A/N: Signs you're a forensic scientist... I swear, everything in this is true. Except I'm still okay with rice (but I might be in the minority).

In some cultures what I do would be considered normal.

Sometimes, Tim McGee wished he had never wanted to be a field agent, or Agent Gibbs had never accepted him on his team. Right now, he would much rather be stuck behind a desk in a windowless and airless room, surrounded by computers and other geeks than in the great outdoors, in a picturesque beauty spot with the sun shining on his head.

And not because of the dead body. Because of the crawling, faceless blobs on the dead body.

Corporal Larsson had left this world a few days ago, judging by the appearance of the maggots. And the maggots weren't behaving as though they were in some kind of television show, one or two scattered around various parts of the deceased. No, there had to be a thousand of them at least, all congregating in various parts of the soft tissue. The eyes, the nose, the mouth, the ears – anywhere warm and easy to consume. They wiggled in packs of at least fifty, with only the odd one on its own. They constantly moved, they gave off a disturbing amount of heat and smell, and they looked like moving blobs of rice.

The egg fried rice in his fridge was going in the trash the moment he got home.

He had been assigned to collect a sample for Abby. In this case, a sample meant forty from every maggot mass site, half to be killed now and preserved, half to be reared up back at the lab to determine a surprisingly precise time of death. With Ducky's permission, he would have to turn the body over to see if there were any maggots underneath. He would need to photograph his work, stick thermometers into the wriggling masses to get a temperature, chase any fully-grown flies with a useless net, and label everything with mountains of information in case the specimen jars became muddled.

He swallowed hard. He needed a stronger stomach.

And he would definitely need a stronger stomach when they began to stink the whole lab out when Abby grew them.