Disclaimer: I don't own NCIS.

Prompt #8: Brag - Sick and tired about hearing him go on and on about his degrees, Abby decided to put a cork in it.

Words: 444


It was another case, another series of leads panning out to a whole lot of nothing, and another sojourn down in Abby's lab to help her hack into some secure computer system to run their tests and find missing military intelligence. Really, just another day.

Except Abby was ready to rip her pigtails from her skull and beat McGee with them.

He had this really, really, really annoying habit of talking to himself as he hacked, almost bragging how smart he was and how he was going to take down the code for all it was worth. It was like he was showing off to the code. It got even worse when he started bragging about his degrees from Johns Hopkins and MIT.

As if the code would care how talented he was.

Abby let him rant and ramble on for about twenty minutes before she decided to make him stop.

But how? That was the question. There were obvious methods - killing him was a possible choice - but Abby wasn't about to test the limits of Gibbs's fondness for her by causing permenant damage to one of his agents.

That whittled her choices down to a smaller and not-quite-fear-inspiring list. And of course, Abby had to make sure that this lesson took. Which rubbed off quite a few more options. That left brute force, verbal threats, assault with a deadly weapon, and the shock factor.

Assault with a deadly weapon was always a possibility, but the new McGee didn't scare as much as the newbie McGee used to, not since his stint in that ladies' prison. Brute force wouldn't work either; Abby was no Ziva. Verbal threats sometimes worked, but she couldn't bet on the chance that he would just tune her out.

So that left shock factor.

But again, the question remained - how? So many options, so little sanity left to choose before she got desperately drastic.


Tony chuckled when he saw how McGee winced when the elevator door dinged. Looks like Abby used the air horn on him, he thought with some sympathy. Poor Probie never really had a chance.

Across the bullpen, Ziva was likewise sympathetic to her coworker's pain - to a point. Past that point she was also chuckling at McGee's goof for speaking while he hacked. He really ought to know better than that by now.

It was a wonder that Abby hadn't beat him over the head with Bert.


This...was a tad weird. But whatev, it works!

Review please!