Disclaimer: They belong to DPB. Who is a Sadist of the first degree.

Author's Note: Please review. Pretty please.

Presence Of An Absence

"Undo it, take it back, make every day the previous one
until I am returned to the day before the one that made you gone.

— Nessa Rapoport

It's three years today.

As he steps out onto the roof McGee thinks about that day, thinks, not for the first time, that it would've been better if he'd been the one to go down because his death would've been less hurtful, less cataclysmic than hers. And they'd have only lost him.

Not that anybody's left, though he knows for a time they'd all considered it, all but Gibbs, it's the fact that Tony isn't okay and hasn't been. The fact that none of them know how to make him okay because something broke and shattered in Tony after Kate's death, something he won't let anyone of them near. And maybe it's selfish of him to think that they need Tony whole, but they do and he's not and in that he thinks Ari accomplished what he was after.

But they don't talk about that and never have.

When McGee finds him he's not really surprised to see that Tony's standing on the ledge, his gaze fixed to some point below which he can't discern. Last year he was sitting on the railing and the year before that he was leaning against the low wall which is somehow supposed to stop people from doing exactly what Special Agent Dinozzo is doing at that very moment. He used to think you got better with time, but he knows now that that's not true. Tony isn't getting better, not by a long shot.

"You gonna jump," It's probably a stupid question and he could probably do better but it doesn't matter. Not up here in this place that used to be hers. Not on this day.

Tony doesn't look at him, he never does, but he responds and some might take encouragement from that.

He doesn't, because this is the third year they've been through this and Tony isn't getting better, but some might have.," Is Ari still alive?"

"You know he is."

"Then I guess I'm not."

He leans against the railing and remembers the sound of that last shot, remembers that even he, untried and inexperienced as he'd been, had know that it was somehow different from the rest. More important. More dangerous.," You want to though."

"It's on my list of things to do. "

Three years and even though this conversation is all but scripted he still doesn't know what to say to him because it hurts to think about her. Hurts to remember that she'd lectured him on the fact that any one of them could die at any time, to remember teasing her that morning about calling out for Gibbs in her sleep.

"She wouldn't want this from you."

"She's dead McGee, what she'd want doesn't matter anymore."

Tony isn't getting better but he's not always like this. Most days he's still Tony and he laughs and jokes and flirts with anything even remotely female and if you didn't know you could almost believe it. Could almost miss the dark and empty spaces he thinks he hides so well on any other day.

"She'd want you to live you know."

Gibbs didn't come into work today and that too was part of the ritual. Part of how they dealt with their loss and their failure. Ari was still alive somewhere and none of them could forgive that, Gibbs and Tony least of all. So the one stayed away from work and went wherever he went and the other made his way to the roof.

"I told you," and there's a bite to his voice now, sharp and vicious," that I'm not going to jump."

"But you're still on the ledge."

Because Kate was three years dead and Ari was still alive.

Tony'd brushed him off that day when he'd suggested Kate might be in love with him, and he'd been joking when he said it, setting him up for what came next, but he hadn't really. She'd stayed with him in isolation when she didn't have to and during his sick leave she'd walked around laughing and teasing and hiding behind the inanities of her every day life in much the same way Tony has been for the last three years.

He'd said she was too smart for that, too smart to fall for him, and that hadn't been anything like him, not anything at all.

"It hurts you know?"

McGee starts at the sound of Tony's voice and turns to him partly in disbelief and partly in fascination. They all miss Kate, yet watching Tony slowly and meticously pull apart the threads of his life in his grief has birthed some strange species of sympathy and voyeurism within him which can neither be repressed nor ignored. What would it be like to be so completely lost to something, to someone, as Tony is to the loss of a love not realized?

And how, McGee sometimes wonders , when he's watching Abby move about the lab with something that, to his eye, is very near to grace, can he possibly bare it?

He doesn't respond to Tony's words because this familiar pattern of theirs is no longer familiar, the lines are no longer scripted, and he has no idea what he can say to this man who is both his friend and a stranger he does not, cannot know. This man he sometimes fears.

"It's like every bone in my body is shattered and cracked and every time I move they rub against each other and it hurts even more. All those broken bones grinding together."

As he speaks his voice is quite, distant, and still it almost echoes between the buildings and McGee can feel the goose flesh rising along his arms and neck. He doesn't mean to think it but it comes to him that if ever the dead have spoken they have done so in that voice, and it doesn't matter now if Tony takes a step off the ledge, or if he eats a bullet as they'd all been so worried he'd do before and after the funeral, because he's no more alive now than Kate.

He lets the silence stand between them because despite everything he loves his friend and doesn't think now that words are wise. Tony will stand there as long as he wishes and he will go on until Ari is in prison or dead and that, for him, will be the end of all things.

Suddenly he remembers the sound of Kate's voice as she called out for Tony after the explosion of that car, the fear and the panic therein had nearly made him sick, and before he can stop himself he says what none of them have dared, not even Abby," She loved you, you know that. Don't you?"

"That doesn't make it better.," Tony snarls and scuffs his shoe against the ledge.

No, McGee thinks with a sigh, it probably wouldn't.