Sorry for the wait, and sorry for any rushed errors. Thanks for the patience and readership! R&R, should it tickle your fancy to do so, my friends.

(See chapter one for introduction.)

Chapter Six: Ordained Recalcitrance

Ziva held the cup to Timothy's lips and let him sip slowly. The look of relief on his face gave her a bittersweet smile. Knowing he felt better made her happy, but the condition he was in that made him unable to help himself made her burn with anger. She set the cup aside once it was drained and sat beside the bed in the rather unused chair. Timothy made no attempt to communicate, and Ziva remained silent for a long time.

Finally, after an extended moment of unsure quiet, Ziva leaned forward and laid a hand on Timothy's shoulder. He looked up and was surprised by the twisted, tearful look of grief, and he had to listen hard to what her words were, hushed and shaken.

"I-I do not know how I would have gotten past losing you, my friend, Tim. I do not think I could have." She leaned in and gave him a little kiss on his forehead. "I want you to not feel such pain. Sleep well."

She left as quickly as she came, and Timothy felt tears burn in his eyes. He had no idea that Ziva was so fond of him. And in the doorway, Gibbs waited. He would not try to get the information again so soon. Timothy did need his sleep. But eventually, from his own lips or hands, the wounded agent would have to tell him what happened in that alley.

When the security detail arrived, the agents went back to NCIS headquarters and waited for the buildings to wake up. It was true that at all times something was running at NCIS and someone somewhere was working but the bullpen did not 'open' until seven. For now, Ziva dozed at her desk while Gibbs sat back in the early quiet and mulled over the infinite thoughts that he concerned himself with.

Just before seven, Abby entered her lab and found the boxes of evidence waiting for her. Within them were photos, bullets, bloody clothes, and other items lifted at the crime scene. She stared at the innocuous banker's boxes and felt a churning of emotion, but she took a deep breath and released those feelings. A shaking hand could ruin a test and eliminate valuable evidence. She went to those boxes, found the one labeled 'T. McGee- personal effects' and began laying out the items.

A black NCIS jacket, a pair of dark pants and a button up shirt. A white undershirt and underclothes. A pair of dark, high-quality shoes. All stained with blood. A cell phone and smashed communicator components. A wallet with over 700 dollars in it and several credit cards, untouched by the attacker.

It would take a while to process the physical evidence. Since Timothy had been in a fight, there could be some trace of his assailant on his clothes. One hair, one drop of sweat, one partial fingerprint- it was all Abby needed to find this bastard and when she did, nothing would stand in the agents' ways of taking them down.

Twelve after seven, Tony strode into the bullpen, tall and strong, but his eyes were dark. He had shaved and showered and put on clean clothes but somehow retained an air of unkemptness that declared an unrested body and soul.

Gibbs barely glanced up at his clean-shaven senior agent and said, "I thought I told you get some sleep."

"I-I did, boss," Tony replied, blinking, then his expression fell even more. "I got plenty of sleep." What painful dreams from the night Tony had playing behind his eyes, Gibbs could not imagine, but if anyone understood that feeling of torture, it was him.

His boss gave a sigh, recognizing that the agent's endeavor to rest had been earnest but in the end futile. "I know, Tony." Gibbs waited for him to look up and, in the early morning quiet of the bullpen, they exchanged a silent look of understanding. "C'mon, we got work to do. Tony, pull up all of McGee's recent credit activity and phone record and take a look at his personal effects here and on his computer. Ziva, wake-"

Her eyes snapped open. "I was not sleeping."

Gibbs repressed a smile. "I want you to come with me to see Abby and get the videos and pictures to process up here."

"On it, boss!" Tony said, curiosity piqued. He had sifted through Timothy's stuff a couple times before, and he always found something interesting. Now he could do it with a legitimate reason. He was nose deep in his co-worker's desk drawer as Ziva and Gibbs headed for the elevator.

Ziva was hard pressed to find a situation that made her feel awkward, but that elevator ride was definitely in the top five. It was right up there with that time on her third trip to France when that young husband had caught her in bed with his wife. And that other time when she had double-crossed a double-crossing agent who had been working with a double-crosser. In simpler terms, it had ended in a very bizarre stand off where she had somehow ended up on the wrong side.

Before she could work up the courage and then speak a carefully prepared explanation for herself, they reached Abby's floor and Gibbs strode out into the hallway, appearing oblivious to her internal conflict. She sighed and shook her head, following her team leader to the forensic scientist's lab.

Abby look up from her tedious work and, on a normal person, the lack of dark rings around the eyes would have been good, but on Abby, it meant she had not had the effort to make-up herself properly. She managed a weak, wry smile.

"Gibbsy, I've told you once, I've told you a million times. I'm good, but-"

"I think you're that good," Gibbs said and gave her a quick hug. "Got anything? Ziva needs the photos and tapes, and I need something to work off of."

Abby set the clothes and dirt samples aside and nodded. "I've got just what you need, Ziva." She sifted through a banker's box and removed one or two items, then passed the whole box to Ziva. "These are all the security, ATM, and cell phone recordings from bystanders and all the pics from our cameras. Have fun. And for you, Gibbs, I lifted a print from the earpiece, but it's pretty fragmented. I have a few more places I think I'll check, but I can't make any guarantees on that first one. After that, I'll run the ballistics on this-" She rattled the twisted bullet in its little glass container. "-and hopefully, we'll be able to trace it. It looks like it's in pretty good shape f-for such a close shot." Her voice shook, and she swallowed. Gotta push that emotion down, gotta bring it all in-

Gibbs squeezed her shoulder. "You're doing great. I'll go help Ziva and Dinozzo, you call me if you get anything."

Abby nodded and watched them go. She did not tell them what she was going to check, and reluctance made her do the preliminaries on the bullet first, but eventually she got back to her original object of interest. Elastic, though stretching and re-stretching eventually degraded prints beyond use, typically held them for a while if not handled too much, and the ridges often caught minute organic traces like skin or sweat. The medical report for Timothy had detailed no sexual assault, but with the boxers in such pristine condition, and with the particular viciousness of the attack, maybe the assailant had gotten interrupted, and Abby, as an expert investigator, was not naive enough to ignore every possible explanation for a situation.

She opened the top of the clear box where super-heated super glue would reveal any fingerprints and placed the dark underclothes within, then prayed that she would not find anything. She did not know what she would do if she knew Timothy had come so close to being hurt in such a terrible way.

Upstairs, Ziva was watching security recordings from across the street from the alley with Gibbs as Tony had moved onto Timothy's personal records. Every now and then, one of them would speak up, but usually it was an immediate dead end.

"It could be another crazy fan," Tony said with an almost hopeless tone as he leafed through pages.

"His publisher said that they have not received any suspicious letters since those that were fabricated," Ziva reminded him.

Tony flipped to the next page. "Nothing suspicious on these phone records."

"That garbage guy was in the alley for a while," Gibbs noted

\to himself as he rewound and replayed, but the trash collector had just picked up a particularly difficult-to-hold bundle.

They went on in silence for a while, examining the evidence. Ziva moved onto photos. Tony went on to Timothy's impressively small criminal record.

"Jethro!" a familiar voice called out from the elevator as the doors slid open. All three agents looked up to see Ducky's somber face as he unbundled himself from his long coat. "Please tell me how our young Timothy is doing. I'm afraid I was out for most of the night after that prescription cough medicine I took." Gibbs stood up and wrapped an arm over the older man's shoulders.

"Let's talk, Duck," the team leader said. They walked down the hallway as Ziva and Tony stared after them. For once, Gibbs' emotional armor could provide no help, rendering his efforts to mask his responses useless. Ducky was much too wise for his tricks and smooth talking to fool him. Gibbs continued as they made it around the corner. "Tim was targeted, attacked, and shot. They think he's becoming stable, but… Someone came after him, Duck." Gibbs' eyes burned with frustration and self-loathing. There may not have been much that Gibbs could have done to protect his youngest agent, but Timothy was still his agent, and it was his job to make sure the team came through okay- and he had failed.

Ducky nodded with a grave frown, patting Gibbs' shoulder with a grasp of strength that belied his older body. "Timothy is a good lad, a strong lad. If he's made it this far, I highly doubt he will give up now." Ducky stared with his analytical mind into the field agent's eyes and added, "And there was nothing you could've done differently. You know what is best for your friends."

"Boss!" Tony said, cutting in from afar. "Check- come check this out. It's weird."

Immediately, Gibbs' demeanor changed, and he nodded bye to Ducky and rejoined his team. "You know I don't like weird, Dinozzo."

Tony was standing by his desk, so impelled by his discovery that he could no longer remain sitting. Open on his desk was a manila folder containing an assault report- from 1995.

"Look at this- apparently, McGee filed an assault charge against someone when he was 16, but the description, the name, the time and place- it's all blacked out. The only thing it really says is that all charges were dropped a few days later, and look at this box checked- the second word is scribbled out but the first word isn't." Ziva and Gibbs leaned forward to see the marked document. Tony looked up with a scowl. "It's 'non-consensual.' The first word is 'non-consensual.' I don't like how this looks, Boss."

Suddenly, the phone on Gibbs desk started ringing. The leader glanced at the light on the base- the call was from forensics. He put it on speaker. "Whacha got, Abs?"

"You're not gonna like this, Gibbs," Abby said, her voice quiet and pained. "But I lifted a pointer finger and thumb print from the waistband of Tim's boxers, and the guy whose prints they belong came from a sex offender database, but AFIS blocked the search once it got that far."

The agents' blood ran cold. Things had suddenly gotten much, much worse.

Ah, and the big twist! The true nature of the tale comes forth. Let me know what you think, and thank you for reading.