In the wake of Director Shepard's death, Gibbs stood in the middle of her home office. "What did I do to deserve this?" Gibbs asked out loud, to no one as he took in the unorganised chaos that was her home office.
Just this morning, Vance had disbanded his MCRT team, sending Ziva back to Israel, Tony as agent afloat and Tim to the Cyber Crimes department in the basement. After today's service, her Lawyer Ethan Barnetti approached Gibbs and mentioned that Jenny had named him executor of her estate and there was a will reading in his office on Monday week at 1800, before handing Gibbs a handwritten letter from Jenny.
'Dear Jethro,
I can't think of no one better to be the executor of my estate, than you. Think of it as payback for all the headaches you've given me. Especially when I was your Probie and later on when I was your Director.
I need you to do something for me ... a favour for me. But first, I'm going to break rule six and apologise. I am sorry, I kept this from you. I've never told anyone before. Only my the Colonel, Heather and my mother know this. Now you will too ...
I have a secret to confess. Something I should have told you a long time ago. When I was sixteen, I fell pregnant from a drunken encounter. I was a wild child back then, but that experience scared me sober.
My father gave two choices, abort the baby or to live in Europe for a year and put the baby up for adoption when it was born. That's the truth to how I ended up living in Naples, Italy for a year.
The baby was placed up for a private adoption through an American orphanage to a couple who lived in Naples too. He was military and she couldn't bare children of her own due an accident when she was a teen.
I don't remember much about the baby's father except he was a man I met at a birthday party my friends threw for me on the beach in Oceanside, California. I was drunk and possibly high, we got talking after the party. One minute I was telling him how gorgeous he was and the next minute he and I were … let's say intimate.
It was four weeks later and I was throwing up everything that touched my mouth. That's when I knew …. I was pregnant.
The child was a boy, I gave birth to a son. Help me find my son, I named him Jasper, after my father.
I have since learnt that his adoptive father was in the US navy. Unfortunately, they wouldn't share his name with me. That's as far as I have gotten. That's what drew me to NCIS, as opposed to following in the Colonel's footsteps and joining the CID.
I always loved my little boy, my Jasper. I didn't want to give him up, but I was broke, living in a foreign country and about to be homeless if I didn't comply with my father's demands. You know what kind of man, he was like.
I'm begging you, help me find my son. I've been writing him letters since the day he was adopted and I'd like him to get to know me. I can't get that time back, but maybe he can forgive me for what I did. Tell him about me, too.
I know I can count on you, Gibbs. You've always had my back, don't let me down now.
Love Jen. X'
"Damn it, Jen." Gibbs let out a frustrated groan. "Where the hell do I start?"
--
It took Gibbs nearly three hours of reading, sorting and filing papers before the room resembled being habitable. Looking around, he decided to treat this like a cold case. Use the tools available to him. DNA testing was expensive and he didn't know where Vance stood on using NCIS, especially for all the trouble that Jen had caused the agency. He wouldn't trust anyone but Abby with her DNA so he'd put that idea aside as a last resort. Tony, along with Ziva's contacts would be useless at this point. McGee? He is his own tool, besides that huge brain of his, those computer skills are unparalleled to anyone he'd ever met.
"Sorry Jen, I need a partner on this. We both know that McGee can out computer any of us."
Looking at the time, 1800 hours on a Saturday night, he was in two minds if Tim would even be available. Couldn't hurt to try, even if he wasn't on the MCRT, Tim didn't t seem like the type to be unreachable especially if his sister was around.
"Agent McGee!" His warm and polite greeting came over the phone line. It always astounded Gibbs that no matter what time of the day or night he called him, he was always so polite.
"McGee? Ah, I mean Tim, hi." Gibbs stammered a little. "Have you got some time to help me?"
"Gibbs?" He asked, curious. Gibbs never asked Tim for help on a personal matter. He always went to Tony, to Abby, Ducky or to Ziva. Never to Tim.
"Well yeah, it's me." He chuckled, Gibbs could almost see the confusion on the young man's face. "Can you spare some time? Preferably tonight. But tomorrow will do."
"Where are you?" McGee asked, to Gibbs it sounded like Tim was getting his gear together to go out.
"At Jenny's house." Gibbs answered truthfully.
"I'd tell you to send me the address, but you don't know how to do that. Better tell me where I'm going." McGee answered sarcastically, sneaking a barb at Gibbs in.
"Come on, you've been here before." Gibbs chastised him, not wanting to waste time, thinking Tim was deliberately being difficult.
"No I haven't." Tim snapped at him in return. "I never went anywhere, especially to the Director's home. Tony and Ziva go out in the field. I'm only allowed at crime scenes! If you want my help, I need to know where I'm going."
Gibbs rattled off the address. "Bring your laptop too." He added before Tim wordlessly disconnected the call. That had not gone well. He hadn't known Tim to be capable of such sarcasm and contempt. Especially towards him, he'd always been polite and respectful.
--
As expected, Gibbs was on the front door step to Jenny's home opening the door to McGee within thirty minutes. "Thank you for not telling me to go to hell." Gibbs said as he let Tim inside.
"I still might yet, what is this about?" McGee retorted and Gibbs was taken aback at his former agent's attitude.
Gibbs handed Tim the letter and let him read it for himself as he escorted the young man into the former Director's study.
"Well?" Gibbs asked after Tim had read it twice.
"It's quite possible this son is going to tell you go to hell, himself. He might have been looking for her or he might be content with the status quo. It's possible he might not even know he's adopted. I hope you understand the can of worms we're about to open, here." Tim warned him.
All Gibbs could focus on was Tim's new attitude and if he'd used this attitude on DiNozzo they'd have had very different team dynamics to what had actually played out in the bullpen. "So you'll help me?" Gibbs begged.
"I'm here, aren't I?" Tim asked with a sarcastic grin.
"Great. Thank you." Gibbs said, as he ushered Tim into the seat behind Jen's old desk, the one that belonged to her father before her.
"Obviously, we start with the adoption agency." Tim stated, booting up his laptop. "Did you find any other information about the son, in amongst this chaos?" He asked, his hand sweeping across the room.
"Some stocks and bonds from Jasper Shepard's estate for the unnamed grandson. A small paper trail of Jen's initial search. She didn't find much, though, just the name of the orphanage."
"So tell me what you have found and we'll go from there." McGee offered and Gibbs seemed to stall a little. "Come on Gibbs, we haven't got all day." Gibbs smiled at McGee, half trying to unnerve him and half impressed at his new found attitude.
"In addition to what's in the note, her lawyer wants this mystery son there by Monday. So there must be something else in the will for the son that I don't know about."
"So we know she was sixteen when she got pregnant. That's what 1979, 1980 ish?" Tim asked Gibbs.
" '79 Tim. We know from the paperwork from the orphanage that he was adopted by another American couple when he was five days old. She kept him for the first five days. She's had a maternal streak in her, probably really struggled to give him up."
"Nu-Starts Orphanage. She was a minor, so they may not have her name on file. She said she got pregnant on her sixteenth birthday. The baby's birthday would be helpful." Tim asked.
"February 22nd." Gibbs answered. He remembered that they celebrated her birthday while on an undercover op in Russia together. "That's her birthday."
"Ok, add approximately 266 days for a full term pregnancy and you get a rough due date of November 15." Tim screwed up his face at that.
"What?" Gibbs asked.
"That's my birthday, never did the math of when I was conceived before. That's kinda gross." Tim answered and Gibbs hid a smile behind his coffee cup at Tim's juvenile antics.
--
Tim began furiously typing. In no time at all he was into the Nu-Start's database and taking an unsupervised stroll through the records of all the babies born in November 1979 that were adopted, it was as good as place as any to start. "I think I found it." Tim called out, as Gibbs returned with fresh coffee for them both. "Shepard, baby boy born November 15th, at 2257 hours, 1979 at Holy Trinity Hospital, Naples Italy. Hang on, the adoption agency have notes attached to the file." He took a long sip of the hot coffee that Gibbs had prepared and nodded his appreciation at his former boss. "Birth Mother requested that the family name him Jasper. The adoptive family denied the mother's request. Birth Mother had second thoughts and negated on the arrangement several times before a finally giving the boy up."
"Anything else?" Gibbs asked, he could see Tim was waging an internal war with himself and was debating if he should ask. "Tim, you ok?"
"Yeah, this just stirred up some bad memories, that's all." Tim dismissed Gibbs and with Gibbs' infamous glare, Tim continued. "Did you know that I'm adopted? I tried to find my birth mother once. Didn't go well."
"I didn't know, what happened?" Gibbs kicked himself, McGee was so well-adjusted, he'd never have suspected he'd been adopted.
"The Admiral kicked me out of his life. Haven't spoken to him in nine years now. That's why I cautioned you about opening a can of worms." Tim answered.
"I am sorry, Tim." Gibbs whispered and Tim was surprised to hear Gibbs break his infamous rule six.
"I made my choice and he made his. It's done." Tim announced and he watched as his former junior agent shake off the situation and refocus himself on the task at hand. "Anyway, let me see if we can get the adoptive parent's names."
--
More clacking on the keyboard and another round of coffee, Gibbs discreetly ordered some Chinese for the two of them, thinking he should at least feed Tim for helping him.
"Dinner break." Gibbs called out as he returned with the Chinese food boxes in hand.
"Let me just start this search while we eat." Tim said and five minutes later, he was eating his fried rice and moo shoo pork with chopsticks.
"Showoff!" Gibbs teased him as he attempted to copy Tim's skill of using the chopsticks to eat rice, failing miserably.
"Lived in Tokyo, for three years when I was a little kid, Gibbs. If you couldn't use chopsticks at school, you didn't eat." McGee told him. "The Admiral dragged us to every post with him."
"Where else have you lived?" He asked him, surprised by Tim freely sharing information about himself. Previously, he'd only heard a snippet or two if it related to a case and only if Tony or Ziva related a story of their own first.
"Let's see Tokyo, London, Alameda - that was our first US soil post, Norfolk, Brussels, Naples, Sydney - which I loved, my adopted mother had family there, Norfolk again, Honolulu, Diego Garcia, Quantico, Seoul, Rhode Island, Bahrain, Naples again, which I have fond memories of, Boston for school, Georgia for FLETC, Norfolk for work and now Maryland."
"You're definitely a world traveller." Gibbs stated, impressed by everywhere he'd lived.
"Nah, we were rarely allowed to leave base to explore. Sometimes it was a couple of years, other times it was a couple of months. But I picked up a bit of the Italian language from a girl I was seeing when we were in Naples. Don't tell DiNozzo!" He groaned and Gibbs chuckled.
"Secrets safe with me." Gibbs promised, as his laptop dinged.
--
Staring at the laptop screen, Tim was more confused than he'd ever been before in his life. "Gibbs!" Tim said firmly, the alarm clearly evident in his voice.
Gibbs came over and stood behind him, leaning over as he read over the young man's shoulder.
"Captain John McGee and Mrs Nicole McGee, adopted baby 791115/s, a.k.a baby boy Shepard. Tim, isn't that your parent's names?" Gibbs asked him. "You don't have a brother." It wasn't a question, Gibbs knew that it was just Tim and Sarah.
"I … I … Ah…" Tim tried to spit the words out.
"It's ok, Tim." Gibbs comforted the man, putting his arms around him. "You're in shock. Anyone would be, do you want me to call Ducky?"
"No!" He rushed out. "No … just let me digest this for a minute."
"As long as you're ok." Gibbs said, keeping a close eye on Tim as he watched his former agent process this new information.
--
Tim excused himself to call Penny, to find out what she knew. She had very little to add and was surprised to find out he was adopted from an American agency. Tim chose not to tell his beloved adopted grandmother that he'd found his birth mother, deciding to play it cool instead.
"Penny couldn't help. She didn't even know I'd been adopted through an American agency. She did mention her and the Senior Admiral McGee were stationed in Malta at the time and communication with their son was spotty, at best."
"Besides your family, does anyone else know your adopted?" Gibbs asked, an idea forming.
"No, and only my parents, Penny and myself know. I'm not allowed to tell Sarah." Tim told him and Gibbs swore under his breath.
"Ok, I think it's time for a DNA check." Gibbs said. "I know I have a rule about coincidences, but let's rule it out. Time for an external lab."
"Not necessarily, we have the Director's DNA profile from the cafe, we have my DNA profile from the dog mauling incident. I could manually match the markers."
"Let's do both, Tim. You might get a hit on your father too." Gibbs offered. "Wouldn't you prefer to know both of them?"
"You're right. An external lab could take up to a week or more to run the test, though. I can have the manual marker match done in half a day."
"Let's call it a night and we'll pick this up again in the morning." Gibbs said and Tim agreed. "Just so you don't flip out and unnecessarily worry, you can stay at my place where I can keep an eye on you."
"I'll be fine." Tim promised, not wanting to stay at Gibbs' home.
"Humour me." Gibbs smiled at him, a wide genuine smile.
"Fine then!" Tim replied sullenly, reminding Gibbs of that new attitude of Tim's.
--
Gibbs had managed to convince Tim to leave his car in the garage of the Director's home. They carpooled back to Gibbs' home where he quickly ushered the man inside, dumping his go bag on the sofa as they headed straight for the basement. "Pretty interesting night, calls for a drink." Gibbs told him, handing him a mason jar of bourbon and pouring a generous amount in to his USMC mug for himself.
"We don't even know if the records we found are true. They could be incomplete. They could have been entered into the computer wrong." Tim supplied, he wasn't ready to accept what they'd found as gospel yet.
"Let's see then." Gibbs whispered, beckoning him to stand in front of his boss. He switched on the rarely used overhead swinging light globe. "Stand right here." Tim humoured Gibbs, coming to stand in front of the man.
Tim took a decent swig of the bourbon, placing his mason jar beside Gibbs' mug as Gibbs reached up and gently ran his fingertips along Tim's jawline. "You have the same jawline and cheekbones. The same blue-green eyes and when you're genuinely smiling it's the same cheeky grin." Gibbs stepped back from him. "I should have seen it sooner."
"How can you be so sure, Gibbs?" Tim asked him. "You barely noticed I was on your team half the time."
"Oh I noticed you. You've never needed me the way the other two have, doesn't mean I didn't notice you were there." Gibbs answered truthfully. "Before we were the MCRT, Franks and I had a probie and we worked in counter-intelligence operations."
"Well yeah, Ziva and I worked that one out ourselves when she tried to drag Tony into her clandestine operation against La Grenouille."
"Then I made the right call, bringing you onto my team. You know how smart you are, I'm not going to stroke your ego." Gibbs told him, getting back on track. "We worked many operations both here and on foreign soil. You probably knew Jenny was my probie. You probably even assumed we were lovers at one point." Gibbs told him with a wry look.
"Don't you have a rule about assuming?" Tim asked, taking another sip of bourbon. The two men hoisted themselves up on Gibbs' workbench, sitting side by side, the bourbon bottle between them now.
"I do and she's the reason for that rule. Actually Jen's the reason for a lot of rules." Gibbs admitted with a slight chuckle. "We played together as operatives, both undercover and under the covers"
"I got it, you were sleeping together on and off the job. Please do not go into details." Tim interrupted, holding his hand up and Gibbs smiled. Tim just interrupted him, the way Jenny would interrupt he and Mike.
"You really want to run your DNA? What you did just there, I just had a flashback to Jenny doing that to Mike and I, when we were on our first assignment in London." Gibbs smiled at him again and it was beginning to unnerve Tim. He'd never known Gibbs to smile so much.
"Like you said, running DNA I might find out more, like who my father is. She was kind of vague in her letter." Tim told him, finishing his bourbon.
"Those kind of beach parties they had in Oceanside back then, yeah I'm not surprised she's vague. No one at those parties are sober."
"You've been to one, then." Tim stated, his consumed bourbon giving him a shot of liquid courage as Gibbs refilled his mason jar.
"After basic, I'd just met Shannon when I'd been home on leave. We weren't dating yet. A buddy dragged me along with a group of us from Camp Pendleton. We were pretty drunk before we got there. Don't remember much else about that night, except I reckon I was drunk about five days straight afterwards and we got caught sneaking back on to the base. Our punishment for sneaking off base was so severe that, I never did it again."
"Gibbs, the rule breaking marine who sneaks off to wild rave parties with underage co-ed's, I'd never have guessed." Tim teased him, Gibbs noticed the earlier attitude return and wondered if it wasn't boosted by the bourbon because the Tim he knew would never speak to his boss that way.
"Sixteen was the legal age in 1979 in California. What we're you doing at sixteen, Tim?" Gibbs asked the man, before kicking himself. "Obviously not that."
"I was wild too, I just made sure I did my school work first." Tim told him truthfully. "I partied, I even smoked."
"Yeah?" Gibbs asked, amused by Tim's answer.
"That year, the Admiral was stationed in Naples, I had a friend Daniella. We knew each other from his first Naples posting. Her father was high up in the Italian militia. We were pen pals and she was one of the people I was allowed to associate with, off base that the Admiral approved of. We would hit the underground clubs, drinking and dancing the night away. We were both tall and she was beautiful, we'd slip the guard on the door some coin and he wouldn't ask for ID." Tim took another mouthful of his bourbon. "Other times we'd travel down the Amalfi Coast, hitting the best raves."
"You and her?" Gibbs asked. "Was she the girl you mentioned earlier? The one who taught you the 'bit of Italian'? By the way, I've heard you speak Italian and I know that you're fluent enough in it to list it as a second language on your 201 file."
"Yeah, that was her. We did everything together. Until the Admiral and her father caught on to what we were doing. What we were getting upto both in the clubs and out of the clubs."
"I got it." He told Tim, he understood what had happened.
"She was pregnant." Tim told him and Gibbs blood ran cold. "Her father and the Admiral forced her to abort it. They sent her to live with her Grandmother in Catania. I was sent to live with Penny in Boston. I never saw her again. I heard that her family moved to Catania a couple of months later and she took her own life the following year."
"Oh Tim." Gibbs pulled Tim into a half hug, careful not to jolt the younger man off the workbench. "Come on, that's more than enough for one night." Gibbs noticed that the alcohol was drastically catching up with the younger man and gently guided him upstairs to the main floor before guiding him up the second flight of stairs before putting him down in the master bedroom. "Bathroom is through there and I'll put some water and Tylenol on the bedside table." Gibbs told him as he passed out. He set himself to task. Gently removing his former agents shoes, socks, shirt and jeans, leaving him in his boxer shorts and an under tee.
Gibbs returned to the bedroom, Tim's go bag slung over his shoulder and an unopened bottle of water in hand. He retrieved the Tylenol from the bathroom cupboard and placed it gently on the bedside table. Gibbs stood for a moment, just studying the man who lay in the bed before him. He could see more similarities between the woman he once and still slightly loved and the man he who was his agent, that he loved like a son.
"Just like his mother," Gibbs mused softly, as he tucked the covers around Tim. "can't handle his liquor."