Title: 13:11
Author: LYJ
Rating: PG-13
Category: G/K. Angstish.
Spoilers: That would require a plot, silly rabbit.
Archive: Are there NCIS archives? Go for it.
Disclaimer: Are they mine? Of course not. If they were mine, I would be an extremely wealthy television executive, and I would instantly buy myself a penguin ranch.
Summary: Kate is mildly angsty about Gibbs. Shocker!
A/N: In response to bcavis' "Does This Look Infected" fic challenge. Because bcavis doesn't know me, but I happen to think that she's quite the brilliant authoress. The title is the verse number of the below biblical quote. Why? I don't know why. Because I've always wanted to name something after a number. (I'm clearly mad with power!)
"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."
-1 Corinthians, 13:11
"Does this look infected to you?"
Kate doesn't look up from the report she's proofreading. She doesn't know what it is that Tony wants her to check for infection, but she's pretty sure it's disgusting. On the other hand, she knows for an absolute fact how cranky Gibbs gets about typos in paperwork. Last month, her last-minute polish on a security brief had missed "tenative". The next morning, she'd found the memo taped to the elevator wall. Circled in red. "See me. –Gibbs" written on it.
"Kate. Seriously. What do you think? I could be developing gangrene here."
She looks up: a whining Tony is hard to ignore. She knows that by ignoring him and giving in, she's just intermittently reinforcing him. She remembers enough about B.F. Skinner to realize that intermittently reinforcing Tony DiNozzo is a Very Bad Idea, but she does it anyway.
Instead of the hangnail she's expecting, Tony is bending down over her, head tilted to the side, showing her a small nick in the hollow under his jaw. He's too close for anyone but Tony to be to her without causing offense. (Tony is like a big horny dog: he might hump your leg and annoy you, but he is beyond harmless, so she mostly lets him slide.) She can smell his aftershave, she notices: not unpleasant. Woodsy, citrusy. Like a guy. It seems like a long time since she's been close enough to a man to smell his scent.
She stops sniffing and looks at the nick blankly.
"Infected?"
"Yeah," Tony replies, "does it look infected? The gash?"
"What gash," she says. "There's a tiny nick. Did you cut yourself shaving?"
"It's a gash," he insists. "I sliced myself open! It bled like... like—"
"A stuck pig," Kate suggests.
He draws himself up, offended.
"What's your point?"
Kate rolls her eyes. Sometimes, the routine she and Tony play out amuses her, and sometimes it's just annoying. When she has papers to proof, it's extra annoying.
A change happens in the bullpen now, not one she can define or quantify or predict, but one she recognizes every time. She doesn't have to look up to know who just walked in. She ducks her head and casually slides a file folder over the still-unproofed memo.
A moment: she breathes, composes herself, looks up. Second nature. Not like in the beginning, when she'd arrange her hair, touch her face, tug at her clothes. Grooming herself for a potential mate who never noticed. She caught herself doing it after three weeks, and memorized an alternate routine. Replacing one behavior chain with another, Kate feels okay about Gibbs walking in. Not neutral, but okay.
"Boss," Tony says, and Kate envies him that, for the thousandth time, that easy, unconscious maleness. Kate only ever calls Gibbs Gibbs. Even when she's alone, even when she's thinking thoughts she shouldn't. Anything else feels faintly perverted.
Worse, she suspects that calling him anything else might give her away. And Gibbs might Realize.
Kate lives in a little fear of Gibbs Realizing. It seems to her one of the worst things that could happen (she believes that he would pity her, and she has seen Gibbs pity people: it's horrible.) She waits for it to go away; it hasn't, yet, but it will. She's patient. It will pass.
Sometimes she tells herself something soothing about how natural it is for a nubile young woman to want the resident alpha male of her pack; how a couple million years of evolution are breathing down her neck, not to be put off by a few centuries of civilization.
Sometimes she tells herself these things. But today, his hair is very silver, and his shoulders look very solid, and so she does not.
"DiNozzo", Gibbs says. He gives them the look he gives them when he thinks they might be idiots, which is most of the time.
Kate can speak, now.
"Gibbs," she says, nodding at him. He nods back.
This is their relationship, when it's good. They are respectful of each other. Each believes that the other is worthy of their professional trust. Kate likes this feeling, although not as much as she likes it when Gibbs exhibits a sense of humor, and not nearly as much as she likes it when Gibbs scolds her- just a little, like you might scold a child.
Kate, who is not an idiot, realizes that, comforting evolutionary psychobabble aside, it's probably bad and unhealthy that she's most attracted to her boss when she feels the difference in their ages and rank the most. But she can't help it, and it's not like there's some kind of risk that she'll be acting on her urges.
Gibbs is still looking at them.
"Kate," he asks, slowly setting his coffee down, "why were you sniffing Tony's neck?"
Kate and Tony jerk away from each other like they've been stung. Like children caught by a parent or teacher while doing something naughty, each babbles a meaningless sequence of syllables:
"I wasn't- we weren't—"
"There's this gash, and I—the thing is—"
"It was because of the razor, he said—"
Gibbs holds up a hand.
"Just don't do it on company time," he says, and sits down, and starts squinting at his monitor.
Kate wants to tell her boss that the neck-sniffing was an unfortunate mishap, and that she would never sniff Tony's neck for real, on or off company time, mainly because she's pretty sure that she's in love with the cranky old guy at the next desk.
She does not, of course.
Instead, she finishes proofreading her brief, prints it out, brushes the letters with a fingertip to make sure the ink won't smudge, slides it into a pristine manila folder, and takes it over to him.
She offers the folder to him with both hands, like myrrh.
Gibbs takes it without looking up.
fin