Warnings: None Disclaimer. I don't own the NCIS characters, I'm only borrowing them, and I promise to return them in minty fresh condition when I'm finished.
Notes. I originally intended Sucessor to be a one off but then I felt Tony needed to have his say as well.
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Successor - part 02 (Tony's POV)
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I'd like to be able to say from the start that I knew how special Elizabeth was going to be. I mean, it's always the thing you hear people say "Oh I could tell from the moment I met them" whatever. Like they've got some sort of sixth sense about people when in reality most of them are faking it. So yeah, when I first met Elizabeth, I didn't think anything other than here was yet another newbie to scare away. Well okay, I was also thinking about how much I could annoy her by calling her Liz, or Lizzie, or Beth or Betty or whatever. But then I remembered that she wasn't going to be hanging around long enough for any of that.
Now don't get me wrong, I didn't agree with Gibbs's attitude. I know he felt that hanging round him was way too dangerous, but somehow I didn't think Ari was going to be hanging around just waiting to pick us off one by one. That bastard probably had bigger fish to fry. But Gibbs was adamant about wanting to keep as few people as possible in the line of fire, so I went along with him. Mainly because I figured if I argued too much then Gibbs would have second thoughts about keeping me around. And while I didn't figure Ari was going to come after him again, I still felt that somebody needed to watch Gibbs's back.
So I played along with his little game. I watched as he systematically made sure that nobody wanted to work with him for longer than a week, and yes, I sometimes lent a helping hand to speed the newbie's on their way. I'm not especially proud of the way I treated some of them. But I kept reminding myself that it was for their own good, right?
We'd been without a newbie for a few weeks now and I was starting to think that maybe they'd got the hint upstairs. Or maybe they'd just run out of agents to assign to Gibbs team. I know I'd overheard a few people swearing that they'd quit rather than work with Gibbs.
So when Elizabeth showed up, I thought nothing of it. Just another newbie to torment for a few days. It was good though, because I'd been getting a bit bored the last few weeks. Life was always more interesting with somebody around to tease. I caught myself looking over at Kate's empty desk and a pang of regret hit me. Six months after Ari had murdered her and I still missed her. Oh I'd gone through all the stages of grief, anger, denial, whatever, and was now firmly settled in acceptance. But it still sucked. Kate should have been here giving newbies a hard time just like I was. She should have been there for me to annoy and tease. It wasn't right that the last memory I had of her was of her lying on that rooftop blood pooling around her. It wasn't right that every time I caught the scent of fresh blood all I could think about was Kate and how I'd worn her blood on my face.
The first scene we'd worked after Kate's death made me sick...literally. It hadn't been an excessively gory one. Single gunshot wound, but the guy had bled...a lot. And when I walked in and caught the scent of the blood, for a minute I was back on the rooftop watching Kate's body. I guess I was lucky...I managed to make it outside of the room before throwing up, and the taste of vomit in my mouth sort of cancelled out the smell of blood. But since then, any time I've gone near a crime scene that there's gonna be blood at, I make sure I've got a jar of vapo rub or something to stop me smelling it. Ducky taught me that little trick the first time I stood in on an autopsy he was doing. The guy had been dead in the water for several days before ending up on Ducky's table and the smell was something you wouldn't believe. So Ducky let me in on a mortician's secret, mainly to stop me puking all over his nice clean Autopsy.
But anyway, where was I...vapo rub, blood, Kate. Oh yeah, Elizabeth's first day. Well like I said, there was nothing special about her. I mean, she looked nice enough, but there wasn't really anything about her that would make her stand out in a crowd. Suppose that's no harm when you're in N.C.I.S. But anyway, she walked up to my desk and said that she was looking for Special Agent Gibbs. And then she looked a bit of paper and added "With two B's" and she sort of smiled at me and I got the impression that she knew exactly what the second B was supposed to stand for. So I smiled back at her. Now that I think of it, that probably wasn't the smartest thing to do, given that I was supposed to be scaring her off. But I figured that hey, she'd made me smile with that line so I could at least be nice to her...for her first day anyway. Besides, odds were she wouldn't be coming back for a second day.
So I directed her over to Gibbs's desk where her 'interview' with him went pretty much as I'd expected it would. Except for the part about her convincing him to give her a week. I thought she'd have been out the door five minutes later. Guess first impressions aren't all they're cracked up to be.
Anyway, she was sitting at McGee's old desk for the day. You know I really missed McGee those first few weeks. I know the Probie had himself a hot new job doing computer techy stuff and I know that Gibbs was the one who'd set him up for it. But I missed the little guy. It was fun having somebody around who looked up to me like he did. Maybe I should lean on Gibbs a bit, persuade him to keep one of the newbies around for longer than a week...and maybe I should just swat myself on the head, save him the trouble.
So Elizabeth was left to do some paperwork while Gibbs and I got on with the real investigative stuff, only when we got back to the office that evening, she waved a bunch of notes at us excitedly and told us she'd found something good. Course it turned out that she'd managed to clear the guy who we'd figured to be the main man for a bunch of robberies we were investigating. I could tell that Gibbs wasn't too happy about having wasted so many hours building a case against him only to have it pulled out from under us. But he didn't act pissed. He even muttered "Good work" under his breath. But I knew he was annoyed. Why else would he have ordered me to take her to lunch the next day and made it clear to me that it wasn't supposed to be a chance to make friends.
I knew what he meant. He wanted me to be as annoying and obnoxious and behave as much like a jerk as possible so Elizabeth wouldn't even last the week. It wasn't because he was pissed at her, Gibbs wasn't that petty and he always approved of work that was well done, but I knew that he didn't want Elizabeth to turn out to be a good worker because that'd be one less excuse he could use to get rid of her. So from his point of view if she couldn't handle the DiNozzo charm that would be one way of getting her out of the picture and out of harms way. So all I had to do was scare her off. Easy, right?
And I was gonna to do that, honest. But we sort of got to talking and she started telling me about some of the cases she'd done, and I filled her in on some of my cases and I ended up talking about Kate for the first time in months.
Not that I hadn't thought about Kate. I had...a lot...but there were so few people around that I could talk to about her without opening up old wounds. Gibbs never mentioned Kate to me and I knew better than to bring up the subject with him. Ducky would talk for hours about her, but every time he mentioned her name it was like somebody had stuck a knife in his guts. And Abby...she had draped a black cloth over Kate's desk as soon as she'd heard the news. Wouldn't let anybody touch it until after the funeral. And even now, six months later, she kept changing the subject whenever Kate's name came up. We were all still hurting, and somehow it was a relief to be able to talk to somebody about Kate who wasn't going to get angry or upset or withdrawn when her name was mentioned.
"You'd have liked Kate," I said, as I chewed on a toothpick. "She didn't take any crap from anybody. She'd have stood up to Gibbs the same way you did yesterday. Very brave of you, might I say. Most people tend to quake in their boots when Gibbs glares at them like he did you."
She grinned at me and said "Well it's easy to be brave when you've got nothing to lose. The way I figured it, the worst that was going to happen was that Gibbs would send me packing, right? But everybody knows he's been going through new agents like wildfire. So there wouldn't be any blame on me for only lasting a day. Everybody would just put it down to Gibbs being Gibbs." She took a swig from her coffee. "And if I last the week then it'll look good that I was able to hang on that long. It's a win win situation for me."
I belatedly remembered that I was supposed to be acting like a jerk, so I reached over to try and snag the last of her fries, only to get rapped on the knuckles with her fork. She grinned at me even as she told me that the next time I tried that it wouldn't be the flat edge of the fork she'd use.
I think that was the moment when I knew I wanted her on the team. Let's face it, I was fed up with the revolving door of agents we'd had in the last few months. I wanted a bit of stability in the team. And if I'm being honest, I wanted somebody on the team to watch both mine and Gibbs's backs.
So the first opportunity I got, I told Gibbs I thought we should let her stick around. I mean, I don't mind the extra workload that came with just the two of us working a case, but there was no sense in working that hard if we didn't have to. Plus I liked Elizabeth. She was fun to talk to, she was smart. But as Gibbs pointed out, she was also a target. I knew in my heart that Gibbs was just trying to look out for her safety, but we were NCIS agents. Danger was part of the job. Of course I didn't know then that one day I'd understand exactly where he was coming from.
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To be continued
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