phone."

Jimmy nods dryly at that. "It's a really nice office. You know, Vance is the only person I know here who has his own office. Abby's got her desk, but that's also work space and the other LabRats use it, and Ducky and I share a desk, too, but no one's got an actual office."

Tim gets up. "You know, I've got a kind of funny story about that."

Jimmy looks relieved and then curious. "Good, I could use some funny stories."

Tim smiles at him, and squeezes his shoulder. "You'll like this one." They head out, and Tim closes the door to his office, and calls out to the nearest Minion. "Dume, I'm out for lunch. I've got my phone on. Anyone needs me, give a call."

"Back soon?"

Tim looks at Jimmy, can see the sadness behind his eyes. "Not more than two hours. I've almost got the scheduling program done again, Monday, everyone takes a crack at it, then I'll run through it again and we'll begin live testing."

"Got it, Boss."

"Good."

They're in the elevator when Jimmy asks, "Does it feel weird?"

"Hm?"

"Them calling you 'Boss.' I mean, that's Gibbs, right?"

"Actually, it's a lot less weird than I was expecting it to be. I thought it would feel kind of fake, but…" Tim shakes his head. "Nope."

Jimmy smiles at that, for a second, and then it falls from his face.

"How are you doing?"

Jimmy shrugs. "I've had better days. Yesterday was hard. Today's not any easier. Hopefully tomorrow…"

Tim nods. "Early bootcamp this week?"

"No." Jimmy shakes his head. "I don't want to fight. I'm not angry. Just sad."

"Okay."

"So, tell me your funny story about having an office."

Tim smiles, and then says, "So… Um… Yeah… I might be the fourth highest ranked guy at NCIS."

Jimmy snorts a laugh at that, sees Tim's serious, and then raises his eyebrows. "Is this where I say, 'I'm out of it for a little while and everyone's getting delusions of grandeur?'"

Tim sighs and laughs quietly. "You might. Vance has asked me to come up and chat with him this afternoon, so I'll find out for sure then, but… So, yeah, I'm the Director of Cybercrime."

"Well, yeah, that's on your nametag."

"Uh huh. And the door. You know, the door, of my office, the kind of office no one else has…"

Jimmy nods, and Tim sees it hit him that he might actually be right about this as a slow smile spreads across his face.

"Okay, so, I've been doing some checking and…" Tim tells Jimmy about what he's noticed, and by the time the elevator doors were opening, Jimmy was laughing.


Tim gets back from lunch, drops food off for Abby, and then heads back to spend another hour beating the new scheduling system into submission before having his chat with Vance.

He's almost nervous about talking to Vance. Almost. Like, there's the idea that he should be nervous, especially because he's not entirely sure what the hell his job is, but… He's not actually feeling nervous.

It's sort of like how, when he got to a break point in the code, he just fired off an email to all of his (and he's thinking of them as his) Team Leaders, describing what the new system should do, and how he wants to know who each team member is, what they specialize in, and build a database so that the best person (people) for the job gets the job, no matter where the job is. He didn't think about it. He didn't worry about it. He just fired it off, and within an hour started getting emails back with ideas for how to make the system better and all the information he asked for.

If there's one thing true about Tim McGee, it's that he's never had any problem seeing what an issue is and taking care of it. Sure, in the past, he's felt nervous about doing things he hadn't been specifically told to do, but that's never stopped him from doing it. And now… he's just not feeling that anymore.

It's almost like the last year burned the nervous out of him. He almost feels like he's gotten to the point where he no longer has the capacity for nervous (at least, about the job.)

As soon as he gets to Vance's office, Vance asks, "How's it going?"

"It's going," he says, sitting in the chair Vance nods at.

Vance's eyes narrow very slightly, and Tim adds, "I think it's going well. They don't all love me; one of them has resigned already, but I've got her replacement starting week after next. We're moving toward being an actual team and getting some real work done." He fills Vance in on his job software, and how he's hoping to have a testing version ready by start of work on Tuesday. Vance looks pleased by this. He looks very pleased when Tim starts telling him about how once he's gotten it working properly, he'll roll it out across NCIS and start assigning jobs by specialty instead of geography. Vance is even more pleased as he explains how much he think that'll speed up computer work for the Field Teams.

Vance's satisfied smile as he tells him about the job software plans could be a hint that, yes, he's Director of Cybercrime and that this is indeed under his job description. Or it could just be the fact that Vance will take any good idea that makes his operation work better, no matter where it comes from.

Vance jots a quick note on the new job system and then says, "You rearranged the basement."

Tim nods, wondering if Vance headed down there to take a look at what he had done. "Better workflow. They can talk to each other without having to deal with walls. They weren't working as a team before because they were walled off in their own little cubbies. Now we've got a space in the middle for breaking down what we're doing, who's doing what, why, and how. Once I get the stuff delivered, we'll have a conference area in the middle, space to plan our jobs out, who's doing what, and with any luck, some room for down time, too."

Leon nods. He was looking enthusiastic until Tim got to down time. He's not sure about that, but he's also not arguing about it. "Physical plant is fussing because you changed the light bulbs on your own."

Tim shrugs. The guy he spoke to did seem kind of pissy about the idea that Tim might actually attempt to change his own light bulbs, but, degree in biomedical engineering, he's feeling competent to handle light bulbs. (Turns out Manner was full of shit about the heat thing. It might be a degree or two warmer down there, but it's not sweltering. Still, the LEDs are cooler and only need to be replaced every twenty-five years or so, that sounds pretty appealing to him.) "Physical plant told me they couldn't get new bulbs in for three weeks. So while the Minions were rearranging, I put in new bulbs."

Leon raises his eyebrow at 'Minions' and then shakes his head, and gets to why he brought it up, "Any non-union labor on that sort of thing invalidates our liability insurance."

Tim's staring at him, stupefied. He literally cannot imagine how that rule could have possibly been set. Finally he asks, "Do you want me to take them out?"

"No. You putting them in caused the problem, taking them out doesn't fix it. But in three weeks Physical Plant will show up with the union electrician and he'll 'inspect' the job you did, and that will make it all better."

Tim, by sheer force of will alone, does not roll his eyes. However, there's a lot of skepticism and annoyance as he says, "We need an electrician for light bulbs?"

"Welcome to management," Leon says dryly.

"But I can rearrange my floor plan?"

"Technically, you should have waited for the electrician to do all the plugging and unplugging, as well, but if you do that, it'll be July before they get a full free day to do it all. He'll be back in June to 'inspect' your job of plugging and unplugging, as well."

That did get an eye roll. "So you're saying I better like the new layout."

Vance smiles. "It's not just a matter of my personal idiosyncrasies that nothing around here ever moves. Just hope no one trips on a cord and sues."

Tim makes a mental note to get some electrical tape and make sure that all of the cords are taped flush to the floor. "All right. Anything else?"

"I understand you took them out of the basement for target practice."

"Yes."

"Why?" Leon looks curious about that. Like it's nothing he ever expected Tim to even think of, let alone do.

"I wanted to see what they'd do if I gave them something they'd never done before. If you dropped me in charge of a new field team, I probably would have made them knit or something."

Leon smiles dryly at that image. "And was it informative?"

"Yes. Most of them were able to roll with it. Might have thought it was silly, but they loaded up, listened to instructions, worked on it, and had a good time. Four of them dug in and balked. As I said, I've already gotten one of them to resign. At least three more of them aren't staying. There's a fourth I'm not sure about. She's great with a computer, and I think just too shy to really function with all of those people staring at her. I want to see what Ngyn will do if I toss her a loop when she's not on display. I can work with shy. Stubborn and unwilling to bend is a different story all together."

"And who are you thinking needs to go?"

Tim grabs his phone and sends Vance their CVs.

"What would you suggest happen to them?"

"Forensic accounting?" Tim shrugs. They have lots of jobs that need computer skills. Part of the issue is he can't really fire them. It's almost impossible to get rid of a Federal Employee, so he can use all of the tools at his disposal to make them want to resign, but he can't out and out boot them. He can, possibly, reassign them, though. "Tech support? HR? Web development? See if the IRS can use them? Somewhere decent computer skills are necessary, but the ability to adapt on the fly isn't. If we're going to track down the bad guys we need to be faster and better than they are. Just sheer computer skill isn't enough, we need imagination, too. We're not just going to think outside the box. We're going to be the guys who build the box so other guys can think in it."

"Okay." Leon seems to like that idea. He's flipping through the CVs Tim's given him.

"I need to know how young I can hire," Tim asks. This is something he's been thinking about for a while. Currently all Federal jobs on their level require a college degree. But… for the kind of talent he wants a college degree means those guys are going to be VERY expensive.

"Excuse me?"

"I'm hoping to have four open desks soon. I've got one new tech on the way, and I've got ideas for the kind of people I want on the other three. I currently can't hire without a college degree, but I figure if you wave that, I can. So, if I can grab a seventeen-year-old on his way to MIT, can I have him?"

Leon just stares at him for a moment. "You're going to headhunt babies?"

"If I can. The seventeen-year-old I want will be going for millions by the time he's twenty-one. Even if I could pay based on merit, I can't win in a bidding war against Stanford, let alone Facebook or Google. I don't have the budget for that, but if I can get him early, I can train him to cover what he might miss by skipping the traditional four-year-school, and hopefully get him for a fraction of the cost."

Leon's still staring at him.

Tim lets him in on his logic for this. "They can enlist at seventeen. We'll let them work on a nuclear submarine at seventeen. I don't think I've got anything hotter than that under my umbrella."

"Seventeen, with parental permission," Vance says slowly, realizing that Tim's not just serious, but has given this some real thought.

"If I can get this hypothetical teenage hacker's parents to go for it, can I hire him?"

"Check with legal, if they say you can, sure."

"Good."

Vance looks at his phone, seeming to re-read the guys Tim wants out. "Why Hepple? According to your reports he was always in the middle on all of his scores."

Tim shrugs. "He is. He's not bad at all, but… he's a mainframe specialist. Apparently we hired him right out of Cal-Tech in '88."

"And…"

"And we don't have a mainframe. We didn't have a mainframe the first time I was in Cybercrime. No one has a mainframe anymore. He's not a field agent, so I can't age him out. Back in '13, when he hit twenty-five years in, Jenner was suggesting that maybe retirement would look good, but no dice. He's not bad at any of the stuff we do, but he's not good either. And this isn't the team for mediocre. I can't fire him, no cause. He's on time, muddles through his work, and if, for some reason, we ever end up having to deal with a mainframe again, he'll be worth his weight in gold, but… It's like having a mimeograph tech on staff. Best I can hope for now is that he doesn't like the hours I give him, and he decides retirement is looking good."

"Okay. Anything else?"

Tim's been thinking about this for a bit, but had been planning on waiting more than a week into it, but Vance is asking… Tim thinks for a second more, this is a good test. The Director of Cybercrime can make this decision for himself. Navy Yard Team Leader needs to ask permission. So… "I'm dropping the dress code."
Leon lifts his eyebrows, but doesn't challenge his right to do so.

Tim explains his thinking. "I can't offer them better pay. I can't give them better benefits. My hands are tied on both of those. I will move heaven and earth to get them the best team, and we will find the most interesting cases, and I'm going to do everything I can to make it the best work environment. I've got plans for the environment, budget permitting, but step one is making this look like a place where real computer guys work."

"Uh huh." Vance keep staring at him. "We got you on that salary and benefits."

"As a field agent. You couldn't have afforded me as a computer specialist. If Armstrong hadn't promised me that I wouldn't be chained to a computer here, I would have gone with the CIA; they offered more money, a car, and would have paid for my doctorate as long as I had been willing to get that doctorate overseas and report back about what I noticed while I did it."

That was something Vance hadn't known. He looks at Tim for a long minute, working on actually, really seeing him, and then says, "You took a pay cut so people could shoot at you?"

"Yes."

Vance shakes his head, looking surprised and amused. "You have to write the code up, and it's got to be in line with the sexual harassment regs."

"Thanks."

Vance spends another minute staring at him, and then a smile spreads across his face, "So, now that you've been on it for a week, is the job about what you expected?"

Tim sees the smile; it's an awfully smug sort of look. Now's the real acid test, if he actually is as highly ranked as he thinks he is, he can say this to Vance. "You've got a really sick sense of humor, Leon."

Leon laughs at that. "My kids say that about me all the time. Congratulations again, Director McGee."


Three hours later Vance was CCed on an email that went out to all of the Minions: (A similar one went to all of his Team Leaders, updating them on the Navy Yard change, and letting them know that whatever level of dress code they deemed appropriate for their own teams was fine with him. Tim's not going to mess with his Team Leaders until he's got a much better idea of what's actually going on out there.)

As of 1/11/16 the dress code for Navy Yard Cybercrime will relax.

Feel free to wear whatever you are comfortable in, keeping a few things in mind:

1. Are all of the bits of you you really wouldn't want a bad sunburn on covered? No? Go put more clothing on.

2. If the idea of getting a tattoo/piercing there hurts so bad you wince, it better be covered with clothing.

3. If the idea of getting a tattoo/piercing there hurts so bad I wince, it better be covered with clothing.

4. Is the clothing you're covering those parts with so sheer/transparent I can see them through it? Put more layers on until they're invisible.

5. If there is anything written on said item of clothing that you don't want your hyper-vigilant, ultra-feminist grandma to see, don't wear it to work.

6. If you do not have a hyper-vigilant, ultra-feminist grandma to school you on what's appropriate, I will lend you mine.

7. If it is violent or gory or would give a small child nightmares, do not wear it to work. Come on guys, you know this.

8. I do not want to see your underwear. Doesn't matter how snazzy it is, it stays under your clothing.

9. If there is a chance I may mistake your outerwear for underwear, it better be hidden under more outerwear.

10. If words printed on it would show up in George Carlin's Seven Words You Can't Say on TV (Google it) act, don't wear it to work.

11. If you consider it appropriate for a hot date out at a club, don't wear it to work.

12. If you are unsure as to whether or not it's appropriate for work, it's not.

13. That said, non-office-casual makeup, piercings, tattoos, facial hair, hats, shoes, boots, jewelry, and items of clothing are fine in the dungeon. Just don't be a twit about it, and try not to make your co-workers uncomfortable.

14. For court appearances, you will be dressed exactly how the legal beagles tell you to dress. Which will likely be conservative, upright, and professional. This means you will own at least one outfit of clothing that makes you look conservative, upright, and professional. (If this is a concept you are unsure about, the legal beagles will be happy to help. But, quick rule of thumb: Navy suit, white button down, black shoes. If you're a guy: maroon tie, good watch. If you're a woman: nude pantyhose and pumps. Boring makeup. No jewelry beyond watch and or wedding/engagement ring.) You will wear this outfit often enough so that you can fake looking comfortable in it if you are not genuinely comfortable. You will also own and know how to use whatever camouflage makeup is necessary to cover whatever needs to be covered so that you look like you just stepped out of a Brooks Brother's catalogue.

15. Speaking of uncomfortable, that is what anyone who screws this up so badly I end up having Vance decide he needs to chat with me about this is going to be.

Forward this back to me to show you've received it and understand the terms.

See you Monday,

McGee

Vance sighs, closes his email, closes his eyes and rubs his forehead. He knew Cybercrime was stagnating. He knew it was falling further and further behind where he needed it to be. He knows he put McGee in charge because he'd shake it up.

Somehow though, he hadn't expected this much shaking up. Not this soon. He figured it'd be at least a month before Tim got comfortable enough to start really swapping things up.

And right now, he's really hoping that McGee's right, and this is what needs to happen to get it to where he wants it. He's certainly intrigued with the hiring younger workers. He's seen the stats, knows that less than 10% of the Federal workforce is under 30 and that more than 25% is about to retire. He knows for NCIS those numbers are even worse, fewer than 5% under 30, more than 35% retiring in the next five years.

If this scheduling thing he's talking about works, that would be fantastic. He has gotten irate calls when someone's been sitting on a hot case waiting around for Cybercrime to do its job.

He thinks about this, and finally comes up with why this feels so off. This is Gibbs... Junior... his upfront, no bullshit, no excuses style, but with actual power. Gibbs as a Team Leader is a great thing, Gibbs as a Department Head is terrifying.

Vance blows out a breath, hoping he made the right call, and then he forwards the email to Gibbs with: Your boy in action in the subject line.


Two minutes later, Gibbs is staring at his computer screen, smiling, chuckling quietly, very glad to see Tim putting his mark on Cybercrime.

He'd been hoping to get a chance to talk with Tim, see how he was liking running a team, but between Tim on full work mode with his new team, and them on a hot case, it hasn't happened.

With any luck he'll get to see him tomorrow or the next day. Gibbs can already feel that tonight is off the menu. They aren't breaking this before tomorrow morning at the earliest.


Tim's wrapping up for the day. He's got a beta(ish) version of the job allocating software in the can, and on Monday, the Minions'll start playing with it again.

He heads up to Abby, and as he heads in, he notices that all four of them are in there, and they're all still working.

No music, they've all got earbuds in, listening to their own stuff. But he knows the feel of this, the sort of energy that goes with the Lab humming away.

Abby looks up from her pipettes, and smiles at him. She's in full on lab protection gear, so is the other three, so he hangs back and waits for her to take her earbuds out.

"Not quitting time for you, is it?"

She shakes her head.

"They're all working away upstairs, aren't they?"

She nods at that, too. "Gibbs was in three minutes ago for an update. I think Tony and Ziva are heading to Baltimore. Draga's still digging through financials, and Gibbs has a suspect he's about to break with what we just gave him."

Tim nods. "Okay." He knows Jimmy went home after lunch. "I guess I'll pick up some food and Kelly and head over to Jimmy's."

"Probably a good plan. Make sure to give both of them kisses from me."

"How about hugs?"

She quickly switches to signing, which he appreciates once he got the message. Jimmy kissed you when you needed it.

Jimmy's not on the verge of a panic attack, does not need to be shocked out of anything, and getting kissed by me, even if it is "from you" isn't going to do much to cheer him up.

It'll perk up Breena.

Tim shakes his head, no.

The looks she's giving him indicates that she thinks that's BS, but isn't going to argue it. "Fine, hugs. I'll get home when I can."

He kisses the nape of her neck. He'd like to do more than that, but she is covered in protective gear, so he doesn't want to risk getting whatever it is she's messing with on his skin by going in for a hug or a real kiss.


He's in the parking lot, texting Jimmy and Breena, seeing what they want to do for dinner, when it hits him that a whole week went by, with a hot case, and beyond chatting with Abby and Jimmy about what they were up to, he was just out of it.

He didn't feel any need to go up. There wasn't any sort of itchiness or wondering. He wasn't craving the mystery and didn't feel any need to head upstairs and make sure Draga was doing his job right.

In fact, other than a sort of missing his family, because besides Jimmy and Abby (and Ducky for a second), he hasn't seen any of them since Sunday, he's not feeling any craving for his old life, at all.

And he's honestly not sure if he's okay with that.

Not sure if switching over that fast, that completely means this is good, that he was ready, more than ready for a new job, or if this is his usual routine and he's just got his feelings so deeply buried under making sure he's doing the job right that he can't feel them.

He gets a text back from Breena, saying they're in the mood for Japanese, and right now, he can contemplate his emotional interior, or grab his baby girl, a bunch of sushi, and spend a few hours trying to cheer up his hurting friends.

Doesn't even take a tenth of a second for him to know what he's going to do.

Place the order, go crazy and splurge, it's on me. (Has Jimmy told you the story that goes with that?) I'll pick it up. See you soon.

Next

Shards To A Whole: Director McGee?

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

Chapter 339: Director McGee?

Thursday morning, he got in, and noticed ten more introductory emails.

He's noticing something else, his nametag says Director of Cybercrime. The emails he's getting are from people with the title of Team Leader.

It is occurring to Tim, that possibly, actually finding out what this job was, instead of going off his memory of what Jenner was doing when he worked down here the first time, before waltzing into Leon's office and saying he could do it, was probably a good idea. Because, as he gets more of these 'Hi, I'm (insert name here) out of (insert NCIS station). My team's on blah. We often do blah, blah, and blah. Looking forward to working with you,' emails he's coming to the conclusion that he may actually be the Director of Cybercrime and not, as he thought, the DC Office Team Leader.

For most of NCIS the hierarchy goes something like this: Agent, Team Leader, Department Head, Office Director. People like Abby and Ducky are Department Heads (because of their more specialized work, and they do work for all the teams in the office) and report directly to the Office Director. Team Leaders report to the Office Director, too. Office Director report to... He doesn't remember, but there's a Director of Operations who's in charge of the ins and outs of what all the Field Offices are up to.

Leon is, in addition of Director of NCIS, the Office Director for the Navy Yard.

So, Tim was thinking that, like Abby and Ducky, he was moving into Department Head.

But, looking at his inbox, where yet another Hi, I'm Blah (This one is from the Reykjavik Office. Why they have a Reykjavik Office, he has no idea.) it's occurring to him, that possibly Cybercrime doesn't follow that pattern.

This puts him in something of an odd position, because he can't exactly head on up and ask Leon what the fuck his job actually is, because he got the job by saying he could do the job better than the guy who, at that point, had the job, and way better than the other guy who wanted the job. (Manner's comments about Tim moving to this job being some sort of pay off from Leon are making a hell of a lot more sense now.)

So, on Thursday, he did some rather discrete research on what Jenner had left for him, and rapidly came to the conclusion that he may, in fact, be the Director of Cybercrime for the whole of NCIS, and that running his twelve Minions was only one of his jobs.

Figuring this out left him simultaneously feeling exceptionally proud and wanting to hyperventilate.


He fires off a text to Abby and Jimmy: Lunch?

Sure! Comes back from Abby.

Autopsy. Tomorrow? Comes from Jimmy.

So he heads out of his office and down… nope… up to Abby's office, collects her, and she can tell something is up, she keeps looking at him sideways as he fidgets in the elevator on the way out.

Once they're at Carlo's, food in front of them, she says, "What? I haven't seen you this antsy in a long time."

"I think I'm Director of Cybercrime."

She's staring at him, not getting it. "Well, they did write that on your door."

"No. I mean Director of Cybercrime. All of it. Every branch. All the teams, all hundred and fifty people, are reporting in to me, and… I was going through Jenner's files, and they've been reporting to him for years now. It looks like Cybercrime consolidated under him in '11. Every month they all check in, let him know what's up, get his approval for hires and fires and send him budget updates and… I think the whole department is mine."

Her eyes go very wide, and then she starts to giggle.

"It's not funny!"

"Oh, no, this is funny. This is the definition of funny. You're telling me you got a senior level position by accident? You swaggered on in to Leon, told him you could do the job, and didn't bother to find out what the job was?" She laughs some more.

"I thought I knew what it was!"

"Apparently not." She giggles again. "So… You outrank me, then, right?"

"Um… Yeah, I think so."

The more research he did, the more it seems that Cybercrime is spread out all over the place because it's convenient for one part of its job, namely offering computer support to the Field Teams. However, for bigger jobs, terror threats, major cyber-attacks, they all work together as one team, reporting to, apparently, him.

"I think I might be the fourth or fifth highest ranked guy at NCIS. You answer to Leon because you're in DC. I could be based out of Los Angeles, and I'd still answer directly to Leon."

She smiles widely at that. "So, what does think mean?"

"I'm not entirely sure if I am or not. I mean, when I told Vance I could do the job, I meant I could run the DC branch."

"Do you want to run Cybercrime?"

"If I'm right, I'm going to have to. Not like I can head up and say, 'Oops.'"

She giggles at that, too. "Obviously… I mean, assuming you're right, Vance thinks you're up for it. So, how do you intend to find out for sure?"

"Money hits the bank in a week. If it's a lot more than you make, that'll be a hint."

She laughs again. "Yeah, that would."

"And, at least now, I'm sending emails to the other Team Leaders… Speaking of hints, there's one, they all have Team Leader as a title… Anyway, the letters are kind of vague, but basically… I'm assuming…" He cringes at that. Assuming got him here, and he's hoping it doesn't bite him too hard. "That I'm the guy in charge."

"Well, if you aren't, who is?"

"I thought it was like Tony. You know, report to your Office Director. But, the more I read up, the more it looks like that's not how it works."

She sips her drink, smiling at him. "So… what are you going to do with all your new power, Director McGee? I mean, there's, what, Leon, Craig, Operations Director, who handles all of the field teams, and then, what, you?"

"I think so," he says with a slow nod. "Operations… What's his name?"

"Severin."

"And, God, he's not at the Navy Yard, right? He's based out of where…?"

"Okinawa last I heard. Craig handles all the politicking and Severin handles the Office Directors."

"And I've got the Cybercrime teams reporting to me. So… yeah… I think it's Leon, Craig, Severin, and then… me."

She laughs again. "Youngest department head in NCIS history, by accident. Do you think Leon has any clue that you didn't know what you were asking for?"

Tim shrugs. "He looked really amused when I handed in my Special Agent stuff, but I haven't talked to him since."

"Bet he's going to want to check in soon."

"Probably."

She squeezes his hand. "You can do it, you know that, right? And you're going to be brilliant at it."

He gives her a lopsided, self-depreciating smile. "Yeah."


Thursday afternoon he sees Manner get up, paper in hand, walk a few steps, and then turn around and sit back down three times.

Each time he sits back down, he works on his computer a few more minutes, stares off into space, taps his fingers a bit, picks the paper back up, and then repeats the standing up, taking a few steps, and then sitting back down again.

The fifth time he does it, he's half-way across the basement before he starts to turn around, which was when he notices Tim is watching, so he squares his shoulders and heads to his office door.

It's open. (Tim's figuring that's going to be true a lot.) But Manner stops at the door, waiting to be waved in.

"You resigning?" Tim asks, waving him in, nodding at the door so Manner knows to shut it.

Manner bristles. If he asked right, (and he's not sure if he did) there was just enough challenge in his voice to make Manner want to stay and prove that he can do this job. If he did it right, (and once again, Tim's not sure he did. Gibbs would have gotten it right. Tony definitely would have gotten it right, but he's not Tony or Gibbs.) that voice would have indicated that he thinks Manner is up for playing the role of Scotty, and it's just a matter of if he's got the balls to step up and do it.

Manner sits down, holding his letter, not answering. Finally he says, "I can do the job."

Tim nods. "I never said you couldn't. I've never thought you couldn't. I know you can do it. You graduated fourth in your class at CMU. You've got over-the-moon recommendations from your professors. You passed my tests and tracked me down. Once upon a time, you were a creative worker, able to dissect problems at a glance and come at them in directions no one expected. Somehow, in the ten years between then and now, you got in a rut. So, it's not about can; I know you can. It's about will.

"Will you do the job? Will you put the hours in? Will you get out of this bureaucrat mindset and become a computer guy again? Will you be a cop? If you want to do that, I've got a job for you. If not, then it's best we part ways now, before I'm no longer willing to give you a glowing review."

Manner thinks about that for a moment, then stands up, doesn't hand over the piece of paper in his hand, and heads back to his desk.

Tim's feeling like that's a victory. Then, seeing them all working away, he goes back to tweaking his case triage system. They noticed some bugs in it yesterday, and he wants it fixed fast.

After all, if he really is Director of Cybercrime, that means he can roll this out to the whole of NCIS. Assuming it works, (They'll test it in just the DC branch for a month or so, give DC's best and brightest a good chunk of time to break it in ways they'd never imagine on their own.) and assuming its better than the systems his other teams currently have (He jots a quick note to let them know what he's doing and see how they handle it, and what they want in a system for this sort of thing.) he'll have made a positive change for the whole system.

Might as well earn his pay. (Whatever it might be.)

One more thought hits as he's coding away. If he really is Director of Cybercrime, then there's no reason why he can't be sending his casework to whoever's best at it. If John in Reykjavik is the best guy for the job (even if the job is in Bogota) there's no reason, short of the need to get hold of the physical computer, for John not to do the job.

Tim gets back to programing, but he makes a note for himself, he's sending out an email to each of the Team Leaders, finding out exactly who works on each team, what they're best at, and building a database of who does what.

Once this system goes live, any casework that comes up will get triaged, diagnosed, and then whoever's best at this is going to get flagged. It's 2016, long distance communication is easy, so there's no reason to run Cyber cases like it's 1999.


Quitting time Thursday he's got his alpha version in play.

Team goes onto the intranet. They fill out a Cybercrime request form. Originally the form just included name, location, and a brief description area for what the problem was.

Now it still has all three of those things but includes bits like what sort of case this problem belongs to. Do they have a physical computer in custody. There are detailed directions for how to get said computer/phone/whatever it might be also onto their intranet (Yes, he knows he's got to build a safe haven for that so that you can't infect the whole damn system that way.) so that the tech in question can crack into it right away instead of having to wait for the field team to get moving on it. What sort of information is the field team trying to get. All of that's on the intake form now.

He's got the basic triage up and ready: Terror, Kidnapping, Murder threat, Rape, Assault, Murder, Theft, Drugs, Misc. (There are many things that are technically illegal in the Navy and Marines that Tim has no interest at all in having his guys slogging through computer logs working on. For example, inappropriate fraternization cases will be dealt with shortly after Hell freezes over, or every single other case on the docket is clear.) So that the jobs should show up in the queue based on what sort of case they're for.

He's got a keyword database up and running for the tech who will do the diagnostic. S/he'll read through, maybe get onto the computer, mess around a bit, and then keyword it. He's also got his twelve techs sorted by keyword as well.

So, if this works the way he hopes it will, jobs will come in, they'll get sorted, the next available tech will diagnose, and once she's done, the program will send an email to the three techs that matched the most keywords.

He sets it live, and sends out a last email of the day letting them know it was up and to each spend an hour messing with it tomorrow.

And then he heads to Abby.


They're halfway home when she asks, "Did you get to talk to Jimmy or Breena today?"

"No. Just a few second to ask if Jimmy wanted to do lunch with us. Why?"

She shakes her head a bit. "Tried to call Breena today, but she let it go to voicemail."

"Okay…" He's still not getting it.

"It's the seventh, Tim."

And then he did get it. "Oh." He winces, feeling the dull ache of it. Better off not having remembered.

"Yeah. Ducky dropped off samples for us today, so I'm guessing Jimmy's feeling pretty low today, probably pretty anti-social, too."

"I'll stop in early tomorrow, make sure to get to Autopsy. Just, give him a hug or something."

She nods at that. "If the case is wrapped in time, I know Ziva's got something planned for tomorrow's Shabbos, in remembrance."

"Okay." For the first time all day, Tim realizes that it's January 7th, which means this time a year ago Jimmy and Breena were going through the torture of delivering a stillborn baby.

Next

Shards To A Whole: Boss or McGee

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

Chapter 338: Boss or McGee


Wednesday morning. First day of the new layout.

08:00 everyone is there, front and center, at the new conference table (Showed up last night. Light bulbs they won't give him until February, but a decent sized table and fourteen chairs, that took two hours. He's got no idea what sort of priority list Physical Plant has.) waiting.

He's still making due with the whiteboards. Big screen plasmas are still a ways out and the digital touch screens he's hoping for are waiting for a quarter where he's got more free money in his budget.

"Until now, you've had a system where jobs come in, and each of you took whatever came next, worked it until it was done, then grabbed the next one. We're not doing that anymore. Ten of you are on current jobs, right?"

Twelve heads nod.

"Okay. I want each of you explaining what you are doing. Put it up on the whiteboard. Then we're going to play job swap and team building. I'm sure some of these actually are single person jobs. But a lot of them aren't. By the time we're done with this, all twelve of you will be on active cases, and we'll have a working template in place for how jobs get divided."

He looks to Connon, the tech closest to him and hands him a dry erase marker. "You're up. What are you on?"

"Case for the New Orleans branch…" Tim's listening him explain the case, thinking along, seeing this is a database case. They need to build one, putting facts in, and then use it to find the patterns. Pretty straight forward, not difficult, just time consuming. He's thinking about that when it hits him, New Orleans branch?

His guys are doing cases for the New Orleans' branch? He's temped to ask about that, but they're actually working with each other pretty well, two of the Minions offering good suggestions for how to deal with the data, because Connon isn't a database guy, so he doesn't want to break that up. He'll ask later.

Connon gets done, and Tim says, "Trevet, Manner, good ideas for dealing with this. Congrats, Connon's case is yours now." Connon writes their names next to the case and then hands the dry erase marker to Trevet, who had been sitting next to him.

Trevet isn't looking thrilled about that, and as he explains what he's on, Tim can see why. Connon's job is big and slow. Trevet's current one is a monster. And doing both at once would be a pain in the ass. It's twenty million, at least, lines of code that have to be slipped through to find the way to sneak into a program, but the more he explains what he's on, the happier Ngyn and Dume look. His Code Wizards are ready to hop on this.

So, Trevet hands off his project, and hands the dry erase marker to Patil, who explains what he's on.

And on and on it goes. They get the jobs rearranged and, listening to what everyone is doing, for whom, and why, and Tim's come to a conclusion: Cybercrime has changed since he was down here last. At least, from the sound of it, they're now handling all the cases for anyone who doesn't have a tech on hand, which appears to be every one of the smaller outposts in the western hemisphere and all of the Agents Afloat in the Atlantic.

Once they're all assigned, and they're getting ready to start to work again, he stops them for a last second. "Okay, last thing. My job. Today, I'm reworking the job system. Let me make sure this is right. Anyone who wants our attention logs onto our intranet, write up a job ticket, and then you guys grab it?"

They all nod.

"Okay. That's what I'm on. We're redoing the interface. By the time I'm done with this, the system will triage as well as send us cases. They'll not only tell us what work they need done, but it'll be ranked by how urgent it is. You guys won't be slogging away on thefts while a kidnapping lingers in the background anymore."

They seem to like that.

"Once I'm done with it, cases will come up in order of importance. Whoever's on deck takes the next case and diagnoses it. Figures out what it is, what specialties are needed for it, and then flag it to whomever it's a best fit for. So, say, like what we've got Trevet and Manner on, it's a database case. Trevet, Manner, and Patil will all get flagged on the case, then the three of them will talk about it, come up with a plan of attack, split it up, and get it done. Once it's done, they'll each go back and grab another case. Sound like a plan?"
Nodding and 'Yes, Boss' hits his ears.

"Great. I'll have it done by this afternoon, and then you guys are going to test it. If it's good, I'll send the beta live tomorrow."

They look surprised at the speed he wants to move at, but they don't argue with him. Everyone breaks up and off they go.


He notices, as he's coding away, reworking the Cybercrime interface, that he's getting some emails he wasn't expecting.

As of this point, he's had three different Cybercrime Team Leaders, (Okinawa, Pearl Harbor, and Rota) all send him pleasant emails introducing themselves, explaining what they're working on, how their teams work, and how they used to work with Jenner.

He sends them polite emails back, happy to get to know them, explaining that he's looking forward to working with them, too.

Then he does more coding and doesn't much think about it.


He got the first letter of resignation that afternoon.

He wasn't dismayed to see it, either. Bergener wasn't happy about the range, really wasn't happy about getting hacked, was fuming at being told that she needed to shape up quite a bit to get to the level he wants his guys at, and didn't seem to like this new system, either.

She's exactly the kind of person he wants to see the back of, and in two weeks, he will.

That's one open desk, and he knows who he wants to fill it. He just hopes she's still available.

He kept her contact information, and pulls it up.

"Hello?" Same voice, she still sounds shockingly young.

"Catherine Howard?"

"Yes."

"Hi. This is Tim McGee, you may not remember me, I interviewed you for a position at NCIS."

He felt the pause, then she placed him. "I remember you. What can I do for you Agent McGee?"

"Are you still looking for a job, or feel like getting a better one?"

"A better one?" she sounds intrigued.

"Probably. Where are you now?"

"Homeland Security."

He nods, she would have been a good fit there.

"I'm running the NCIS DC Cybercrime Division now, and I'm rebuilding it from the ground up. At Homeland you're one of what, three hundred techs?"

"Something like that."

"Give notice. Come with me. There'll be thirteen of us, and by the time next year is done Homeland will be asking us for help when they get stuck."

"You sound pretty sure of yourself."

"I am. What could you do with a smallish team of very talented people and an awfully open-ended mission statement, let alone with a Boss who wants you spending no more than thirty percent of your time on the paperwork?"

She sounds very eager as she says, "A whole lot."

He's quiet.

"I've got to give two weeks' notice."

Tim smiles. "Then I'll see you in fifteen days."


It was one thing to say he wanted his guys spending no more than thirty percent of their time on paperwork, it was a whole other thing to deliver on that.

Upstairs, the break down is somewhere along the lines of forty percent of their time in the field dealing with criminals, ten percent on court related work, and the rest is paperwork.

Down here…

Okay, not much in the way of court time. From the looks of it, his guys rarely see the inside of a courtroom, probably because no lawyer in his right mind wants to spend hours digging through tech specs the average juror couldn't make heads or tails of if his life depended on it.

No… as he's looking through what they do, (He sees confirmation that they are indeed handling the casework for every Field Office with fewer than four people, which works out to about thirty offices, and for twenty more Agents Afloat.) close to ninety percent of their guys plea bargain out or plead guilty, and the ones that don't end up in cases where the lawyers try not to do much with the tech work.

Still, looking at the paperwork… God, they've got to be running close to sixty percent of their time filling out forms.

There's got to be a way to streamline this.

He steps out of his office and heads over to Ngyn's desk.

She's got her headphones in, bopping away to something as her fingers fly over the keyboard. He reads over her shoulder, making sure she's not actively coding, (nope, more paperwork) before interrupting.

"Hey."

She jerked at the sound of his voice and stammered through, "Boss?"

"May I?" he snags one of the chairs from the conferance table, pulls it over, indicating he'd like to sit down.

"Uh… sure." She's blushing and not looking directly at him.

He settles in. "I'm looking for ways to battle the paperwork dragon. I was wondering if you could take me through it."

"Boss?"

"We don't have 5440s or D-13-67s, or Internal Tracking 44-Cs, upstairs. What is all of this? Why are we doing it?"

"They want to know everything we do, how we do it, and why."

"Everything?"

"Just about."

"Why?"

She thinks about that for a long minute, looks at him, like she's testing him, and then looks away. "They just do."

"Who's they?"

She shrugs.

"Okay. So, you fill these out, hit print…" That part's killing him, they're still using actual paper down here, though, in that they're filling out the forms on the computer, they're three steps ahead of the Field Teams. "…give them to me, and then what?"

The look on her face seemed to be saying, Isn't it your job to know that?

"Like I said, we don't have these upstairs."

"I think you file them?"

He looks in the direction of the filing cabinets. He can't see them, but he knows they're there. "Great. So, basically you spend more time reporting what you're doing than doing what you're doing?"

She nods. He makes a mental note to ask legal if they actually need to have physical copies of all of this crap sitting in a file somewhere, or if he can just warehouse electronic copies.

He looks back at the form she's got up on her screen. "You keep putting the same information into the same blanks over and over?"

"Pretty much."

"This the kind of thing where if there was some sort of master database for each case that could then fill the forms out for you, it'd save a lot of time?"

She thought about that for a minute, too. "Probably."

"Okay." He was standing up, getting ready to add building a database for this to his to do list when something hits him, he's the Boss. He doesn't have to build this. He's got people he can delegate this task to. It's a rather novel sensation to realize that the tech problem he's encountering is not one he has to personally solve himself. In fact, given the talent pool in front of him, it's better off that he doesn't actually solve this one, because while he can handle a database, it's not his specialty. "Come join me in the center." He raises his voice, "Hey, conference time. Everyone in the center!" He really needs a call to arms, some sort of Gear Up for the Minions.

He snags a few markers for the whiteboard and begins writing:

Master Case Database:

Takes info as you work
Fills out forms for you
Accessible by all of us
Tracks casework
Shows who did what
Electronic signature
Stores basic forms, print them out only if you need them.

By the time he's finished that everyone else is around them.

"From what I can see, we're wasting way too much time on paperwork down here. So, that's gonna stop. We're going to build a database that'll take information from our computers as we work, store it, and then fill in the forms for us, so all we've got to do is fill in whatever specialized blanks there are, print it out, sign it, and then go send it off to collect dust.

"Manner, Trivet, and Patil… You're the database specialists, right?"

Three heads bob up and down.

"Hepple, Jonas, Chang, you're my programmers, right?"

More nodding.

"Good. You're gonna build it. Roger, Ngyn, Connon, you three are going to test it when the alpha version is done. Allen, Soth, and Sturm, you're going to test the patched up version.

"All twelve of you are going to add ideas to this whiteboard. What does this thing need to do so that when you get to the end of a case all you do is hit print, and then all your paperwork comes out nice and tidy, waiting for your signature?

"The six of you who aren't building, you're taking up the slack while the two development teams work.

"Two weeks I want us on a beta version, which we're all going to work with, probably for a month, and then move onto a production model."

"You want a beta version in two weeks?" Manner asks, an expression between stupefaction and rage on his face.

"Yes. Was I unclear?"

Manner is still glaring at him, beyond angry at what he considers a ridiculously inappropriate request. "Two weeks? You're talking about a system that would take any other team a year to get into place. A year if all they did was work on it."

"Door's over there" Tim points to the elevator. "If you can't or won't do it, Manner."

"No one can do this," Manner spits out.

"Are you resigning?"

"No! I am telling you that you are asking us to do something impossible. We're playing catch up from two days of furniture moving, you've got us all on new cases, you want us testing a new job system, we're already past swamped and now you want us to build an entirely new system in two weeks. It's impossible."

Tim smiles at him, eyes sharp. Manner might be the only one feeling secure enough to say it, but he's fairly sure that at least a few others have to be thinking it, too. So, time for more Hard-Ass, and also an example of what he's going to expect them to be doing down here.

"Get used to it, Scotty. We've been limping around on a rusty warp core for way too damn long. Jenner might have been fine with just getting the job done, but he's gone, and I'm here. And just getting the job done doesn't cut it anymore. Now, you gonna do it, or sit there and complain about it?"

"Just the requisitions alone-"

Tim cuts him off. "Code it yourself or use open source software. You're right, this is impossible if we try to get NCIS to buy us a database to work with. That's why I didn't tell you to go shopping for one. I told you to build one. Mongo is good. Data X is better. And I'm sure that if you spent this much time actually doing some research you could find something even better."

"But-"

"My office, Manner. Sturm, congratulations, you just joined the Alpha team. Go, build us a database that'll do our paperwork for us and save us thousands of hours of boring, useless, soul-sucking work each month."

Eleven versions of, 'On it, Boss,' echoed through the basement as Tim points to the office door. Manner storms in, and Tim kicks the door shut behind him.

"But, what, Manner?"

"But we are legally not allowed to just grab up software off the internet! Which you would know if you had actually worked down here before. We are required by law to make sure that it's clean, that there are no backdoors, that it's designed in such a way as to not be vulnerable to attacks from the outside. Because of that, we are required to go through certain distributors for our software. We are required by law to-"

Tim stops him dead with a dry, "Bullshit."

"What?" Manner stares at Tim like he had just peeled off his face and is actually a gray alien.

"Bull shit." Tim enunciates both words very clearly. "That is an excuse. You don't want to do the work, fine, but don't give me bullshit about it. First off, if it's open source, we'll have millions of other people also pouring through the code, looking for bugs and backdoors. It'll be way safer than using the same stuff every single other federal office uses. Anyone who's serious about getting into one of our systems knows who we get our software from and is targeting them.

"Secondly, we aren't the NSA, and as long as we stay on the side of the angels and keep our noses clean when it comes to not spying on everyone on earth, no one is going to care if we used an open source database to fill out our paperwork."

Manner's looking furious, trying to get Tim to listen. "But we are-"

"No! We do the job! And, though it seems that you've forgotten this, the job is stopping the bad guys. We do what we need to to do that. And right now we're filling out forms and not catching bad guys, so that stops."

"It's not legal!" Manner says desperately. He's acting like his magic words, that always worked before, suddenly stopped working, but he's got no idea of what else to try, so he keep spouting them again and again.

"That's my job. You think I'm going to leave you out there without cover? You guys build it, and I'll get it squared away. There's only one person who's successfully broken the protections I've got on the NCIS computers, the entirely legal protections that I built myself instead of buying from an approved vendor, and that's me. We've had people break into the building to use our computers because that's easier than hacking them. You think I can't get an open source database fortified to the degree it needs to be to get up to specs?"

Manners had the grace to start looking embarrassed.

"Now. In two months, when we have a fully functional system set and ready to go, Vance is going to be awfully pleased. In four months, when it's so streamlined and functional that we can roll it out to the other departments, he's going to be very pleased. And in six months when the whole of NCIS is saving hundreds of thousands of hours a month on paperwork, he is going to be ecstatic, and in that happy mood, he's going to be making note of the people who made that happen, and do you know who's name isn't going to be on the developer list?"

"Mine." And with that word he sees Manner get it, he's not the Boss, he's not going to be the Boss, and he is not going to be able to get rid of Tim. This is the new reality of the situation because now Vance is going to be expecting things like this out of Cybercrime, and he's not the guy who can come up with them.

"Exactly." He takes a long minute to stare Manner down. "Next time I give you a job, you do the job or you hand me your resignation."

Manner blinks, slowly, and says, "Yes, sir."

"Boss or McGee, Manner. Not sir. I work for a living."

Next

Shards To A Whole: The Rules

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

Chapter 337: The Rules

Tuesday morning, he's the first one in. It's intentional. First and foremost, he drops off the paperwork he filled out last night, detailing what he wants in his computer set up. Supposedly IT will deliver it sometime today. He figures the earlier they get it, the sooner he'll be up and running, too.

Next up, back to Cybercrime. He steals two cubical dividers, hooks them to each other, and sets them up with his newest additions to Cybercrime, two of the biggest whiteboards Target sells.

Then he starts to sketch.

He's breaking Cybercrime into seven sections, four of which will be huddled around a central conference area. He's hoping to get a good long table, a bunch of whiteboards, and several plasmas for the conference area. He wants them able to talk big jobs there, about what everyone is working on, and that area should also be where jobs get picked up and assigned.

Each of those four areas will be three desks set facing each other, the dividers used to provide some level of walls, but not shut everyone off. Like how the dividers were used in the bullpen. He's setting them up into hackers, programmers, database, and code wizards. He wants them working in teams based on skill set. Sure, big problems are going to require multiple people from different specialties, but at least to start, this'll get his people into teams.

He doesn't see anything, anywhere, set for dealing with hardware. So that's the sixth section. In the far back, near the filing cabinets (He's not sure where they're going, but not down here, not anymore.) he's going to be putting workbenches and tools. Cybercrime should be able to deal with actual, physical computers if need be.

Last section is going up by the coffeemaker. All he's got for it now is an empty space. Once it's full, there'll be at least a few sofas, a big screen TV, a few game systems, some games, and a decent array of drinks and snacks. He's going to expect them to work hard, so he needs a place for cooling down and playing, too.


The Minions all make it in by 08:00. Whatever else is true about them, they're punctual.

He shows them his floor plan, and what he's hoping to do, and then, and they were surprised by this, he says, "Okay, before we start moving things around, double check the plan, talk to each other, and me, and if you've got better/different ideas, let's hear them."

They do. Looking it over. Chattering among themselves.

Ngyn says, very quietly, not looking at him or anyone else, "What if we like a quiet place to work?"

He looks at his plan. That's a good point. If you need solitude… "How about a line of three traditional cubicles on the east wall? I'll see if I can get the extra gear. You'll all have your main stations, but those'll be for when you want to work on one computer as a team, or when you want to be on your own?"

They seem okay with that, but Ngyn isn't looking happy. Tim makes a mental note to go chat with her about this whole teamwork concept, and how the rest of Cybercrime has to know what she's up to.

"Anything else?"

More chattering, but no one came up with anything.

"Okay. Today, we're moving stuff and getting settled into our new places. I'll be getting my stuff set up, too." Then he headed into his office to set up his own stuff and watch how his twelve Minions would do when given a specific end goal, but no guidance on how to get to said end goal.


He had taken the stack of paperwork home, and gone through it. That was a good thing, because how he got his own computer set up was in there.

Fortunately IT works a lot faster than Physical Plant.

He'd filled out the forms for what he needed, handed them in, and in only four hours, he was looking at the system of… okay, not his dreams. His dream system is a lot snazzier, but he's also staring at what is likely the best set up in the building. He doesn't think the Director of IT has this much computing power on his desk. (Of course, the Director of IT also doesn't need this much power.)

It's not the bleeding edge of tech, but it's the best stuff IT had to offer him, and it's a few light years past what he had on his desk upstairs. It's on par with what's on his desk at home.


Between setting up his own stuff and filling out requisition forms for what he hopes to add (Thank you Jenner for the sixty thousand extra in budgetary operating capital. Tim's not going to use it all. He wants to make sure he's got a 30k overtime cushion, but that other 30k will get him a lot closer to his goal of what Cybercrime should look like and have than he is now.) he keeps looking out to see how the move is going.

By three hours in, when they were all still kind of milling around, having successfully taken the dividers down (because they can all easily lift and move the dividers, and the chairs were pushed out of the way, but all of the heavy lifting was still sitting around, he heads out again.

"All of you, over here."

And they come to him. He sits on the nearest desk and pats it. "These weigh, what? Ninety pounds, hundred and fifty? They're heavy, right?"

They all nod.

"So, is that why you're all just sort of standing around? Because you can't move your own desks?"

More nodding.

"What I'm considering the biggest problem with Cybercrime is that none of you are working together. That stops now. There are twelve of you. This desk is no big deal at all, if you move it together. It's a massive pain in the ass on your own. So, you all know the plan. Traditional lunch time is in an hour. I want all the desks in place by then. When you get back from lunch, the rest of the afternoon is about getting everything set up again. We hit the ground running tomorrow."

He hops off the desk, hoping they can team on their own if pointed in that direction, dreading they'll need more help that what he's already provided.


When he heads out for lunch, he does see that all the desk have been rearranged and three of the dividers are up in their new places.

Good.


By the end of Tuesday, Tim had twelve Minions, a completely rearranged floor plan, and though it wasn't yet filled with furniture, a conference space.

He gathers them together and starts with the speechifying, hoping this is the last time he's got to do this.

"Okay, I've talked to each of you, and you know things are going to be very different around here soon. Some of you are going to decide to stay, some of you won't, and here's the last bit of information you need for figuring it out:

"My team, my rules. There's seven of them and they're easy:

"One: Never be unreachable. At least one member of the team will always know a way to get ahold of you. I don't care who it is, and I don't care what you are doing, someone will always be able to reach you. This is a two way street, someone will always be able to reach me, too. You will all have my home address and number, as well. If you need me, my door is always open.

"Two: Never screw your team. If you cannot have every other member of the team's back 100%, I will accept your resignation right now. If you are worried about someone else, come talk to me. We'll get it worked out, but if it can't be, then walk away. If you can't work with someone on the team, I will not hold it against you if you want to leave. I will hold it against you if you stick around and screw one of your teammates.

"Three: Verify. We're gonna wade through a lot of crap here. We are going to go to the front lines of the cyber battlefield and we'll never be entirely sure what is going on, so we verify. Check it once, check it twice, make sure what you think is happening is happening.

"That leads into Four: Trust your instincts. If it feels hinky, it probably is. See number three. Let me know what you think is going on, let your teammates know. If you're too close to it, we'll be your second and third eyes. But if it feels wrong, let us all know so we can swing into action and beat whatever it is into submission. Even if you think it's stupid, even if you can't back it up, tell us. No one ever gets laughed at for telling the rest of us what sort of feel they're getting on a project. Your subconscious notices things you conscious doesn't, and it tries to let you know what you're missing with that little voice in the back of your mind. Listening to that voice saves lives in the field, so we're not gonna ignore it down here.

"Five: When you're on the case, be on the case. When you're off, be off. You need downtime. Make sure you get it. We cannot be the best if we're burnt. Yes, someone needs to be able to get ahold of you at all times, but you're not getting called in on your off time unless the world is ending. Your downtime will be held sacred, but I'm also going to expect you to work the case until its done. You won't have to be physically here to do it. I've got a wife and a six-month-old daughter, both of whom I intend to see every day, so if I need to, I'll work from home, and so will you.

"Six: If you screw it up, fix it first, apologize second.

"Seven: You will screw up. I will, too. If you can't fix it on your own, own up to it and get help. Screwing up is never unforgiveable sin, trying to hide it and not getting the help you need to fix it, is. Most of the time, you screw up, it'll be a small problem, and it'll be an even smaller one with all of us on it. Screw up, hide it, wait until you're in so deep over your head you can't possibly get out on your own, and that small problem becomes a massive one that burns all of us. Bad plan, don't do it.

"That's it. McGee's rules. If you can work by them, if you want to be part of what will be the finest Cybercrime division in the US, then stick around. If you want to keep coasting around with a cushy federal job with nifty benefits and easy hours," he points toward the elevator, "don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out."

Next

Shards To A Whole: Boss

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

Chapter 336: Boss


"You ready?" Abby asks as they pull into the parking lot.

He nods. "Ready."

"Kick ass and take names?"

He nods again, then wiggles his foot. "Boot shall prod buttock as often and with as much force as is needed to get these guys into shape."

Abby grins at that and kisses him. "You're gonna do great."

He sighs. He's been telling himself that all weekend long. He is going to do great. He's got big plans, little plans, and a bunch of in between ones, and it's time to go put them into place.

He kisses her, and squeezes her hand. She smiles at him. He takes a deep breath and lets it out, and then they get out of the car and head in.


For the last few months, Tim's been pondering what to do his first day as, apparently, Director of Cybercrime. He's talked to all of his Minions. He's got the beginning of a feel for them. They're starting to get a feel for him.

But he wants to make it absolutely clear that the status-quo-ante-McGee ended the minute Jenner left the building.

So they're taking a field trip.

To the range.

"Why are we doing this?" Of course the one asking is Stephen Manner.

"Teambuilding, Manner." Tim says crisply as the Minions all gather around him, ear protection around their necks, safety glasses on. "I know none of you are field agents. That's fine. But we are cops. It is our job to solve crimes and defend people. And if any of you ever need to defend yourselves or anyone else, I want you to be able to do it with something other than code."

He takes out his gun, (Personal piece, also a Sig. He carried for more than a decade, and he's not comfortable roaming about DC without a gun. He didn't realize how painfully naked he would feel on the ride home Friday night without his service piece, so that's just not happening again.) shows them how it works, explaining that yes, this is a loaded gun, when he's got a gun on him, it's loaded, and that it's in his desk when he's in the building and he carries when he's not in the building. Then he runs the target out to the full extent, and shoots a smiley face into it at 100 meters.

He brings it back in, and watches them all stare at it, wide-eyed, stunned. (Even Manner looks impressed, against his will.) The first time he was in Cybercrime they treated him like a rock star because he'd been a field agent and carried a gun. This time he's proving he can use it. "By the end of the year, you're all going to be able to do that, too. Handgun proficiency just got added to all of your to-do lists. We're geeks. That's fine. That's who we are, and we're going to be proud of it. But we're going to be the most dangerous geeks anyone has ever seen. We will code longer, harder, and better than anyone ever has or will, and if we ever need to, we'll back that up with physical force. Those of you who were here back in '12 remember what happened to James Hunt. For those of you who weren't, Hunt was one of us; he was undercover in the field. Our security was breached, his name was leaked, and he was tortured and killed, leaving a wife and six-year-old child behind. Not happening on my watch. On my watch, you will all be able to take care of yourselves, and you are never going to be dangling in the wind out there alone."

They all look pretty impressed by that.

"So, step one, let's get you some guns."

For the most part they're pretty bad at it. Cheerful, having a good time, but by any shooting standard, they're pretty bad. A real gun is a whole lot different than a simulation of one. He got to know each of them better, and more importantly got to see how they reacted when given a task way outside of their expectations. For two thirds of his group, he's pleased with what he's seeing.


By the time they get back to the basement, his guys are loosening up a bit. They seem to be getting a little more comfortable with him, and, for the most part, appear to approve of his field trip.

Okay, they'd seen fun, approachable McGee. Over the last two months they'd seen curious McGee. With the coffee they'd seen considerate McGee.

Time to bring out the hard-ass, and as he told Abby, apply boot (Technically, today it's a loafer. Unlike Tony he almost never wears boots to work. Of course, also unlike Tony, all of his boots are on the Doc Martin side of things.) to buttock.

Right now Cybercrime is a collection of desks in nice, straight lines, divided by cubicles. It's very tidy, very organized. And Tim has nothing against organized, he prefers organized, but this flavor of organized is not good for brainstorming, it's not good for working as a team, and it's certainly not good for how he wants his team to work. His office, in specific, and the basement, in general, is also woefully lacking in space to conference with 13 people.

First thing tomorrow, they're rearranging furniture. But for now, he's got them in a semi-circle in front of the coffee maker, desk chairs all around.

He remembers Gibbs telling him that most men just need a gentle whack to the pride to get them moving in the right direction. And he's about to apply said whack.

"Everyone comfy?" They've all drug their chairs out, gotten drinks, and settled in to see what he was going to do next. No one suggests he isn't ready, so Tim twists his chair around, straddles it, folds his arms on the back rest, facing them, and continues on, "In the last six months, I've hacked all of your systems. I got your personal computers at home, I got your work systems, I got your phones, and I did it multiple times." He sees signs of anger at that, some alarm, and a few of the brighter ones are starting to look a little sick. "It was a test. I wanted to see how good your security was. I wanted to see how aware of threats you were. And I wanted to see what you'd do if your systems were compromised." As soon as the word test fell off his lips ten of them start looking very nervous. Good, they should.

"Six of you failed. Completely and utterly. You did not notice you'd been hacked. Your security was sloppy and your safeguards insufficient.

"Four of you passed, barely. You noticed you'd been hacked, tightened your security, and didn't think twice about it.

"Two of you passed the test. You tightened your security, tracked the attack, found that it came from me. One of you talked to Vance. One of you talked to me.

"None of you had a system I couldn't get into, which means none of you aced it."

He sees ten of them blanch. Six of them look sick. Ngyn and Manner, the two who passed, are looking uncomfortable, too. Ngyn's taking this a lot harder than he had hoped for, she looks ready to hang herself because he was able to get into her system, and Manner's between annoyed and outright angry.

All in all Hard Ass McGee appears to be working.

He makes sure to take a few seconds to hold eye contact with everyone who isn't Ngyn or Manner and then says, "To say I was disappointed by those results is an understatement. You are Cybercrime. One of your primary jobs is to defend against cybercriminals. If I had meant business, I could have crippled all of your personal systems. More importantly, if I had meant business, I could have crippled NCIS on your watch. From what I can tell, the only reason that hasn't happened yet is because NCIS is such a small institution that no one knows we exist." He decides mentioning that no one's been able to get through the wall he built around NCIS after Hunt died is counter-productive to the mood of abject terror he's trying to instill right now.

"After almost all of you failed my first test, I decided to go and check over all of your resumes; I rechecked your references and transcripts. I know, that once upon a time, you were all top-notch talent." Okay, that's not exactly true. But they were all in the top quarter of talent, and he's trying to add a little pep talk to his slap to the pride here. "What I do not know is why all of you stopped being top-notch talent, and why only two of you even remember what top-notch talent even looks like.

"I know one other thing, the only people who are staying on this team are the top-notch talent.

"As of today, you just became Probies again. We'll talk one on one today and tomorrow about what I'll expect from each of you. But one thing is true, only two of you were even in the neighborhood of what I'm going to expect from you going forward.

"I wasn't kidding at the range. We're geeks. And we are going to be the best team of geeks anyone has ever seen. We are going to redefine what it means to be a Cybercrime operation. Right now we sit here, wait to find out that someone has broken the law, and then go after them. Not anymore. We are going to be hunters, searching for the problems before they become apparent. We're not just going to clean up messes, we're going to prevent them. Now, all of you back to your desks. Start packing your stuff up." Some of them look terrified at that, and it hits him that they may think he's doing a mass firing. "Tomorrow we're rearranging everything so we can work as a team." And he sees some relief cross six faces. "You've been off doing your own things for too long. We're rebuilding so we can work with each other. Meanwhile, I'll be dropping by to talk to you one on one about what I expect out of you for the next year."

Twelve sets of eyes just stared at him, but no one moved.

"Okay, speaking of what I expect, the correct answer right now is 'On it, Boss' or 'Yes, Boss' then you all get up and do what I've told you to."

Ten forced-sounding versions of "On it, Boss" echoed through the basement as the Minions began to move. Tim made note of the two who didn't say it. Ngyn, terminally shy, and Manner, who was probably horrendously annoyed at this whole thing.


Talking to everyone went, for the most part, smoother than he was expecting. Apparently a judicious application of hard-ass did indeed soften people up nicely.

Unfortunately a judicious application of hard-ass did not speed up physical plant. So, after being told that there was no possible way that they could get new light bulbs any time before February, Tim heads to the supplies cabinet, finds the damn light bulbs and a ladder, and shocks the hell out of his team by replacing them himself.

"What are you doing?" Hepple asks. (Though he can feel eleven other sets of eyes watching as he sets up the ladder below one of the dark lights.)

"Leading by example. This," he points to the lack of lights, "is a problem. Physical Plant says they can't get here until February, so I am fixing the problem myself instead of just ignoring it until someone else can deal with it."

Hepple nods at that, looking like he approves, and goes back to his cubicle.

By the time Tim's done, they can all see easily and the basement is suddenly looking significantly less dungeonish. (And with more light it is clear that it's also in need of a new coat of paint and the janitorial staff has been slacking off. There really shouldn't be cobwebs in the corners.)

And of course, it's after he's done that Manner drifts by and says, "We had so few of them to cut down on the heat and glare. They get really hot and make it hard to see the screens."

"We're moving around tomorrow, so we'll find spots that don't cause too much glare. As for heat… Physical plant says they can get here in February, so when they do, we'll upgrade to LEDs. There's no reason for us to be stumbling around in the dark down here."

Manner doesn't seem impressed, but he drifts back toward his cubical, which he may or may not have been packing up.


That ate up pretty much the whole first day. He was putting the ladder back when the clock hit five. He knows they usually leave at five, so he's curious as to whether or not anyone will be there when he gets back.

They are.

"Okay," He gestures and they all drift forward again. He takes the white board he had written What kind of coffee do you like? on and tacks it to the wall outside of his office.

"Last of today's changes. Come Monday we're on twenty-four seven. Crime doesn't just happen on a nice, tidy nine to five schedule. So, names on the board, write down whatever hours you'd like to work best. I don't care when they are, as long as there are fifty of them a week." He sees Manner about to chime in, "And yes, that fifty hours includes your lunches and breaks. Actual working time will still be forty hours, though we're going to be having a chat about overtime and comp time in the not wildly distant future.

"You don't have to decide what hours you want tonight. Go home, talk with your families, figure out what times will work best, stick some hours up there by Friday end of work. For times I don't have a lot of coverage, we'll use the same sort of on call system we have upstairs, skeleton crew rotating through and one or two of you on call if there's a rush/someone calls in sick.

"All right. That's today. Tomorrow we're rebuilding the office and going over the new vision for Cybercrime.

"Wednesday, we get back to work."

This time he hears a collection of variations on the theme of 'On it, Boss,' as they all wander off, some to fill in hours on the whiteboard, (He makes a mental note to get a big one to stick in the center of his soon to be conferencing area. Yes, there will be upgrading as soon as he gets his hands on his budget and requisition forms, but for right now, he feels like he can spare the pocket money for a big whiteboard. Plus, they're just always good to have around.) most to grab their gear and head home for the night.


With everyone gone, Tim heads into his office for the second time ever. He got in in the morning, put his boxes on the desk, and then turned right around, headed out, waited by the coffee maker, and got everyone together to explain their field trip.

He stands in the door, looking around. He's got an office. Of his own. All his own.

And while he's sure that Manner had already been in to measure for curtains (The front and left walls are both glass with vertical shades.) he hadn't paid much attention to the idea of an office.

Right now, it's a moderately sized room (twelve by ten) with a desk (Big desk, more than enough room for two monitors, keyboard, writing space, pictures… It's at least half again the size of his desk upstairs.) desk chair, two book shelves on the back wall, with two file cabinets between them, a blank wall to his right, and two more guest chairs along the left wall.

So, right now it's really empty.

Kind of odd that there's no computer in there, what with the whole it's the office of the Director of Cybercrime, but there's also a packet of paperwork for him to fill out on the desk, so he's hoping that there's something in there about how he gets a computer for himself.

He'll get to them soon enough.

He's just standing in there, looking around. He figures tomorrow, when everyone else is setting up their new work stations, he'll set up his as well.

But he does put his pictures up. That helps it feel a bit more like his.

"Hi."

He looks over his shoulder from putting the skull picture on the corkboard between his book shelves and above the filing cabinets to see Abby standing in his doorway.

"Nice," she says, grinning at his space.

She touches his door, fingers tracing over the small black and gray plastic name tag that reads, Timothy McGee Director of Cybercrime. "A real door?"

He shrugs. "Looks like you get all the fancy toys." With the exception of the main lab door, all of hers are sliding glass.

"Probably not much chance of any sort of chemical gas leak down here."

"I'd imagine it's pretty small."

She's looking at the blinds, fiddling with the plastic wand that opens and closes them, smiling, and then turns to him. "You know, your desk will never, ever again be that empty or clear."

Right now, the only thing he's got on it is a box of his stuff and the stack of paperwork. So he nods. He can't imagine it will ever be this empty in here again.

"And… as of… tomorrow, the next day… you'll have them working twenty-four, seven right?" By 17:10 or so the Minions were out of the office. So, he is, currently, in possession of a mostly empty office in a deserted Cybercrime basement.

"Monday. We shift to full time on Monday." He's starting to guess where this is going, and a grin is spreading across his face, as well. They've certainly christened her office, might as well do his…

"So… this is a rare opportunity, then." She's facing him, wicked smile on her face, but her back is to the door to his office, she hooks her foot onto the door and kicks it closed. With a snick, it does. One more click and it's locked. Takes a few twists, but the vertical blinds all shut.

He sets the box on the floor, paperwork on top of it, and closes on her, pulling her against him. "Very rare."

"Excellent." Her arms wrap around his neck, and she feels him lift her, and then set her on his desk.

He kisses her, wet and soft, lots of explicit promise from his tongue.

She's moaning quietly, a soft breathy sound that he knows well and loves, as her hands find his belt.

"Quick?" he asks.

"Heather expects us back usual time," she says between kisses.

He nods, thinking that means they've got fifteen minutes, nibbling her collar bone, hands trailing up her legs, noticing that she's got a skirt on today. His fingers brush her pussy, skirt and a thong. He smiles at her, seeing the glee in her eyes. She definitely planned this for today.

Her legs cross around his hips, keeping him close and snug, while her hands unfasten his belt and jeans. "Been thinking about this all day," she says nibbling his bottom lip, unbuttoning his shirt, rubbing her hands and lips over his chest.

He pulls her head up, kisses her, shoving her skirt out of the way, making sure her lab coat is pushed back enough. "God, I love you so much!"

"You mean you haven't been thinking about this?"

He shakes his head, and then groans as she pushes him back a step, pulls his dick out of his boxers, and bends forward to kiss it, lips wet and soft, tongue playing on the tip.

She jacks him slow and steady with a wet hand. "You mean, all day today, you've been thinking about work…"

"I'm not anymore," he says through gritted teeth, watching her hand slip over his dick.

"Good."

He pushes her back a bit on the desk, so she's lying down, hips on the edge, and drags the thong to the side, giving her pussy a good long, wet, sucking, licking kiss. Then reaching back, he grabs his desk chair, pulling it to sit on, and placing each of her feet on one of the arms.

"Good?"

She moans as his mouth dips to her pussy again, body rocking up to meet him, and that's all the confirmation he needs.

He's licking hard, fast, fingers thrusting. There's nothing teasing about this. Sure, he'd like to lay her out and feast on her here, spread out on his desk like his own private, kinky Boss and Secretary porno, but… But it's not happening, not tonight.

Though he thinks she's on the same page, because he's hearing her say, "Oh, God, Yes, oh sir! Yes! Please, sir, get me off, sir!"

She's wet and eager, probably really has been thinking about this all day, and it's only a matter of minutes before words slip into deep breaths and high pitched moans, and just as she's cresting, as her body's pulling tight and her fingers are clenched on the far edge of his desk, he stands up and slips into her, setting her off, reveling in the wet, tight, pulsing grasp of her body on his. Doesn't take him long to follow her, few fast, hard, deep thrusts, hoisting her legs up, around his waist, arching into her at full out speed, and then he's shuddering and twitching, glowing with this.

For a moment, he rests there, head on her chest, bent over his desk, the heels of her boot scratchy on the small of his back. When his heart stops pounding, and her breathing calms down, he kisses her gently on the throat, feeling her lightly stroking his shoulders.

He stands up, about to step back when he notices a snag in their plan. He's in a very empty office. Very empty. And the nearest bathroom is fifty feet away.

"No tissues."

She ducks her hand into her lab coat pocket and pulls a few out. "Don't let it be said that I'm ever unprepared."

He kisses her, grinning, and in a minute, they're wiped up, and his shirt's buttoned and tucked in again.

"You ready to head home?" she asks, and he takes the paperwork and nods.

They're in the elevator before he asks, "You ever going to do that again?"

"You want me to? I don't think you'll ever have an empty office again."

"True…" He's on the fence, because his door does lock, and he does have the blinds, so… as long as they were quiet, they probably could get away with it.

She sees him thinking about it and says, "One day, when you're not expecting it, I'm going to head in for an 'important conversation,' and then I'm going to gag you, and ride you in your office chair."

His eyes close at that, and he bites his lips. Then he kisses her, hard, once more.

The door to the elevator is just about to open. She gently pats his dick, and then, just as they slide apart says, "So, how did your first day go?"

And, as they walk toward her car, he tries to answer.

Next

Shards To A Whole: The Last Ride of the Four Musketeers

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

Chapter 335: The Last Ride of the Four Musketeers

It's a series of endings.

Last day as an Agent.

Last day of the year. (That wasn't intentional, but it feels very right.)

Tim signs his name to a 445B2. His last piece of paperwork. (Well, his last piece as an Agent. There'll be tons when he gets downstairs.)

They head out to lunch; last time he straps his gun on to head out.

And while he knows this won't be his last meal with Tony, Ziva, Draga, and Gibbs, it is his last working one. Last one where they're all talking shop about the most recent case. No. That too, will happen again. Talking shop is part of down time. Last time he's part of talking shop, last time he's in charge of part of the case.

When they get back, he heads to HR. They take his current ID and shred it. (He was kind of hoping to keep it. It feels really, really odd to say goodbye to all of the marks of Special Agent Tim McGee.) He stands against the white background, smiles, and they shoot a new picture of him.

Five minutes later, he's holding a new id. Like Abby's it's designed to clip onto his clothing. (No, he doesn't have to have it on at all times, but they don't let you in the building if you don't scan in first.) He touches the picture and the words beneath it. Timothy McGee Director of Cybercrime.

He feels a thrill at that. A rush of heat and pride. But there's some sorrow there, too. Special Agent Tim McGee is gone. He's a memory now, and that's worth a bit of sad.


Back upstairs, he shows off the new ID, and they're all properly oohing and ahhing. But that's really only about three minutes of showing off followed by… packing up. He guesses that's the part that comes next.

After all, he didn't drag a stack of cardboard boxes into work today just for kicks.

So he gets to it.

He untacks the last picture and lays it on top of all the rest of his stuff. Surprising that it only took up three boxes. It feels like it should be more. Like… Like twelve years should matter more. Like they should take up more space.

But it's only three boxes.

He'll take them down on Monday. When he officially starts. (He's not going down to Cybercrime today. Today he's making sure Jenner has the time to do the same thing he's doing up here, saying goodbye.) For right now, he's got them tucked under the empty desk behind his.

He pats the desk one last time, fingers lingering over the smooth surface, and for a second he's almost wondering if they'll stick, if somehow Tony might have done one last run with the superglue. Keep him here that much longer. He almost wishes Tony had.

But they don't stick.

He didn't turn. "All yours, Draga."

"Thanks, McGee."


Then next bit is harder. He notices he's going slower and slower the closer he gets to Leon's office.

He's got the new ID, which means it's time to say goodbye to the old one.

"Mr. McGee," Vance says as he heads in.

Tim shakes his head. He knows that all the department heads are called by their title, Mr., Ms., Dr. but… nope. That's just wrong.

"That feels really odd. They're going to be calling me Boss or McGee, so, just McGee, please." That's when it hit that if Vance is calling him Mr. McGee, that means he outranks Jethro, and that's just… That's all of his heartstrings vibrating in a chorus of resounding NO!

Vance seems amused by that. Tim's not sure if he's amused by seeing the shades of Gibbs in him, or just recognizing how this kind of career jump feels. "Okay, McGee. You've got something for me?"

"Yes." He wears both his badge and his service pistol on his belt, and he took them both off. "One Sig Sauer P-228, serial number," he reads it off the gun, "and one service badge, number…" he rattles off his digits. Those he doesn't need to read, he knows them as well as his Social Security number. But they aren't his. Not anymore.

"Ready for Monday?" Vance asks with his amused smile.

"I think so, sir. Got a few plans in mind."

"Kind of plans I'm going to like hearing about?" Vance's eyebrow crooks up slightly.

"I certainly hope so. But, either way, they're going to happen."

Vance smiles at that. Tim realizes he's pleased to hear that it doesn't matter if he approves of the plans or not, they're going forward.

Vance stands and shakes his hand. "Congratulations, Mr. McGee." Tim knows that this is intentional, a mark of his new status, so he doesn't mention the Mr. again.

"Thank you, Director."


He heads down to the lab, and none of Abby's LabRats look even remotely surprised to see them head for the ballistics lab to talk privately.

"All wrapped up?" she asks.

"Yeah." He hands over his new ID.

"Ohh… Good picture." He hadn't looked at it enough to notice that, so he does.

"Yeah." It is a pretty good picture. Of course, he hadn't had his ID redone since 2012, so he looks a lot different in this shot.

"Director of Cybercrime? How fancy." She grins at him.

He nods. "Kind of silly really, I didn't bother to find out what the official title was." He sounds a bit off as he says that.

She wraps her arms around his neck, and kisses him gently. "You okay?"

He half-smiles, half-shakes his head, and flashes her a mostly confused look. "I should be, right?"

"Not if you aren't."

"It just feels… I don't know… Lost. It's not bad or anything… It's not scary."

She pets his face and kisses him again. "It's okay."

"Yeah, it is." He nods, as much convincing himself as her, and kisses her again, taking comfort, reassurance in touching her. The world spins, changes, the carpet gets yanked out under his feet, and his feet find new floors to inhabit, but this is true and real and there. Abby is here. Loving Abby is here. As he said in his vows, that's his bedrock, and the rest of the world can burn, as long as she's near, he'll be okay. "And it's going to be. And Monday is going to be awesome. But right now…"

"Yeah." She caresses his face, smiling softly at him, getting it. "Right now. You want to hide out down here with me a bit more?"

He nods, resting his head on her shoulder, enjoying having her pet his hair.


They'd had the 'real' celebration when it was official that Jenner had resigned and he was going to be the next Director (Really, how did he not manage to find out what the title of the job was?) of Cybercrime.

So, he's half-hoping, as he heads back up to the Bullpen, that today can sort of just fade away. Clock out at five like a normal paperwork day. Then home for a bit, get Kelly, and over to Ziva and Tony's for Shabbos.

But, half-hoping or not, he's pretty certain that when he heads back up there, there'll be some sort of big deal.

He doesn't feel like he can get out of the building today without Tony drawing attention to it.

He supposes that's appropriate. They've been a team for eleven years. Longest unchanged roster at NCIS. And today it ends. Two weeks from now, it really ends because Gibbs goes, too.

When he gets up there, Draga's got his stuff unpacked and set up. He's not sure if he spent longer with Abby than he intended to, or if Draga just doesn't have that much stuff. But for a second there's a visceral flash of get the hell out of my desk, but it fades pretty quick. It's not his desk. Not anymore.

He sees Tony flash off a quick text, but nothing else is happening, so he heads to the empty desk and… And he doesn't know what to do now. There's half an hour until quitting time. But he's done.

No one's talking to him, and Draga won't look him in the eye, so, some sort of surprise is in the works.

And two minutes of just sitting around reveals it. The elevator bongs, and Jimmy and Ducky and Abby head in, wheeling in a pretty large computer shaped cake with Congratulations McGee! on it.

He stares at Abby and Jimmy, rather shocked they managed to keep it a secret, but they both grin at him.

He smiles back, and settles in to eat some cake, drink some champagne, and listen to some stories about his various exploits.

It's not unpleasant, just, odd. He usually does a really good job of not being the center of attention, but as the cake gets handed out, along with the booze and soda for people who are still on duty, more and more people wander over. Co-workers, colleagues, Penny and Breena and the kids all make it.

And they're all paying attention to him. Telling stories about him. Even Gibbs tells the story of the first case he was on. Tony's got at least three of them. Abby adds a few. And, he thinks he's handling it gracefully, holding Kelly, laughing at his own history, taking the compliments and praise nicely, no blush is sight, but, yeah, it's just odd. He feels almost outside of himself as it happens. Like he's watching it from afar.

Vance stops down, smiling at him, adds a few of his own stories, the redacted, don't involve any illegal activities versions of those stories. They're a bit less impressive that way, still it's probably not a good idea to admit hacking Mossad or the CIA or hunting down Bodnar when there are a ton of people around.

After two hours, it wraps up. Everyone's had some cake, said congrats, wished him well in Cybercrime, and told stories of how he'd saved the day.

Turns out there's no Shabbos celebration tonight. They're heading toward the diner for dinner, and then, because babies don't like late nights, home.

But as they're getting ready to leave, waiting for the elevator, Tony says to him, "Last time this ever happens." He's smiling, but there are tears in his eyes. "You did good, Probie."

"Thanks, Tony."

"C'mere." He hugs Tim, and after a moment he feels Ziva and Gibbs snuggle in, too. The rest of the family holds back, knowing this is for them, the core team. They break apart after a minute, all of them looking shaky, discretely dealing with teary eyes.

The elevator opens and the Four Musketeers walk through those doors for the last time.

Next

Shards To A Whole: Pitfalls

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

Chapter 334: Pitfalls

Tony brings Bishop into the bullpen and introduces her, and Gibbs feels his heart freeze.

She's young. She's really young. And blonde, and pretty, and innocent, and bubbly and cute and just, shit. Sure, she's dressed for an interview, so her hair's up and she's got a cream colored suit on, but… she just radiates cute and playful.

She's a problem waiting to happen.

She's a problem he's really hoping Tony's outgrown.

Really, really hoping.

He smiles and shakes her hand and notices that Tony's introducing her as Bishop, which he thinks is good, but…

Shit. This could go so bad so fast, and bite Tony so hard in the ass he'll limp for the rest of his life.

Gibbs knew Bishop was a woman. That was clear from the resume. But his mental image of her was someone older, less attractive, less cute. Someone a whole lot more Eleanor. God, she's a puppy, so light and bubbly and eager to make everyone around her happy.

She's talking to Tim and Draga, getting acquainted, and Gibbs is just staring.

Tony catches the look, and Gibbs looks toward the elevator. Tony nods, wondering what Gibbs is seeing that he isn't. He can feel the worry coming off Gibbs but doesn't know what's setting it off.

"Bishop?"

She looks over to him, away from McGee. "Yes?"

"We're mostly coffee drinkers here. First one's on me. Next one's," he gestures to the group, indicating she's getting a whole round, "on you. What do you like?"

"Ohhh…" She thinks about it. "Half-caff macchiato with a shot of vanilla syrup and whipped cream."

Tony nods, burning that into his memory, and he and Gibbs go on the coffee run. Two seconds after the elevator doors close, he whacks the emergency stop.

"What's wrong?"

Gibbs stares at him, not sure how to even start saying this, because he knows this is going to be touchy. But… Just… SHIT! "You can't be bending or breaking the sexual harassment rules if you're the Boss."

Because they do, generally, ignore them. They always treated them like a joke, did everything they could to get out of having to deal with them, and Gibbs knows he turned a blind eye to everything Tony dished out to Kate and Ziva, mostly because if they couldn't handle him, he knew they weren't tough enough for field work.

But Tony's the Boss now, and he can't pull that crap. If he does… Shit. And… in the more than ten years since they hired Ziva those rules went from something they all winked at to laws that had to be followed.

And Tony's reacting exactly the way Gibbs expects him to. He's staring at him, horrified, hurt, stammering, "I'm not…!"

Gibbs holds his hands up. "Just, listen, okay? Not your Boss, not right now. But as your friend, as a Dad, as someone who wants the best for you and wants you to succeed in everything you do, please, take this seriously. You cannot be crossing, bending, stepping on, or even getting near the line with her. And, if the stuff Penny says about her school is anything to go by, the line's about three miles closer than you or I think it should be, and none of these kids have any sense of humor."

"Gibbs…"

"Please. Get the regs, re-read them, and then go talk to Penny; she's going to have a much better idea of how someone Bishop's age understands this stuff. Because I know it's not how we do."

Tony's looking stunned, hurt, and like someone's shining a light on the parts of himself that he doesn't like seeing, let alone anyone else seeing.

"I love Ziva."

Gibbs winces, that's a direction he wasn't thinking, but… Yeah, that's in play now, too. He was thinking about Tony making some sort of stupid joke or off color comment or… but not that. "I know you do. I know you're faithful to her, and I know you're going to stay faithful to her. I trust you on that. But… God, you make the wrong joke, or she catches you looking…" Tony appears unhappy at that, but Gibbs knows Tony's gonna look, he's married, not blind, and Bishop is well worth looking at. "You and I both got away with things with Kate because she would take it, part of proving she belonged in the boys' club. Ziva knew anything you dished out she could take and double down on. You don't know how Bishop understands this stuff, you're more than twenty years older than she is, and she's married, so anything you do may seem really creepy to her."

Tony's glaring at Gibbs. "What do you think I'm going to do?"

"I don't know, use her deodorant? Take your shirt off in the bullpen? Talk too loud with Draga about when you got laid last? I don't know! And that's why I'm worried. That stupid porn conversation you guys were having last month might be her idea of sexual harassment. Or… remember that time Borin was talking about playing softball left-handed and you made that comment about swinging both ways? First time you met Kate, she asked about sketching, and your example for scale was a model's cup size, I know you know that's out of bounds now, but…"

Tony's nodding, getting an idea of what sort of minefield this might be. "I'll re-read the regs."

"Good. Talk to Penny, too."

"Okay."

"Thank you."

Tony flicks the elevator back on, and it gets less than ten feet down before he hits the stop again.

"Did I just shoot myself in the ass?"

Now Gibbs isn't sure what the problem is, so he says, "Not if you keep your mouth in line."

"Not what I'm thinking."

"What are you thinking?"

He's thinking that, ten seconds ago, he'd been really insulted at the idea of the sexual harassment thing meaning him flirting with or hitting on Bishop. That Gibbs was hitting him on something he was trying hard not to be. But he wasn't. And yeah, inappropriate jokes/comments is a possible issue.

But once Gibbs got off that idea of crossing more personal lines with Ellie, Tony got onto it. And he'd quickly shifted from feeling like he's a million years old and she's some new little puppy to noticing that Ellie Bishop is very attractive.

"I'm thinking as Ziva's Dad, you're gonna kill me for this."

"Right now, I'm your friend. And even in full on avenging Dad-mode, I'm not going to do anything to you for just thinking. And you haven't done anything yet, so talk to me, and let's not end up with Ziva's Dad putting together his sniper's rifle."

Tony flicks on the elevator. "Someone's going to want to use this eventually. Too cold for outside. Locker room's usually empty this time of day."

Gibbs nods, and off they go.


Tony does check to see that it's empty, and it is. Gibbs sits down on one of the benches and Tony paces between the lockers and the bench. He's not talking, just sort of moving back and forth, trying to get this right in his head, so he can say it to Gibbs.

He's not attracted to Ellie. She's cute, she's perky, she's pretty, but he's not feeling any spark for her. However… thinking about it... He can see a situation where he could. He can see it happening very easily, and it scares the shit out of him.

Every woman he's worked with, gotten close to, trusted his life to, he's fallen for. Adrenaline, the fight or flight chemicals pumping through your system, the chase, that soaring high of getting the bad guy, add that to a beautiful woman sharing it with you, and it's almost as good, and for him, often more intimate, than sex. Definitely more intimate than sex with anyone who wasn't Ziva or Wendy.

This might be a much bigger problem than he was anticipating. And worse, the net of help he depends on, people who keep him straight and narrow, they're all leaving.

"Tim's gone Monday. You're gone two Mondays after that. Ziva's leaving… whenever she leaves. Draga can't do it…"

Gibbs watches him walking around.

"She's leaving. She's going to go get pregnant, and have the baby, and she's going to change, and she'll be focused on it, and… I'll be here, but she won't be. Her being here keeps me in line. And I just hired my dad's hot secretary's body double."

Gibbs nods. He gets this. Just because you love your wife doesn't mean every other woman on Earth goes away. Doesn't mean you stop wanting. He knows that worries Tony, because they talked about it when they talked about him marrying Ziva.

He knows that love isn't always enough. And he knows that people are frail and do stupid things.

And he knows that Tony's actively scared of doing something stupid.

"You guys would keep me in line. She keeps me in line. But you won't be here."

Gibbs nods at that, too. "Bishop going to do what you need her to?"

Tony gets that Gibbs is asking did you just hire someone cute and decorative, or can she do the job. "I think so. New job, new way of looking at the old job, but I think she'll do it, and be good at it. That's probably part of the problem, too. If she isn't good at it, I likely won't be interested. But she'll be good, she'll be working with me, all day, late nights, talking killers and terrorists, overnight trips to God knows where and who knows what cover IDs, and I'll go home and Ziva'll be talking diapers and teething."

"You're afraid Ziva'll be less interesting to you?"

Tony waffles on that, but he is afraid. "She's going to change."

Gibbs nods. "She is. So are you."

"My ninja's becoming a soccer mom."

Gibbs shrugs.

"I love the ninja. I fell in love with the ninja. I married the ninja. Me and her taking on the world, together, catching the bad guys."

"She's not dying, Tony."

"No… but… our life is."

Gibbs nods at that, too. Life as they knew it is coming to a close. Life as all of them know it is ending right now.

"And it's not like I'm looking at Bishop and thinking 'I want some of that.' I don't. And you suggesting it—"

"I wasn't…"

"It pissed me off anyway."

"Good."

"But she could…" That's not right. This is on him, not Bishop. "But I could find her attractive. Kate, Cassidy, Jen, Ziva, of course Ziva, always Ziva, EJ… Borin's the only woman we work with regularly that I've never been interested in."

"I know."

"The job's so intense and…"

"Tony, I know. Rule 12 didn't just come to me in a dream one day."

"Twelve involved your third marriage going down the crapper?"

Gibbs shakes his head. "That marriage was… It was never good, Tony. Jen didn't kill it. Desire for Jen didn't kill it. But wanting Jen, thinking that maybe, somehow I could have her. That screwed a lot of things up."

Tony nods. "For a long time, I thought twelve meant don't get caught."

Gibbs nods, he knows exactly what Tony did with twelve and how to get around it, and he knows how Tony got burned on Cassidy and EJ.

"When I was married to Shannon…" He's never come close to saying anything like this to Tony, but right now he thinks Tony needs to hear this. "I loved her more than anything in the world." Gibbs smiles sadly. "Still do. But, even with that… I'm not going to say I never looked. Not going to say I didn't think about it." And Gibbs' look gets across that some of those thoughts involved some pretty vigorous hand motions, too. "And there were nights I did extra rounds, took extra sentry duty, and made sure I had a buddy with me all night so I wasn't alone. Because the job is intense, and when they're with you, going through it, and home's far away and it's been a long time, and… And you know. You've felt it. But you do the rounds, you make sure you aren't alone, you call us for help if you need it, and we'll come. None of us are going to think less of you if you call at one in the morning because it's late and you've been on a case non-stop for two days, and she's telling you her back hurts and wouldn't a quick rub feel so good. That happens, you get the fuck away from her, you call, we'll be there. You do what you need to do to make sure you don't end up in a bad situation with her.

"That's love. That's being a man. That's knowing that what you have is worth more than what you can get." He stares at Tony, decides to go crude as hell, because right now, that's part of this. "There's pussy all over the goddamn world, and it's all yummy, and we all want it, and it's easy as hell to get. If anyone knows that, you do. But there's only one woman attached to a pussy that lights up your life and makes you glad to be alive. So you be a man, you be a husband, and you keep control of yourself, and if you get shaky you call for back-up and we get you through it."

Tony nods.

"That's being a good husband. But you've got to be a Boss, too. I don't have a great track record with this, but… You do whatever it is you have to not to see her as someone you can have. It was easy to see Abby as a daughter. We just clicked like that. After Ziva killed Ari, that slipped into place, too.

"But Kate had a dad. She didn't need me to be her father. She didn't want me to be her father. And… I wanted her so much. All the time those first few months. I had a girlfriend, but I still wanted her. She was so good at her job, and smart and strong and beautiful and…" Gibbs shakes his head at that. Three quarters of his interest in Allison Hart had been based on how much she reminded him of Kate. And right now he doesn't want to think about how much of his attraction to Rachel was Rachel or similarities to and memories of Kate. "But I was the Boss. And I'd already been down that road and it had been a disaster." Gibbs looks a bit embarrassed by this, but, it… Maybe worked is a bit of an overstatement, but it made it easier. "I finally started telling myself you two had a thing. I wasn't going to mess it up for you guys. I got it so deeply embedded in there, that…" He lets that trail off. Tony probably doesn't need to know about that… vision, fantasy, whatever that was. "It helped some. Your future girlfriend was off limits, so that was that." Gibbs can hear Penny yelling at him in his head on that, that he had an easier time dealing with Tony's claim on Kate than just shutting himself down. but he's thinking that isn't very important to this. "Bishop's married. You are. Use those rings as anchors. It might help."

Tony nods at that, and Gibbs knows this must be serious because he's not getting any ribbing on being attracted to Kate.

"You were Jen's Boss when…"

"Yeah." Gibbs rubs his eyes. "She was my first Probie, at least, first one as Team Leader. And Burley was trying to keep me in line, but it didn't work. I didn't want to be kept in line, and Jen really didn't want me in line. I married Stephanie as part of trying to keep myself in line, and you know how well that worked."

Tony sits down on the other end of the bench. "Not even sure what to think about that."

Gibbs shrugs.

"I mean, you couldn't do it. You can do anything…"

"I didn't want to do it. I put myself and Jen into a situation where it was going to get sticky. The only reason Burley didn't get sent into Paris is that I didn't want to share Jen. Say you do find yourself wanting Bishop, you gonna go on a two-month-long deep cover op, where your cover is couple-in-love with just her?"

"No."

"And that's the difference. When I wanted to do it, I did. Sure, there weren't a lot of beautiful women in Iraq, and they kept the female Marines away from us, but Colombia was a different story and so was Nicaragua. But that time, I knew I had something at home worth guarding, so I did it."

Tony sits quietly, thinking about it.

"It doesn't get easy. Your dick wants what it wants and the fact that your head and heart know it's a bad idea doesn't change things. But like I said earlier, I trust you. Ziva trusts you. I looked at Bishop and saw you saying something that horrified her, making a bad joke at the wrong time, maybe looking a bit too long or standing a bit too close, but that's it."

Tony nods. He looks at his watch. This is way too long for a "coffee run." "Let's get the drinks and get back there."

"Okay."


When they get back, Bishop grins at him, taking the pro-offered coffee. She takes a sip. "Perfect. McGee was telling us about going after Saleem and using the Caf-Pow trail to find him. That's one of the things I used to do. Just on a much, much bigger scale."

She's all smiley and perky and chatting with Ziva and Tim and Draga, and Tony watches, thinking, studying what he's feeling. He's not feeling any attraction to her. She's pretty, she's aesthetically pleasing, but... no spark, no craving. He looks a Bishop as she talks to Ziva, the way she's leaning toward Ziva, listening carefully, asking good questions, and he's pleased by that. She looks like she's going to make a good student, good addition to the team.

He looks at Ziva and sees his whole world standing there.

And right now, he's thinking, hoping, this is going to be okay.

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