Chapter 2: In sickness and health

I take you to be my wedded wife. To have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness or in health, to love and to cherish 'till death do us part. And hereto I pledge you my faithfulness.


Buchanan townhouse
Georgetown, DC
Three weeks after the wedding.

It was the sound of violent vomiting that woke him up. McGee blinked rapidly trying to get rid of the sleepiness from his eyes and the sound repeated, muffled by the closed door of the ensuite bathroom.

He sighed loudly before moving sluggishly on the bed, looking at the hour on the alarm clock by his side table.

It was three fifty-six in the morning.

He moved the duvet away from his body, feeling the goosebumps immediately covering his pj clad legs as he felt a light breeze flowing from the open window. He walked slowly towards the door and leaned forward, touching the closed door with his forehead.

"Joy!" He called out loud enough to be heard at the other side of the door. He heard the sound of the toilet flushing and finally the water running in the sink.

"I'm fine, Tim. Give me a minute." Joy's voice came muffed by the door before she finally opened it and slowly dragged her sorry ass out of the bathroom, falling in an exhausted heap on the bed and moving the duvet slowly to cover her head, shivering lightly under McGee's worried gaze.

"This has been going on for weeks."

"I'm fine."

"No... you're not." McGee turned off the light of the bathroom and sat on the edge of the bed, his hand resting on top of the duvet, feeling the light shivering through the thick blankets. "You're not getting better, you're getting worse."

"It must have been the sashimi we've had yesterday. It tasted funny."

He shook his head, "No, it didn't. It tasted exactly the same of the previous week."

Joy uncovered her face just to glare at McGee. "It tasted funny. The smell was different."

"It wasn't. You're imagining things. Are you going to let me ask Ducky to check you out?"

"It's just something I've eaten."

"What if it isn't?" McGee asked, his hand moving to touch her cheek, finding it damp with a fine mist of sweat over her skin. "What if it's something... related to the radiation you've been exposed to?"

"But that was months ago."

"But think: You've been feeling sick, vomiting and having a light fever that has been lingering for days."

"It's just a bug."

"All symptoms fit to what they told us to watch out. You're still under observation for a couple more months. There's no way to predict how the human body would react to the radiation you, Ziva and your mother were exposed."

"But the symptoms would have appeared several weeks ago."

"I'm still calling Ducky coming the morning." He said, turning off the light on the bed lamp, before going around the bed to lay beside her, his arms snaking around her upper body, feeling her light shivering as they both tried to rest.

She soon fell asleep, moaning lightly as her fever went up and down, keeping McGee in a sleepless vigil until the early hours of the morning, as he held his wife of very few weeks in his arms feeling the first tendrils of worry coiling around his chest and slowly squeezing his heart under his ribs.