If Given As A Gift - NCIS, McGee/Dinozzo, PG-13
Title: If Given As A Gift
Pairing: Anthony Dinozzo/Timothy McGee
Author: dome_epais
Rating: PG-13
Summary: An AU where McGee is a forensic computer analyst who washed out of training to be an agent. He gets a chance to work with Gibbs' team on a case - can he prove that he has what it takes? Warnings: Swearing. No more (and probably less) violence than the show itself.
sexycazzy created this banner - you can find this and a lovely wallpaper for the story at her art post!
There is a firing range on base that Tim uses after work three times a week. It’s never empty, but it never feels too crowded. The regulars don’t bother each other. It’s not for civilians.
Today, Tim checks in, puts on his safety gear, and takes his gun case with him to a lane. He loads his Ruger MK II .22 with even, steady moves, concentrating on the routine of it. He follows safety procedures with every ounce of caution, because any mistake will end a life.
Tim tells every person he dates that he owns a firearm. It’s always on the second date: after they’ve had a chance to talk to him, before they might jump into bed together. In Tim’s opinion, opening the bedside drawer and finding his locked case is not the way to find out that there is a gun in the room.
When (if) he tries to date, he (the date) is surprised to learn this. He almost always tells Tim that the gun clashes with his outward persona. Tim is a couple dozen pounds from being in shape, pale from days in the basement. He’s nice and earnest and safe.
Tim cares about security and self-reliance. He doesn’t think a computer-based job precludes this.
He didn’t fail his training because his aim was bad. It’s not hard to stand at a range, fix his stance, breathe, fire.
At the end of his budget of ammunition, Tim determines that his aim is a little more consistent than it used to be. The holes are a cluster of paper stars crowding the target’s diaphragm. He checks that his gun is cleared and makes it safe, packs it up. He’ll clean it at home.
When he’s back across the firing line, he notices the man two lanes down. It’s Special Agent Tony Dinozzo. His impeccably tailored suit makes clean lines across his shoulders and down his legs. He is focused on the target, his body taut, his hands steady.
Since it’s so close to the building, Tim sees other NCIS employees there often. No one to speak to, not even real acquaintances. He recognizes their faces under the safety glasses, their stances past the firing line. He collects small details about them and files them away.
He can see that Dinozzo is a little more relaxed. His mouth has a hint of a smile. There haven’t been any major cases lately.
Tim lingers a few minutes longer, looking. Just looking.
Dinozzo finishes, checks his target, packs his gun. Walks past Tim with eyes that glide over everything but catch on nothing.
Tim goes home.
--
Tim drives through the usual morning traffic. He stops about three blocks away from the Navy Yard and picks up coffee and a Caf-Pow. He shows his NCIS ID card at the gate and wends his way to headquarters.
In the lobby, he sees Dinozzo waiting for an elevator. He’s a little over six feet, and his fine taste in suits is distinctive. Instead of silently watching the screen that is counting down past two, Dinozzo is smiling charmingly at a legal aid.
The legal aid, for her part, is carefully trying to adjust the fit of her shirt in the reflective doors of the elevator. In a classy, subtle way. Dinozzo follows her eyes and smiles at their duplicates.
Tim’s the only one of the group that hits the down button, so he stands a few steps apart and lets the group pack into the elevator. The contrasting temperatures of the hot coffee and the iced Caf-Pow in his hands distract him from his idle study of Dinozzo’s body language. (Still relaxed.)
He waits a little longer and the elevator comes for him. The ride down is quiet like always. Tim stares at the brushed metal that turns any reflection into a blur. He wouldn’t mind staring at the slight puff of his cheeks, the not-quite-handsome face. Five years ago, right after he washed out of field agent training, he hated how much of a geek he was. But now, he spends ten hours a day crunching numbers and staring at his computer screen, and he’s fine with that. A paper chase or hard drive recovery is just as essential for catching and keeping bad guys as, say, pointing a gun at them.
Tim gets off the elevator and walks past the thick glass door to Ducky’s autopsy. The room across the hall is Abby’s lab.
He hovers in the doorway for a few seconds to gauge how busy she is. She’s fiddling with something in her hands, as opposed to typing or babysitting tests. So, not preparing a report or evidence for a case.
“I can smell that,” she says, without looking away from her hands. “McGee, did you bring me ambrosia?”
“Figured Gibbs wouldn’t need to keep you supplied, with this dry spell,” he answers, entering the room fully. When he got a different angle on her hands, he jerked back in surprise. “Whoa!” Some of the cold energy drink sloshed down his hand. “Are you playing with a knife?”
She gestures for the cup before he desecrates it further. Then she smiles, a perfect line of deep red lipstick around bright teeth. “Rule Number 9, Tim. You’ll never catch me without one.”
Abby’s wearing her usual dark blend of cosmetics and clothes, mixing goth and metal and getting something illogically adorable. One of the hair ties in her pigtails has a plastic thing of that black penguin from Hello Kitty. Tim can’t believe that someone so hot has seen every episode of The Next Generation, but Abby tells him that his attitude is full of stereotyped prejudice, so he’s trying to get over it.
Abby’s currently waving her hand over the Caf-Pow, wafting the scent like a wine connoisseur. She sighs and says, “I forgot how awful seven in the morning can be without this stuff. Thanks.”
Tim sips his coffee and leans his hip against an area of counter free of paperwork. “So. Any nice gossip?”
“I don’t know,” she takes a sip of her drink, “why you think,” another sip, “I get out,” another, “more than you do.”
“Well.” Tim picks at the join of his cardboard sleeve of his coffee until it begins to tear. “I think Dinozzo and a legal aid have a thing.”
She frowns at him. “Not like Tony to be unprofessional at work. Were they, like, holding hands?”
“No…” he acknowledges.
“Flirting a lot?”
Tim cringes a little. “He was doing that. Um. That smiling thing he does.”
She sighs and puts down the Caf-Pow in order to cross her arms at him. She gives him a Look.
“And she was preening?” Tim offers meekly.
“Timothy McGee, it is Not Polite to assume things based on circumstantial evidence alone,” she reminds him sternly.
He makes a face at her. “Is that you telling me to drop it, or to go through their cell phone records?”
After a short hesitation, she reluctantly says, “Probably better to drop it. Acquiring solid evidence on his relationships is taking your crush a little too far.”
McGee shifts his weight uncomfortably. Bringing up drunken confessions is not playing fair. “It’s not like I was looking for evidence in the first place.”
“Okay,” she says dubiously.
“I wasn’t!” he protests. “They were just… being obvious about it.”
“No, of course,” she agrees in the same tone.
He throws up his free hand. “You’re being impossible. I’m going to my office.”
“Bye, McGee.” She smirks at him. Then she snaps her fingers. “Oh, I’ve emailed you some lukewarm cases that I hope to kick-start while we’re in this slump. Take a look at them, okay?”
He waves over his shoulder and makes his way to the small, cramped office one door down. He settles in just about on time and opens up his email.
There’s the usual flurry of messages from Abby (rather, ascutio@ etc.), attachment size maxed out and asking for collating, cross-referencing, researching. There’s nothing new from a certain team; no adinozzo, zdavid, or pcassidy. Their boss, Special Agent Gibbs, has never sent down something directly.
Tim gets started on his work.
--
He has a lot of time for observation. At this point, he cannot tinker with his network’s efficiency any further, and a CODIS search can still take hours. So he goes for coffee upstairs, briefly enduring Abby’s loud music and taking the elevator up to the buzzing activity of the field teams’ floor.
He has to walk past the Major Case Response Team’s area to reach the coffee. It’s not his fault if his steps slow, if he eavesdrops a little bit.
All four of them are clustered around their screen, discussing something. There’s the silver head of Gibbs; Cassidy, blond; David, glossy black; and Dinozzo, just at the line between brown and dark blond.
Paula Cassidy is a profiler, and she tends to jump the gun on her conclusions. Ziva David is Mossad and used to assassinate people, so suffice it to say that she terrifies Tim. There is a constant, subtle battle between the two women, both of them strong and accustomed to being the alpha female. They stop to let Special Agent Gibbs speak, but they talk over each other, competing to reach the truth first.
Between those three dominant personalities, the more jovial Tony Dinozzo might have given up ground and let them carry on. On the contrary; he has seniority over both of the women and sometimes gets the jump on them, armed with experience or more effective techniques. Also, the charming smile and good looks don’t hurt.
And, of course, there is Gibbs. He’s… intimidating.
The competence rolls off all of them in waves; the tension in their shoulders, the quick conclusions and ideas bouncing between them, the (sometimes hilarious) witty repartee.
Tim wishes he could be a part of it. The problem is that he wouldn’t fit in. He’s not like them, not at all; he would be subsumed. So he walks by slowly on his way to coffee and gathers impressions of them, as though there will be a test later.
When Tim gets back down to the basement, the music is off. He glances in Abby’s door but keeps walking, because she’s a blur of activity. There’s clearly a new case.
Tim goes to his office and sees a new email from adinozzo. He puts the lukewarm cases aside and gets on it immediately.
--
Seaman Apprentice Jeffery Miller disappeared from his on-base residence (at Joint Base Andrews Naval Air Facility) between the hours of 2000 Tuesday and 0600 Wednesday. He left behind his car, a fried computer, a ransacked house, and a few patches of blood-stained carpet. During a search of the house, investigators discovered a cubbyhole in the wall, concealed behind a couch.
Running theory: Miller was doing something illegal (supplies/profits of which were hidden in the wall), and this merited his abduction.
Tim’s job: Figure out what Miller was hiding.
--
At about three, Tim takes another break. He goes for coffee.
Abby is checking on four different machines as they all beep for her attention. Gibbs is in Ducky’s autopsy room, apparently just for a chat.
The elevator comes after a minute’s delay, and Tim spends the wait and the ride up trying to straighten out the tangle of numbers and details that he’s been collecting for hours.
Cassidy and David are busy at their desks when Tim passes on his way to coffee. When he reaches the break room, he pulls up short.
In the near corner, out of sight of the rest of the floor, Dinozzo is leaning over the legal aid from that morning with her elbow propped up against the wall. He’s talking in a smooth murmur that makes her stifle embarrassed, interested laughter.
Tim doesn’t do more than glance at them. He keeps going for the coffee, some noise as he’s fixing it. By the time he finishes and turns around, they’ve quietly dispersed.
He goes back downstairs.
--
Abby is always busy during a case. It’s no surprise that Tim emails his results to Dinozzo, powers down his station, collects his things, and finds her lab still bustling. This is already a late night for him; he has no idea how late she intends to stay.
He walks out to the convenience store on the street. He gets yet another coffee for himself and fills up a Caf-Pow. He turns around and walks back to Abby’s lab.
She’s slumped over an autoclave, watching it whir through a cycle. The high whine runs down, and she carefully reaches in with gloved hands. She takes out a vial and mixes a flaky white substance with an unlabelled, bluish liquid, then stoppers the vial and sets it to run in the centrifuge. Her movements have an uncharacteristic, tired speed.
All of this done, she snaps off her rubber gloves and says, “Sorry, Gibbs, your innate timing has failed you-” She turns around and finishes, “Um. Or, yeah. Hi, McGee.”
“Evening,” Tim says. “I just thought. It’s getting late, and if you’re going to be here a while...”
“Thank you.” She takes it from him and drinks a lot of it immediately. “I was seriously dying. Something about this Miller case is weird.”
Tim leans against her cabinet and says, “Miller himself has a strange past. Tested into Stanford with a partial scholarship. Partied too much and washed out. He was smart enough for any other school, didn’t have to enlist.”
“I’m talking about the guy’s computer.” She points to a cardboard box filled with blackened, melted plastic. “Someone with size 10 feet stomped open the casing and took a literal blow torch to the thing.”
The centrifuge stops and beeps loudly. She takes another huge gulp and then pulls on new gloves. She’s still pulling on her safety glasses when she says, “Oh, man.” She doesn’t need to pull the vial out to see that the bluish liquid has turned to the dark purple of a bruise.
“Cyclonite. It’s C4?” she asks her equipment, completely taken aback. “Who keeps C4 in their wall?”
“A seaman who intends to use it, Abbs.” A hard, gravelly voice comes from right behind Tim.
Tim jumps and - yes, maybe he scurries out of the way. He hovers uncertainly near Abby’s main computer station, nervous. He’s never actually spoken to Gibbs before. Once, he ended up sharing an elevator with the man, and he did his best not to breathe wrong.
Gibbs is holding another huge Caf-Pow and looking from the one on Abby’s desk to Tim. “What’s going on?”
Abby leaves the gloves and glasses and brushes her hands down her white coat on the way to her computer. She starts going through her conclusions: two intruders; the blood identified as Miller’s, from an apparently non-vital wound; traces of store-bought hair dye in the bathroom drain. Now with the waxy remnants from the cavity in the wall identified as explosives.
Things aren’t looking good for Miller’s innocence.
Tim’s seen photographs from the scene, neatly cut drywall outlining the storage capacity. He sets down his coffee and uses his hands to mark the approximate measurements. “By the volume of the cavity, and assuming standard dimensions of military-grade bricks, you’re dealing with at least sixteen kilos of C4. That quantity is impractical for a single minor strike. It would be more effective if detonated in several locations simultaneously, or maybe one location with a more elaborate design.”
He looks away from the crime scene photos on Abby’s screen to see both of them staring at him.
“It depends,” he adds lamely. “Maybe they want hysteria and confusion. Or maybe, say, a semi-controlled demolition.”
“Huh,” Abby says. “You never mentioned explosives experience.”
Tim rubs the back of his neck. “I took a year or so of demolitions and structure courses when I wanted to be an engineering major.”
Gibbs asks, “Who is this guy?”
“He’s the computer forensics dude,” Abby answers. She has somehow sidled up to Gibbs’ side, and most of her focus is on the full Caf-Pow in his hand. She glances up at Gibbs’ irritated stare. She explains slowly, “Technology wizard. Abracadabra! Money trail, evidence, case.”
“Right.” Gibbs points at Tim, then the door. “You, upstairs.” He points at Abby, who is seconds from snatching the new Caf-Pow, hand frozen mid-swipe. “You - one at a time.”
She pouts and slinks back to sip on the drink Tim brought. “Fine.”
As Tim ducks out in Gibbs’ wake, she calls, “Say hi to Tony for me!”
--
The elevator ride up to the field teams’ floor is silent except for the ice cubes tumbling together in the cup Gibbs is holding. When the doors ding and glide open, Tim keeps a couple steps behind Gibbs, glancing around like he doesn’t walk through here every day with less excuse. The floor is quiet and half the lights are off; it looks like Dinozzo and David are the only agents left, bent over their computer screens.
“What are you going to do with that?” Tim asks when they reach the break room.
Gibbs sticks the Caf-Pow in the refrigerator’s glacial freezer before he speaks. “It’ll keep for later. The damn things don’t freeze.” Then he walks back out of the room.
Tim, for lack of a better option, keeps following him.
“Dinozzo. David.” At their names, the agents’ heads snap up. After a beat, when Gibbs notices that the other member of his team is missing, he barks, “Where’s Cassidy?”
David presses her lips together and glances at Dinozzo. He takes the cue and says, “She left, Boss. Ran into a dead end, didn’t have anything else to follow up on.”
Gibbs shakes his head, but doesn’t say anything else. Tim has a sense of Gibbs’ work ethic: if you run out of leads, you start over again and look for what you missed. On the other hand, it’s well past 9pm. Tim had been headed out, himself.
“Who’s your friend? Looks familiar.” Dinozzo prompts, looking Tim up and down quickly, and then with more attention.
Gibbs looks at Tim. All three of them look at him, actually, with no small amount of curiosity.
“I-I’m Tim. Tim McGee,” he stutters out. “U-uh, technology wizard.”
Dinozzo snorts and clearly makes a huge effort not to laugh outright.
David claps her hands and says, “T McGee, from the email!”
Tim knows he’s blushing, all blotchy and irregular. Surprise, surprise. He gets a chance to talk to them and he’s an idiot.
“Abby had news,” Gibbs says. He steps back, leaving Tim alone in the spotlight. “McGee. Tell us something we don’t know.”
“The residue in Seaman Apprentice Miller’s residence was C4,” Tim recaps for the sake of his new audience members, trying not to trip over his tongue. “A lot of it. More than he could even semi-legally acquire or use on his own.”
Dinozzo rubs his short hair. “So he’s now a suspect.”
“And they’re planning something big,” Tim adds grimly.
“‘They’,” Dinozzo echoes.
“Accomplices,” David supplies thoughtfully. “For what?”
Tim’s been trying to reconstruct Miller’s online life all day. This was a little more difficult with the home computer’s CPU unrecoverable and no facebook under his name. The credit card history lead to a PayPal account, from there to an eBay username, reused on an politically extreme forum. After Tim explains his path, he finishes with, “The posts he submitted there did not reflect terrorist intentions, in a strict sense. His suggestions were more childish. Creating some mayhem to fight the power, no ideological motivation.”
“He’s a twenty-year-old Stanford-dropout NCO,” Dinozzo muses aloud. “Hates the shit-duties, the hazing, the strict regulations. Not motivated enough to actually earn recognition, but blowing stuff up? That’s easy.”
Tim clears his throat and nods. “Miller took a few structural engineering courses, dropped out of college, and worked as a laborer before enlisting twenty months ago. I know he’s worked on at least five controlled demolitions. His juvenile record-”
“Is sealed,” Dinozzo interrupts.
“Was sealed,” Tim corrects him, making eye contact by accident. Dinozzo’s attention is fixed and intense, reminiscent of Gibbs.
Now is not a good time for Tim to reflect on his tiny workplace crush. (A good time would actually be never.)
He clears his throat again. He used to have coffee, where did…? Right. It stayed behind in Abby’s lab.
Tim keeps going. “Miller’s record leans toward vandalism rather than theft. With the quantity of explosives, his at worst limited demolition skills, and his arrests, my conjecture would be that he - along with undetermined accomplices - intend to demolish a multi-floored building.”
Dinozzo whistles. “That’s a hell of a conjecture.”
“The floor is open for anything better,” Gibbs advises both of his agents.
From the looks on their faces, both of them have been scraping the bottom of the barrel as far as leads go.
“I’ve got more,” Tim volunteers. That gets him their expectant stares - losing some of the initial skepticism - once more. “Abby will be conducting further tests to determine its source, but I expect the C4 to be military-grade, assuming that his accomplice(s) are in the service and stole it based on opportunity.”
“Now that is surely reaching,” David says, her accent drawing out vowels and changing syllabic emphasis. “Miller did not have close friends or acquaintances at his work. He is a technician trainee, for Paul’s sake.”
“‘Pete’s sake’,” Dinozzo corrects her reflexively. “Points for venturing into another religion’s PG epithets.”
“We have no suspects for these alleged accomplices,” David persists.
Gibbs steps closer and their body language changes to center around him, all of them waiting for orders. He says, “That’s where you come in. Get looking.”
“On it, Boss,” Dinozzo acknowledges. He and David execute a perfectly synchronized retreat to their desks, across the aisle from one another. Dinozzo is already talking: “Do we think he was recruited into a pre-existing group based on his skills?”
“He’s too smart for it,” Ziva answered, sitting down. “More likely he started it when an accomplice mentioned access to explosives. Miller would have made the connection back to his demolition experience.”
“Then he probably started out with a target in mind.”
They keep going, creating a list of Miller’s neighbors, co-workers, and acquaintances that require cross-checking.
“Damn,” Dinozzo says, after a short pause. “When does he do PT? No one I spoke to knew how he used his off-duty time. We might be talking about friends that just play basketball together or meet for drinks, with no military records.”
Tim, who has been standing awkwardly for three minutes, offers, “I’ll go back through his calls and then check his acquaintances. You can start looking for the motive or target.”
Dinozzo blinks at Tim. Then he says, “…Oh. Right. Once ten rolls around, we usually have to wait for morning for tech things. I guess you go home, sometimes.”
“I’m here,” Tim says, disregarding the joking tone, “and I can get it done. I’ll go back downstairs--” he begins, casting his eyes around automatically for any other options.
Gibbs stands up from his own desk. “Can you do it from up here, McGee?”
“Yes?” Tim answers, taken aback.
“Then use my desk. Double- and triple-checking goes faster that way.” He grabs his coat and shrugs it on as he warns, “Do not mess with anything.”
“Yes sir,” McGee says, feeling like a twelve-year-old talking to his retired Navy father again.
Gibbs swoops out of the office. McGee cautiously sinks down into his chair.
He clicks around for thirty seconds, opening the intra-office network and trying to get his bearings, before he realizes what he’s not seeing. “Where’s his browser?” he asks the monitor. “All I see is Internet Explorer.”
Dinozzo gives him a pitying glance. “Boss isn’t very tech-savvy, McGee.”
“Okay. Okay, so he still uses IE,” Tim says levelly. He can get over this. This isn’t the end of the world.
He just needs to get to work.
--
“The end of the world, though,” he finds himself saying four hours later, “is that I opened Word and Clippy offered to help me get started.”
Ziva and Tony - who feel that everyone sharing an office at 0200 deserves to be on a first-name basis - both laugh at his wounded tone. They’ve moved their chairs over to Ziva’s desk for this break-slash-meal.
Ziva finishes chewing a mouthful of lo mein before pushing another white box of take out over her desk for him. She points with her chopsticks. “Have a pot sticker. I find them to be an excellent palliative when confronted with Gibbs’ technological difficulties.”
“Wait till you see his driving,” Tony grimaces. “Coping with that takes something a little stronger.”
Tim shakes his head. Gibbs’ driving is something of a legend in the office. Jimmy, the assistant ME, took one ride back from a crime scene with him and cried.
That was probably apocryphal, right?
“I can’t believe Miller’s the ringleader,” Tony says with a half-masticated chunk of chicken in his mouth. “I was really hoping that we could find him and save the day. Y’know, just skip the terrorist plots this one time.”
“‘Miller is intelligent but lacks drive,’” Ziva recites from one of the performance reviews. “He is a prime candidate for a foray into the world of criminal masterminds.”
Tony expertly maneuvers his chopsticks into the box in Ziva’s hand, instigating a miniature sword fight. Looking very pleased at Ziva’s frown, he asks, “But is he really? How complicated can his plan be? Sneak into some building, plant the C4, and wait. Circumstantially, we can only suspect two accomplices.”
“It is not difficult to make a building explode,” Ziva agrees.
“Not necessarily. Miller would need access to his target’s detailed structural blueprints. And before that, he probably nursed a long grudge against whatever his target may be. Then…” Tim does a few mental calculations. “It would take a trained engineer weeks to determine well-hidden, structurally vital locations. They won’t have time to drill into load-bearing beams, have to increase the amount of explosives. With minimum two accomplices, they can place minimum three packages at a time. That means hours on-site without being suspected and without the packages being found.”
There’s a short silence as the two agents continue eating. Tim is awkwardly trying to gauge their reactions, because he can’t tell how welcome his monologues are. (His kid sister calls him a know-it-all often, but she’s been putting up with his info dumps longer.)
At last, Ziva prompts, “If there are more accomplices?”
Tim wipes his mouth. Sweet and sour sauce gets everywhere. “Shorter time on-site. Longer preparation to train every person out of possible mistakes. Also, it opens up the possibility of simultaneous public explosions, instead of a demolition.”
Tony shakes his head and reminds them all unnecessarily, “His history and skill set point toward demolition. And he doesn’t exactly have the interpersonal talent to gather a large team.”
“I’m just saying that with all that planning, Miller probably thinks of himself as a Danny Ocean type.”
“Oh, McGeek breaks out a reference.” Tony leans closer, elbows resting on his knees. “You a fan of the Clooney?”
This needles Tim. He’s never liked people messing up his name, and he hates being insulted because of his strengths. ‘Geek’ isn’t a dirty word, but it still gnaws at Tim’s childhood insecurities. He lets it go and says, “I didn’t know some people weren’t.”
“I agree,” Ziva says. “George Clooney is quite attractive.”
Tony chuckles and throws a look at Tim, expecting commiseration. “Well, Ziva, not all of us are inclined-”
“I think it’s the shoulders,” Tim interrupts, mind abruptly full of static.
Ziva flexes her shoulders in response, sits up to seem larger. “He radiates masculinity,” she says, her pose mimicking the macho type.
“He’s got It.” Tim can feel his heartbeat in his fingers. Well… he’s been trying to get better at casually mentioning his sexuality. After all, Abby hit him when he clumsily tried to swap gender pronouns in a bad-date story. The lecture that followed was very motivational.
Tony’s looking between them. “Um.”
Ziva opens her hand to welcome his input. “Tony, will you concur that George Clooney has this ‘It’?”
“Well.” Tony coughs. “I wouldn’t kick him out of bed for eating crackers.”
Ziva thoughtfully picks at the contents of whichever box she’s holding now. “I would,” she says eventually.
“What? Really?” Tim asks.
“I assume our business would be concluded?” she asks, looking between the two men. At their shrugs, she nods. “Then he goes. His firm buttocks do not excuse behaving like a slob.”
Tim can’t help laughing. Since it’s close to 0230, he loses control of it for a few seconds too many.
“Don’t laugh, McGigglefits,” Tony cautions, “I think that might be real talk.”
“We should get back to work,” Tim says, coughing and trying to let this one go as well.
--
It’s the first all-nighter he’s pulled since qualifying as a forensic tech. Tony and Ziva are handling it marginally better than Tim; the result of conditioning, perhaps. He’s usually just waking up right now.
The sun doesn’t even have the heart to rise properly. The first time he works in a place with windows in years, and it’s overcast.
He’s usually on his way in right now, he thinks to himself, listlessly clicking through tenuously-related medical histories. He’s usually getting coffee, clearing out the cobwebs of sleep. Waiting for the elevator. Observing Tony’s well-tailored wardrobe choice of the day.
He glances diagonally across the team’s workspace at Tony’s profile, red eyes doggedly reading his screen. He’s a little worse for wear, but still attractive. God knows how his suit isn’t a wrinkled mess, because Tim’s definitely is.
Something’s niggling at Tim, and he re-reads a page to pinpoint it. “Why has his most of his extended family been tested as liver donors?”
Ziva yawns, covering her mouth demurely. She answers, “I believe that a young family friend died of liver failure when Miller was seventeen.”
“Sad story.” Tony volunteers to tell it. “This girl’s family was not well-off, but the mother’s employer had health benefits that should have covered her treatment. The claim was rejected because the company ‘didn’t cover congenital diseases’.” This comes with snide, exaggerated finger-quotes. “The family sued with money they didn’t have and looked for a possible liver donor. Insurance company dragged out the court case.” He pauses here, mouth set in a grim line, tone very serious. “She died. Family settled for barely more than lawyer’s fees.”
Tim sighs and rubs his eyes. “That’s enough to disillusion a kid who’s about to undergo the huge life-change of college.”
Ziva sits bolt upright in her chair. “What insurance company?”
With a few flipped papers, Tony provides: “Safeguard Steppe Inc., covering health, dental, and life.” He adds, “They were happy to pay for her funeral.”
“Where is it based?”
Tim, half a step ahead of Tony, has the search completed. “Clinton, Maryland. Close, very close.” The map loads and he hisses through his teeth. “Even closer to Miller’s base.”
“That’s worth looking into,” Tony says, and they all exchange heavy nods.
--
Fifteen minutes later, Tim has a stroke of brilliance. He pulls out his phone and texts Abby to see if she’s on her way in.
y, traffic=bad >:( is the return message.
Tim requests, I need three emergency coffees with the legal limit of caffeine.
timothy did u stay at work all night
Yes, I did. No sleep. Need coffee.
ur asking for two other coffees
After some hesitation, Tim replies, They’re for Tony and Ziva.
u owe me
I’ll pay for them, of course
The next message is immediate and gleeful: oh no u owe me sooo many details
He sighs down at his phone. He can’t blame her for her curiosity.
“Is your phone a problem?” Gibbs asks.
Tim doesn’t jump out of his skin, but he flinches. He looks up at Gibbs’ frown. And then down at the computer screen in front of him.
He spontaneously volunteers, “How about I give you back your desk, Special Agent Gibbs.”
“How about you do that,” Gibbs agrees.
When Tim has all of his new data on a USB drive and has vacated the seat, he feels out of place. Like he didn’t just spend long, quiet hours bouncing names and theories back and forth with Tony and Ziva. Like he is no longer being useful.
“Take Cassidy’s seat until she gets here. Then we can go over what you three came up with.” His eyebrows sink and give the distinct impression that they had better have something.
“Who’re you texting, McTension?” Tony pries. “Boyfriend?”
Tim shakes his head. He’s amazed that he’s received exactly zero direct comments about his revelation before now. “Abby.”
Gibbs glares at him so intensely that Tim feels his hair singe.
He protests weakly, “She’s picking up coffee for us.” He doesn’t know a tactful way of saying that he isn’t planning on dating her. He mostly tries to communicate this to Gibbs via telepathy.
“Have her get some for the boss, too,” Tony advises.
“And for Paula,” Ziva adds, as Tim starts a quick new message.
Gibbs shakes his head. “She can have break room coffee until she earns it.”
In the end, Tim goes with Gibbs’ (callous) suggestion. Abby just sends back, duh :/
--
Abby walks in with a drinks carrier and a bright smile twenty minutes later. They’re still waiting on Paula Cassidy.
She hands out three of the cups and then pauses with Gibbs’ drink hovering inches from the man’s outstretched hand. She says, “I seem to recall that you have a spare Caf-Pow around here.”
“Just give me the coffee, Abbs.”
Abby seems prepared to hold it hostage.
Gibbs concedes. “McGee, show her where it is.”
So Abby gives up the drink and follows Tim to the break room. Once they’re out of sight - uncomfortably, using the same corner that housed Tony’s interlude with the legal aid the previous afternoon - she starts hopping on the toes of her high boots. “Well? Well?”
“Well what?” Tim stalls. He pulls the Caf-Pow out and sets it on the counter. It’s still liquid. He has absolutely no idea what the ingredients are.
“How did it go,” she demands.
“It was fine.”
“Tim.” She pokes one hard finger into his sternum. “You have had a huge thing for this entire team since you started working here. And that’s without factoring in the Tony crush. You just spent like eleven hours together, and you are going to tell me about them.”
Tim shrugs, not sure how to put the night into words. He begins with, “I came out to them?”
Her mouth makes a perfect circle. Then she hugs him hard enough for his ribcage to creak. “That is awesome, Tim. You are awesome. That is brave.”
“I didn’t. I didn’t really plan to? I don’t know.” This is making Tim more flustered than the actual event. “I wanted to get it out of the way.”
She doesn’t let him go. “I am positively reinforcing your courage,” she explains.
Tim shrugs again helplessly. “Also, I’m… sort of rethinking the Tony thing?”
“What? Why?” She holds him at arm’s length suddenly and gives him a shake. “Was he a jerk about it? I can kill him. I can totally kill him for you.”
“It’s kind of a stupid reason,” Tim admits. “He keeps… making up nicknames. They play off of my last name. I can’t tell if he’s teasing me or what, but it… um, it reminds me of getting bullied as a kid.”
She furrows her brow at him. “That is a totally stupid reason. Tony’s not a bully. He just thinks he’s funny when he’s not.”
“I know.” In his own defense, he adds, “Plus, he has a thing with that legal aid, so…”
“Your only evidence is, ‘Because they were smiling at each other’,” she points out.
“No, I definitely saw more direct propositioning than that.”
She flaps her hands, entirely dismissive. “He was hitting on her? Timothy. That is his primary function.”
“My point is,” Tim hisses, “I’m about to go back into my basement downstairs and never speak directly to any of them again. Okay?”
“No, my point is,” she brings out the Stern Finger of Approbation again, “you got a chance to work with Tony and Ziva. Did you impress them?”
“Maybe, I guess,” Tim hedges, shrinking away from her.
“Of course you did. And did you do anything incredibly awkward?”
“I was so nervous that I described myself as a ‘technology wizard’.”
“That’s not end of the world stuff. Last but not least, do you still acknowledge that Tony is super hot?”
Tim scoffs and tries to turn his head, not actually denying anything”
Abby makes him hold eye contact. She says very clearly, “You shouldn’t give up on your crush. Okay? Both of you are my friends; I don’t want you to chicken out and avoid him. And I’ve seen Tony with less plausible dates.”
“Fine,” Tim says reluctantly. When she lets him look away, he repeats, “Fine.”
--
By the time they emerge from the break room, Cassidy has arrived. Tim assumes that she’s had a dressing-down from Gibbs, judging by her mood. She’s sitting in her desk chair, arms crossed and face mutinous, while Tony and Ziva stand at the screen and talk.
Abby pats Tim’s shoulder as he re-enters the team’s space and she keeps moving for the elevator.
They’re wrapping up a presentation of their night’s work. After Tony summarizes their suspicions for Miller’s target, Ziva continues, “Two airmen were reported AWOL for late duty last night at Andrews. Airman Jessica Forney and Airman First Class William Rogers have received reprimands in the past for shared exploits. Mean-spirited, destructive practical jokes.”
“It seems like Miller reached across service lines to tap into that mischievous streak,” Tony added. “This is why joint bases can backfire.”
Cassidy’s glowering at them. She left without consulting Gibbs, sure, but she had stayed later than most considered overtime. It was her bad timing that the C4 revelation had come so soon afterward. She had missed the information that led the three of them to useful leads by less than ten minutes.
Tim watches her swallow back one sour comment after another.
Gibbs says, “Good work,” which exacerbates Cassidy’s mood. “Time for a field trip.” The other three members of the team start digging in their desks for supplies.
Gibbs stops in front of Cassidy’s desk and looms until she stops moving. “Desk work,” he says in neat, clipped syllables.
Tony, Ziva, and Tim all find other things to pay attention to. Well, actually, Tim turns away and doesn’t have anything else, but Tony recognizes his need and beckons him over. Tim gratefully holds the thick file of analog information for the case as Tony digs out more.
Cassidy takes a deep breath. “That is bullshit,” she answers evenly.
Gibbs stares her down. Then, Gibbs strides out between Tony’s and Ziva’s desks, and they fall in behind him like ducklings. Tim stays planted to the floor, wishing desperately that he could go with them.
Halfway to the elevator, Gibbs calls over his shoulder: “You coming, McGee?”
Cassidy turns to Tim, plain shock on her face. She calls to Gibbs, “That is in blatant violation of regulations! He’s not even - who are you?”
Tim can say a lot of things. Like, ‘Not a field agent,’ for one. Instead, he coughs out, “Tim McGee?”
Tony claps him on the shoulder, startling Tim. He grins with all his teeth at Cassidy. “Technology wizard.”
“Look, Dinozzo, will you just tell Gibbs I’m fucking sorry?” she asks, hissing the curse with a look around for eavesdroppers.
“Rule #6, Paula,” Tony says, pulling Tim toward an impatient Gibbs. “Never apologize.”
Tim is too busy catching up to ask questions about the legitimacy of his joining them or where these rules are coming from.
--
Part 2
Pairing: Anthony Dinozzo/Timothy McGee
Author: dome_epais
Rating: PG-13
Summary: An AU where McGee is a forensic computer analyst who washed out of training to be an agent. He gets a chance to work with Gibbs' team on a case - can he prove that he has what it takes? Warnings: Swearing. No more (and probably less) violence than the show itself.
sexycazzy created this banner - you can find this and a lovely wallpaper for the story at her art post!
There is a firing range on base that Tim uses after work three times a week. It’s never empty, but it never feels too crowded. The regulars don’t bother each other. It’s not for civilians.
Today, Tim checks in, puts on his safety gear, and takes his gun case with him to a lane. He loads his Ruger MK II .22 with even, steady moves, concentrating on the routine of it. He follows safety procedures with every ounce of caution, because any mistake will end a life.
Tim tells every person he dates that he owns a firearm. It’s always on the second date: after they’ve had a chance to talk to him, before they might jump into bed together. In Tim’s opinion, opening the bedside drawer and finding his locked case is not the way to find out that there is a gun in the room.
When (if) he tries to date, he (the date) is surprised to learn this. He almost always tells Tim that the gun clashes with his outward persona. Tim is a couple dozen pounds from being in shape, pale from days in the basement. He’s nice and earnest and safe.
Tim cares about security and self-reliance. He doesn’t think a computer-based job precludes this.
He didn’t fail his training because his aim was bad. It’s not hard to stand at a range, fix his stance, breathe, fire.
At the end of his budget of ammunition, Tim determines that his aim is a little more consistent than it used to be. The holes are a cluster of paper stars crowding the target’s diaphragm. He checks that his gun is cleared and makes it safe, packs it up. He’ll clean it at home.
When he’s back across the firing line, he notices the man two lanes down. It’s Special Agent Tony Dinozzo. His impeccably tailored suit makes clean lines across his shoulders and down his legs. He is focused on the target, his body taut, his hands steady.
Since it’s so close to the building, Tim sees other NCIS employees there often. No one to speak to, not even real acquaintances. He recognizes their faces under the safety glasses, their stances past the firing line. He collects small details about them and files them away.
He can see that Dinozzo is a little more relaxed. His mouth has a hint of a smile. There haven’t been any major cases lately.
Tim lingers a few minutes longer, looking. Just looking.
Dinozzo finishes, checks his target, packs his gun. Walks past Tim with eyes that glide over everything but catch on nothing.
Tim goes home.
--
Tim drives through the usual morning traffic. He stops about three blocks away from the Navy Yard and picks up coffee and a Caf-Pow. He shows his NCIS ID card at the gate and wends his way to headquarters.
In the lobby, he sees Dinozzo waiting for an elevator. He’s a little over six feet, and his fine taste in suits is distinctive. Instead of silently watching the screen that is counting down past two, Dinozzo is smiling charmingly at a legal aid.
The legal aid, for her part, is carefully trying to adjust the fit of her shirt in the reflective doors of the elevator. In a classy, subtle way. Dinozzo follows her eyes and smiles at their duplicates.
Tim’s the only one of the group that hits the down button, so he stands a few steps apart and lets the group pack into the elevator. The contrasting temperatures of the hot coffee and the iced Caf-Pow in his hands distract him from his idle study of Dinozzo’s body language. (Still relaxed.)
He waits a little longer and the elevator comes for him. The ride down is quiet like always. Tim stares at the brushed metal that turns any reflection into a blur. He wouldn’t mind staring at the slight puff of his cheeks, the not-quite-handsome face. Five years ago, right after he washed out of field agent training, he hated how much of a geek he was. But now, he spends ten hours a day crunching numbers and staring at his computer screen, and he’s fine with that. A paper chase or hard drive recovery is just as essential for catching and keeping bad guys as, say, pointing a gun at them.
Tim gets off the elevator and walks past the thick glass door to Ducky’s autopsy. The room across the hall is Abby’s lab.
He hovers in the doorway for a few seconds to gauge how busy she is. She’s fiddling with something in her hands, as opposed to typing or babysitting tests. So, not preparing a report or evidence for a case.
“I can smell that,” she says, without looking away from her hands. “McGee, did you bring me ambrosia?”
“Figured Gibbs wouldn’t need to keep you supplied, with this dry spell,” he answers, entering the room fully. When he got a different angle on her hands, he jerked back in surprise. “Whoa!” Some of the cold energy drink sloshed down his hand. “Are you playing with a knife?”
She gestures for the cup before he desecrates it further. Then she smiles, a perfect line of deep red lipstick around bright teeth. “Rule Number 9, Tim. You’ll never catch me without one.”
Abby’s wearing her usual dark blend of cosmetics and clothes, mixing goth and metal and getting something illogically adorable. One of the hair ties in her pigtails has a plastic thing of that black penguin from Hello Kitty. Tim can’t believe that someone so hot has seen every episode of The Next Generation, but Abby tells him that his attitude is full of stereotyped prejudice, so he’s trying to get over it.
Abby’s currently waving her hand over the Caf-Pow, wafting the scent like a wine connoisseur. She sighs and says, “I forgot how awful seven in the morning can be without this stuff. Thanks.”
Tim sips his coffee and leans his hip against an area of counter free of paperwork. “So. Any nice gossip?”
“I don’t know,” she takes a sip of her drink, “why you think,” another sip, “I get out,” another, “more than you do.”
“Well.” Tim picks at the join of his cardboard sleeve of his coffee until it begins to tear. “I think Dinozzo and a legal aid have a thing.”
She frowns at him. “Not like Tony to be unprofessional at work. Were they, like, holding hands?”
“No…” he acknowledges.
“Flirting a lot?”
Tim cringes a little. “He was doing that. Um. That smiling thing he does.”
She sighs and puts down the Caf-Pow in order to cross her arms at him. She gives him a Look.
“And she was preening?” Tim offers meekly.
“Timothy McGee, it is Not Polite to assume things based on circumstantial evidence alone,” she reminds him sternly.
He makes a face at her. “Is that you telling me to drop it, or to go through their cell phone records?”
After a short hesitation, she reluctantly says, “Probably better to drop it. Acquiring solid evidence on his relationships is taking your crush a little too far.”
McGee shifts his weight uncomfortably. Bringing up drunken confessions is not playing fair. “It’s not like I was looking for evidence in the first place.”
“Okay,” she says dubiously.
“I wasn’t!” he protests. “They were just… being obvious about it.”
“No, of course,” she agrees in the same tone.
He throws up his free hand. “You’re being impossible. I’m going to my office.”
“Bye, McGee.” She smirks at him. Then she snaps her fingers. “Oh, I’ve emailed you some lukewarm cases that I hope to kick-start while we’re in this slump. Take a look at them, okay?”
He waves over his shoulder and makes his way to the small, cramped office one door down. He settles in just about on time and opens up his email.
There’s the usual flurry of messages from Abby (rather, ascutio@ etc.), attachment size maxed out and asking for collating, cross-referencing, researching. There’s nothing new from a certain team; no adinozzo, zdavid, or pcassidy. Their boss, Special Agent Gibbs, has never sent down something directly.
Tim gets started on his work.
--
He has a lot of time for observation. At this point, he cannot tinker with his network’s efficiency any further, and a CODIS search can still take hours. So he goes for coffee upstairs, briefly enduring Abby’s loud music and taking the elevator up to the buzzing activity of the field teams’ floor.
He has to walk past the Major Case Response Team’s area to reach the coffee. It’s not his fault if his steps slow, if he eavesdrops a little bit.
All four of them are clustered around their screen, discussing something. There’s the silver head of Gibbs; Cassidy, blond; David, glossy black; and Dinozzo, just at the line between brown and dark blond.
Paula Cassidy is a profiler, and she tends to jump the gun on her conclusions. Ziva David is Mossad and used to assassinate people, so suffice it to say that she terrifies Tim. There is a constant, subtle battle between the two women, both of them strong and accustomed to being the alpha female. They stop to let Special Agent Gibbs speak, but they talk over each other, competing to reach the truth first.
Between those three dominant personalities, the more jovial Tony Dinozzo might have given up ground and let them carry on. On the contrary; he has seniority over both of the women and sometimes gets the jump on them, armed with experience or more effective techniques. Also, the charming smile and good looks don’t hurt.
And, of course, there is Gibbs. He’s… intimidating.
The competence rolls off all of them in waves; the tension in their shoulders, the quick conclusions and ideas bouncing between them, the (sometimes hilarious) witty repartee.
Tim wishes he could be a part of it. The problem is that he wouldn’t fit in. He’s not like them, not at all; he would be subsumed. So he walks by slowly on his way to coffee and gathers impressions of them, as though there will be a test later.
When Tim gets back down to the basement, the music is off. He glances in Abby’s door but keeps walking, because she’s a blur of activity. There’s clearly a new case.
Tim goes to his office and sees a new email from adinozzo. He puts the lukewarm cases aside and gets on it immediately.
--
Seaman Apprentice Jeffery Miller disappeared from his on-base residence (at Joint Base Andrews Naval Air Facility) between the hours of 2000 Tuesday and 0600 Wednesday. He left behind his car, a fried computer, a ransacked house, and a few patches of blood-stained carpet. During a search of the house, investigators discovered a cubbyhole in the wall, concealed behind a couch.
Running theory: Miller was doing something illegal (supplies/profits of which were hidden in the wall), and this merited his abduction.
Tim’s job: Figure out what Miller was hiding.
--
At about three, Tim takes another break. He goes for coffee.
Abby is checking on four different machines as they all beep for her attention. Gibbs is in Ducky’s autopsy room, apparently just for a chat.
The elevator comes after a minute’s delay, and Tim spends the wait and the ride up trying to straighten out the tangle of numbers and details that he’s been collecting for hours.
Cassidy and David are busy at their desks when Tim passes on his way to coffee. When he reaches the break room, he pulls up short.
In the near corner, out of sight of the rest of the floor, Dinozzo is leaning over the legal aid from that morning with her elbow propped up against the wall. He’s talking in a smooth murmur that makes her stifle embarrassed, interested laughter.
Tim doesn’t do more than glance at them. He keeps going for the coffee, some noise as he’s fixing it. By the time he finishes and turns around, they’ve quietly dispersed.
He goes back downstairs.
--
Abby is always busy during a case. It’s no surprise that Tim emails his results to Dinozzo, powers down his station, collects his things, and finds her lab still bustling. This is already a late night for him; he has no idea how late she intends to stay.
He walks out to the convenience store on the street. He gets yet another coffee for himself and fills up a Caf-Pow. He turns around and walks back to Abby’s lab.
She’s slumped over an autoclave, watching it whir through a cycle. The high whine runs down, and she carefully reaches in with gloved hands. She takes out a vial and mixes a flaky white substance with an unlabelled, bluish liquid, then stoppers the vial and sets it to run in the centrifuge. Her movements have an uncharacteristic, tired speed.
All of this done, she snaps off her rubber gloves and says, “Sorry, Gibbs, your innate timing has failed you-” She turns around and finishes, “Um. Or, yeah. Hi, McGee.”
“Evening,” Tim says. “I just thought. It’s getting late, and if you’re going to be here a while...”
“Thank you.” She takes it from him and drinks a lot of it immediately. “I was seriously dying. Something about this Miller case is weird.”
Tim leans against her cabinet and says, “Miller himself has a strange past. Tested into Stanford with a partial scholarship. Partied too much and washed out. He was smart enough for any other school, didn’t have to enlist.”
“I’m talking about the guy’s computer.” She points to a cardboard box filled with blackened, melted plastic. “Someone with size 10 feet stomped open the casing and took a literal blow torch to the thing.”
The centrifuge stops and beeps loudly. She takes another huge gulp and then pulls on new gloves. She’s still pulling on her safety glasses when she says, “Oh, man.” She doesn’t need to pull the vial out to see that the bluish liquid has turned to the dark purple of a bruise.
“Cyclonite. It’s C4?” she asks her equipment, completely taken aback. “Who keeps C4 in their wall?”
“A seaman who intends to use it, Abbs.” A hard, gravelly voice comes from right behind Tim.
Tim jumps and - yes, maybe he scurries out of the way. He hovers uncertainly near Abby’s main computer station, nervous. He’s never actually spoken to Gibbs before. Once, he ended up sharing an elevator with the man, and he did his best not to breathe wrong.
Gibbs is holding another huge Caf-Pow and looking from the one on Abby’s desk to Tim. “What’s going on?”
Abby leaves the gloves and glasses and brushes her hands down her white coat on the way to her computer. She starts going through her conclusions: two intruders; the blood identified as Miller’s, from an apparently non-vital wound; traces of store-bought hair dye in the bathroom drain. Now with the waxy remnants from the cavity in the wall identified as explosives.
Things aren’t looking good for Miller’s innocence.
Tim’s seen photographs from the scene, neatly cut drywall outlining the storage capacity. He sets down his coffee and uses his hands to mark the approximate measurements. “By the volume of the cavity, and assuming standard dimensions of military-grade bricks, you’re dealing with at least sixteen kilos of C4. That quantity is impractical for a single minor strike. It would be more effective if detonated in several locations simultaneously, or maybe one location with a more elaborate design.”
He looks away from the crime scene photos on Abby’s screen to see both of them staring at him.
“It depends,” he adds lamely. “Maybe they want hysteria and confusion. Or maybe, say, a semi-controlled demolition.”
“Huh,” Abby says. “You never mentioned explosives experience.”
Tim rubs the back of his neck. “I took a year or so of demolitions and structure courses when I wanted to be an engineering major.”
Gibbs asks, “Who is this guy?”
“He’s the computer forensics dude,” Abby answers. She has somehow sidled up to Gibbs’ side, and most of her focus is on the full Caf-Pow in his hand. She glances up at Gibbs’ irritated stare. She explains slowly, “Technology wizard. Abracadabra! Money trail, evidence, case.”
“Right.” Gibbs points at Tim, then the door. “You, upstairs.” He points at Abby, who is seconds from snatching the new Caf-Pow, hand frozen mid-swipe. “You - one at a time.”
She pouts and slinks back to sip on the drink Tim brought. “Fine.”
As Tim ducks out in Gibbs’ wake, she calls, “Say hi to Tony for me!”
--
The elevator ride up to the field teams’ floor is silent except for the ice cubes tumbling together in the cup Gibbs is holding. When the doors ding and glide open, Tim keeps a couple steps behind Gibbs, glancing around like he doesn’t walk through here every day with less excuse. The floor is quiet and half the lights are off; it looks like Dinozzo and David are the only agents left, bent over their computer screens.
“What are you going to do with that?” Tim asks when they reach the break room.
Gibbs sticks the Caf-Pow in the refrigerator’s glacial freezer before he speaks. “It’ll keep for later. The damn things don’t freeze.” Then he walks back out of the room.
Tim, for lack of a better option, keeps following him.
“Dinozzo. David.” At their names, the agents’ heads snap up. After a beat, when Gibbs notices that the other member of his team is missing, he barks, “Where’s Cassidy?”
David presses her lips together and glances at Dinozzo. He takes the cue and says, “She left, Boss. Ran into a dead end, didn’t have anything else to follow up on.”
Gibbs shakes his head, but doesn’t say anything else. Tim has a sense of Gibbs’ work ethic: if you run out of leads, you start over again and look for what you missed. On the other hand, it’s well past 9pm. Tim had been headed out, himself.
“Who’s your friend? Looks familiar.” Dinozzo prompts, looking Tim up and down quickly, and then with more attention.
Gibbs looks at Tim. All three of them look at him, actually, with no small amount of curiosity.
“I-I’m Tim. Tim McGee,” he stutters out. “U-uh, technology wizard.”
Dinozzo snorts and clearly makes a huge effort not to laugh outright.
David claps her hands and says, “T McGee, from the email!”
Tim knows he’s blushing, all blotchy and irregular. Surprise, surprise. He gets a chance to talk to them and he’s an idiot.
“Abby had news,” Gibbs says. He steps back, leaving Tim alone in the spotlight. “McGee. Tell us something we don’t know.”
“The residue in Seaman Apprentice Miller’s residence was C4,” Tim recaps for the sake of his new audience members, trying not to trip over his tongue. “A lot of it. More than he could even semi-legally acquire or use on his own.”
Dinozzo rubs his short hair. “So he’s now a suspect.”
“And they’re planning something big,” Tim adds grimly.
“‘They’,” Dinozzo echoes.
“Accomplices,” David supplies thoughtfully. “For what?”
Tim’s been trying to reconstruct Miller’s online life all day. This was a little more difficult with the home computer’s CPU unrecoverable and no facebook under his name. The credit card history lead to a PayPal account, from there to an eBay username, reused on an politically extreme forum. After Tim explains his path, he finishes with, “The posts he submitted there did not reflect terrorist intentions, in a strict sense. His suggestions were more childish. Creating some mayhem to fight the power, no ideological motivation.”
“He’s a twenty-year-old Stanford-dropout NCO,” Dinozzo muses aloud. “Hates the shit-duties, the hazing, the strict regulations. Not motivated enough to actually earn recognition, but blowing stuff up? That’s easy.”
Tim clears his throat and nods. “Miller took a few structural engineering courses, dropped out of college, and worked as a laborer before enlisting twenty months ago. I know he’s worked on at least five controlled demolitions. His juvenile record-”
“Is sealed,” Dinozzo interrupts.
“Was sealed,” Tim corrects him, making eye contact by accident. Dinozzo’s attention is fixed and intense, reminiscent of Gibbs.
Now is not a good time for Tim to reflect on his tiny workplace crush. (A good time would actually be never.)
He clears his throat again. He used to have coffee, where did…? Right. It stayed behind in Abby’s lab.
Tim keeps going. “Miller’s record leans toward vandalism rather than theft. With the quantity of explosives, his at worst limited demolition skills, and his arrests, my conjecture would be that he - along with undetermined accomplices - intend to demolish a multi-floored building.”
Dinozzo whistles. “That’s a hell of a conjecture.”
“The floor is open for anything better,” Gibbs advises both of his agents.
From the looks on their faces, both of them have been scraping the bottom of the barrel as far as leads go.
“I’ve got more,” Tim volunteers. That gets him their expectant stares - losing some of the initial skepticism - once more. “Abby will be conducting further tests to determine its source, but I expect the C4 to be military-grade, assuming that his accomplice(s) are in the service and stole it based on opportunity.”
“Now that is surely reaching,” David says, her accent drawing out vowels and changing syllabic emphasis. “Miller did not have close friends or acquaintances at his work. He is a technician trainee, for Paul’s sake.”
“‘Pete’s sake’,” Dinozzo corrects her reflexively. “Points for venturing into another religion’s PG epithets.”
“We have no suspects for these alleged accomplices,” David persists.
Gibbs steps closer and their body language changes to center around him, all of them waiting for orders. He says, “That’s where you come in. Get looking.”
“On it, Boss,” Dinozzo acknowledges. He and David execute a perfectly synchronized retreat to their desks, across the aisle from one another. Dinozzo is already talking: “Do we think he was recruited into a pre-existing group based on his skills?”
“He’s too smart for it,” Ziva answered, sitting down. “More likely he started it when an accomplice mentioned access to explosives. Miller would have made the connection back to his demolition experience.”
“Then he probably started out with a target in mind.”
They keep going, creating a list of Miller’s neighbors, co-workers, and acquaintances that require cross-checking.
“Damn,” Dinozzo says, after a short pause. “When does he do PT? No one I spoke to knew how he used his off-duty time. We might be talking about friends that just play basketball together or meet for drinks, with no military records.”
Tim, who has been standing awkwardly for three minutes, offers, “I’ll go back through his calls and then check his acquaintances. You can start looking for the motive or target.”
Dinozzo blinks at Tim. Then he says, “…Oh. Right. Once ten rolls around, we usually have to wait for morning for tech things. I guess you go home, sometimes.”
“I’m here,” Tim says, disregarding the joking tone, “and I can get it done. I’ll go back downstairs--” he begins, casting his eyes around automatically for any other options.
Gibbs stands up from his own desk. “Can you do it from up here, McGee?”
“Yes?” Tim answers, taken aback.
“Then use my desk. Double- and triple-checking goes faster that way.” He grabs his coat and shrugs it on as he warns, “Do not mess with anything.”
“Yes sir,” McGee says, feeling like a twelve-year-old talking to his retired Navy father again.
Gibbs swoops out of the office. McGee cautiously sinks down into his chair.
He clicks around for thirty seconds, opening the intra-office network and trying to get his bearings, before he realizes what he’s not seeing. “Where’s his browser?” he asks the monitor. “All I see is Internet Explorer.”
Dinozzo gives him a pitying glance. “Boss isn’t very tech-savvy, McGee.”
“Okay. Okay, so he still uses IE,” Tim says levelly. He can get over this. This isn’t the end of the world.
He just needs to get to work.
--
“The end of the world, though,” he finds himself saying four hours later, “is that I opened Word and Clippy offered to help me get started.”
Ziva and Tony - who feel that everyone sharing an office at 0200 deserves to be on a first-name basis - both laugh at his wounded tone. They’ve moved their chairs over to Ziva’s desk for this break-slash-meal.
Ziva finishes chewing a mouthful of lo mein before pushing another white box of take out over her desk for him. She points with her chopsticks. “Have a pot sticker. I find them to be an excellent palliative when confronted with Gibbs’ technological difficulties.”
“Wait till you see his driving,” Tony grimaces. “Coping with that takes something a little stronger.”
Tim shakes his head. Gibbs’ driving is something of a legend in the office. Jimmy, the assistant ME, took one ride back from a crime scene with him and cried.
That was probably apocryphal, right?
“I can’t believe Miller’s the ringleader,” Tony says with a half-masticated chunk of chicken in his mouth. “I was really hoping that we could find him and save the day. Y’know, just skip the terrorist plots this one time.”
“‘Miller is intelligent but lacks drive,’” Ziva recites from one of the performance reviews. “He is a prime candidate for a foray into the world of criminal masterminds.”
Tony expertly maneuvers his chopsticks into the box in Ziva’s hand, instigating a miniature sword fight. Looking very pleased at Ziva’s frown, he asks, “But is he really? How complicated can his plan be? Sneak into some building, plant the C4, and wait. Circumstantially, we can only suspect two accomplices.”
“It is not difficult to make a building explode,” Ziva agrees.
“Not necessarily. Miller would need access to his target’s detailed structural blueprints. And before that, he probably nursed a long grudge against whatever his target may be. Then…” Tim does a few mental calculations. “It would take a trained engineer weeks to determine well-hidden, structurally vital locations. They won’t have time to drill into load-bearing beams, have to increase the amount of explosives. With minimum two accomplices, they can place minimum three packages at a time. That means hours on-site without being suspected and without the packages being found.”
There’s a short silence as the two agents continue eating. Tim is awkwardly trying to gauge their reactions, because he can’t tell how welcome his monologues are. (His kid sister calls him a know-it-all often, but she’s been putting up with his info dumps longer.)
At last, Ziva prompts, “If there are more accomplices?”
Tim wipes his mouth. Sweet and sour sauce gets everywhere. “Shorter time on-site. Longer preparation to train every person out of possible mistakes. Also, it opens up the possibility of simultaneous public explosions, instead of a demolition.”
Tony shakes his head and reminds them all unnecessarily, “His history and skill set point toward demolition. And he doesn’t exactly have the interpersonal talent to gather a large team.”
“I’m just saying that with all that planning, Miller probably thinks of himself as a Danny Ocean type.”
“Oh, McGeek breaks out a reference.” Tony leans closer, elbows resting on his knees. “You a fan of the Clooney?”
This needles Tim. He’s never liked people messing up his name, and he hates being insulted because of his strengths. ‘Geek’ isn’t a dirty word, but it still gnaws at Tim’s childhood insecurities. He lets it go and says, “I didn’t know some people weren’t.”
“I agree,” Ziva says. “George Clooney is quite attractive.”
Tony chuckles and throws a look at Tim, expecting commiseration. “Well, Ziva, not all of us are inclined-”
“I think it’s the shoulders,” Tim interrupts, mind abruptly full of static.
Ziva flexes her shoulders in response, sits up to seem larger. “He radiates masculinity,” she says, her pose mimicking the macho type.
“He’s got It.” Tim can feel his heartbeat in his fingers. Well… he’s been trying to get better at casually mentioning his sexuality. After all, Abby hit him when he clumsily tried to swap gender pronouns in a bad-date story. The lecture that followed was very motivational.
Tony’s looking between them. “Um.”
Ziva opens her hand to welcome his input. “Tony, will you concur that George Clooney has this ‘It’?”
“Well.” Tony coughs. “I wouldn’t kick him out of bed for eating crackers.”
Ziva thoughtfully picks at the contents of whichever box she’s holding now. “I would,” she says eventually.
“What? Really?” Tim asks.
“I assume our business would be concluded?” she asks, looking between the two men. At their shrugs, she nods. “Then he goes. His firm buttocks do not excuse behaving like a slob.”
Tim can’t help laughing. Since it’s close to 0230, he loses control of it for a few seconds too many.
“Don’t laugh, McGigglefits,” Tony cautions, “I think that might be real talk.”
“We should get back to work,” Tim says, coughing and trying to let this one go as well.
--
It’s the first all-nighter he’s pulled since qualifying as a forensic tech. Tony and Ziva are handling it marginally better than Tim; the result of conditioning, perhaps. He’s usually just waking up right now.
The sun doesn’t even have the heart to rise properly. The first time he works in a place with windows in years, and it’s overcast.
He’s usually on his way in right now, he thinks to himself, listlessly clicking through tenuously-related medical histories. He’s usually getting coffee, clearing out the cobwebs of sleep. Waiting for the elevator. Observing Tony’s well-tailored wardrobe choice of the day.
He glances diagonally across the team’s workspace at Tony’s profile, red eyes doggedly reading his screen. He’s a little worse for wear, but still attractive. God knows how his suit isn’t a wrinkled mess, because Tim’s definitely is.
Something’s niggling at Tim, and he re-reads a page to pinpoint it. “Why has his most of his extended family been tested as liver donors?”
Ziva yawns, covering her mouth demurely. She answers, “I believe that a young family friend died of liver failure when Miller was seventeen.”
“Sad story.” Tony volunteers to tell it. “This girl’s family was not well-off, but the mother’s employer had health benefits that should have covered her treatment. The claim was rejected because the company ‘didn’t cover congenital diseases’.” This comes with snide, exaggerated finger-quotes. “The family sued with money they didn’t have and looked for a possible liver donor. Insurance company dragged out the court case.” He pauses here, mouth set in a grim line, tone very serious. “She died. Family settled for barely more than lawyer’s fees.”
Tim sighs and rubs his eyes. “That’s enough to disillusion a kid who’s about to undergo the huge life-change of college.”
Ziva sits bolt upright in her chair. “What insurance company?”
With a few flipped papers, Tony provides: “Safeguard Steppe Inc., covering health, dental, and life.” He adds, “They were happy to pay for her funeral.”
“Where is it based?”
Tim, half a step ahead of Tony, has the search completed. “Clinton, Maryland. Close, very close.” The map loads and he hisses through his teeth. “Even closer to Miller’s base.”
“That’s worth looking into,” Tony says, and they all exchange heavy nods.
--
Fifteen minutes later, Tim has a stroke of brilliance. He pulls out his phone and texts Abby to see if she’s on her way in.
y, traffic=bad >:( is the return message.
Tim requests, I need three emergency coffees with the legal limit of caffeine.
timothy did u stay at work all night
Yes, I did. No sleep. Need coffee.
ur asking for two other coffees
After some hesitation, Tim replies, They’re for Tony and Ziva.
u owe me
I’ll pay for them, of course
The next message is immediate and gleeful: oh no u owe me sooo many details
He sighs down at his phone. He can’t blame her for her curiosity.
“Is your phone a problem?” Gibbs asks.
Tim doesn’t jump out of his skin, but he flinches. He looks up at Gibbs’ frown. And then down at the computer screen in front of him.
He spontaneously volunteers, “How about I give you back your desk, Special Agent Gibbs.”
“How about you do that,” Gibbs agrees.
When Tim has all of his new data on a USB drive and has vacated the seat, he feels out of place. Like he didn’t just spend long, quiet hours bouncing names and theories back and forth with Tony and Ziva. Like he is no longer being useful.
“Take Cassidy’s seat until she gets here. Then we can go over what you three came up with.” His eyebrows sink and give the distinct impression that they had better have something.
“Who’re you texting, McTension?” Tony pries. “Boyfriend?”
Tim shakes his head. He’s amazed that he’s received exactly zero direct comments about his revelation before now. “Abby.”
Gibbs glares at him so intensely that Tim feels his hair singe.
He protests weakly, “She’s picking up coffee for us.” He doesn’t know a tactful way of saying that he isn’t planning on dating her. He mostly tries to communicate this to Gibbs via telepathy.
“Have her get some for the boss, too,” Tony advises.
“And for Paula,” Ziva adds, as Tim starts a quick new message.
Gibbs shakes his head. “She can have break room coffee until she earns it.”
In the end, Tim goes with Gibbs’ (callous) suggestion. Abby just sends back, duh :/
--
Abby walks in with a drinks carrier and a bright smile twenty minutes later. They’re still waiting on Paula Cassidy.
She hands out three of the cups and then pauses with Gibbs’ drink hovering inches from the man’s outstretched hand. She says, “I seem to recall that you have a spare Caf-Pow around here.”
“Just give me the coffee, Abbs.”
Abby seems prepared to hold it hostage.
Gibbs concedes. “McGee, show her where it is.”
So Abby gives up the drink and follows Tim to the break room. Once they’re out of sight - uncomfortably, using the same corner that housed Tony’s interlude with the legal aid the previous afternoon - she starts hopping on the toes of her high boots. “Well? Well?”
“Well what?” Tim stalls. He pulls the Caf-Pow out and sets it on the counter. It’s still liquid. He has absolutely no idea what the ingredients are.
“How did it go,” she demands.
“It was fine.”
“Tim.” She pokes one hard finger into his sternum. “You have had a huge thing for this entire team since you started working here. And that’s without factoring in the Tony crush. You just spent like eleven hours together, and you are going to tell me about them.”
Tim shrugs, not sure how to put the night into words. He begins with, “I came out to them?”
Her mouth makes a perfect circle. Then she hugs him hard enough for his ribcage to creak. “That is awesome, Tim. You are awesome. That is brave.”
“I didn’t. I didn’t really plan to? I don’t know.” This is making Tim more flustered than the actual event. “I wanted to get it out of the way.”
She doesn’t let him go. “I am positively reinforcing your courage,” she explains.
Tim shrugs again helplessly. “Also, I’m… sort of rethinking the Tony thing?”
“What? Why?” She holds him at arm’s length suddenly and gives him a shake. “Was he a jerk about it? I can kill him. I can totally kill him for you.”
“It’s kind of a stupid reason,” Tim admits. “He keeps… making up nicknames. They play off of my last name. I can’t tell if he’s teasing me or what, but it… um, it reminds me of getting bullied as a kid.”
She furrows her brow at him. “That is a totally stupid reason. Tony’s not a bully. He just thinks he’s funny when he’s not.”
“I know.” In his own defense, he adds, “Plus, he has a thing with that legal aid, so…”
“Your only evidence is, ‘Because they were smiling at each other’,” she points out.
“No, I definitely saw more direct propositioning than that.”
She flaps her hands, entirely dismissive. “He was hitting on her? Timothy. That is his primary function.”
“My point is,” Tim hisses, “I’m about to go back into my basement downstairs and never speak directly to any of them again. Okay?”
“No, my point is,” she brings out the Stern Finger of Approbation again, “you got a chance to work with Tony and Ziva. Did you impress them?”
“Maybe, I guess,” Tim hedges, shrinking away from her.
“Of course you did. And did you do anything incredibly awkward?”
“I was so nervous that I described myself as a ‘technology wizard’.”
“That’s not end of the world stuff. Last but not least, do you still acknowledge that Tony is super hot?”
Tim scoffs and tries to turn his head, not actually denying anything”
Abby makes him hold eye contact. She says very clearly, “You shouldn’t give up on your crush. Okay? Both of you are my friends; I don’t want you to chicken out and avoid him. And I’ve seen Tony with less plausible dates.”
“Fine,” Tim says reluctantly. When she lets him look away, he repeats, “Fine.”
--
By the time they emerge from the break room, Cassidy has arrived. Tim assumes that she’s had a dressing-down from Gibbs, judging by her mood. She’s sitting in her desk chair, arms crossed and face mutinous, while Tony and Ziva stand at the screen and talk.
Abby pats Tim’s shoulder as he re-enters the team’s space and she keeps moving for the elevator.
They’re wrapping up a presentation of their night’s work. After Tony summarizes their suspicions for Miller’s target, Ziva continues, “Two airmen were reported AWOL for late duty last night at Andrews. Airman Jessica Forney and Airman First Class William Rogers have received reprimands in the past for shared exploits. Mean-spirited, destructive practical jokes.”
“It seems like Miller reached across service lines to tap into that mischievous streak,” Tony added. “This is why joint bases can backfire.”
Cassidy’s glowering at them. She left without consulting Gibbs, sure, but she had stayed later than most considered overtime. It was her bad timing that the C4 revelation had come so soon afterward. She had missed the information that led the three of them to useful leads by less than ten minutes.
Tim watches her swallow back one sour comment after another.
Gibbs says, “Good work,” which exacerbates Cassidy’s mood. “Time for a field trip.” The other three members of the team start digging in their desks for supplies.
Gibbs stops in front of Cassidy’s desk and looms until she stops moving. “Desk work,” he says in neat, clipped syllables.
Tony, Ziva, and Tim all find other things to pay attention to. Well, actually, Tim turns away and doesn’t have anything else, but Tony recognizes his need and beckons him over. Tim gratefully holds the thick file of analog information for the case as Tony digs out more.
Cassidy takes a deep breath. “That is bullshit,” she answers evenly.
Gibbs stares her down. Then, Gibbs strides out between Tony’s and Ziva’s desks, and they fall in behind him like ducklings. Tim stays planted to the floor, wishing desperately that he could go with them.
Halfway to the elevator, Gibbs calls over his shoulder: “You coming, McGee?”
Cassidy turns to Tim, plain shock on her face. She calls to Gibbs, “That is in blatant violation of regulations! He’s not even - who are you?”
Tim can say a lot of things. Like, ‘Not a field agent,’ for one. Instead, he coughs out, “Tim McGee?”
Tony claps him on the shoulder, startling Tim. He grins with all his teeth at Cassidy. “Technology wizard.”
“Look, Dinozzo, will you just tell Gibbs I’m fucking sorry?” she asks, hissing the curse with a look around for eavesdroppers.
“Rule #6, Paula,” Tony says, pulling Tim toward an impatient Gibbs. “Never apologize.”
Tim is too busy catching up to ask questions about the legitimacy of his joining them or where these rules are coming from.
--
Part 2