CHAPTER TWO
"Uh… well… Tony's in here, boss. He's still out cold." McGee stammered, trying desperately not to flinch, Gibbs was like a dog, if you showed your fear you were screwed.
"Tim?" Alice said hesitantly, looking from Gibbs to McGee and back again.
"It's OK, Alice, I got this. But, do you think you could send Dr. Harding up here, please?" Tim smiled, reassuring the shaken nurse.
"Sure thing. He's on rotation right now, but I'll send him up as soon as he's finished," Alice said, backing away from Gibbs and walking rapidly down the hall, back to the nurses station muttering something that appeared to contain the word 'bastard'.
"Well?" asked Gibbs, as he turned to face McGee, face like a thundercloud with a hernia.
Tim straightened his shoulders, looked Gibbs square in the eye and began to speak as though he were giving a report on a case, not his friend in a hospital bed.
"The doctors won't be absolutely positive until Dinozzo wakes up, and they run a few waking tests. They still need to run an MRI and another EEG while he's awake, but unless something completely out of the blue turns up in one of those tests then they're pretty sure he has epilepsy."
Ducky nodded to himself and said, "Ah yes, that does explain young Anthony's unusual symptoms. I'm surprised I didn't see it before. You know, Alexander the Great was an epileptic, his seizures were one of the reasons everyone thought he was a god, and if I remember rightly…"
McGee snorted with laughter, and then grinned to himself at the mental image his mind presented of Tony dressed in a toga, trying to pick up scantily clad women with the bragging rights on his seizures.
Saying "Come on, Duckman," and rolling her eyes, Abby grabbed the still-yammering doctor's wrist and led him down the hall, pausing only to ask the still-pale Alice for Tony's room number.
Kate looked down the hall at Abby and Ducky's retreating backs, fidgeting slightly and looking as though she wanted to be anywhere but here. Refusing to look McGee in the eye, Kate said abruptly "Well, if he's still out of it, there's no real reason for me to sit by his bed and mope. I'm going back to NCIS."
Gibbs nodded and gave her a list of things she could be doing once she was back at the office. But McGee wasn't listening. He was watching Kate's eyes. McGee frowned as something that could only be described as pure, unadulterated fear flitted back and forth behind Kate's normally calm and determined eyes. He continued to watch her even as she turned and walked rapidly down the hall away from him.
"McGee?"
"Hmm…? Oh. Yes, boss?"
"Epilepsy?"
"Yes, boss."
"Seizures?"
"Yes, boss. Apparently the strobe lights from the club triggered the seizure that landed him in hospital, but all the symptoms he showed previously can be traced back to some form of light source. For example, that first time he blanked at work, he was just finishing up a report on his computer. The second time he blanked, he was down in Abby's lab looking at results on the big screen. That time in the car, it was a bright sunny day at about three in the afternoon; the sun would have been glaring off of just about everything."
"So, in other words, what you're trying to tell me, McGee, is that Tony faked some disease in order to get out of work?"
There was a reason Tim McGee never lost his temper, never got upset and always appeared to be the soft-spoken, calm, almost timid man that the NCIS team knew. To Tim, it was a very good reason. It saved him pain, broken bones and blood loss. It also saved him countless hours of scans and tests. It wasn't who Tim McGee always was or wanted to be, but if it saved him the pain and confusion of the seizures that always followed him losing his temper, then it was worth it.
But with his boss' last comment, Tim McGee suddenly found he didn't give a damn about the two black eyes he knew he'd be sporting the next day, he didn't give a damn about the migraine that he knew was going to eat at his head for the next week. And with the pig-headed ignorance of his boss' words ringing in his ears, McGee suddenly found that he didn't give a damn whether Gibbs found out about his epilepsy. The man was wrong, wrong about him, wrong about Tony, hell, the man was just plain wrong. And Tim McGee was gonna make sure he knew it.