New Fic: Camping with Tom Petty (Part 2)
Camping with Tom Petty (Part 2)
a.k.a. The one in which our favourite NCIS team goes camping on Labour Day Weekend and Abby decides the occasion calls for a classic rock playlist. Set in Season 10, following Dearing's capture but before 10x02. Tiva if you squint.
Author's Note: Imperfect fluff, because I am supposed to be writing a Master's thesis. But fluff is fluff, and while I'm not 100% happy with this, may it still bring you joy.
Here, have a puppy. Take a handful of confetti on your way out.
Chapter 2: Wildflowers
(Gibbs POV)
You belong among the wildflowers
You belong somewhere close to me
Far away from your trouble and worry
You belong somewhere you feel free
You belong somewhere you feel free
~ Wildflowers, Tom Petty
For the most part, Leroy Jethro Gibbs sees things coming. Over the years he’s taken a raw talent for making intuitive leaps and turned it into a carefully cultivated skill. Admittedly, he can’t predict everything - God knows there have been times he’s remained disastrously blind to the future, and each one is a heavy burden of regret. But, for the most part: Gibbs sees things coming. And he’s therefore a bit baffled as to how, with no precognitive inklings whatsoever, his plans to spend Labor Day weekend in his basement - alone - have ended up unceremoniously cast aside in favor of three days in the woods with his team. Even as he tosses five hot dogs onto a campfire grill, Tom Petty crooning in the background, the entire scenario feels almost unreal.
The part of Gibbs that only gets more sarcastic with age wonders if maybe that’s just because they’ve gone along with one of DiNozzo’s crackpot schemes, for once, to say nothing of the fact that in doing so they’ve implicitly acknowledged it might actually have been a good idea. Then again, if he ignores the crotchety old man hiding within him, he suspects it has more to do with the simple perfection of the evening. Over the treetops the sun is setting, its dying light filtering through the leaf cover and dappling their campsite with muted beams of pink, orange, and red. The wieners are now sizzling on the grill, and- if Gibbs listens carefully above the sounds of Abby’s Pod-Radio-Thing - he can hear a nearby river babbling away. It’s peaceful in a way that their everyday lives so rarely are.
Well. Relatively-speaking.
“I cannot believe you forgot to bring buns,” Ziva says for the third time. She sits on a long log in front the campfire, hunched around herself to keep warm. The air has grown cooler and she wears nothing but a t-shirt and jeans.
“Ziva,” Tony returns in a voice that usually means his patience is wearing thin, “Have you ever been to a grocery store the Thursday before a long weekend? It’s not pretty! I got frazzled, I forgot the buns. Cut me some slack.”
“You were not frazzled, you were scared of the soccer mom who glared at you for leaving your cart unattended.”
“I was no such thing!”
“Oh, really?” Ziva unfolds slightly to fish around in her pants pocket. “I still have the paranoid text you sent me, if you would like me to refresh your memory.”
Tony frowns.
So much for peaceful, Gibbs thinks, and if the sentiment is entirely too fond, well, that’s his business. He turns the hot dogs so they get an even cook, letting the argument wash over him. The tiny quirk that slowly steals over his lips becomes more pronounced when Tim joins in the fray, saying, “I don’t know, Tony, I’d like to see this text.”
Tony, having begun lobbying for the text’s deletion, resumes his campaign with renewed vigor. “Trash it, David!” He points at her imperiously from his seat across the fire.
Ziva shoots Tony a wink that - well, if Gibbs were anyone else he would call it ‘sultry,’ but as it is he carefully blocks the descriptor from his mind. Instead, he focuses on the infinitesimal movement of her thumb against the screen of her cell, and the gradual morph of her expression into a smirk.
Tony’s eyes widen in dismay.
“No!” he breathes. “Tell me you didn’t.”
Abby, lounging next to Ziva with her booted feet kicked out languorously, pushes herself up and leans over the other woman’s shoulder to peer at the phone. “Oh,” she says, lifting her face to broadcast a grin almost as wicked as Ziva’s. “She did.”
Tony glances at Tim. From where he stands halfway between the tents and the fire pit, Tim raises a cocky eyebrow back. He reaches for his hind pocket.
The second eyebrow meets the first, and Gibbs shakes his head at the grill. On a longsuffering exhale, he says, “You left it your tent, McGee.”
There is a moment of frozen stillness, then at once the campsite explodes into a flurry of motion: Tim takes off at a run; Tony rockets up from the campstool on which he’s been perched, sending it on a teetering trajectory to the ground as he scrambles to catch up with Tim’s head start. “Hey!” Gibbs shouts sharply. He swivels to give them the full force of his stare, pleased to find both have paused - Tony comically so, with one foot in mid-air. Least I trained ‘em well. “Food’s almost ready. Make it quick.”
“Got it, Boss!”
Tim recommences his mad dash for the tent while Tony tosses out the automatic acknowledgment, and is already unzipping its flaps by the time the senior agent realizes what’s happened.
“Hey! McCheater!” Tony yells, lunging after him.
Ziva releases a throaty chuckle. It’s a genuine sound Gibbs always relishes on those rare times it can be heard. She never has laughed enough - not that he’s one to talk.
A yelp comes from inside the two-person pop-up Tony and Tim are to share for the weekend, and Abby’s giggles join Ziva’s more subdued sounds of amusement. As he gives the hot dogs one last flip, Gibbs congratulates himself on bringing his own tent. It’s a bit beat up, hasn’t really seen the light of day in over a decade, but it will serve its purpose. In theory, Tony was supposed to provide all the supplies - the single condition of Gibbs’ participation in the trip. But granting DiNozzo this one reprieve, to his mind, was worth it.
He’d explained the decision to Abby by asking, “Did you really think I’d room with McGee and DiNozzo?” - a rhetorical question if there ever was one. In the backseat of his car, Abby had shrugged to convey the point’s fairness, and continued toying with the pink and yellow beads decorating the drawcord of the tent’s accessories pouch. Gibbs, meanwhile, resumed tapping his index finger on the steering wheel. They’d had to double back so Ziva could grab an extra sweater, and he was becoming increasingly anxious to hit the road. (“One can never be too prepared,” she’d argued when he protested returning to her apartment. “What if something happens to the one I am wearing?”) Far be it for Gibbs to argue with one of his own, albeit unofficial, rules, but the window for avoiding nightmarish long weekend traffic was rapidly closing.
Now, recalling his and Abby’s brief conversation, Gibbs wonders why Ziva is still sitting there, trying to rub heat into her bare triceps, when the back-up sweater she’d fought to retrieve is resting in her bag just a few feet away.
“Cold, Ziver?”
“A bit,” she admits. “I might go change, if we have a few minutes before dinner?”
Gibbs nods his assent. “You can do that while Abby grabs the plates. And Abs - see if DiNozzo packed some cutlery, too. Looks like anyone who wants condiments will be eating with a knife and fork, tonight.” As he says it, he tries not to think about those summer nights he’d used to sit beside Kelly, painstakingly cutting her hot dogs into toddler-sized bites.
Obediently, Abby throws him a salute and rises from the log. Ziva appears about to do the same, but spares a moment to first grumble resentfully, “Palmer.”
“What about him?” Tim asks. He and Tony have evidently decided to emerge from the pop-up and let bygones be bygones, though Tim’s grip is tight around his phone and his face wary. Situation not totally resolved, then.
“Is little Jimmy coming back with his tail between his legs?” Tony asks. “Didn’t think he’d have the guts.”
“He doesn’t,” Gibbs says.
“Ah, good. I think my worldview would’ve been shattered if he had.”
Gibbs is hard-pressed to disagree. Earlier that afternoon, Palmer had fumbled a full bucket of water in his haste to answer a call from his wife. Its contents had wound up sloshed over the hoodie Ziva had left lying on a nearby folding chair. Deservedly or not, the glare with which he’d been leveled for the offense had had Palmer gulping and Tony - for once the innocent party - wincing in abject sympathy. Breena’s request that Palmer return home to help her deal with a family emergency had been only too gladly received.
Fortunately for the absent M.E., Abby’s return with the requested plates prevents any further rehashing of the incident. Gibbs takes one and begins to dole out the hot dogs. “Here, McGee. Ketchup and mustard’s by the cooler. Did you find the cutlery, Abs?”
She about-faces and presents a pocket stuffed with sporks. “Your dispenser awaits, Gibbs. Freaky spoon-fork hybrids on the left cheek, napkins on the right.” Huh. He hadn’t noticed the napkins.
“Really?” he feels compelled to ask, although he grabs a spork and passes it to McGee regardless. “DiNozzo, you’re up.”
“One sec, Boss.” Gibbs waits while Tony ducks back into his and McGee’s tent, then re-emerges holding a bundle of scarlet. He heads over to Ziva. “I know your own sweatshirt’s probably still soaked, and it’s getting kind of chilly, so...if you want?” He extends his arm a little, offering her what Gibbs assumes must be an article of clothing.
Ziva blinks. “Oh,” she says. “Actually, I…” She gestures vaguely over her shoulder. Trails off. Tony’s hopeful expression dims in the silence of her hesitation.
Dammit, DiNozzo, Gibbs thinks, manfully resisting the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose out of secondary embarrassment. This is painful.
“Actually, I would really appreciate it. Thank you, Tony.” She takes the proffered item - an Ohio State sweatshirt, it is revealed - and smiles up at him.
Tim, squirting copious amounts of ketchup onto his plate, snorts. Gibbs wholeheartedly agrees.
“DiNozzo,” he repeats gruffly. “Hot dog.”
Tony snaps his fingers. “Right.”
He comes around the fire to get his dinner. Sweatshirt half over her head, Ziva calls after him through the fabric, “Grab my bunless hot dog, too!”
With a dramatic roll of his eyes, Tony stage whispers, “She’s never going to let that go, is she, Boss?”
Gibbs hands him a second plate. “Doubt it,” he says. The image of Shannon wearing an oversized USMC sweatshirt floats to the top of a vast pool of precious memories. “They never do.”
Leroy Jethro Gibbs admits he can’t predict everything. Sometimes, the big picture just doesn’t come together fast enough. But, as his Senior Field Agent frowns in confusion, he finds he’s able to be content in the knowledge that for the most part he sees things coming.
Usually before everyone else.
Note: This is totally getting audiofic-ed :) - Nat
a.k.a. The one in which our favourite NCIS team goes camping on Labour Day Weekend and Abby decides the occasion calls for a classic rock playlist. Set in Season 10, following Dearing's capture but before 10x02. Tiva if you squint.
Author's Note: Imperfect fluff, because I am supposed to be writing a Master's thesis. But fluff is fluff, and while I'm not 100% happy with this, may it still bring you joy.
Here, have a puppy. Take a handful of confetti on your way out.
Chapter 2: Wildflowers
(Gibbs POV)
You belong among the wildflowers
You belong somewhere close to me
Far away from your trouble and worry
You belong somewhere you feel free
You belong somewhere you feel free
~ Wildflowers, Tom Petty
For the most part, Leroy Jethro Gibbs sees things coming. Over the years he’s taken a raw talent for making intuitive leaps and turned it into a carefully cultivated skill. Admittedly, he can’t predict everything - God knows there have been times he’s remained disastrously blind to the future, and each one is a heavy burden of regret. But, for the most part: Gibbs sees things coming. And he’s therefore a bit baffled as to how, with no precognitive inklings whatsoever, his plans to spend Labor Day weekend in his basement - alone - have ended up unceremoniously cast aside in favor of three days in the woods with his team. Even as he tosses five hot dogs onto a campfire grill, Tom Petty crooning in the background, the entire scenario feels almost unreal.
The part of Gibbs that only gets more sarcastic with age wonders if maybe that’s just because they’ve gone along with one of DiNozzo’s crackpot schemes, for once, to say nothing of the fact that in doing so they’ve implicitly acknowledged it might actually have been a good idea. Then again, if he ignores the crotchety old man hiding within him, he suspects it has more to do with the simple perfection of the evening. Over the treetops the sun is setting, its dying light filtering through the leaf cover and dappling their campsite with muted beams of pink, orange, and red. The wieners are now sizzling on the grill, and- if Gibbs listens carefully above the sounds of Abby’s Pod-Radio-Thing - he can hear a nearby river babbling away. It’s peaceful in a way that their everyday lives so rarely are.
Well. Relatively-speaking.
“I cannot believe you forgot to bring buns,” Ziva says for the third time. She sits on a long log in front the campfire, hunched around herself to keep warm. The air has grown cooler and she wears nothing but a t-shirt and jeans.
“Ziva,” Tony returns in a voice that usually means his patience is wearing thin, “Have you ever been to a grocery store the Thursday before a long weekend? It’s not pretty! I got frazzled, I forgot the buns. Cut me some slack.”
“You were not frazzled, you were scared of the soccer mom who glared at you for leaving your cart unattended.”
“I was no such thing!”
“Oh, really?” Ziva unfolds slightly to fish around in her pants pocket. “I still have the paranoid text you sent me, if you would like me to refresh your memory.”
Tony frowns.
So much for peaceful, Gibbs thinks, and if the sentiment is entirely too fond, well, that’s his business. He turns the hot dogs so they get an even cook, letting the argument wash over him. The tiny quirk that slowly steals over his lips becomes more pronounced when Tim joins in the fray, saying, “I don’t know, Tony, I’d like to see this text.”
Tony, having begun lobbying for the text’s deletion, resumes his campaign with renewed vigor. “Trash it, David!” He points at her imperiously from his seat across the fire.
Ziva shoots Tony a wink that - well, if Gibbs were anyone else he would call it ‘sultry,’ but as it is he carefully blocks the descriptor from his mind. Instead, he focuses on the infinitesimal movement of her thumb against the screen of her cell, and the gradual morph of her expression into a smirk.
Tony’s eyes widen in dismay.
“No!” he breathes. “Tell me you didn’t.”
Abby, lounging next to Ziva with her booted feet kicked out languorously, pushes herself up and leans over the other woman’s shoulder to peer at the phone. “Oh,” she says, lifting her face to broadcast a grin almost as wicked as Ziva’s. “She did.”
Tony glances at Tim. From where he stands halfway between the tents and the fire pit, Tim raises a cocky eyebrow back. He reaches for his hind pocket.
The second eyebrow meets the first, and Gibbs shakes his head at the grill. On a longsuffering exhale, he says, “You left it your tent, McGee.”
There is a moment of frozen stillness, then at once the campsite explodes into a flurry of motion: Tim takes off at a run; Tony rockets up from the campstool on which he’s been perched, sending it on a teetering trajectory to the ground as he scrambles to catch up with Tim’s head start. “Hey!” Gibbs shouts sharply. He swivels to give them the full force of his stare, pleased to find both have paused - Tony comically so, with one foot in mid-air. Least I trained ‘em well. “Food’s almost ready. Make it quick.”
“Got it, Boss!”
Tim recommences his mad dash for the tent while Tony tosses out the automatic acknowledgment, and is already unzipping its flaps by the time the senior agent realizes what’s happened.
“Hey! McCheater!” Tony yells, lunging after him.
Ziva releases a throaty chuckle. It’s a genuine sound Gibbs always relishes on those rare times it can be heard. She never has laughed enough - not that he’s one to talk.
A yelp comes from inside the two-person pop-up Tony and Tim are to share for the weekend, and Abby’s giggles join Ziva’s more subdued sounds of amusement. As he gives the hot dogs one last flip, Gibbs congratulates himself on bringing his own tent. It’s a bit beat up, hasn’t really seen the light of day in over a decade, but it will serve its purpose. In theory, Tony was supposed to provide all the supplies - the single condition of Gibbs’ participation in the trip. But granting DiNozzo this one reprieve, to his mind, was worth it.
He’d explained the decision to Abby by asking, “Did you really think I’d room with McGee and DiNozzo?” - a rhetorical question if there ever was one. In the backseat of his car, Abby had shrugged to convey the point’s fairness, and continued toying with the pink and yellow beads decorating the drawcord of the tent’s accessories pouch. Gibbs, meanwhile, resumed tapping his index finger on the steering wheel. They’d had to double back so Ziva could grab an extra sweater, and he was becoming increasingly anxious to hit the road. (“One can never be too prepared,” she’d argued when he protested returning to her apartment. “What if something happens to the one I am wearing?”) Far be it for Gibbs to argue with one of his own, albeit unofficial, rules, but the window for avoiding nightmarish long weekend traffic was rapidly closing.
Now, recalling his and Abby’s brief conversation, Gibbs wonders why Ziva is still sitting there, trying to rub heat into her bare triceps, when the back-up sweater she’d fought to retrieve is resting in her bag just a few feet away.
“Cold, Ziver?”
“A bit,” she admits. “I might go change, if we have a few minutes before dinner?”
Gibbs nods his assent. “You can do that while Abby grabs the plates. And Abs - see if DiNozzo packed some cutlery, too. Looks like anyone who wants condiments will be eating with a knife and fork, tonight.” As he says it, he tries not to think about those summer nights he’d used to sit beside Kelly, painstakingly cutting her hot dogs into toddler-sized bites.
Obediently, Abby throws him a salute and rises from the log. Ziva appears about to do the same, but spares a moment to first grumble resentfully, “Palmer.”
“What about him?” Tim asks. He and Tony have evidently decided to emerge from the pop-up and let bygones be bygones, though Tim’s grip is tight around his phone and his face wary. Situation not totally resolved, then.
“Is little Jimmy coming back with his tail between his legs?” Tony asks. “Didn’t think he’d have the guts.”
“He doesn’t,” Gibbs says.
“Ah, good. I think my worldview would’ve been shattered if he had.”
Gibbs is hard-pressed to disagree. Earlier that afternoon, Palmer had fumbled a full bucket of water in his haste to answer a call from his wife. Its contents had wound up sloshed over the hoodie Ziva had left lying on a nearby folding chair. Deservedly or not, the glare with which he’d been leveled for the offense had had Palmer gulping and Tony - for once the innocent party - wincing in abject sympathy. Breena’s request that Palmer return home to help her deal with a family emergency had been only too gladly received.
Fortunately for the absent M.E., Abby’s return with the requested plates prevents any further rehashing of the incident. Gibbs takes one and begins to dole out the hot dogs. “Here, McGee. Ketchup and mustard’s by the cooler. Did you find the cutlery, Abs?”
She about-faces and presents a pocket stuffed with sporks. “Your dispenser awaits, Gibbs. Freaky spoon-fork hybrids on the left cheek, napkins on the right.” Huh. He hadn’t noticed the napkins.
“Really?” he feels compelled to ask, although he grabs a spork and passes it to McGee regardless. “DiNozzo, you’re up.”
“One sec, Boss.” Gibbs waits while Tony ducks back into his and McGee’s tent, then re-emerges holding a bundle of scarlet. He heads over to Ziva. “I know your own sweatshirt’s probably still soaked, and it’s getting kind of chilly, so...if you want?” He extends his arm a little, offering her what Gibbs assumes must be an article of clothing.
Ziva blinks. “Oh,” she says. “Actually, I…” She gestures vaguely over her shoulder. Trails off. Tony’s hopeful expression dims in the silence of her hesitation.
Dammit, DiNozzo, Gibbs thinks, manfully resisting the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose out of secondary embarrassment. This is painful.
“Actually, I would really appreciate it. Thank you, Tony.” She takes the proffered item - an Ohio State sweatshirt, it is revealed - and smiles up at him.
Tim, squirting copious amounts of ketchup onto his plate, snorts. Gibbs wholeheartedly agrees.
“DiNozzo,” he repeats gruffly. “Hot dog.”
Tony snaps his fingers. “Right.”
He comes around the fire to get his dinner. Sweatshirt half over her head, Ziva calls after him through the fabric, “Grab my bunless hot dog, too!”
With a dramatic roll of his eyes, Tony stage whispers, “She’s never going to let that go, is she, Boss?”
Gibbs hands him a second plate. “Doubt it,” he says. The image of Shannon wearing an oversized USMC sweatshirt floats to the top of a vast pool of precious memories. “They never do.”
Leroy Jethro Gibbs admits he can’t predict everything. Sometimes, the big picture just doesn’t come together fast enough. But, as his Senior Field Agent frowns in confusion, he finds he’s able to be content in the knowledge that for the most part he sees things coming.
Usually before everyone else.
Note: This is totally getting audiofic-ed :) - Nat