Written for the NFA Magic Book Challenge:
You have to write a story in which a magic or fantasy book plays an important role, it can be a real book or series of books such as The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Chronicles of Narnia, etc. Or in can be a made up book, it makes no difference, the important thing is that a book is somewhere in there.
The Continuing Adventures
Even now, when McGee thought about how close he had come to blowing it all, he still panicked. Tony and Kate had broken into his apartment that Sunday morning and it was lying on his writing desk – just lying there. He tried to hustle them out the door but somehow in the process of collecting his clothes and gun while not disturbing his sister still sleeping in his bed, he got careless. Before he knew it, the manuscript was in Tony's hand and he was laughing at the title – "The Continuing Adventures of L.J. Tibbs"
Fortunately, the senior agent had no concept of how long it took to write a manuscript to that length. Not for one moment did he stop and think, "Hey, this guy has just joined our team and ALREADY he has written a book about our cases." More fortunately, he had not opened it and skipped to the part where feisty yet virtuous ex-presidential-bodyguard Fate Bodds gave her life protecting L.J Tibbs or read the introduction of her sultry and emotionally distant replacement – Mossad officer Lisa.
Perhaps it was just as well he mentioned his writings to Tony on that first stake out. It dulled his curiosity to a mere, "Oh, this is what you were talking about." McGee scoffed quietly at Tony's accusation that day, "Isn't that plagiarism?" Life was plagiarising him, not the other way around.
It had started not long after he acquired the typewriter. He loved mysteries, he longed to be a special agent and so it was only natural that he put the two together. His first free-writing experiments, however, scared him. He would fall into a deep trance as his fingers flew. The gross outline of the story played out before him but the details were hazy, frustratingly out of his grasp.
After it was over, he would read the pages over and type again, filling in the gaps as best he could to make sense of the whole thing. He thought he had some great writer's gift – the way the words flowed so effortlessly. The fact that his gift only chose to manifest itself on an old Remington typewriter and not on a modern computer with a word processor, he chose to ignore.
The Tibbs/Gibbs rhyming bothered him from the start. He had heard of Special Agent Gibbs: he had a reputation. A quick background check put his mind at rest – there were no tangible similarities on paper.
Then one day, it happened: a phone call from a Special Agent with a familiar sounding name – Tony DiNozzo. Logically, that should have started alarm bells ringing but it was only when he met the three of them together – Tony, Kate and then L.J. Tibbs that the whole thing started to seem terrifyingly real and his final paradigm was broken.
He spent a great deal of time that day covering his panic by staring at the acid dipped body and hyperventilating into a face mask. Sure they'd think he was a wimp, but it was better than them knowing the truth. Suddenly all those little details he had glossed over in his manuscript, all the unclear bits he had tidied up with fantasies conjured from his own imagination, became excruciatingly important. Through the whole case, he had raced home each night and scanned for useful details, cursing himself for not paying more attention to his visions.
When the case was over and the field agents had all left, he had entombed the entire manuscript in a large box, bound it tightly with string and buried it deep under his bed with his collection of jazz records assuring himself repeatedly that co-incidences do happen despite what L.J. Tibbs or even L. J. Gibbs would say.
When the time came to move to Washington D.C., the bound document made the journey cowering in the bottom of his trunk. The moment he arrived, it was promptly banished to the top of his closet where it was slowly absorbed by a pile of sundry refuse.
The only time the manuscript came out into the light was when his sister was staying over. She knew he was writing a book and he'd rather risk her discovering the truth that endure her teasing that he'd given up on his writing. He was careful about it though: methodically keeping track of how much of the manuscript was lying on the table so that it grew each time she visited.
Naturally, Tony and Kate would choose THAT morning to break into his apartment and Tony would be so impertinent as to pry into all his things. In hindsight it was his own fault – a neat pile of paper was obviously too much of a temptation for Tony. If he'd left a messy heap of paper, Tony might have passed straight over it... but then his sister would have known something was up: a haphazard jumble of paper was too far removed from his innate anal-retentive character.
No, he was never going to win.
Over the years he watched as the world slowly evolved to fulfil his book's destiny. Case after case had a familiar ring and yet he played dumb. Kate died, Ziva came and he realised there was no point denying it anymore.
Of course, it wasn't all doom and gloom: he was very interested to meet the resident forensic scientist, for example. She was almost as he had expected: peppy, cheerful and brilliant. He knew her inside out: and what he needed to do to get his chance. It had taken a quarter of his book for McGregor to figure out he needed to get a tattoo on his butt for Amy to take him seriously and there was no way he was wasting that sort of time: he had it in place for their first lunch date.
Abby was fantastic. Every time he saw her, it was all he could do not to jump her bones right there in the lab – but he didn't. In fact, he did almost nothing, not wishing to tempt fate (no not Fate, fate). He couldn't get over the feeling that pushing reality along the lines of his story was cheating somehow. So he let Abby take the lead and followed with a genuine curiosity to see how reality viewed the visions in his head.
He still laughed at Palmer's indignation over the book's interpretation of his dreams. Yes, it wasn't dead people but what Pimmy Jalmer had dreamed in the first draft was something so grotesque McGee's publisher actually blanched and demanded a re-write to something the average population could stomach.
At one point, he had taken the entire typewriter apart piece by piece to isolate the source of its power but, as far as he could tell, it was just an ordinary manual typewriter. It was then Abby chose to throw it across the room at her ex-boyfriend. He should have seen that coming. No really, he should have: it was in chapter 27. It was with mixed emotions that he reconstructed the Remington. Had Abby's shot put destroyed its power? The problem was he would not know if the typewriter was still working its magic for years.
He had to try it – just to see. It wasn't long before he found himself halfway through a second manuscript. The first book had not even played out and he was already pacing ahead of life again. He was an addict and he knew it but, like all good addicts, he hid the evidence of his vice: systematically filing each page away along with its associated typewriter ribbon so that there was no evidence for anyone to find.
Then there was a point when he realised that all the documented events in his first manuscript were now in the past. The story he had fed Tony all those years ago was, for all intents and purposes, quite true: he had written a book about NCIS past cases. There was no reason not to send it off to a publisher. Excitedly, he exhumed his first manuscript, added some extra touches of unreality to throw people off the scent and popped it in the post.
To his great surprise, the book became a National Best seller. To his horror, his publisher requested another. Desperately, he negotiated the deadline. It was important that all the information was in the past. Slowly, he simulated real writing: drawing pages from their secret stash and forming a manuscript, keeping a folder of random "free writing notes" some real, some actually fictitious and even binning the typewriter ribbons as he reached the appropriate points. He was the master of artificial book writing.
Then suddenly, his characters became endangered by the storyline and he panicked. His pace slowed as each visit to the keyboard brought terrifying visions of Amy in danger. In desperation, he ceased typing and went reality cold turkey. If he didn't type it, he reasoned, it couldn't happen. Unwillingly, he watched the real-life story unfolded before his eyes.
"You look like you have seen a goat," Ziva had remarked.
He knew it was true. Whereas for the first book, the events had been written years before they took place, his fear and procrastination had conspired to align the second book with its reality much more closely. The story was closing in on Amy. The fact that someone had stolen his typewriter ribbon had come as a genuine surprise. In fact, the case itself marked the first genuine surprises he'd had for many years.
Gibbs urged him to write the ending as though he knew the secret of his book but still he baulked. What if something happened to Abby before the villain was revealed? Eventually it got too much and he rammed a fresh piece of paper in and typed. Amy was with the nuns – sure they were disco dancing nuns, but it was close enough. The villain, however, remained stubbornly obtuse. He cursed the typewriter, cursed himself. The bad guy was someone known to McGregor; a regular yet casual acquaintance. The typewriter was punishing him for his betrayal. There was nothing for it; he had to submit to vagaries of real life.
When it was all over and Abby was safe, he went home to his typewriter and finished off the last chapter. Everyone was safe and McGregor was retiring – no moving on…maybe to the Cyber Crimes unit.