Soooo, I'm posting again ! Yay me ! To commemorate a year of me falling head first in to the fanfiction world rather than just sort of looking over the edge every so often, I have decided to write and post new fics. Except, being me, I only came up with this idea a few days ago. And also, being me, I can't remember what the exact date was so I have to do one for every date of the duration of when it was. So I am going to be posting something every day from the 14th to the 19th. That's a lot of work !
(And I made this rule that all of my fics have to have a quote for a title so...)
Quote of the title - "Paper Thin Walls" - A line from the song "Nightmares" by All Time Low
...
Tim McGee was tired.
He was tired of being nothing but the office geek. He spent all his days on computers, completing all the tedious tasks that the rest of his team could easily learn to do themselves. He sent out BOLO's, programmed facial rec searches, even made all the slideshows that they present to Gibbs on the plasma. While the rest of his team were sent out to question witnesses and round up suspects, he was more often than not left alone at the Navy Yard, only knowing if his co-workers were still alive through the tracking and monitoring of their phones.
He was tired of being left out of things. When he first joined the MCRT, he spent years being hazed by Tony and Kate with some of the cruellest jokes they could think of. Even after Kate died and Ziva join the team, Tony still treated him like the naïve little Probie he could push around. He never felt quite included in the bullpen, with Tony and Ziva laughing and joking together to hide all the sexual tension that they were pretending wasn't there. And he still wasn't welcome down in Abby's lab, where the sexual tension truly was dead. Even after years of working together, he still felt something more for the excitable scientist. But she was definitely over what happened between them – that much was clear from her constant chatter about all her latest boyfriends and how they were 'such good guys'. He was grateful that Abby tried to include him, but the majority of the time he felt like he was just being talked at rather than talked to. So here he spent his life, watching from the side lines while the few people he could call friends enjoyed their lives without him.
He was tired of always being the second choice. It was clear that Gibbs preferred Tony, his SFA and longest standing member of the team. He supposed it was only natural that they would have more of a bond. Tony and Ziva were almost inseparable – rule #12 may have forbade them from being in a romantic relationship, but he was sure that with how much time they spent together under the pretence of literally everything else, they were very close to breaking it, this of course leaving Tim on his own. When Kate had been with them, she and Abby were almost as close as Tony and Ziva, only without all the supressed romance. When she died, it was Abby who was hit the hardest. After this, her affection that she had had for Kate slowly began to transfer itself on to Gibbs, even though she practically worshipped the man in the first place. The two were complete opposites in every way, but somehow that just made them closer. Again, this left Tim alone and not sure who to turn to, especially when it came to times like this.
Most of all, he was tired of life. Sitting at his desk in the bright orange room, he considered just how replaceable he was, and he knew that if he wasn't here, someone else could easily fill his place. When he was driving home, he realised how he was just one among billions; that he was so very insignificant; that one less person driving down the freeway at rush hour wouldn't really make that much of a difference. When he was on his computer, defeating the villain in his latest game, he saw that life was just like a game, that no matter how hard you try, you will always die eventually and there was no reason why that shouldn't happen any sooner than scripted. When he was lying in his bed, trying to go to sleep, he thought about how little his life really mattered and how, if he just stopped living, nobody would really mind.