Another stake out. By Tim's best estimate this is hour 4,872 of this day of staking out.

They're in a bus terminal, in something that looks like a bus, which is actually the com center for keeping eyes on the locker which is currently holding fake travel documents and more than five hundred thousand euros. Sooner or later their perp has to show up and collect this, after all, he can't get out of the country, let alone get away with his robbery, if he leaves the damn money in the terminal forever.

So, sooner or later, he's got to show up to grab the stuff.

But sooner wasn't yesterday, and it wasn't the day before yesterday, and right now Tim's sure as hell it's not going to be today.

So, he's sitting next to Tony, whom he rarely gets alone time with anymore.

"What are you working on?" Tim asks without looking away from the monitors. They take turns, half an hour on half an hour off. That's as long as anyone can focus, hour after hour, day after day on a fucking locker. It's Tim's half hour on.

Tony makes a non-committal sound, and keeps typing away at something. Tim assumes that's Tony's version of his holding up one finger, let me finish this thought before it goes skittering away.

So he does, sitting there, listening to the clicking of Tony's fingers on his keyboard, watching the locker that no one is showing any interest in at all. His fingers tap the desk he's sitting at, and he makes a mental note that next time they're breaking into the locker, tagging everything with RFIDs, and waiting for the signal to move instead of sitting here staring until their eyes fall out.

Tony stops typing and looks up at him. "Okay, what was that?"

"Just asking what you were working on."

"Oh. Reynolds," the marriage counselor they were seeing, "asked both of us to write the five best and worst things about our parents' marriages. A what did we learn from growing up like this, kind of thing."

Tim nods, that makes sense to him. "Don't marry anyone younger than your kids?"

Tony smiles wryly. "Believe it or not, that doesn't actually make my top five."

"Yikes!"

With a nod, Tony goes back to looking at his screen. "How about yours?"

Tim shrugs, wanting to look away from the monitors, but doesn't. "I don't know. Stay in the same hemisphere? Don't know enough about how their marriage worked to really know."

"You were there, right?"

"Yeah, I was. But my dad wasn't."

"Oh." Tony seems to think that's a good point. "How about good stuff?"

Tim shakes his head. "I've got nothing. How about you? What's your dad good at?"

Tony flashes him the patented DiNozzo smile. "Romance. He's always been good at that. Big gestures, little ones, no one makes a woman feel special the way my dad can. Sure, he'll be sleeping with the secretary and have a girlfriend on the side, but when there's money he's the guy who shows up with diamonds, 'just because they made me think of you,' and when he's broke, he can give a woman a daisy and make her feel like it's a diamond."

Tim thinks about DiNozzo Senior and has no trouble imagining that at all. "I can see that."

"Yeah." Tony sighs.

"Speaking of which, any news on Delphine?"

"You mean he's been with her nine months, isn't it about time he gets engaged again?"

"Something like that."

"Last I heard, they were still together and he had not yet gone engagement ring shopping. But at least half of the step-moms I learned about after the fact; I'm not holding out hope of him telling me about it ahead of time."

Tim nods at that, still staring at the monitor. "How many do you have done?"

"All five bad ones, one good one."

Tim nods and shuts up, letting Tony get back to his writing.

His own downtime. Finally getting to look away from the screen. He's got Jethro and Penny's notes back from Shadow Force and is thinking his way through them.

He stops for a moment, ideas tumbling around, nothing really concrete. Both of them noticed that one of the early scenes isn't really working, and he knows it isn't working, too. Knew it when he wrote it. It just kind of drags along, but he's still got to fill that chunk of time and drop that bit of information into the plot at that point…

He growls quietly at the notes in front of him, and Tony says, "Trouble in paradise?"

"Paradise is fine. Deep Six land is a bit different."

"So, is good old LJ Tibbs going to hang up his badge and hand the reins over to his trusted second-in-command Tommy DiGino?"

"Nah. LJ Tibbs is immortal. He's what moves books."

"Hard to believe the old man actually is going to hang it up."

"Yeah. He tell you he's already checked the regs to find out how much time per year he can Franks his way back into cases?"

Tony snorts at that. "He'll be Franksing his way back into your cases. He's not getting onto my team for at least a year."

"Is that for you or him?"

"Both of us." Tony's posture switches, straightens, and Tim catches it, sees what he's seeing. "Come on…" It's a man in a dark jacket who's gone past the locker three times now. "Open the locker…" Tony croons to the man. "Get us out of this prison…"

The man turns, takes two steps, and opens the locker three doors down.

"Damn it!" Tony says sharply.

Tim nods.

"I was thinking that we need to do something special for him," Tony says, getting back to what they had been talking about.

"Special how?"

"I don't know, yet. But we need to do something. Gibbs is retiring, that's big, that's planets shifting in their orbits, universes quaking big, and we need to do something to commemorate it."

"Yeah."

"Something better than a gold watch."

"Definitely."

Another half hour came and went, and one after that, as well.

And with those slowly crawling increments of time was a complete and utter lack of someone checking the locker.

Once again Tim was off and Tony was watching, and he got to thinking about the whole, 'you've brushed me off on the what was going on before Kelly was born bit.'

And, well, especially with talking to his mom last night, it's on his mind.

So… "I talked to my mom last night…"

"Mmmm…" Tony's watching the feed, not really paying any attention to him, which he doesn't mind; it's almost easier to say this if Tony's not entirely there.

But, less than three paragraphs in, when he gets to the got sick, cursing out Abby, stuck with Ducky knowing, Tony's paying attention, and by the time he got to the why he was saying things like that, why he even had phrases like that in his head, Tony's entirely paying attention to him.

Tim keeps talking about it, and also takes over on watching the monitors, because it's easier to just say this, without making any eye contact, and Tony's looking concerned, making the right sorts of concerned noises, and just, really, being a good friend, listening, taking it in, offering to beat the shit out of his dad and then tie him up and use him for target practice, stuff like that.

Tim can see it, out of the corner of his eye, Tony's on the verge of rage about this. He's furious about it. He's… he's doing everything a good friend should do.

And Tim's getting pissed. He can feel it just building, and he's not sure, at first, why. But he's really getting completely fucking pissed, rage into the sky, break things pissed.

And Tony's seeing it, looking more and more alarmed, as Tim's having a harder time keeping control of himself, and finally he says to him, "Tim, do you need to… I don't know… Do you need to go home?"

He's looking at Tim, eyes wide, concern radiating off of him, sincere anger and sorrow for him on his face, and Tim gets it, knows why he's pissed, knows why he wants to scream, and he nods, then got up, and left, without saying anything.

He texts Jethro on the way to the range, letting him know Tony needs backup. No he doesn't think anything is going to happen today, but that doesn't mean Tony needs to be there on his own.

Jethro asks what's going on, and he sends back one word. Later.

Okay. But we'll talk about it?

Yeah.

He shot through his first magazine, and the second one, and the third in fast succession, mostly just feeling the recoil and the force and the shattering satisfaction of seeing the target torn to shreds.

And it helped some.

He'd really like to fight. But it's the middle of the day, middle of a work day, so Jimmy's doing what Jimmy's supposed to be doing, working. Jethro's backing up Tony, and in no condition for it, and Ziva was on all night.

So he loads another mag. It's less satisfying, but eventually it gets the job done.

"Tim?" Abby's voice as he heads through the door.

"Yeah." He heads to the sofa, knowing she'll be over soon enough. And indeed, a minute later, he hears the flush of the toilet, rush of the sink, and then she was sitting next to him.

"What are you doing home at four in the afternoon?"

So he told her, and she was following along until he said, "And I was telling him, and just started feeling so angry, he's giving me perfect responses, sounding pissed on my behalf, and really concerned, and just…"

"Just…" she asks, not entirely sure what's going on with this.

"Just…" He looks away from her, eyes narrow, feeling the anger cresting through him again. "Like he didn't pull the same fucking shit on me for years!" He sees recognition light her face. She blinks slowly and wraps her arms around him. "Like he didn't superglue me to my desk. Like he didn't mock me for years. Like he didn't do everything he could to make me miserable. Like he didn't invent a fake woman for me to fall in love with. Like he didn't…" Tim shakes his head, and Abby holds him a bit closer.

"And I know it's been years since he's pulled any crap on me. Since he finally remembered that he used to get bullied, too, and how much it hurt. But I was talking to him, and he's looking at me with big, concerned eyes, and I just wanted to punch the ever-living fucking shit out of him over and over and over. I wanted to break my fingers on him.

"So he notices I'm not good, and asks if I need to go home, so I went."

"Oh, Tim," she strokes his hair and cheek.

"Yeah." He rubs his eyes and shake his head. "I don't even know what to do with this. It's been years… And he's just… clueless."

"Really?"

"If the idea that just possibly there's some sort of connection between how he treated me and me flipping out right now occurred to him, it was after I left."

"He on his own?"

"I sent in Gibbs."

"So, you can find out if it occurred to him. Or you could arrange for it to occur to him."

"Hm." He's not sure if he likes that idea or not. Then he shakes his head. If Gibbs smacks Tony upside the back of the head on it, it won't be on his say so. (Though he wouldn't mind if Gibbs did that.)

"What do you want him to do?" Abby asks, concern clear on her face.

"I don't know?" He's shaking his head.

"You're shaking your head. Really, what?"

His eyes narrow. "That reading micro-expressions class you took is turning out to be annoying."

She smiles at him. "Come on, what? You can always tell me anything. I'm not going to be offended. And even if you are overreacting, I'm not going to give you any crap about it. You're allowed to be a bit off kilter about this, especially right now."

He stares at the ceiling, and blows out a long breath. What does he want? "Acknowledgement that he was a fucking asshole to me for years. At least five, probably seven of them. That's a start. I want him to feel bad about it, really bad, and not because I'm some sort of fragile, damaged person who needs to be handled with kid gloves and can't take a joke, but because the way he treated me fucking sucked!"

He's staring at the fireplace, glaring at it. "I want him to know it wasn't just joking around. And it wasn't cool."

He looks back to Abby. "I want him to admit he stepped over the fucking line, and he did it over and over. I can take the McWhatevers, that's just him being him, and that's not the problem. But the superglue was just fucking sadistic. You remember how long it took for my face to heal up? He told all of the girls I was gay. The Claire thing… I mean, do you have any idea how long it must have taken him to set that up? Level five sorceress? Hours, weeks, of fucking around on that game so I could fall in love with a phantom, and then oh ha, so funny. Because my love life didn't suck bad enough back then! I needed to be rejected by every real girl I was even vaguely interested in, and then imaginary ones could yank my heart around, too.

"But, no, he's just clueless, listening, looking supportive, not a single idea in his big, fat, empty head that…" He lets that trail off. "I'm just going over the same stuff. I want him to hurt for it. And I know it's not cool-"

"And nothing. You don't have to make excuses for that. The only thing you've got to do is figure out if you want to talk to him about it, or if you want one of the rest of us to talk to him about it, or if you want to try and just let it go. You do not have to feel bad about being pissed off because you got bullied. And the fact that it was years ago doesn't mean it didn't hurt. And the fact that you took it, turned the other cheek, and smiled, doesn't mean you were cool with it. And the fact that he's not doing it anymore doesn't mean he gets a free pass for it."

Tim rests his head on her shoulder. "I don't tell you I love you nearly often enough. Could do it every minute of every day for the rest of my life, and it still wouldn't be enough."

She kisses him. "Back at ya, love. Back at ya."