A/N: SPOILERS for 'Minimum Security'; 'Heart Break'; 'Mind Games' and 'Grace Period'. My take on Paula Cassidy. Hope you enjoy.

NCIS belongs to everyone who can legally lay claim to them. I don't own them; I'm just borrowing them for the time being.

No Gracious Words We Hear

I remember the first letter I ever received. I was eight, and I vividly recall the excitement and glee that made my fingers shake as I greedily tore into the envelope that formally bore my name, Miss Paula Cassidy.

This wasn't something for Mom and Dad; not for my older brother, Brian (who had a subscription to Boys' Life), and certainly not for my two younger sisters, Jennifer and Stephanie, who were barely out of diapers. This was mine, and somehow made me feel a little more grown-up.

My favorite teacher had sent it on the occasion of my birthday; a card and a neatly-handwritten letter. She'd promised to write to me when she moved to New York City from Simi Valley, California, and I was thrilled she'd kept that promise.

Over the next ten years or so, we actually maintained a regular correspondence. It was this pen-pal relationship that fuelled my love of letter-writing. In the age of e-mail, cell phones, text-messaging and even video conferencing, penmanship is fast becoming a lost art, and mailing a handwritten letter passé.

I prefer sending something through 'snail mail', even when that system is sluggish. When I was stationed at Gitmo, (notoriously slow mail service!) I eschewed modern technology and persisted in shooting off letters to family and friends. There's something so much more personal, tactile and enduring about a letter. Letters you can treasure forever. They're keepsakes for your grandchildren to pore over in the attic on a rainy afternoon long after you're gone.

I love the feel of a good-quality pen scrolling across good-quality paper. You never feel the same level of connectedness to an e-mail that you would to a physical letter. I still feel an echo of the thrill and excitement I felt as a giddy eight-year-old when there's a letter addressed to me in my mailbox. Some things never change.

I remember the utter sense of violation I felt four years ago when confronted by Agent Jethro Gibbs about letters I'd written that were found on a dead colleague. He actually threatened me with a court order when I was rightfully indignant about having him poke through my private correspondences to my family.

After all this time, I think what really upset me the most was that Agent Gibbs didn't trust me, and refused to let me in.

"We're in the same Agency; we're not on the same team," he told me after I asked to be treated like a member of the team, not as a suspect. It was like a slap in the face.

I've now been an NCIS Agent for nearly ten years, and a damned good one, if I do say so, myself... except during my run-ins with Gibbs. I don't relish being chewed out by anyone, especially when the perceived offence is a minor one, or completely non-existent.

I honestly don't know how agents DiNozzo and McGee have dealt with him all this time... don't know how the late, great Agent Caitlin Todd ever figured leaving behind her Secret Service duty to work with Gibbs was a brilliant career move.

Sometimes it feels like I'm destined to run into Gibbs every time I feel I've attained some level of success in my career. I can't get too proud of myself, because Agent Gibbs will be just around the corner, ready to knock me off my self-made pedestal.

As NCIS Agent Afloat the U.S.S. Kennedy, the sole black mark against me came when Gibbs and team were investigating the suspicious death of one Commander Dornan. His chest literally blew up – flames and all – in his hospital bed at Bethesda, where he'd undergone open-heart surgery. Lab tech, Abby Sciuto was convinced this wasn't an accident. She went so far as to call it murder.

A young Ensign, Evan Hayes, who'd verbally threatened the commander in the past, went U.A. just prior to the Commander's death. He'd also appeared on Bethesda hospital security footage the day of Dornan's explosive end. There had been continuous conflict between Hayes and Dornan. It seems Hayes just couldn't hack the abuse Commander Dornan was dishing out, and eventually committed suicide-by-cop. Agent Todd fired the fatal shot, an event that left her quite shaken and riddled with guilt.

I did not officially investigate the verbal threat Hayes issued to Dornan when it occurred. That meant the personnel issues that apparently lead to the boy's emotional breakdown did not make it into any report. My feeling was that Commander Dornan had been the instigator; riding the poor kid harder than was professionally appropriate. I explained to Gibbs that Dornan had assured me he would 'handle' the situation. Gibbs reacted to this revelation as if I'd broken one of his cardinal rules. There's something about getting a dressing-down from Agent Gibbs that one isn't too eager to repeat, and fortunes definitely aren't in my favor when it comes to this.

My third and most significant encounter with our cheery Agent Gibbs came a short while after Kate was killed. I was on Temporary Additional Duty for the week while Gibbs was given the unenviable task of getting a killer he put away years ago to reveal the location of his still-missing victims' remains.

Blunder number one was to have the mug of this killer, Kyle Thomas Boone, up on the screen that morning. If looks could kill, I'd be six feet under. Gibbs gave me a withering glare when Tony identified me as the one who'd put Boone's image up there. I just thought I was being helpful. Evidently not. Gibbs doesn't need help, it seems; certainly not mine. Never mine.

We were on location at the abandoned Boone family farm when, for the briefest of moments, I actually entertained the thought that Gibbs 'needed' me. Turns out he only 'needed' me because I was the only one small enough to squeeze through the filthy chimney. But in retrospect, I don't know what was worse: having Tony gleefully rattle off my pertinent stats ("34-36-34; 120 pounds") as Gibbs measured me, or being covered with soot, grime and dead bird droppings while I dug for evidence. I finally pulled a book of some kind down from behind the flue. The pictures inside nearly made me retch. Even more disturbing was the fact that there were five more victims than the twenty-two Boone claimed he'd killed.

What we couldn't have guessed at the time was that Boone's own lawyer, Adam O'Neill, was responsible for four of the unidentified ones, and that they were recent victims. That clue came almost too late. So, while McGee was making that leap of logic before anyone else was, I was taking a shovel to the head, courtesy O'Neill, copy-cat serial killer.

Every so often, I go over in my mind how I made it through those critical, desperate hours. I should have been dead; my tongue cut from my mouth; a heart sliced into my back, like the rest of those murdered women.

Abby, the Goth-scientist, doesn't believe in luck, and I've never put much stock in prayer, so I don't know if it was Lady Luck or God, or whatever higher intelligence you believe in. But I have to admit the powers that be must have granted me some ounce of saving grace; some stay of execution on that day. I got out of the clutches of that twisted killer and survived with nothing more than a sliced-up shoulder, slight concussion and a generous collection of bumps and bruises.

I've wondered, sometimes, what Gibbs would have thought if O'Neill had succeeded in killing me. Would Gibbs have felt remorse for the way he'd treated me in the past? Would he have regretted how quickly he'd dismissed my feelings and my professional experience? Would he have been just as determined to nail O'Neill as he had been determined to nail Ari Haswari after Kate was killed? I don't know. I've become resigned to the fact that there is nothing I can do that will ever earn me Gibbs' trust; nothing that will ever endear me to him.

Gibbs never really spoke to me after my brush with death. I spent the rest of what should have been my T.A.D., recovering from my injuries. After that, it was on to greener pastures when I was assigned to the Pentagon. I heard that a Mossad officer was filling the void Kate left behind on Gibbs' team: 'Ziva David'. Well, better her, than me.

I eagerly accepted the challenge of heading my own team of NCIS agents. Rick Hall and James Nelson call me 'Boss', and we share a very easy camaraderie. Jimmy's the grinning newly-wed, and Rick is loving the life of the carefree and unattached bachelor.

My team dynamic is so different from what I've observed when working with Gibbs' team. Gibbs is authoritarian. He's smacked heads; Tony's, usually. Rick and Jimmy joke around, but they're adults compared to Tony. They don't ever require a daily dose of corrective physical abuse.

For the past year, our cases have run the gamut from the serious to the downright silly. Just last weekend, we fielded a call from a guy who thought his dog was a Taliban sympathizer. We all had a good laugh about it.

At the end of the day, I go home with a real sense of satisfaction and accomplishment. Me, Jim and Rick work well together. We're a team. We trust each other with our lives each and every day we're on the job together. It's everything I've ever wanted from the NCIS.

We weren't thrilled about working the Hotline two weekends in a row, but we're still considered one of the newer teams; i.e., low on the totem pole, so we're expected to pick up the slack and work the crappy shifts.

So, here we are, waiting to make contact with an anonymous source claiming to have information about a potential terrorist attack. I can think of better ways to spend my Sundays, but when it comes to matters of national security, my personal wants have to take a back seat.

Rick and Jim are watching the passers-by from their vantage point of a table at a sidewalk café. We've been waiting for three hours and our source still hasn't shown. Rick wants to know if we should call it a day, but I'm not quite ready to pack it in yet. I'm watching from the parked car with the surveillance camera, and I interrupt Rick when my cell phone rings. It's our anonymous source. I instantly snap to attention.

"Where are you?" I ask. The caller claims he's near. He insists on a meeting inside a building close by, and he rattles off the address. I protest that we prefer a meeting on the street, but my caller fears that he's being watched by people 'everywhere'. I'm not about to jeopardize the safety of this confidential source. If he really does have something valuable to tell us, I can't risk having him seen by his supposed enemies, which by extension would make them our enemies, as well.

Rick and Jim spot a bearded man making his way purposefully towards the chosen rendezvous. He's trying to be inconspicuous, but looks rather silly in his knitted hat and sunglasses. I snap off a few shots of the man. He enters the building, which appears to be some kind of store.

"How do you want us to handle this?" Rick asks, cautiously.

"Pick him up," I reply, assuring them I'll be right behind. I put the car in gear, drive up a few more yards and put it into park. I make sure I have my weapon with me; one can never be too prepared when walking into unfamiliar territory.