A/N: I miss Jimmy (there's just not enough of him in the so-far average Season 7), and apparently so does my muse. Since the show writers have completely failed to explain his absence, I've filled in my own gaps. First time trying to write a credible Palmer voice - comments and constructive criticism welcomed. :)
Disclaimer: If they were mine, there would be much more Palmer screen time in canon. Clearly I own nothing except for the computer on which I looked up various medical facts, Palmer backstory and the real meaning of piloerection.
Summary: It's sort of exciting, being part of a real hospital that employs more medical staff than an elderly greying man with an honorary degree in the art of the segue.
The blaring of Jimmy's alarm clock interrupts a rather nice dream about the filing clerk from the second floor. He's never asked her name, but she's got an enviable pair of authentic tan and chocolate coloured Chanel stilettos.
In his dream, he's just bribed someone from maintenance to disable the elevator so that he can follow her sh – uh, coincidentally walk a few steps behind her while only looking at where he's putting his feet – up two flights of stairs. It's more than a little wrong on a variety of different levels, but it's his dream and so impropriety doesn't count.
Jimmy's in the middle of pretending that the slight increase in his respiration rate is to do with lack of fitness rather than the sight of her heels ascending the staircase when she opens her mouth. Instead of asking him to dinner as she has in previous dreams, she starts screeching and beeping in a very urgent and alarming way.
It's really not at all attractive.
Jimmy peers at the bright green numbers floating mere inches from his face. Through the fog of sleep he can just barely make out the numbers four and three, bookended by zeros, which normally means it's time to roll over and sink back into sleep for a few more hours. 0430 is far too early to be forcing your brain into a state of full consciousness, but such is life when you're a medical student who's unluckily been assigned to the early shift at the Georgetown University Hospital ER. Finding his glasses doesn't improve matters much, mainly because they seem to be inexplicably smeared with fingerprints. The evidence of clumsy hands makes it seem like he's watching the world through a haze that just happens to have distinctive whorls and ridges.
Night-time glasses-tampering intruder, or the result of an extra beer with last night's takeout Chinese?
Option B seems more likely somehow, but maybe he'll ask Abby to show him how to dust for prints, just in case. It could be a handy skill to have.
Nevertheless, it might be time to have his eyes tested again... when he has a moment of spare time between the demands of med school rotations and the demands of one Scottish medical examiner… or one silver-haired dogmatic Special Agent in Charge Leroy Jethro Gibbs.
It's no wonder he doesn't have time for a social life.
When rotations are finally over, he might even think about having the Lasik surgery that Abby took great pleasure in detailing step by step during one particularly slow day in the lab. The eye-opening tutorial (he smiles to himself at the pun) came complete with a handmade scale model of the eye, removable corneal epithelium and all. He didn't want to ask what she used to actually create the cornea, because he'd had red Jell-O for lunch and the outer layer of the eyeball looked suspiciously like it was created from some kind of gelatine-based substance.
Jimmy's stomach might be leaning more toward the cast-iron end of the scale since he started working for Dr Mallard, but it wasn't really good enough Jell-O to warrant a repeat tasting.
His backup alarm blares from across the other side of the room, reminding him in strident tones that it's now 0439 - well past time for him to be something other than horizontal.
Pushing back the hand-stitched quilt that his mother sent him the Christmas just gone (which of course he only uses when the temperature drops to record icy lows because what fully grown and independent almost-medical-professional man sleeps under a star-patterned quilt as a matter of course?), Jimmy stretches and half-stumbles toward the bathroom for a hasty but reviving shower.
Thinking of his mother has proved a rather effective distraction from a certain just-woken state.
Still, it's always better to be safe than sorry. He doesn't dare look down as he ignores the hot water tap in favour of the cold and steps in, biting back a yelp (because yelping isn't at all manly) as the cold water stings his flesh. The prescribed remedy has the desired result, though, and minutes later he's pulling on jeans and a clean shirt, the thoughts of shapely legs and those exquisitely crafted, hand-made pumps tapping up the stairs ahead of him all but –
Jimmy thinks Tony would be even more proud to hear him cursing like a bawdy drunken sailor at the re-emergence of his, uh, problem, until he remembers that pride tends to goeth shortly before a fall – or endless ribbing from one Senior Field Agent, no matter how much clandestine secret-agenting went on between them during Gibbs' sabbatical in Mexico. Tony DiNozzo is almost as anal-retentive about details as Dr Mallard, though his area of specialisation tends more toward the dirty and embarrassing than the Scotsman's recitation of various tales, medical facts, and indicators of trauma.
Coming into work in a state of palpable excitement over shoes.
He's pretty sure he'd have to move to a different continent – Australia, perhaps, or somewhere else warm where the star quilt can stay firmly packed away in the closet, because in Australia surely he'd have time for a social life and his apartment would need to be ready just in case – to escape the fallout from that one.
For a moment he's almost glad that he's not around NCIS headquarters quite so much these days, but then he catches sight of a textbook on the procedures of psychological forensic analysis that he really should return to Ducky sometime soon.
Maybe he'll have time to swing by the Navy Yard after his shift ends, just for a few minutes. Drop off the book and leave before Dr Mallard feels the urge to share a story about his own days as a medical student, which Jimmy knows from experience might take an hour or more.
Drop off the book and leave. Got it.
Possibly via the bullpen, because he has a bone to pick with McGee on the rumour (courtesy of Abby) about Deep Six maybe being made into a movie. He's got a few alternate names to suggest for the character that is supposed to be him, none of which are in any way related to jocks who used to torment him in the locker room showers at his high school.
That would just be in poor taste.
Anyway, he wants to find out the new total of the betting pool on when exactly Tony and Ziva will either hook up in the elevator (highly uncomfortable on account of the steel walls and worn carpet, though not without a certain thrill of discovery… or so he's heard) or throw down in the middle of the bullpen.
At last count, it was up to triple figures, though he thinks he might raise his bet a little. His sources tell him that the two of them went to Paris recently on protection detail and yet only one room was charged to the company credit card.
This new information bears some top-secret and very clandestine investigation, because he's well aware of Ziva's predilection for knives and not at all keen to have her perform unauthorised field surgery on his nether regions. He heard her threaten Tony with that once in his first year as Ducky's assistant, but he doesn't think she noticed him standing wide-eyed around the corner.
After all, the ex-Mossad agent had seemed genuinely puzzled as to why he stumbled over his words and avoided her gaze for weeks afterwards.
"Son," his father told him once after he'd heard about a certain elementary school corridor incident that no power on this earth will make Jimmy retell, "You gotta learn to pick your battles. You meet someone you know is going to whoop your scrawny ass, you just drop your eyes and back the heck out of there." He'd chewed thoughtfully on the inside of his cheek and studied his son.
"Maybe we should get you some karate lessons for your birthday. Toughen you up a bit."
It's no wonder the evidence techs have a habit of suddenly disappearing into the nether realms of the evidence garage when Officer… Probationary Agent David strides out of the elevator. Maybe his father got that particular lesson from some kind of book on keeping sons safe from emasculation, and maybe their fathers had the same book.
He's pretty sure nobody ever wrote a chapter titled 'How To Not Get Whumped By A Girl,' though, but then Ziva is a special case. Either way, though she isn't quite as scary these days - especially since coming back from Africa with dirt on her face and empty eyes – he's not about to take any chances.
Better to be safe than sorry, and he's willing to wager that she knows a whole slew of ways to make people apologise, even if Gibbs doesn't believe in such things.
Yeah, maybe he'll just stop by on his way home tonight. The agents over the other side of the divider might be interested in starting a new pool.
His Anatomy 101 professor once likened the human body to a well-oiled machine.
If all the wheels and gears and cogs are well-greased and working as they should, things run smoothly and with very little effort. Sometimes you don't even know that you're pushing the button or pulling the lever until the mechanism starts to wear under stress and becomes creaky and fragile, likely to grind to a halt at any minute.
The rumour among the first year students was that the man occasionally turned up to class rather well-oiled himself, if his shambling walk and the rosacea blooming vividly across his nose and cheeks was any indication.
He supposes in hindsight that making assumptions like that is similar to a first year Psych major being let loose on their family and friends with a copy of the DSM-IV and notes from three lectures on mental disorders. Suddenly Aunty Ethel's predilection for extreme mood swings turns into manic depression, when really it's just a manifestation of stress and anger because Uncle Bob took off with his secretary and left her to raise two kids under five.
Everyone's got a little bit of crazy in them if you look hard enough.
Anyway.
The cerebral cortex of the brain contains somewhere between 15-33 billion neurons, depending on the owner's gender and age. These neurons send their signal pulses (action potentials, Professor Bracewell would interject sharply, with his glasses slipping down his wide red nose) to the rest of the body, activating muscles and secreting chemicals that have specific effects depending on the situation.
A man is pointing a gun at you, his eyes shadowed and menacing beneath his hood.
Your heart pounds, your salivary glands seem to dry to dust, your sphincter tightens. Jimmy left that part out in all the subsequent retellings, because mentioning sphincters around Tony tends to lead to inappropriate jokes, and Jimmy's got quite enough inappropriate of his own.
Your vision narrows and greys, and you start to experience auditory exclusion – his internal Tony-voice grumbles impatiently and makes another crack about dumbing it down for the PE major – sorry, Agent DiNozzo. Temporary loss of hearing.
In his first weeks at NCIS, Dr Mallard had told him a story about…
Well, to be honest, the medical examiner had used the term piloerection somewhere in the early part of the telling; which sufficiently distracted his young protégé from anything but the most vivid mental images, and so the specifics and the greater meaning are somewhat foggy, and… what was his point again?
Jimmy can't quite remember, except that the term was nothing to do with the increase of blood flow to certain parts of the male anatomy and everything to do with your hair standing on end.
But like everything else, that's beside the point.
He's careful to look at the floor of the elevator as the door opens and doctors and nurses pile into the open space in a tangle of coloured scrubs and white coats. There's a doctor here – he's not sure which one – that will tear apart any med student that dares to meet his eye, and now isn't the time for a grilling, especially when semi-naughty words are still at the forefront of his mind. Not that he'd ever show his amusement in such an environment.
After all, he's well beyond getting hung up on such juvenile – wow, black calfskin boots with a low heel, size six. Possibly Italian, most likely handmade and great for –
Thankfully, the elevator heralds the arrival at his destination with a sharply familiar 'ping,' which almost makes him expect to see the pumpkin-orange walls and the scrolling electronic board of the squad room, except when the doors finally open, the greenish-white glow of fluorescent hospital lighting spills into the lift cage. He leaves a trail of mumbled excuses in his wake as he pushes his way out, the lab results for the patient in Curtain Three clutched firmly in his hand.
It's sort of exciting, being part of a real hospital with more medical staff than an elderly grey-haired man with an honorary degree in the art of the segue. Even if the MO he's been assigned to seems far too young and flippant to be holding lives in his hands, and he doesn't have any stories that don't involve himself, the nursing staff and copious amounts of alcohol.
Even if sometimes during another twelve hour stint of treating flu, muscle strains and various insertion injuries (what it is about the hours between 2000 and dawn that makes people prone to experimenting with things that are just far too big to go where they're put, he can't figure out) Jimmy starts to understand why Dr Mallard likes working with deceased people, because they don't try to offer explanations like 'fell through a plate glass window and some of it got up my rear passage accidentally,' when their clothes are clearly intact and they won't meet his eyes.
Dead people have no secrets, and better yet, they don't lie.
There will be one more part to come before (hopefully) the muse will allow me to get back to my other projects. Feedback welcomed and encouraged, as always. :)
