Greater Good
An NCIS Fanfic
By CaelumFelis
Disclaimer: I don't own NCIS or anything associated with it.
Navy Yard
Washington, DC
1043 EST
Ducky was keeping Abigail company in her lab when his cell phone rang. She giggled at the tinny bagpipe music, while he fumbled in his pockets for the infernal little machine.
"Dr. Mallard, Medical Exam-"
"Duck, need you up in the bullpen, bring Abby with you," Jethro interrupted. "I need you to check McGee over."
"Yes of course, I'll be right up-McGee? Timothy? Jethro, what on earth is Timothy doing here, he should still be in hospital, for G-d's sake, he should still be unconscious!" Ducky couldn't believe his ears. The last he'd seen of young Timothy, the boy had been out cold in a hospital bed, bandages wrapped around his chest, bruises covering every visible inch of his pale skin.
"Hospital's not safe for him anymore," Jethro replied tersely. "I'll explain later, Ducky, just get up here."
Ducky sighed. "Very well, Jethro, I'll be right up " click. Jethro hung up in his usual abrupt manner, and the old medical examiner chuckled before closing his own phone and slipping it back into his pocket.
"Come, my dear, Jethro has requested our presence up in the bullpen," Ducky said, offering Abigail his arm.
"Ducky, what's this about McGee being here instead of at the hospital?" Abigail asked as they went out into the hallway to call the lift.
"Apparently Jethro does not consider the hospital safe for our Timothy any longer," Ducky replied as the lift doors opened. He ushered Abigail inside and pressed the button for the third floor, where the bullpen was located.
They rode up in silence, Abigail nearly vibrating with nervous energy. Ducky smiled to himself, he loved Abigail like a niece, but sometimes she made him tired simply by looking at her.
The lift doors opened, and Abigail was off like a shot. Ducky followed at a more sedate pace in order to observe Timothy and the rest of his team from a distance.
The first thing he noticed was Jethro, hovering in the background like an overprotective father, his expression worried, angry, tired, and fearful, a combination of emotions rarely seen in the man. Next, he noticed Anthony and Ziva, both perched on the edge of Timothy's desk like sentinels, both fiercely protective and loyal, but Ducky could see the underlying fear they held for their teammate's safety. The third thing he noticed was Abigail, practically wrapped around her best friend, her face buried in his shoulder.
The last thing he noticed was Timothy himself, pale, shaken, and still bruised, but on the whole a bit healthier looking than Ducky had last seen him. The sheepish smile he received as he came into Timothy's view was normal, at least, if a tiny bit forced.
"Timothy, my boy, I must say I didn't quite expect you up and about quite so soon," Ducky said, keeping his tone jovial and his disapproval of the situation buried. He would lecture Jethro later. "How are you feeling, young man?"
Timothy carefully extricated Abigail from around his person, and gingerly sat up taller in his computer chair. "Tired, sore, and my chest hurts, but otherwise I'm fine," he answered, the sheepish grin growing as the lad attempted to prove his words true. Ducky snorted and shooed the rest of the team away, so that he could thoroughly examine Timothy.
"DiNozzo, David, with me," Jethro ordered. "Abby, back to the lab. Duck, stick with him until we get back."
"Understood, Jethro," Ducky replied absently, checking Timothy's blood pressure while the boy looked on bemusedly. "Wipe that smirk off your face, Timothy, I am heartily annoyed with you."
"I'm sorry, Ducky," Timothy replied sincerely, "but Gibbs insisted. Besides, I'm not that hurt anymore. Still kinda stiff, but that's just because I haven't been allowed to move around a lot. Something about ripping out my stitches."
"I should think so, young man," Ducky scoffed. "Now, would you mind telling me the reason Jethro was so insistent that you sign out AMA?"
"Well, it could have something to do with the nurse that tried to kill me."
Ducky was so shocked he dropped the thermometer he was holding. "I beg your pardon, Timothy?"
The shrug Ducky received was infuriatingly nonchalant, and did nothing to alleviate Ducky's confusion and shock. "Timothy…"
"I'm a metahuman, Ducky."
The statement came so suddenly and so fast that Ducky wondered for a moment if he'd heard correctly. He attempted to get a look at the boy's face, but Timothy had turned away from him, refusing to look at him. Timothy was afraid of him.
"Ducky, say something."
Ducky blinked. "Well, dear boy, I can't quite… think of anything to say," he replied. "This is… quite outside the realm of my experience. I confess a complete ignorance of this subject. Care to enlighten me, young Timothy?"
The shocked green eyes grew impossibly wide as Timothy spun around to face him, and Ducky almost laughed at his expression. "You… you're not mad?" He asked, his tone plaintive, almost childlike.
"Timothy, why on earth would I be mad?" Ducky asked, frowning. "I don't know anything about metahumans. I don't have any right to be angry. Now, if you would be so kind, Timothy, I would greatly appreciate learning more about them, and you."
Timothy gave him a wobbly, hesitant smile, and reached over to turn his computer monitor towards the medical examiner. "I'm a technopath, I can control any kind of technology with my mind."
Ducky watched, fascinated, as Timothy took the computer through his morning routine (email, systems check, and a whole manner of other things that Ducky couldn't even begin to understand) without touching the machine at all. At one point, the old ME tore his gaze away from the monitor and studied Timothy's face. The boy's expression was distant, but his eyes… the green irises were oddly bright, almost glowing, and Ducky found that he couldn't look away.
Suddenly, Timothy blinked and bashfully smiled at him. "Sarah always teases me about how freaky my eyes looked whenever I was surfing, but she doesn't really have much room to talk," he said quietly. "Her eyes turn yellow, like a cat's."
Ducky chuckled. "Well, dear boy, this certainly has been enlightening. How long have you had this ability?"
"Since I was almost thirteen," Timothy replied. "I'd been hacking for a few years before that, ever since I got my first computer when I was ten. I woke up one morning and discovered that I'd been reprogramming my computer from my bed on the other side of the room in my sleep."
Ducky chuckled. "I'm sure your parents were quite amused," he said, then frowned at the closed off expression on Timothy's face. "You did tell them about your ability, didn't you, Timothy?"
Timothy didn't answer, turning instead to his computer. "When I was going through the nurse's history, I found a link that took me to a heavily encrypted website," he said, his tone cold, his eyes glowing. Programming script raced across the computer monitor faster than Ducky could keep up. "I couldn't break through the encryptions by myself, they're too strong, and I don't have enough processing power on my own. I might be able to do it here…"
Ducky sat quietly and watched as Timothy appeared to go into some sort of trance, staring off into space as his eyes glowed brightly, darting from left to right as though he were reading something only he could see. His fingers twitched slightly as his hands rested on the desk in front of him.
"Go ahead, Ducky."
It took Ducky a few moments to realize that it was Timothy who had spoken, who was smirking lightly at him, an expression made rather eerie by the brightness of his eyes. "I beg your pardon, lad?"
"Ducky, you're sitting here twitching worse than a cat in a bath," Timothy chuckled. "It's kind of distracting. I know you're dying to check me out while I'm surfing, and it's better that you do it now while I'm distracted with a real problem instead of later when I'm surfing just to surf. Go ahead."
Ducky needed no other prompting, and raced back to Autopsy to gather some testing materials, nearly giddy with excitement. He gathered the things he needed and hurried back upstairs. He'd just turned the corner to enter the bullpen when he spied Timothy standing behind his desk, glaring at three agents in front of him.
"-should've known you were one of them," Timothy growled. "You never could get over the fact that I was brought back to field agent status and you got kicked back to the sub basement, Keating."
"You never should've been hired in the first place, McGee, much less promoted to field agent," Agent Keating snarled back. "You should've been put down ages ago like the metahuman scum you are, before you could corrupt our systems and propel yourself forward."
The bitter, barking laugh Timothy let out sent chills up Ducky's spine. "Propel myself forward? I wasn't the one who hacked his personnel file and ramped up his credentials, Keating. That's so grade school. You're lucky you didn't get killed when you were on Gibbs' team."
"You would've loved that, McGee, wouldn't you?" Keating growled.
"Keating, I really couldn't have cared less," Timothy sighed in annoyance. "I had too much on my plate at that point to waste my time being jealous of you. Besides, you were practically begging to be sent back to your little hole, if I recall. You couldn't handle being in the field then, what on earth makes you think you can handle it now?"
Instead of answering, Keating snarled at the other two agents. "Hold him!" He ordered. Ducky gasped as they each grabbed one of Timothy's arms, holding him firmly in place as Keating advanced on him, pulling back his fist. Timothy's glare never wavered as the fist made contact with his cheekbone, the crack of the bone snapping echoing around the bullpen.
Ducky couldn't believe what he was seeing. These were bloody NCIS agents attacking one of their own. He'd known that there had been no love lost between Timothy and Agent Keating, but he hadn't been aware of the strange hate that the other man seemed to have for Timothy.
Timothy spat blood in Keating's face. "My sister hits harder than you," he taunted.
Keating smirked darkly. "Ah yes, the lovely Sarah McGee. Tell me, how long do you think your sister's little forest friends are going to be able to keep her hidden away? There are so few wild places left in the country… it would be a shame for her to find herself on the receiving end of some backwoods hunter's rifle."
Timothy roared in rage and lunged at Keating, but the two agents holding his arms forced him quite roughly back. Keating pulled back his fist again.
"THAT IS ENOUGH!" Ducky bellowed, striding into the bullpen. All four agents stared at him dumbfounded, Keating and his cronies with some degree of apprehension, and Timothy with blatant shock.
"Stay out of this, old man," Keating growled.
"I think not, Agent Keating," Ducky snapped. "You are aware that it is a felony to assault a federal agent? Release Agent McGee immediately!"
"Ducky, get out of here," Timothy pleaded. "There's nothing you can do, just leave."
Ducky began to reply, to tell Timothy to stuff it and call Jethro, but something hard and heavy struck him on the back of the head, and as darkness fell and he felt himself pitch forward, he heard Timothy shout "NO!" and thought, I'm so sorry, lad.
And then he thought no more.
Author's Note: Sorry this took so long, this chapter liked to ramble, much like Ducky himself. ; )
As for the Keating-bashing... I'm sorry, I never liked any of Gibbs' B-team, but Keating just really rubbed me the wrong way. How he managed to become a field agent is beyond me. If he's anywhere around Tim's age, he'd already spent far too much time in the sub-basement to really be able to adapt well to fieldwork when Vance put him with Gibbs'. Besides, I needed a Society member in NCIS, and Keating seemed like the perfect candidate because he was Tim's "replacement", and after a promotion like that, I'm sure it stung like hell to be kicked back to Cybercrimes, so he's already got a beef with Tim. I just made him a lot more evil. **evil chuckle**
The next chapter is the last one part of the "beginning" section of this story, and then we'll really get into the thick of things. Stay tuned!
PS: To the reviewer who asked why I spell G-d the way I do, the long answer is that in Judaism, the name of G-d is sacred, and if you write it on anything (and I do mean anything), that object cannot be destroyed by burning or throwing it away, because you're then figuratively destroying G-d. This is why Torah scrolls and Hebrew bibles are buried in a special section of a Jewish cemetery when they get too old to be used, instead of simply trashed or burned, because they are still sacred documents that deserve respect. By not writing the word G-d out completely, you're not actually writing the name, and therefore whatever you're writing on can be destroyed like any other piece of paper. I take it a step further by not spelling it out at all, in anything that I write, that way I can delete a file (pretty much destroying it) without taking out my entire memory drive and burying it. I'm not a religious person by any stretch of the imagination, but this tradition is something that spoke to me as a writer, and so I chose to uphold it.
The short answer is that it's a habit I've gotten into and see no reason to break. ; )
I would've replied to the question in a PM, but for some reason the reviewer disabled PMs on her account, and so I have no choice but to answer it in an author's note. Hope this answers your question, reviewer! And to everyone else who reads this, I hope you learned something new today!
