Author's Note: Here I am, just short of one year after posting chapter one to this story. I am constantly amazed by how often I check my email and see someone has favorited or alerted or reviewed it. One chapter of one story, among the whole huge archive of NCIS stuff on this site, but people keep responding to it. I've got almost 80 reviews. 80. Of one chapter. I'm lucky if I get 80 reviews for whole sagas I write.

I'm pretty in awe of that, and a little bit nervous about it. Like if I pick it back up it'll let all those people down. I went to a new fandom, got a bunch of other character stuck in my head. I've got no idea if I can do this thing justice anymore.

But I did adore this story, and all the plans I had for it. I can't let it die. So I may be a little slow, a little rusty, jumping back in like this. This is a short chapter mostly to get myself back into the groove or else crash and burn hideously.

All of which I'm telling you guys just so you'll get a sense of why I'm suddenly posting chapter two of this thing. I didn't intend to start off sounding like a pretentious dickbag, but I think I do, so I'm shutting up now.

Suspect.

Witness.

McGee.

Those three words seemed to loop around themselves in Gibbs' head in the precious few moments after he discovered who lived in that apartment with their latest dead Marine.

Suspect. Witness. McGee.

They were all three important to note. The investigator in Gibbs wanted to hold on to the first two, to not lose sight of the murder, the dead body, the Navy Cross. As an investigator there were steps that had to be taken. Questions that needed asking, a statement to take, an alibi (or motive) to establish, and a list of potential other suspects to begin.

Witness. Possible suspect. The man in that bedroom was the only other person found in an apartment where a man was brutally, over-zealously murdered.

He was also...or he seemed to be...or the cops thought he was...

Lover. Boyfriend. Victim's significant other, and that was always the first person investigated. They always had to look at the first person on the scene, and the closest person to the victim. And if Person and his asshole jokes were even a little accurate, McGee was both of those things.

Suspect, had to be questioned. Witness, had to give a statement.

The investigator in Gibbs knew that McGee had to be sequestered in a room somewhere, questioned for the smallest of details while they were fresh on his mind.

But he didn't move, didn't act on that knowledge, for those first few valuable moments standing in that bedroom gaping at his agent.

His eyes stuck on the blood-stained MIT lettering on that worn t-shirt, the shaking hands, the bent head. The tension that practically rolled off McGee as he sat on that bed, braced. Ready for an explosion, or a knife in the back.

Gibbs took the Investigator side of himself deadly seriously. But it wasn't the only side of him there was. He looked at that worn t-shirt, and the Marine won out over the Investigator.

Never leave a man behind. There's no case so important that one of his own has to be sacrificed.

Witness, suspect. Both true, but both failed to overshadow the third: McGee. His McGee, his guy. His kid on his team.

Gibbs moved to the bed, looking down at that bent sandy hair. "Hey."

McGee just tensed that much more. His hands were limp in his lap, half-uncurled fists stained with the brown of dried blood.

Gibbs frowned and dropped to a crouch in front of the bed. He tapped McGee's knee with his knuckle. "Hey. McGee."

McGee looked then, tilting his head up only enough to catch Gibbs' eyes.

Gibbs didn't beat on witnesses when they were distraught – he was only a hardass with the guilty. He met McGee's dazed, horrified gaze and he searched him the same way he would have any other time he came across one of his guys bloody and scared.

"You okay? You get hurt?"

McGee hesitated. He looked down at himself, fisting his fingers and wincing at the pull of the dried blood on his skin.

It was strange, and painful, seeing that wordy, innocent kid lost for response.

No, he wasn't okay. For a couple of very good reasons, McGee wasn't okay. But he wasn't hurt, or he would have said as much as the easy answer to Gibbs' question.

Gibbs leaned back, looking around until he spotted Tony hovering around the doorway. "Find David. Get Duck over here. This place has been sitting too long as it is, we need to get to work."

Tony stood there, eyebrows raised high. He nodded his chin back at McGee in an uncharacteristically graceless way, questions in his eyes.

Gibbs looked back at him, expressionless. "Were my orders confusing?"

Tony frowned. He opened his mouth, then shut it. Looked at McGee, then back at Gibbs.

He turned, not answering, and went out the door to the bedroom, tugging his cell from his pants.

Gibbs sighed and turned his focus back on McGee. "Okay, you know the details we need at this point. Got anything you can tell me that'll help?"

McGee looked up, but his gaze went past Gibbs to the now-empty doorway. He looked at the place where Tony had been. His throat worked, and his hands uncurled against.

"No," he said, hoarse and quiet like the rasp of dead leaves. "I didn't hear anything. I didn't see..." He swallowed. "I came out this morning, and Nate was..."

"Yeah." Gibbs sighed and straightened up. Tony's voice was a murmur from the other room – Ducky would be there soon. Work had to begin. He had to let the Investigator take over.

McGee, witness, suspect.

No. Investigator or not, Gibbs knew his guy. Detective Person was a big-mouthed moron, and Gibbs trusted his people without question.

So...McGee, witness.

Better. Still one too many roles for one of his team to play in an investigation, but Gibbs could work with it.

"Okay," he said, as much to McGee as to himself. He tried not to notice McGee flinch at just the sound of his voice. "The second Vance finds out you're this close to a murder he's gonna try to jerk us off this case. I don't want to make that easy for him, so I need you out of here and back at the Navy Yard, ready to make a full statement when we come in. Got me, McGee?"

McGee looked up at him, the smallest line furrowing his brow.

Gibbs nodded at him to get up. "Get out of those clothes – we'll bag 'em for processing. Get yourself cleaned up."

McGee stood, looking more like an automatic response to Gibbs' orders than any conscious choice on his part. He looked down at himself as if just noticing the blood, as if he hadn't been feeling it staining his hands however long he'd been sitting in that room.

Shit. Sitting in that room being shadowed by a LEO taking orders from that fucking bastard Person. It was a good damned thing Gibbs didn't know the whole story while Person was shooting his mouth off about fags and Martha Stewart.

He flashed a quick, tight smile at McGee. "Go on, Tim. Get dressed."

He turned and headed for the door, already trying to think of arguments for when Vance tried to take this crime from him.

"Boss..."

He stopped in the doorway, looked back.

Tim stood there, his hands tense at his sides, green eyes stark and too-bright on Gibbs. "React."

Gibbs frowned. "What?"

Tim gestured, sharp and uneven. A vague gesture at the room around him, the apartment, maybe. "Just...react. I have to know...where I stand." He swallowed, pale, the dark smears of brick red on his shirt and up his arms standing out all the more. "Please. I can't deal with..."

Gibbs knew that lost look in McGee's eyes, and it ached somewhere deep down. He'd seen in in mirrors for years after putting Shannon and Kelly in their graves.

But Gibbs wasn't there to sympathize or share anyone's pain. He was there to do a job, and there to be a leader for one of his people.

"You fill out the right forms at the Yard when you moved in here from your old place?" he asked. "All that change of address protocol?"

McGee frowned but nodded. Still braced where he stood, like there was a blow aimed for his spine that he knew he wouldn't see coming.

"Guess you didn't break any rules, then." Gibbs shrugged. "We don't have all day, Tim. Get dressed and get out of here." He met McGee's eyes, deliberate in his words. "Vance isn't gonna let you near this case no matter how loud I yell, but we can see to it that the rest of your team stays in the middle."

McGee understood, of course. Caught the 'your team', the present tense. Caught that he wasn't going anywhere, and that his team wasn't leaving him behind. Just in case those were the reactions he was worrying about.

"Okay." McGee nodded to himself, letting out a shaky breath, and looked around him as if trying to place his bearings. "Okay."

It was practically visible watching the guy's brain firing into gear. It was only temporary, Gibbs had no doubt, but one less dread seemed to be enough to allow McGee to function long enough to obey Gibbs' orders.

It was a start, though. Not much of one, and the start of what Gibbs wasn't sure and didn't really want to think about. But it was start.

Tony had no idea how long Ziva was in the room before he finally noticed the cup she was holding out and the raised eyebrows she was looking down at him under.

He grimaced, blinking dry eyes and taking the steaming coffee cup. "Thanks."

Ziva didn't bother answering. She looked at the glass in front of them, her own cup forgotten in her hand. "I'm surprised you're not in there with him."

Tony looked over, but McGee hadn't moved from where he sat. Hadn't moved for the twenty minutes Tony had been staring at him through the one-way glass.

"Gibbs didn't ask me to babysit, and I'm not about to go into an interrogation room without permission." He shrugged, looking down at his coffee.

"Tony." Ziva slapped his arm when he didn't answer her soon enough. "Tony, it's McGee. He's hardly a suspect. Gibbs isn't going to interrogate him." She frowned, blinking back at the glass. "Is he?"

Tony frowned. "He's not McGee right now, he's the only thing like a witness we've got in a murder investigation."

But no, he was more than that. He was involved. He was Victim's Partner, or Significant Other, or however the hell the reports would read.

When Tony first walked into the bedroom of that ritzy place and saw Tim there, his instant, sincere reaction was that Person was an idiot who had gotten the whole situation ass-backwards. This wasn't some sobbing boyfriend, this was McGee. Roommate, maybe. Pal. Shaken up because he hadn't expected to see a dead body, and Nathan Bryar had died hard.

Not what Person thought, not at al.

But Tony for all his boneheaded hope about maintaining the status quo realized pretty fast that Person wasn't wrong at all.

One bedroom apartment, after all, and in itself that left little room for doubt.

One bedroom apartment, Tim's books and computer parts and games and Nerd Accessories all intermingled with unfamiliar pictures of a stranger's family, and a stranger's clothes, and a stranger's life.

There was a small loft in the place, a narrow staircase leading to a small room that Tony had hoped as he climbed was maybe bedroom number two.

Instead he saw Tim's typewriter, his desk. His paper shredder and a thin pile of neatly-stacked pages.

And even Tony couldn't deny it then.

If Tim's writing was there, then that was Tim's home. Bryar's home, and Tim's home. Their home, together.

Tim wasn't a pal of Bryar's who'd gotten a little too shaken up at an unexpected corpse. He was Gay Boyfriend of Gay Victim.

And hell if Tony knew what the hell that actually made him, at least where the case was concerned. Not McGee, not friend and partner and team computer nerd and uninvolved, like he usually was. But what?

Ziva didn't realize. She'd only arrived at the scene as Tony was bringing McGee down to the car to come back to the Yard. She knew, she'd been told, but she didn't know. She didn't hear that asshole cop's dumb jokes. She knew it was McGee, then she knew it was gay Marine murdered in his home.

"Tony."

He sighed and dragged his eyes back to her, since she got punchy when she was ignored.

But her eyes nearly made him look away – narrowed and dark and looking at him as if he were the suspect waiting to be questioned.

He frowned at her then looked back at McGee's slumped shoulders through the glass. "What's Mossad's position on gay officers?"

"Are we seriously having this conversation right now?" Ziva tapped on the glass – quietly, Tim didn't seem to notice. "I know you are not homophobic, Tony. Why aren't you in there telling McGee stupid jokes and distracting him?"

Tony sipped his coffee and studied McGee's slumped shoulders, and wondered that himself. Why wasn't he in there?

Ziva heaved an annoyed sigh when he didn't answer. She turned, heading towards the door.

Tony didn't look away from McGee, from the way he sat so still, waiting. Staring at the table like he hadn't seen it a thousand times before.

He didn't hear the door close behind him, but suddenly the door behind McGee opened and there Ziva was.

Tim looked back at her way too slowly – shock, maybe, Tony's mind supplied.

She went up to the table and stretched out the second cup of coffee she'd been carrying. "Something tells me you did not stop for breakfast on the way in."

McGee looked at her, searched her, for a moment. He reached out and took the cup. "Thanks," he said, his voice low.

Tony looked away from them, frowning to himself.

Why the hell wasn't he in there? Ziva was right: even if McGee was a suspect, even if he was the only suspect - hell, even if they all thought he actually might've killed the guy, which was ridiculous on so many levels – Tony still should have been in there.

That was his Probie. His friend. He had known Tim for years, trusted him to watch his back. Told him things – in passing, from time to time – that he'd never told anyone. Tim had pulled him off a ledge once. Shot at people to keep him safe. Worked his ass off to prove Tony innocent of a crime. And Tony had and would have done exacty the same for his partner.

Of course Tony wasn't homophobic. Tony didn't give a single solitary damn about sexual preferences. Hell, Tony might have had his own little experiments back in college. And since college. Now and then.

Maybe.

Why the hell was it so hard to talk himself into moving? All he had to do was stand up, take the walk to the interrogation room – a path he walked all the fucking time – and grin at his partner, make some idiot joke that would make Ziva slap his arm, and boom. Everything would be right with the world. They'd be a team, facing down Gibbs' questions and this case together, the way they did everything.

He didn't move.

By the time he focused on the room again, Ziva was gone. Tim's hands were wrapped around the coffee cup, but he was back in position staring at the table and not moving.

He looked up, once, after a while. Looked at the mirror with those sad puppy eyes and the paleness of real, legitimate shock on his face.

Tony looked back, safe in his anonymity behind the glass.