She'd slapped men before.

Hauled off and laid her hand cutting across the cheek of a liar, a cheater, a downright prick. Hell, she'd decked a terrorist and asked permission to do so again. But she'd never, never, hit a man so hard as cracking her slightly cupped palm across Tony's face while under garish lighting and the smell of antiseptic.

"Where the hell were you?!" She'd inadvertently raked open the barely dried split in his lip and let it bleed down the corner of his mouth.

And a slippery little spill of pleasure went writhing through her at the sight of it.

He didn't deserve it... but her rage had needed that blood strike to feed on.

And she was only surviving on variations of need at the moment.

"I was right there, Kate." And if she'd never taken such a strike against him, his eyes had never looked at her with such pained betrayal. "You know that."

She couldn't breathe. And he was touching her and his hands were the last goddamn hands she wanted anywhere near her – because, because he hadn't done what she'd always silently begged him to do (even if he couldn't have possibly known that was her unspoken request).

He hadn't taken the bullet(s).

He hadn't volunteered himself the way she would have if she could have.

"Why didn't you stop it?" She accused, realizing that he was stronger in this moment than he had been an hour before and loathing him for it.

Tony's hands dug into her arms, she could feel his full palms controlling the drop her body wanted to make into his chest. "Because neither of us could."

"I hate you." She legitimately thought that for a moment… she really did despise him.

"I know."

"Kate." Tony said her name like it was the last word mankind could speak at the brink of an emotional armageddon. "Kate was right."

Tim lifted his head into how dully flat it had wrung from the older man's lips, how the singular syllable had seemed to cut down dry his ability to be anything but sad. DiNozzo seemed suddenly all grown up and far more knowledgeable and Tim felt marginally guilty for thinking anything less of him at any other moment of the day. He let himself study the other man's profile, noting how much older he looked when he was just quietly settling down and letting go of all the silly ways he defended himself. Juvenile comments, frantic and frenetic movements, that jock-like smirking that tended to remind the younger man of high school... all of it was gone. And his partner seemed legitimately responsible and tremendously guilty.

Tim swayed his head to the side, shaking off how oddly stripped his partner seemed. "She didn't mean it."

"She did mean it, Tim." Tony was staring at her empty desk, barely blinking as he avoided looking at Gibbs' equally deserted space. "She's in love with him."

The assertion seemed to build an invisible wall straight down the center of their offices, he and Tony on one side, their stagnantly still desks on the other. His and hers, empty on the other side.

They were always a them lately – they were together on cases, she was always with him, she was his partner, they were interviewing, interrogating, investigating. The two of them, in constant combination, had become them. And he wasn't sure when that had really become a mental construct that was so unquestionable in its sudden reality.

They were together, a combination of one, even if it was just in terms of physical space.

And that fact couldn't have been made any clearer than by their combined absence and Tony's undiluted honesty.

"Tony - "

"I mean, how'd we miss that?" The other man's breathy laugh was manufactured, made to sound like laughter when all it really signaled was surrender. "A woman like Kate… that woman? She doesn't hate me so thoroughly unless there's a damn good reason."

The younger of the two minced him a sharper glance than expected, something sympathetic and disbelieving at once, "She's always had a sort of crush on - "

"This is bigger." DiNozzo argued sharply "And a woman like her? Love is the only thing that can make her truly hate."

"She didn't mean it, Tony."

"She meant it." He said it with quiet surety, like she was the Oracle of Everything and that one thing she'd said had become the final tallied sum of their day-to-day lives. "She's right. I shoulda..."

Tim winced into how flat the other man sounded, "There was nothing - "

"She would have."

He was right. He was more than right. He was speaking the immutable truth that every one of them knew and just never (ever, ever) said out loud. And by using that tone he was daring the universe to contradict him, starting with the very boundaries of their office. Just wait and see if the whole damn Navy would counter the absolute truth that she, of all of them, was the one that loved him most.

She would have taken that bullet (and the second) if she'd seen it coming, if she'd had the chance.

She wouldn't have questioned it for an instant.

McGee suddenly felt like he needed to join him in his statement, because it was truth and truth was all that any of them really went looking for, "Because she's in love with him."

"Shoulda done it for her." Tony looked at him once, and for once, with pure fraternal honesty. "For him."

"He's gonna be okay." He tried to make it sound just as truth-worthy as anything the other man had said in the previous minutes. It fell flat, though. Sounded trite as Tony turned his glance toward the windows, worn out.

And the silting rain that the other man was staring at said it was a bold faced and mutinous lie.

Seemed these days that the rain was their barometer for tragedy as well as pressure.

"He's got a bullet in his lungs, Tim. For fuck's sake." A blankness had dropped out the bottom of the other man's voice, stolen all emotion and voided between them. "And one in his gut. You wanna play the ponies with those odds?"

"It's Gibbs." McGee murmured, as though the man's mere identity meant that he was removed from being a normal (weak) human being. "He's gonna be okay."

Tony just breathed out a dry noise that almost sounded like sardonic laughter. "How'd I not know?"

"About Kate?"

"I mean," Tony almost smiled, ruefully and with an internal darkness that matched the shadows of the office, "how'd I not realize that he was gonna put himself between her and a gun?"

Tim blinked over his partner's stillness, exhaling words slowly, "He thinks that's where he belongs."

"She was right, Probie." DiNozzo's swift jerk of his head had his glance heading for rain run windows again. "Shoulda been me."