If there was one thing Tony DiNozzo hated more than begin stuck in a car with a crying woman, it was being stuck in a car with someone else's crying woman. There was not even the promise of consolation sex. She had managed to attain some frequency that made his teeth resonate, an experience he had only once suffered at the experienced hands of his math teacher, Mrs Powers. He considered spinning the wheel and crashing the car into the next oncoming vehicle, and then dismissed it as a tad too rash. He knew there was only one thing to do, and has much as he hated to do it, it was his only way out.

"So how did you two meet?"

The sobbing stopped almost instantaneously. Now the problem was listening to the answer.

"Well, it was after I was kidnapped and some nice NCIS woman had taken my statement and the ambulance people were finishing up and he came over."

Tony was impressed, McGee had become quite the little protégée: woman in a vulnerable position, go in for the kill. Crime scenes were much better than funerals; you didn't even have to go out of your way.

"He asked me how effective I had found the Virginia Singles dating service, apart from the kidnappers," she looked up at Tony, "I thought he was joking at first but he looked really serious. He said that Virginia Singles had an 85 percent marriage rate and I said that the other 15 percent were complete psychos and he pointed out the two weren't mutually exclusive and psychos can make very devoted husbands."

She turned to look out the window. "That made me laugh. After all I had just been through, he made me laugh. Then I looked at him again and I tried to imagine what his kids would look like and…"

"Whoa!" Tony interjected, "Too much information."

She paused and smiled at him, "So then they said I could go home and I realised I didn't have transportation with me and he offered me a ride home."

"What did he say when he saw your apartment?" Tony remembered the 'one floor plan fits all nerds' layout from his search with Ziva.

"Ha!" she laughed and sniffed a little simultaneously, "When we were outside the door he was giving me some speech about how a cleanup crew had been through so it wouldn't look too bad and something might seem out of place or broken but rest assured it was much better than before. Then I opened the door and said something about them being better than a housekeeper and he was just standing there in the doorway with his mouth open."

Tony laughed; he could just see the expression on McGee's face.

"Then he rushed straight into the bathroom and said, 'did yours come with the monkey curtains too?'"

She laughed at the memory, "I might have thought he was crazy or giving me some bizarre pickup line if the apartment hadn't actually come with monkey curtains in the bathroom".

"He explained his apartment looked just like mine, we compared layouts they were almost the same, except I have a couch. I still have no idea why he doesn't have a couch. Seems totally crazy to me."

She paused to blow her noise, "Then we found we read the same stuff. Did you know he writes?"

"Yeah", said Tony absently checking the cars in his rear vision mirror.

"So he stayed a while to make sure I was OK and then he asked if we could get together again sometime and I suggested the weekend because I was going to be building my new computer from scratch and I thought he might like to help."

"He would have loved that", Tony agreed.

"Yes he did, and he even brought me a little present. It was a DVD, all wrapped up in a little box and everything."

"What was it?"

"The backup from the hard disk of my old computer, he'd saved everything. It was so sweet." she smiled wistfully at the memory and Tony had to swallow to keep the bile from rising in his throat.

As much as Tony didn't want to hear about the courting rituals of the suburban geek, he was pragmatic enough to realise that if he ever wanted to bed a geek, the information she was now supplying would be invaluable.

"So that's how it all started," he concluded, hoping she would take the hint and stop talking.

"Yes, we spent a magical day together rebuilding the box. We had this romantic little lunch then we went for a walk and we talked about our future. Then when we got back, he showed me he'd brought a photo of himself to put into my MorphPro program so we could check out what our kids would look like."

At this point a little voice in Tony's head started saying 'blah, blah, blah' to drown out her voice. He really didn't want to hear about two geeks designing their offspring. The phrase "soul mate" managed to break through his defences, but in the main, they held tight until the hospital started appearing on the horizon. He gripped the wheel tightly and focused his energies on the building of salvation.