"She headbutted me!" McGee wailed, adding another paper towel to the pile he was holding against his nose.

"She did not." Tony leaned back against the men's room door and watched as McGee did his best to stop the nosebleed. "She just...happened to run into you headfirst. Stop adding to that stack, McClumsy. You're not gonna bleed through twenty paper towels, I promise you."

McGee glared at him, but relinquished two of the layers. "How would you know? You've never taken Ziva's skull to the face!"

Tony pulled another layer out of his hands and smiled. "Yeah, but I've taken yours. And a door. And a couple people's fists." He paused, remembering. "And one time, a yappy little dog. Don't -" he added quickly when McGee opened his mouth, "ask. Just trust me, Probie, I know all the ways a nose can bleed, and 'through three inches of paper towels' isn't one of them unless you're hemorrhaging. Which you're not," he hastened to add.

"She's Mossad! Maybe she knows super-deadly ways to headbutt people!"

"Ok first of all, she's not Mossad anymore. Better start getting used to that. And second of all, there are super-deadly ways to headbutt people, but they involve shattering the nose and shoving it into the person's brain. If she had done that to you..." He pulled out another paper towel by the corner, wrinkled his nose, and dropped it into the trash bin. "You'd be dead by now."

McGee glanced at the door Tony was no longer propped against, expecting to see a homicidal Ziva come charging through it at any moment. "You didn't see her face when I called her 'Probie'. She might have invented a delayed-death headbutt just for me."

"Is that what you said to her?" Tony burst out laughing. "She wouldn't tell me." He slapped McGee in the back of the head, still grinning. "Idiot."

"Yeah, yeah. Very funny. It slipped out!"

"Well, if you value your nose, I bet it won't slip out again. Here, let me check -" With surprising gentleness, he eased the wad of paper towels away from the other man's nose, manfully ignoring the sizeable blood clot that came away with them. When no blood dripped out of McGee's nose in a few more seconds, he nodded. "Sniffle."

McGee did, warily, and was rewarded by air and not blood. He sniffled again, then smiled. "Hey, thanks. I'll, uh, take that," he offered, relieving Tony of the bloody towels and throwing them out. "By the way, how do you know about super-deadly headbutting methods?"

Tony just smiled mysteriously and held the bathroom door open for him.

When the door closed behind McGee, Tony dropped the mysterious smile, crossed his arms, and leaned back against the wall, waiting for it to swing open again. Within a few seconds, it did. "You could've gone easier on him," he announced to the person coming through the door. "Poor kid thought he was gonna drop dead."

"Oh?" Ziva cocked her head inquisitively to the side.

Tony nodded. "Never seen someone so freaked out by a simple nosebleed. He was afraid you put an Israeli death hex into it somehow."

"There are no hexes in Judiasm, Tony." She smiled slightly. "And I knew how much force to use. What did he say?"

"The usual. 'She headbutted me!', 'She tried to kill me!', and so forth."

Planting her hands on the counter that supported the sinks, Ziva leaned back on her arms and regarded him coolly "And what did you say?"

"Told him it wasn't a headbutt." With a conspiratorial look, and trying not to look at her breasts, which her posture was pushing out, he sidled closer until he could put one hand on the counter next to her and lean down to whisper, "Said you'd just happened to run into him headfirst."

Ziva gave him an approving smile and brushed a speck of dirt off the lapel of his suit, which was at her eye-level. "That was...helpful of you."

"Oh yeah. Helpful, that's me." He hunkered down a little more, bringing his face almost even to hers. "Do I get a reward or anything?"

"A reward," she repeated, meeting his eyes thoughtfully.

"Yeah. A reward."

She raised a hand and cupped his cheek, smiling seductively. "Yes," she breathed, slowly leaning closer to him. "You get a reward."

His eyes widened slightly as he processed that, then drifted half-closed. He turned his cheek into her hand until his lips were touching her palm.

Leaning forward the last inch, she pressed her cheek to his exposed one, and whispered against his ear, "Your reward is..."

"Yes?"

"...that I will not headbutt you." She licked his ear, grinned, and was out of the bathroom before he could catch her.