AN: So sorry at how long this is taking me. I never should've started...lol. Way too much going on irl!

*~.~*

"Tony!" McGee shouted at the unconscious man, lightly slapping his face with the hand that wasn't holding the cloth over Tony's bleeding wound. "Tony, c'mon. Wake up! I need you to wake up!" He was anxious. Afraid. He wasn't sure how long they'd been there.

He'd woken up an hour ago when Tony was shouting for him to do so. Tim's hands had been tied up with the anchor rope, which didn't take too long for him to get out of so that he could assess the situation. They were on a boat. In the middle of Nowhere, Oceanville. The control console had been smashed in, and the hull had been taking on water until Tim resourcefully, albeit temporarily remedied that.

Tony's gunshot wound hadn't hit anything vital as far as Tim could determine, but he was losing blood. There was nothing Tim could use to patch him up, only to try and stop the bleeding until they could be found. But as the hours passed, that looked less and less likely to happen. Not that he didn't have faith in his boss, but there was no way to know where they were; no way to know where to even start looking. Tony was running out of time.

Tim had been trying to get the radio rigged to work, the GPS to give some sort of signal, anything, when Tony had suddenly stopped talking to him. It's then that he'd realized the older man had lost consciousness and was no longer holding onto the cloth.

Abandoning the task, Tim had gone back to his partner and reapplied the cloth and pressure over the wound.

Tim looked up and out over the water for the hundredth time. There was nothing in sight around them. No sounds. No birds. Nothing. Wherever the assailants had dumped them, they must have known it was a rarely traveled area.

Tony's cough drew Tim's attention back to his partner. "Tony?"

"Don't...look so scared, McGee," he told him weakly. "They'll find us."

"I know they will," Tim replied with confidence. "I'm just worried about how long that'll take."

"Well don't," he said, and coughed again. "The guys that left us assumed we'd have sunk by now. You saw to it that we didn't. That's a good job..."

"So we won't drown," Tim said. "But we have no drinkable water, no food, no protection from the sun, and no navigation."

"Guess you better learn to fish," Tony said with a grin, then grunted in pain.

"With what," Tim asked, trying to distract him as he pressed harder over the wound.

"Wires," Tony replied. "Man, haven't you ever watched Gilligan's Island? Or Lost? You gotta be resourceful. Like you were plugging up that hole in the hull earlier."

"That wasn't hard," he said. "They assumed I wouldn't get myself outta the rope. Shoving a waterproof jacket in a hole isn't resourceful."

"Sure it is."

"If I had something to fish with, I'd probably be using it to sew you up."

"Recycling." He coughed again.

"What?"

"You can't get the radio to work. Go strip out the wires."

"They're not hard enough to penetrate skin."

"You never know what you'll find. Maybe you can twist some together so they're strong enough."

McGee let out a breath. "Even if I could, we have no anesthetic. No alcohol. No telling what could happen."

"So I get an infection...that still buys me some time, right? Stop me from bleeding out at least. Can't hold this thing on forever. I do not want to go out like Mr. Orange."

"Assuming they don't come back, I doubt you'll go out like Mr. Orange."

"You know Reservoir Dogs? I'm impressed..." He trailed off with a coughing spell.

"Hey, hey... Just breathe, okay? We're not gonna die. We're gonna be fine. Gibbs is gonna find us. I...I'm gonna go see what I can find, okay? So I need you to stay awake and hold this. Can you do that?"

"I'll do my best...Mr. White," he said with a grin.

"As long as I'm not Mr. Pink."

"Not even Mr. Pink wanted to be Mr. Pink." They both smiled. Then Tony's grin faded. "What do you think happened to Bishop?"

McGee looked down with a furrowed brow. "All I remember is her hitting the boat. I watched her head hit the side. I saw her go into the water. When they pulled us out, I didn't see her anywhere..."

"Maybe she got out," Tony said, feigning optimism.

"Maybe..."

*~.~*

"I'm fine, Ducky," Bishop insisted from her crossed-legged position on the cold table, as the M.E shone a light in her eyes.

"Better safe than sorry, Eleanor," he replied. "Since you insisted on being out of the hospital within hours of admission."

"It was just a concussion with slight amnesia...which is no longer even a factor, so just a concussion," she stated.

"How is she, Duck?" Gibbs asked as he strolled into autopsy, doors hissing closed behind him.

"Stubborn and impatient," Ducky replied, turning off the light and glancing to his friend. "Health-wise, however, she seems to be satisfactory for the time being."

"Great," Bishop said before hopping off of the table. "Because I need to check in on Abby; see if she's found anything off the surveillance tapes."

"Just came from there," Gibbs said, causing her to pause in her steps and turn around to face him again. "Markus's boat last left port with Markus. Whoever took it, it wasn't from the dock."

"Which means he was probably hi-jacked," Bishop replied in thought. "But he was found in his apartment."

"He was shot at the water," he reminded her. "Then brought back to the apartment."

"But why? That's the one thing that doesn't make any sense out of all of it."

"Perhaps there was something in the apartment they needed after all," Ducky chimed in. "Something that might've been overlooked. Small but important."

"You profile Markus?" Gibbs asked the older man.

"I dug into his background a bit, but didn't find anything useful. Nothing except, of course..." His sentence trailed off for a moment as he grew thoughtful, then turned to his computer. "His social media account had mentions of some sort of trip," he told them. Bishop and Gibbs moved to look at the screen as he pulled up the information in question. "Mr. Palmer found it, so I'll need to look for a moment. Luckily he left the page open."

"There," Bishop pointed. "He was planning a trip to Mexico. He was planning to go by sea."

"To bring medical supplies to Veracruz which would then be transported to Oaxaca," Ducky added. "It was a charity trip, Jethro. Oaxaca is the poorest city in Mexico. There's no official records of these plans because Sgt. Markus was doing this himself."

"Why would someone kill Markus and take his boat over something like this?" Bishop asked.

"Maybe he was taking more than medical supplies," Gibbs thought aloud. "Someone got greedy."

"If this is about drugs...Tony and Tim are already dead..." Bishop said as her eyes darted back and forth in thought.

Gibbs' phone rang in his pocket then, the moment broken. "Yeah," he answered. Bishop watched her boss's eyes as they changed, giving clues that something had happened. "Yeah. Good. We're on our way. Nobody talks to them until we get there!" He hung up the phone and started out the door, Bishop hot on his trail.

"What happened?" she asked.

"They found Markus's boat. They've got two men in custody..."

*~.~*

AN: Yeah it's kinda on the short side. My bad. Ugh.