AN1: I feel like this is getting worse. Please tell me. There really is a reason that I don't normally write. I'm not terribly happy with this; it kind of ran away from me.

AN2: While I do not have the problems Jenny and Gibbs have, this was, in part, prompted by my boss pissing me off last night.

AN3: Still don't own it. Still not beta'd. Still written at an obscenely late hour.

199?

Kate wandered over to the same Georgetown bar feeling a bit restless. Her counterfeiting case was not going well. They'd hit a roadblock when the TSA let their main suspect slip out of the country and everyone seemed to be blaming her. Just because she was new to the team didn't mean every setback was her fault. She'd gotten the BOLO out to Reagan International, Dulles, Baltimore, hell, every major airport on the eastern seaboard and all of the small private airstrips and TSA had managed to let him on a commercial flight to Prague. It was definitely not her fault. She needed a drink.

"Agent Shepard." Kate acknowledged her now common companion at the bar.

Jenny turned to Kate. "It's Jenny. You've taken my drunk self home and were kind enough to leave some aspirin and water out and you've been listening to me bitch about my boss for weeks. The least you could do is call me by my first name."

"Then it's Kate."

Kate and Jenny settled into a comfortable silence at the bar, each sipping their drinks: Kate her martini and Jenny her bourbon.

"Thank god you're not FBI," Jenny spoke up suddenly.

"Why?"

"I'm currently banned from speaking to them. Hell, from having any interaction with them at all. My whole team is actually."

"Your boss's fault, I assume?"

"How'd you guess?" Jenny smirked.

Kate took another drink. "So what did he do?"

"He got into a jurisdiction dispute."

"There's no way it's that simple. Your boss does not seem like the type to have a jurisdiction dispute." Kate stressed the work 'dispute.'

"Well, turf war might be a more appropriate description. But for once, I'm on his side for this. Just because this guy is sniping only Navy Lieutenants who served on destroyers and have red hair and green eyes doesn't mean that he's a serial killer. And the FBI doesn't have to claim jurisdiction on a case just because they can."

"You don't think there might be a personal connection there?"

"Well Boss was a sniper, so he may be taking that personally."

"Have there been any female victims?"

"The first one. Why do you ask?"

"You don't think the red hair and green eyes have something to do with..." Kate didn't get to finish her sentence when she felt the heel of Jenny's shoe press into her toes.

"Don't finish that sentence if you want to live, Kate."

"And what are you going to do? Shoot me because I'm pointing out that you and your boss might..." Kate felt Jenny knock her leg against her own. She thought Jenny was just being playful until she realized she was feeling a tiny .22 in Jenny's ankle holster against her leg. Maybe Jenny was serious. "A little touchy on the subject, Jenny?"

"Shut it. Don't you want to hear about the turf war itself?"

"I'm training as a profiler, so actually the motivations behind the acts are just as important to me." Jenny glared. "Is that a copy of the glare that your boss reserves for you. Or is his a little more smoldering..."

Jenny kicked Kate again and downed the rest of her bourbon in one gulp. "Anyway... Boss doesn't like... "

"We'll get to the part where you call him 'Boss' later."

"You really have a death wish tonight, don't you Agent Todd. As I was saying, Boss doesn't like losing cases to the FBI. So he had us make copies of all of the evidence and hide it before the FBI came to collect everything. That way we could keep working the cases."

"Well that doesn't sound too bad."

"I haven't gotten to the good stuff yet. At the latest crime scene, he mislaid the trajectory strings as a joke so when the FBI arrived so they spent hours looking for a bullet where none existed."

"Oh."

"That uptight FBI agent went straight to the director. Of course, while he was talking to the director, we may have snuck out with the bullet."

Kate's head shot up. "We?"

"Well, by we, I mean me."

"He's really rubbing off on you. First the bourbon, now 'inter-agency relations.' Next thing you know, you'll be building a boat in your basement."

"Don't have a basement," she slurred slightly. "And I wasn't the worst of it."

"How much worse could it get? I mean that your boss would be willing to pull?"

Jenny leaned down the bar to order another bourbon. "He would never go so far as to damage the case. But I think the latest divorce is getting to him. Something about more alimony. I don't think he's ever physically restrained an FBI agent who almost contaminated a crime scene before. Glared at, yelled at, forcefully escorted, yes. Handcuffed, no. That was pretty much the last straw for us with the director; that's when he ordered us away from the FBI. Not just that team, the entire FBI."

Kate was concerned about just the glaring, yelling, and forcefully escorting part; handcuffing a fellow Federal agent was beyond her comprehension. She was beginning to worry about what her first professional interaction with NCIS might be like. If every lead agent at NCIS was like Jenny's boss, Kate was dreading it.

2003

As soon as she realized she was dealing with NCIS on Air Force One, she waited to see if her earlier fears about working with NCIS were well founded. Then Gibbs hijacked Air Force One (or AF 29000, as it were). She'd been right. Or maybe it really was just Gibbs.