Oh hey, I remembered I had a story going on! Ack. Sorry.

Anyway.

"Are you mad at her?" McGee asks one Friday night when he and Tony are working late for no good reason.

"Nah," he returns absently, flipping pages. "I mean, yeah, she got my lunch wrong, but the kid hasn't really had a chance to memorize my order yet."

"Not Ellie." Tony looks up, puzzled, and McGee nods his head to the desk that now carries upon its back a framed snapshot of Ellie and her husband on their honeymoon and a staggering array of papers and notes addressed to E. Bishop. Ellie may not always sit at the desk, but she's grown more comfortable with the idea that it's hers.

His insides give a long, tired twist, like a worn, gray dishcloth. It's a familiar feeling by now, but Tim is not usually the one to give it to him. But—

"No, I'm not mad at her," he says, and he means it. "Why would I be mad at her?"

Tim lifts and drops a shoulder. "For leaving. For not calling, or writing, or emailing. Or texting."

"She writes."

"She writes Abby and Ducky once a month. Not us."

Tony concedes that this is true.

"Or maybe you could be mad at her for rigging every damn situation to explode in her own face."

Tony stares, shocked. "Tim?"

"Forget it," McGee says, looking back at his monitor. "I was just wondering. Forget it."

"Tim," Tony starts again, but he struggles for the next words, because they seem so preposterous.

"Are you mad at Ziva?"

McGee flinches at the sound of her name—just slightly, but Tony knows him awfully well, and can tell when that muscle on the side of his face clenches. For a very long moment McGee says nothing, just types several sentences and taps a few papers on the edge of his desk to neaten the edges before stapling them together. Finally, he looks towards Tony's desk and Tony's eyes, still trained on him, waiting for him to answer with a calm patience Tony didn't possess a few years ago.

"Yes," he says simply.

But—but McGee and Ziva are buddies. They're allies. They buy each other treats and gang up on Tony to make sure he's the one who has to get headslapped for asking Gibbs if it's okay for them to head home on time when really all three of them wanted to ask. It doesn't make sense. The two of them are—oh.

They are friends.

And she left, without a word.

"Do you wanna talk about it?" he offers hesitantly.

But McGee's already clicking his desk lamp off.

"Good night, Tony."

Tony works for another hour, but McGee's admission has made him feel uneasy, and when he realizes that he's spending more time contemplating the desk across the aisle than he is revising his report, he packs it in and heads home. He wonders if Ziva does think about McGee. It's not like her to ignore him—but then, nothing about this situation is typical.

To be honest, Tony's not one hundred percent sure she still thinks about him. A small part of him doubts it, even though the more reasonable majority knows her mission isn't to forget them, but to remember herself. Still, he would have liked to hear from her. Last week, when he'd called Shmiel to wish her a roundabout happy birthday, he'd hoped she might be there. He'd hoped she might call back. He'd hoped a little too much, maybe.

Most days he tries not to think about it. In fact, he probably shouldn't be thinking about it now. It dredges up painful, sharp-edged questions he'd rather not deal with.

Groceries, he types into his phone in an effort to get his brain back on track.

Call Dad about Thanksgiving.

Find Back to the Future dvd

Take trash out

Do something on the list

He opens his nightstand drawer and pulls out his bucket list, scanning for items that might be doable this weekend. Preferably ones that are inexpensive. Ah, yes. Number 22 will work. He amends the last item on his to-do list. Work on memoir.

Talk to McGee he types at the bottom of the list. Then he frowns. Maybe McGee was just in a bad mood. Maybe he doesn't really need and won't appreciate the big brother treatment. Tony backspaces the item. He'll think about it in the morning.

By eleven o'clock Saturday morning, he's completed his other tasks and settled in at his kitchen table with a nice pen and a pad of paper. His laptop blinks from the seat of a chair; he's used it with previous versions of his memoir, but today he's feeling the pen and paper. It's classic. Cinematic. The movie version of this memoir, he decides, will start by zooming in on his aged hand as it scribbles across the paper. The voiceover (which he will be happy to provide himself) will start. Slowly, aged Tony will fade away, to be replaced by young Tony gaping up at The Little Prince as his mother looks from the screen to her son's bright face and back again—

It's almost three in the afternoon before he looks up again, and his hand is aching. He thinks about walking down to the coffee shop and sitting there for a while with a newspaper—there's a teenage waitress there who puts extra whipped cream and chocolate sauce on his hot chocolate. She serves it to him with a pretty smile and sometimes a bit of conversation about the college tours she's taken with her parents or her gymnastic team's upcoming competitions, and although it makes him feel old, it's old like a favored uncle, not old like a sadsack middle-aged cop with thinning hair and nobody to order chai tea for anymore. He's come to appreciate it.

But no, he thinks, stretching, he's on a roll, and who knows when he'll be in the mood to do this again? So far he has what he considers a pretty decent chapter on his childhood, but he's getting bored and sad talking about that. He can switch chapters now, do something a little more fun, put the whole shebang in order some other time. Love Life, he writes at the top of a fresh page. He grins.

The Rockette stays in; Monica gets a pseudonym. A few times he has to stop and think. Around four he draws a detailed timeline of his romantic life, and it turns out so nicely he folds it in half and sticks it in the back of the notebook. He'd been right. This is a fun section, and he flatters himself that some of the dialog he's including would even make Leroy Jethro Gibbs laugh out loud. Fornell would probably piss himself.

Wendy isn't so bad to write about, but Jeanne is a little hard; he realizes halfway through her section that he's making her out to be a total bitch, and crosses the whole thing out because that's not what he means. He flips back a few pages and adds a humorous note about the first time he met Abby, just to get back in the groove of things, and eventually he takes a deep breath and manages to push through Jeanne's bit and come out on the other side ready to describe E.J. and that one redheaded veterinarian.

The problem with writing about E.J. is that Ziva is part of the story. He'd been able to ignore it with Jeanne, but there's no way to accurately explain his amicable parting with E.J. without including the woman's endorsement of his and Ziva's not-really-a-relationship. There's no way to describe E.J.'s initial reason for being at NCIS without eventually having to explain Ray, and there's no way to portray the full grossness of CI-Ray without pointing out that he was at one point somewhat engaged to Ziva. Tony bites the cap of his pen and considers. If he writes this honestly, both he and Ziva come across as incredibly jealous people with questionable taste. It's enough to make a man wonder what the hell he was thinking back in 2012.

Eventually, he goes with the honest version. Seductive as the notion of remaking facts is, it does not feel right. Plus, when he thinks about altering his own storyline he hears a voice that sounds a lot like Kate's telling him that he's being an ass.

E.J., however, is easy compared to what must be recounted next.

His pen stays still on the page long enough to form a blot. He has no idea how to describe Ziva; the things he wants to express are too big for the notebook. Too big to channel themselves neatly through his fingers or his mouth. If he could hold his heart in his hands, tip it out across the paper in a flood of red ink, that might help, but even then, it wouldn't be enough. She's in his brain, too. She's in the shoulder he broke once in her living room, the one that aches when it rains. Her voice is still in his ears when he doesn't expect it, and he feels her touch on his skin.

He flicks through the pages he's written, past Marcy's freckles and Jennifer's crinkly-nosed laugh and Wendy's cut-the-bullshit attitude, and back to the ink blot at the bottom of the last page, and he notes absently that it's quite a long chapter. You always remember something about every woman. He remembers telling that to somebody years and years ago, vaguely remembers Kate scoffing at it, but he meant it. A tattoo, a tone of voice, a blush on the nape of a neck—there's always something.

The problem is that with her, he remembers everything.

"Are you being a plainclothes cop today?" Hannah asks when she brings him his hot chocolate. The shop is slow at nine in the evening, and he's glad, because it means she can chat, and he's sick of talking to himself. You should be talking to McGee whispers his conscience in a voice that, oddly enough, sounds like Jimmy Palmer's. Tony ignores it.

He raises his eyebrows. "It's Saturday. I don't work every day, you know."

She raises her eyebrows to match his. "You realize it's past dinnertime, right? Like, this is a weird time for a guy your age to be in a coffee shop. I thought maybe you were pulling an all-nighter, like when you came in here with your cop friend that one time."

The friend had been McGee, and the case had been an awful one. And he can actually feel his McGee problems resurfacing. They're niggling at him. A hangnail, a flash of red in his peripheral vision. He must make a face, because Hannah points down the counter and says, "Sugar's over there, if it's not sweet enough."

"Out of curiosity," he says, retrieving it, "if you have a friend who's having issues with another friend, what is the standard eleventh grade way of dealing with that?"

"Text a third friend about it," she says immediately. Tony pictures himself texting Gibbs, then pictures Gibbs smashing the phone with a hammer.

"That doesn't seem very effective."

"You asked for standard eleventh grade."

"Okay, so give me twelfth grade. Give me AP level."

She leans her elbows on the counter. "I don't know. I guess just talk to the people involved? In a mature, adult way."

Tony ponders the likelihood of either Ziva or McGee answering their phones to have a heart-to-heart with him. "Hmm. I don't know if I like it."

"Well, what's your situation? Oh my gosh," she stands up straight, "Mr. DiNozzo, do you actually have a love life? Does your girlfriend not like your friends or something? Because that's a different issue altogether."

Tony uses his wrist to wipe whipped cream off his nose and pops a cap on his cup.

"Oh, no, missy," he says, walking backwards to the door, "don't even peek down that rabbit hole."

"Sensitive subject?" she calls.

He waves. For thirty seconds, he lets himself imagine a world in which Ziva comes home and he and she and McGee go get coffee, and Hannah mouths "Is this them?" and gives him a thumbs-up, and Ziva notices and introduces herself, and McGee rolls his eyes and demands to know what stories Tony's been telling about them—

He stops himself there. He can go on all day if he lets himself, and according to his men's group, that's not healthy. What's healthy is talking about your feelings with people you care about.

The mature thing to do—the thing his reverend would suggest—would be to call McGee and express their shared sadness over Ziva's absence and his affection for McGee and his desire to connect face-to-face to have a drink and discuss their fears and feelings and find support in each other's friendship.

And then there's the thing Gibbs would do—nothing.

But the thing Tony would do—and, to be honest, the thing he's pretty sure Ziva and Abby would vote for, too—is use manipulation, trickery, jokey antics, and/or false pretenses to lure McGee in.

Tony flips through the options and sighs deeply. McGee is his most recent contact, so he taps the kid's number and listens to it ring once, twice, three times.

"What do you want, Tony?"

"Hope you're not busy," Tony says cheerfully. "Do you have plans tonight?"

"Um…why?" McGee does not sound particularly enthusiastic, but Tony does not allow himself to be derailed by such trifles.

"Because if you do, you'd better start making your apologies. Gibbs wants us on stakeout by ten."

"Staking out who?"

"Steven somebody. Look, Gibbs just gave me an address and said to get our asses out to it and let him know if the guy leaves the house."

McGee groans. Tony doesn't blame him—everybody hates stakeouts.

"I'll pick you up in fifteen, so tell Delilah you have to skedaddle."

"She's not even here, it's just me."

"Then why are you so grumpy?"

"Why aren't you grumpier?"

Tony chooses to ignore that question. "Okay, so, fifteen minutes. Clock's ticking."

"Did you forget something?" McGee asks tiredly when Tony pulls into his own building's parking lot.

"Nah."

"Steven seriously lives here?"

"In a manner of speaking," Tony replies. "C'mon."

McGee sighs, but gets out of the car. "Tony, this isn't funny. Just give me the address and I'll program the GPS, okay?"

Tony keeps walking, waiting for McGee to follow. Because here is the thing: Ziva is gone. Kate is gone. Sometimes Gibbs feels pretty gone, too. But McGee is here. And Tony can't risk their friendship; can't let distance or Ziva or even Delilah erode the bond and turn them back into coworkers rather than friends.

Whether or not Tim wants to talk about it tonight is a minor detail.

Upstairs, Tony uncaps two beers and finds a station on Pandora that sounds like McGee's type of jazz.

"If you're trying to seduce me you could have lit some candles," McGee says wryly from the doorway.

Tony chuckles. "Sorry, lambchop. Don't have any. And before you ask, my lingerie's all at the dry cleaner's."

McGee squeezes his eyes shut. "Please don't put that image in my head."

He hands McGee one of the beers and gestures to the couch.

"Look," he says, "we need to talk about stuff."

McGee is silent for a moment. When Tony opens his mouth to start again, McGee shakes his head.

"Did you really plan to kidnap then wine and dine me until I'm not mad at Ziva anymore?"

Tony scratches the back of his neck. "Well, when you put it like that…"

"Seriously, Tony?"

"I just…I've noticed that we don't talk about her much."

"Do you actually want to talk about her? Because I've noticed that every time somebody does say her name, you look like somebody's died."

"I do?"

McGee lifts his eyebrows.

"I don't want to avoid talking about her," Tony says. He looks at his beer. "I…it's not easy to be casual about it, you know?"

McGee shifts on the couch. "Tony, did something happen? What's going on?"

Tony continues as if McGee has not spoken. "But I don't want to stifle you if you need to talk about her, and—I mean, I get it if you're mad. You don't have to not be mad just because I'm not mad. Or you could even try to contact her, that's okay. Don't not do it just because I'm not doing it, Tim. You can make your own decisions—"

"Tony!"

He looks up at McGee's bemused face. "You said you were mad at her."

"Yeah. So?"

"I just don't want that to make things awkward between us."

McGee has been leaning forward, elbows on his knees. Now he flops backwards into the couch and sighs. "You know I'm not mad at you, right?"

"But you're mad at her. And I'm—well, she's—"

"Yeah, I know," McGee says. "But it's not that kind of mad."

"Frustrated?" Tony suggests.

McGee blows out a half-sigh, half-laugh. "I guess."

Silence envelops them.

"Do you have any pretzels or anything?" McGee eventually asks. "I was making a snack when somebody lured me out of my apartment on false pretenses."

A moment later, they're munching on chips and salsa.

"I'm the only one," he says eventually. "She said goodbye to you and Gibbs, and she writes Abby and Ducky."

"If it makes you feel any better, she probably wouldn't have contacted me, either, if I hadn't kinda forced her to."

McGee snorts. "Yeah, she would've."

He shrugs. "You think?"

The expression that answers him is one of the most classic bitch, please looks in McGee's extensive repertoire.

"I tried really hard to get her to come back." The words stick to the inside of his throat, and he has to clear it to get them out. He doesn't mean for it to sound like an apology, but it kind of does.

McGee glances at him and looks away quickly. "Are you really not mad at her? Even a little? You're always mad at Ziva for something."

"Little things!"

"Michael Rivkin," McGee says pointedly. "Ilan Bodnar. And don't begin telling me you weren't pissed about how much she liked Ray Cruz."

"Okay, first of all, I think the word you are looking for is concerned. Second of all, Ray Cruz is an asshole."

He raises his hands. "I'm not arguing with that."

"But—" Tony scrubs a hand over his face. "I'm not mad at her. If you had seen her, Tim—"

"I didn't see her."

"Yeah." He scrubs the hand over his face again. "Yeah, I know. I'm sorry about that."

McGee shrugs, and takes a moment before he answers. "I don't know what you and Ziva have, but I know it's not what she and I have. And I know that Gibbs is different. I get it. But when Ducky got that first letter, I thought…well." He finishes his beer. "It doesn't really matter."

"Yeah, it does."

McGee stares at the television as if there's something playing there. "I'd wanted her to meet Delilah," he says. "It's not important, but…you know."

Tony gets it. Sometimes it's the little things that unravel you. This morning Senior had asked why Ziva stopped updating her EveryoneIEverMet profile, and for a second Tony had wanted to fling open his bedroom window and let the phone shatter on the concrete below.

"Sometimes I don't think I tried hard enough," he admits after a while.

"Maybe none of us tried hard enough."

Tony concedes that that's a possibility. A chip later, though—"The problem is it's not about us."

"Huh?"

"We want it to be about us. But it's really not. It's all her."

McGee looks like he wants to say something, but instead, he just gets up and wanders to the refrigerator, pulling out another beer. It's probably okay to needle him a little, Tony thinks. Better to get it out now than to wonder.

"Out with it, McGee. What's rattling around that CPU of yours?"

McGee rolls his eyes as he heads back to the couch and reclaims the left side.

"What do you want me to say? I respect her right to make her own decisions, but I don't like it. And I think it's a bad way to handle things."

Tony clinks his near-empty beer against McGee's cold one and exhales heavily.

"Amen," he says. "Amen."

On Monday morning, McGee asks if he left his jacket at Tony's place.

Ellie looks curious. Gibbs squints.

Abby, who is upstairs passing out m&m-studded cookies, beams. "It's cute when you two are friends," she says, and gives McGee an extra cookie.

"I don't know if 'friends' is gonna work out if this is your idea of equitable resource distribution," Tony points out. "Wars have been started for less."

She smiles even more brightly, and Gibbs cocks his head at her.

"How about I give you first dibs on reading the happy Thanksgiving card I just got from Israel?" she says, clasping her hands behind her back and rocking back on her heels. "I mean, technically second, because I was first. But I saved second just for you."

His greatest desire is suddenly to shunt them all out of his path as he heads down to squint at Ziva's handwriting, but he tries to bridle the urge before it becomes obvious. Because fairness and sharing, those are important in friendship. And maturity requires sensitivity—which is unfortunate, because trampling over the feelings he and McGee shared on Saturday would be easier.

(There are moments when Tony does not appreciate his own personal growth. This is one of them.)

"Or," he manages to propose, "I could get the extra cookie and McGee could get first dibs. You know. Since I got dibs last time."

Abby plasters her hand to his forehead.

"Well, you don't feel sick. So I'm going to have to run some tests to confirm that the bodysnatchers really got you." Tony swats her away.

"Opinions, Probie?"

McGee shakes his head and, as Tony watches, takes a huge, deliberate bite of the extra cookie. It would have been an eloquent statement if not followed by a wheezy noise and the spraying of barely-chewed crumbs across his keyboard. "Go," McGee coughs. "'s fine."

Tony hesitates, torn, a cartoon image of Abby Heimliching McGee floating before his eyes. "You sure? 'Cause—"

McGee coughs, gags, recovers, clears his throat. "GO."

"Maybe—"

It is possible, Tony reflects later, that they deserved the double Gibbs-slap.