Prologue: The Red Pumps

(Just after The Penelope Papers)

McGee hadn't thought about the red pumps in years, though now that Penny had brought them up, he couldn't get them out of his mind. His recollection was a fond one. He'd gotten positive attention for wearing them, and they'd made him feel comfortable, as if he was like Penny, his favorite adult. It had been the year his mother had broken both of her ankles while his father was deployed, and he'd gotten to live with his grandparents for a whole summer.

Penny had let him play dress up in her bright, soft clothes, and he'd made the discovery of the shoes on a rainy June morning. The shape had drawn him, and the vivid color. They had curves that his scuffed sneakers or even the shiny dress shoes he also liked, didn't. They looked elegant and beautiful, and when he put them on he felt grown up and confident. He spent the day learning to walk in the three inch heels, the ankle strap helping keep them in place on his small feet. It was such a bittersweet memory; having positively loved those shoes, having been supported and even doted on for wearing them by Penny's friends and the free-form congregation she'd belonged to (also his first experience of acceptance in church), it had been a terrible blow when he went home and his horrified mother forbade them and threw them out. He'd cried for days and drawn pictures of them, but even his artwork regarding the shoes had been banned and relegated to the trash. As an adult, he understood his mother had been protecting him from his father's reaction when he returned from his deployment, but it was a hurt to his five-year-old self which had never fully healed.

It put him in mind of the case they'd had early on in his time on Gibbs' team; there was a petty officer who had cross-dressed full time when he wasn't on duty. He'd felt really sad at the thought of someone feeling like they had to lead a double life like that, but he hadn't put it together with his own experience of the red pumps before. It now resonated for him in a very personal way.

For the next few days, he pondered the correlation and looked deeply into himself to see if he had any desire to dress as a woman. Like when he was at MIT and he'd discovered he was sexually attracted to his roommate and needed to figure out if he was gay, he imagined dozens of scenarios running the whole imaginable spectrum of behavior, this time from full on sex change to only wearing some kind of special clothing in a sexual situation and everything in between. And again, it was as it had been in college: he was somewhere in the middle. Both with his sexual orientation and with the cross-dressing question, he felt he was closer to the norm for his birth sex; he found certain men attractive but tended toward dating women, and while he didn't think he really cared to dress like a woman, he found he wanted to explore fabric and color, maybe try some 80's style men's make-up when he went out clubbing or to a concert.

He pulled a few shirts from his closet that he rarely wore due to the colors and decided that he'd wear them. First up was a dark shirt with pastel on the inside of the collar, then he'd go for the purple button-down with long sleeves. He'd purchased the shirt when the color had appealed to him, and looking at it, the purple gave him a feeling of openness and possibility.

After a few weeks of interspersing his normal wardrobe with the others, Tim found he was enjoying the freedom he felt in allowing himself to wear 'girly' colors. He decided it was time to go further in this exploration, and he went online and ordered a half-dozen self-help books, two he could read digitally and the rest to be delivered. He spent the afternoon immersed in his reading and emerged from the concepts and ideas of non-traditional gender identities with his mind awash in possibilities. He needed to clear his head and did a quick search online to make sure the gay club he used to go to was still open. The last few relationships he'd had with men had suffered due to the level of secrecy he'd insisted on, and he'd given up going to the club after the last guy had broken up with him, sadly citing Tim's non-acceptance of himself. Treating himself to dinner and dancing solo to the pounding eighties music, he finally came home and slept, exhausted mentally, emotionally, and physically.

~~~NCIS~~~

A/N This story is now complete. It is about Tim's gender identity, but I promise I don't make him go OOC much. I love the character too much to do that. This is about his inward journey, and he finds love with Gibbs along the way. A lot of readers seem freaked out by this idea, but I hope you'll give it a chance. Go outside your comfort zone of the idea of two genders, and if you like romantic, sexy McGibbs, you won't be disappointed. Let me know what you think.