Title: Coffeeshop, Ch. 3

Rating: K+ (I guess--there's a little language)

Spoilers: Chained

A/N: Finally, a little KIBBS interaction!! It was really hard figuring out exactly how Kate and Gibbs would carry out an argument like this...but I hope the result is well worth it. Let me know what you think!!

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I didn't see anything of her for another couple of weeks. He came in every morning like clockwork, got his usual brew, and left in his usual silence. Everything was pretty uneventful.

Well, except for that one morning when this slightly plump guy in a dark suit and a badge came running in babbling about spilling his boss's coffee and being killed and how he was just a techie at heart and didn't know what he'd been thinking trying to be an NCIS agent in the first place and how DiNozzo (whoever the hell he was) was never going to let him hear the last of this. Mike and I had to sit him down at one of the tables and give him a glass of water to get him to stop hyperventilating and calm down enough to talk intelligibly. Finally we figured out what he was trying to say (and who he worked for), and then everything made a lot more sense. I made up the same coffee I fixed every morning at 7:00 AM while Mike sympathized with the guy about working for a fiend in human form. Considering the situation, I went ahead and made the coffee an extra-large. Knowing what I knew, I figured it couldn't hurt.

But after that things were pretty quiet until one brisk fall day during the slow hours after lunch, before people started coming out for their after-dinner java. I was tidying up the back counter with an eye on the clock and Mike was pretending to sweep the floor and humming along to the radio in the kitchen. It was a nice afternoon, plenty of sunshine, and I was just about to sit down and take a load off my feet when the two of them stormed in.

I recognized them instantly. They were kind of hard to miss—I mean, how many times a day do you see a silver-haired hunk who looks like he's ready to spit nails and a gorgeous brunette with enough fire in her eyes to incinerate the entire block? I didn't know what was going on, but apparently it was pretty hot, and I wasn't about to lose the chance to listen in. So I sidled up to the counter and just stood there, waiting. I didn't say a word. It's my policy to never interrupt when there's a chance of free entertainment.

She started in on him immediately, continuing whatever argument they'd been having before they walked in.

"I do not need backup to interview a suspect, Gibbs!" she spat, rocking back on her heels like a prizefighter getting ready for his first punch. "I am a fully qualified and very competent federal agent. I can take a man down with a single move. I can outshoot Tony, I can outsmart McGee, and I can outrun you. And, I carry a gun. So, I do not need McGee and DiNozzo following me around like a couple of armed baboons!! Are we clear on that?"

He let her have her say, the only sign of his rising temper the steady twitch of his jaw and the sparks shooting from those bright blue eyes. But at her last sentence he visibly…well, lost it.

"Are we clear on what, Kate? Clear on the fact that you think you don't need protection? Clear on the fact that you're risking your life to try and prove that you're as qualified as the next guy? Or clear on the fact that you're a little confused as to who wears the title 'boss' around here?"

He wasn't yelling…yet. At the moment his voice was actually pretty soft, soft enough that I had to inch closer to make sure I could hear him correctly. But there was an unmistakable tone of menace laced through that low rumble, enough that I was mentally preparing to grab the nearest serving tray and use it as a shield whenever he finally blew. I had to admit, I was pretty impressed with her guts. It took somebody with plenty of chutzpah to stand up to this guy in a temper.

She stepped a little closer to him, eyes narrowing in fury as she punched the words at him like a bare-knuckled fist.

"I am not trying to prove myself!!" she hissed fiercely. "If you'll remember, Gibbs, I was the one who was in the Secret Service before I came here. I played the game, I followed the rules, and by the time I left I was one of the best agents in the field. Trust me—if I can handle guarding Air Force One, I think I can handle a murder suspect."

His eyebrows were practically a straight line over his nose by now and the furrows on his face looked like they'd been etched in stone or something. I stayed frozen behind the counter with one hand still clutching a paper cup and tried really hard to not breathe audibly.

He cocked his head to one side and took the plunge, a sharp gleam in his eyes and a faintly mocking note suddenly appearing in his voice.

"But you didn't always follow the rules, did you, Katie?"

I didn't know what that was supposed to mean, but apparently she did. She sucked in a quick breath and turned a shade paler, her eyes glazing over with absolute feral rage. She had one fist up, ready to plow it into his face, when he grabbed her arm and started tugging her toward the back entrance.

"Not in here," was all he said, which was when I noticed that there was a little knot of people standing against the back wall all agog, their eyes practically popping out of their skulls with curiosity. I made a split-second decision—which is necessary at times in my profession—and turned to Mike, who was standing absolutely speechless in the entrance to the kitchen, his jaw bouncing off his toes.

"You—man the counter," I said briskly, giving him a swift slap on the shoulder to get him moving. "I'm going out back to get more cups."

If he'd been thinking straight he'd have realized that we had enough cups up there to serve a medium-size army, but fortunately for me he was as spell-bound as everybody else in there. I headed toward the back, thinking briefly about calling 911 just in case. I wasn't especially worried about the two of them hurting each other, but the blood on the walls might be a little difficult to clean up all by myself.

I made it out the back door just in time to catch Gibbs grabbing her by the shoulders and getting right in her face. I didn't know exactly what I'd missed, but I guessed it had had something to do with his ancestry, character, and eternal destination, and that none of it had exactly been complimentary. At the moment, however, he was chewing her out in that same soft, lethal bass.

"I don't care what you did before you came to work here, I don't care who you guarded or how professional you were when you did it. All I care about is that you have a job to do, which at the moment involves tracking down and interviewing a bastard who has a habit of taking women and putting bullets through their heads. And if you think I'm going to let you go do that without backup, you had better think again, Agent Todd."

She stood rigid in his grip, her whole body shaking with fury.

"What about Tony?" she challenged him. "What about the time he went after a murder suspect with just a GPS chip in one shoe? You going to tell me he didn't need backup for that?"

His jaw tightened at that, his teeth grinding a little.

"That was different, Kate."

She snorted derisively.

"We knew where he was the entire time—"

She interrupted hotly.

"—until he fell into a creek and the chip got wet and you lost him!"

He made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a growl and made the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up. She didn't back down, though.

"Admit it, Gibbs. No matter how much you claim that one agent is equal to another, at heart you are nothing but an old-fashioned, traditionalistic chauvinist. You and I both know that I am perfectly capable of hauling in this bastard without any help whatsoever. But you won't let me—not because I can't do it, but because I'm a woman and in your little Neolithic mind, women are supposed to stay home and build the campfire and make stew."

Angling her chin contemptuously, she shrugged his hands off her shoulders with a single angry movement, still furious with him. "God! All I want to know is how the hell you've made it this long in law enforcement without getting sued for gender discrimination."

He just stood there, watching her with an inscrutable stare until she simmered down, planted her hands on her hips, and was finally quiet. Staring down at the ground, he rubbed a hand across his jaw and scuffed the side of his shoe against the concrete. When he looked up, all the anger was gone from his eyes; instead there was something like a tired patience.

"I don't care which way you button your jeans, Kate," he said, sounding weary all of a sudden. "And this has nothing to do with who has more experience in the field or who can outshoot who. That murdering bastard is armed, and he's dangerous, and he'd like nothing better than to use a federal agent for target practice."

He pinned her suddenly with that piercing gaze of his, the one that usually made me inclined to hide behind the nearest large object and stay there.

"And I don't care if you think I'm old-fashioned or chauvinistic or whatever the hell it was you just said." His voice lowered and roughened infinitesimally. "I am not going to lose you, Kate. If you don't like that, too bad. You're just gonna have to deal with it."

He closed his mouth with the snap of a man who's said his piece and isn't going to speak another word, whatever comes. She sighed heavily and looked down at the toes of her shoes, gnawing restlessly on her bottom lip. Finally she looked back up to meet his eyes, still frustrated but no longer furious.

"Fine," she said grumpily, twisting her lips in an annoyed little pout. "Fine, I'll take the backup." His shoulders relaxed a bit and the lines around his mouth softened; he nodded once, as if they'd just clinched a deal.

Then she looked around, taking in her surroundings for the first time.

"I just have one question."

He looked at her and raised a single eyebrow impatiently.

"Why the hell are we standing in the middle of an alley, Gibbs?"

He glanced at her with his "try not to be such an idiot" look. He was really, really good at those.

"Because I didn't want to have this conversation in the bullpen, Kate." He turned and started walking back to the entrance where I was still hovering in eavesdropper-heaven. "And because I figured that after all of this, I'd need coffee."

He stopped and looked straight at me without a hint of levity in his eyes.

"I still do," he said, and with that he walked right past me and made a beeline for the front counter. She rolled her eyes and followed him into the building. I gave myself a much-needed mental head-slap and scurried after them.

I didn't even ask what they wanted to drink. I didn't figure they were exactly in the mood to order. Amazingly enough, my hands didn't shake half as much as they wanted to as I set the steaming cups down in front of them. He picked his up and dug around one-handed for a crumpled bill that he produced from the usual pants pocket. Silently, he handed her the second cup without looking at her; she took it without a word. Eyes half closed in anticipation, he tilted his own cup back, took a long swallow, and gave a gusty sigh in appreciation as the hot liquid took effect. Then he leaned down and touched his cup briefly to hers in a silent toast.

"By the way…" he said coolly, as if the previous fifteen minutes had never happened, "…I can still outrun you, Kate."

And with that he shot her a smug little smirk, turned on his heel, and headed out the door. She took a look at her cup, another at the back of his head, and then shook her own head as if resisting temptation. With an audible huff, she marched out.

I looked around to find Mike still standing there, looking like he'd grown roots in the floorboards. I found a dishtowel and flicked him smartly with the end.

"Ouch!" he protested loudly, and I brandished my homemade weapon at him threateningly.

"Get to work before I make you clean out all the coffee filters," I told him, darkly pleased when he scurried off to grab his broom. I don't know what it was, but watching other people's fights had me on a roll. I chuckled sadistically under my breath. Mike would be lucky to get home by midnight tonight.

I went on about my evening, dealt with the late-night rush as I always did, cleaned up in the warm, humming silence afterward. But as I smiled at customers, juggled orders, polished fixtures, and finally switched out the lights, I kept replaying their argument inside my head.

I remembered all of it—the flashing eyes, the heated voices, the furious words that had scorched the air between the two of them until it all but stank of ozone. But as I thought back, rewound the tape in my mind, I started remembering other things as well. Little things like the concern that darkened his eyes as he stared at her bent head, the tenderness in his voice when he said wouldn't lose her whether she liked his methods or not. I wondered if I was the only one of the three of us who had noticed the fear that had crossed his face at the thought of some murderer putting a bullet through her head. The only one who realized that there was something way deeper than professional concern behind that hard-nosed façade of his.

Because if that were the case, then I was also the only one who had figured out that the enigma named Jethro Gibbs, the mystery man who came into my little domain every morning at 7:00 AM sharp and specialized in terrifying everyone from hardened NCIS agents to humble coffee shop workers, was experiencing something he hadn't felt in a long, long time…for a woman who apparently infuriated the hell out of him.

Pure, stark, irrational fear.

Now that was something to wonder about.