Sorry that I haven't updated in four years but I was in college. At least I have a deep craving for closure in my life, even on little stories that I started seven years ago. For everyone who stuck it out, you have my endless gratitude, and for any newcomers, also my endless gratitude.

Chapter Thirteen: Collared

"Boss?" Tony called, face twisted in panic and fingers laced through the chain link fence as Abby began to call an ambulance. His head and chest throbbed, but Gibbs still lay quiet on the cold concrete floor. "Boss?!"

The team could not get into the evidence locker to assist either of their teammates.

Ziva crouched, ears flat, and tried to look into Timothy's eyes. "Tim," she coaxed, holding in check the desperation threatening to ruin her soothing tone. "Tim, can you hear me? You need to get to Gibbs and help him. Tim? Tim!"

Timothy shuddered and began to sit up, but his body was wracked with pain. From head to toe, he ached and throbbed from the past several days of constant motion without any food or sleep. His cheeks were sunken and skin pale and drawn. The white of his fur appeared dingy with dust and debris previously hidden by the dark pigmentation. Without the insanity of the power driving him, Timothy could find no energy reserve left to master his overwhelmed body.

"Ziva," he choked out, propped up on one elbow and head hanging. "I-I can't. Everything hurts. Oh, God, I can barely- move- can't breathe."

The weighty rope of her thick tail thrashed with frustration, whipping the concrete floor. "Look behind you, McGee! Gibbs needs immediate medical attention. He needs you now." Ziva continued to guide Timothy as Abby and Tony dug through the auto supplies on the other side of the garage, frantic and desperate for anything that could break into the fenced area.

Sick to his stomach, Timothy glanced over his shoulder. Gibbs looked waxen under the red light, and the young agent bit back a gasp of despair.

C'mon, Tim, they need you now, Timothy cajoled himself, beginning an army crawl towards his boss's body. Every fiber of every muscle in him screamed in protest, and he ground his teeth at the fiery pain lancing through him. It took a several long heartbeats, but soon Timothy was crouched over Gibbs.

"Boss?" Timothy gasped. His vision swam in exhaustion. "Boss, are you awake?" Gibbs' skin was ash white, but his eyes flickered under their lids. He cracked half a smirk, eyes opening just enough to meet his fallen agent's searching gaze.

"McGee," Gibbs said with a weak chuckle, the gray tail beside him managing to give half of a single, happy wag. "You return from the land of the dead."

"Yeah, Boss, you look like you took a little trip there yourself." Twisted with bittersweet pain, Timothy's real smile dared to surface for the first time in days. Abby and Tony had found chain cutters and were opening the door. An alarm began to scream as the security system recognized the locks being broken. "An ambulance will be here soon. Just hold on a little bit." The agent put a hand on Gibbs' wrist to reassure him. At that, Timothy's upper body began to shake until he failed all at once to hold himself off the ground.

Exhaustion pulled at the edges of his vision, and time seemed to fade away, as did the weight of his body and the presence of his aches and wounds. The ground was so comfortable, why were these paramedics moving him? Timothy protested through his deadened haze, trying to push them towards where he imagined Gibbs lying. "Help Gibbs," he said, teeth bared in irritation. "He needs help."

Time then faded out in its entirety, leaving Timothy dead to the world.

When the young agent woke up, he blinked a few times against the blinding lights before screwing his eyes shut against their bright, jarring presence. A hospital blanket clung to him, uncomfortably warm. He tried to move it, but his reaching hand stopped short, handcuffed to the bed railing. His surroundings swelling into his awareness at their own unhurried pace, Timothy saw a bag of fluids attached by needle to his arm and a guard outside his door. The room glowed too bright, every white surface reflecting the sickly fluorescent shine from above, and he had no idea what time it was.

A bevy of unpleasant sensations insisted upon making themselves known, diminishing Timothy's ability to reconstruct the past and situate himself physically or mentally. The details escaped him, but a sense of deep unease and anxiety pervaded, all thought compromised by the dizzying pain of hunger, thirst, and wounds.

The door swung open, and Timothy squinted at the figure entering his room. Ziva, armed with a cup of water, paused by the entrance to take stock of her friend's current state, tail atwitch with tension. The guard must have let her know their captive agent had awoken while she waited nearby.

"Ziva," Timothy said with a stutter, eyebrows knitted with one white ear flicking back in apprehension. It was more a statement than a question.

She seemed to deflate a bit, having given herself mental preparation for another battle in the worst-case-scenario that a delusion rage still plagued her friend. "Yes, Tim, it is me, Ziva." She pulled a chair from the corner and sat at his bedside. Timothy, after a weak shuffle into an upright position, stared hard at his hands in his lap. Ziva offered the cup. "I imagine you are thirsty?"

Timothy's eyes lit up at that, forgetting at once his incomprehensible swirl of confusing memories as he nodded and reached with his untethered hand. Ziva met him halfway, tilting it so that the straw spun towards his face. Observing with an impassive distance in her eyes, Ziva watched as he drained the offered water, coughing as it wet his ragged throat with an icy touch.

Head spinning still, Timothy laid his hand down to rest the empty cup in his lap. Ziva plucked it, unobtrusive to his reverie, and refilled it twice before he was satiated. However, it was enough to wake her fellow agent. She noticed his eyes brightening, darting about the landscape of his memories as panic filled his face.

"Boss, is he-"

"Gibbs is stable," Ziva said, her practiced calm a soothing anchor, far from the cold, impersonal ring that Timothy had first heard in it so long ago upon their initial meeting. "Though they imagine he will be staying at least a few days longer than his last visit. Tony has a concussion and fourteen stitches. You have four, as well as a diagnosis of extreme dehydration and sleep deprivation." Timothy stared at the mentioned wound on the arm of his bound hand, struck wordless as deep confusion swam in his eyes again. Ziva hesitated, attempting to interpret the agent's intermittent lucidity.

"I'm- I went home from work but… But I was in the evidence locker?" Timothy flashed her a fearful look, glancing away just as quickly, panic bubbling up in his throat and squeezing his chest. "Someone attacked Abby... and Gibbs... I don't- I don't remember where or what… Ziva, why do I feel like- Why do I feel like I remember attacking Abby? Or Gibbs?" He looked to her again while mustering the confidence to maintain eye contact. Ziva met him with a level stare but turned away after a moment, unable to find the words that he needed. Her technical navigation of English lacked the fluidity to deliver such news in the delicate fashion she felt it required.

"McGee, it is because… it is true." Ziva could not bring herself to look straight at the agent's devastated expression, but she could see enough of it in her peripheral. "You have not been yourself for several days. You seem to remember small pieces, yes?"

Timothy gave a numb nod, his breathing growing deeper and faster with each passing moment. His fists gripped the blankets, body trembling with horror. "Yes, I-I remember." A hand of revulsion and despair seemed to clutch around his throat, and he fought for air.

"I do not believe that there was anything you could have done, Timothy," Ziva said as he dropped his head and turned away to hide his eyes welling up with tears. "And there is still work to be done. The Director is still missing."

Timothy glanced up, allowing a sense of purpose and mission to chase away his storm of fear for the time being. "Director Shepard? She was like me- I-I don't think I remember… "

"She disappeared after shooting Gibbs, the same night that you- that you came to Abby's lab."

"Jesus Christ," Timothy said in a mutter to himself, unable to shake the flashes of memory that revealed to him his own assault on his boss. He could recall a vague shape of the sling Gibbs had been wearing, as well as the way his knife had entered his boss's shoulder and the way he had kneeled on the broken appendage. He writhed away from Ziva, struck with nausea, clapping a hand over his mouth. Ziva leapt to her feet, but Timothy waved her back down with his cuffed hand. He fought down the urge to retch, empty stomach churning.

"Are you okay?" Ziva prodded, ears straining forward, still at the ready to help and reluctant to return to her seat should he need something.

"I'm-I'm fine," Timothy said in the least convincing tone possible, shaking and struggling to breathe easy. "I just- remembered some stuff. And my stomach hurts pretty bad. I guess I haven't been, uh, eating for a while." Before Ziva could protest, Timothy rolled on, desperate to fill in the gaps from his delusional spiral. "We have no idea where the Director is?"

Ziva shook her head. "Not a sign of her. But we were hoping that maybe you could..." She glanced up, cautious but hopeful imploring in her eyes.

Timothy was beset by a shivering that seemed to spring up on its own accord, but he kept his eyes steely, his tail curled at his side beginning to bristle. "I can try to find her. I can help, I think." But he glanced away once more, unable to uphold the front. "I might need a little- a little time first. Before I can try to find… whoever is doing this."

"Of course," Ziva said with a sympathetic nod. "You need some time to heal."

Ziva meant it in the physical sense, since Timothy had been starving and moving nonstop for days, but Timothy knew there was more to it than that. He feared recalling the one who had forced their way into his head, let alone tracking them down in person. He would have to work backwards through his own terrible memories if he wanted any chance of identifying his attacker, and Timothy knew that doing that would hurt him more than his endless hours of deranged action had.

Once Ziva left, Timothy entered a fitful, shallow sleep, waking in the late morning to eat. Despite his hunger, the agent found his stomach too tender from days of starvation to eat very much in one sitting. Instead, sleeping on and off, Timothy ate bit by bit between catching up on rest. By the next evening, Timothy found himself restless and comparatively lucid when Tony came to his door.

Pushing the door open, Tony stood in the threshold and let his hand rest on the knob. Timothy found his expression inscrutable.

"McGee," the senior agent said. The silence stretched, and Timothy felt a ball of lead in his gut as he realized the emotion painting his fellow agent's face.

"Tony," Timothy responded. After another painful, long moment, Tony stepped into the room and closed the door. However, he came no closer. The wound near his eyes was livid red, made vibrant by contrast with the black closures that had been applied to it.

"David says you have a call on where Director Shepard might be." Tony held himself light on his feet, at ease even, having long practiced how to control his body language to say what he wanted it to say to a suspect. However, Timothy knew him well enough to not need the other agent's arms to be crossed or have a hand resting on his holster. It was all too evident in his eyes what Tony actually wished to express.

"I think I can help," Timothy said, attempting to keep a level tone, but he felt Tony's rage to be well-placed in fact. It was difficult not to blame himself for the events that had transpired even if he had the conscious knowledge that this had all been beyond his control. Timothy's voice trembled, and Tony's mask of fury cracked, providing a glimpse into the despair and fear that he had been trying to master.

The slice of genuine emotion disappeared as Tony took a deep breath. "You're likely to be suspended," he said with a matter-of-fact nod. He ignored Timothy's flinch. "But I think we need you for this investigation. The Director is our priority at this moment. So, you'll get your personal effects in a minute and be free to go once your doc clears you."

Digging in his pocket, Tony revealed a small black device on a flat tether that Timothy recognized at once. "Got you a nice anklet." He tossed it onto the bed. "Don't go banging that thing up. It was expensive, that nice kind that you can't cut off." The senior agent turned on a dime, pulling the door closed behind him.

"Tony, wait!" Timothy called. Almost out the door, the other agent gave just a pause, one hand on the knob, but remained facing away. Timothy felt a clawing need to say something, anything, before he let his friend walk away with such hatred in his eyes. "Tony. I promise you, we'll find the person who did this to us. To me. To the Director. To Abby and Gibbs. I don't know what else to say, except that… you can trust me now. I-I promise you, Tony, that wasn't me."

Tempted to leave without a word, Tony realized his hands were shaking. He wanted to be mad at Timothy. He had seen what the young agent was capable of, even if his attacks had not been his intention. The moment hung between them, swathed in dense silence.

The senior agent looked over his shoulder as all the tension left his body at once, his shoulders slumping and tail limp. Timothy blinked in surprise at the distinct fatigue in his eyes.

"I know I can trust you now, Tim," Tony said, almost at a whisper. Timothy leaned forward as Tony drew him in with his confidential tone, allowing for just a moment his real fear and bitterness to surface. "I know, because I can't do this without you." He turned away. "But I know that was really you, just a part of you that I didn't know about. It helps, at least, that neither did you."

With that, the senior agent left to make way for the guard handing Timothy his things and unlocking his handcuffs. As Timothy slipped the tracking device around his ankle and clicked the strap into place, he could see Tony striding away with smile, ears, and tail perky in an easy imitation of confidence. Timothy's doctor would stop by later in the evening and advise him to wait at least another two days before leaving. Timothy, however, knew to ask to be cleared as soon as possible and would leave first thing in the morning.

There was much work to be done.

To quote Ron Popeil: "But wait, there's more!" At least, eventually. And that's because, to quote Big Boss: "It's not over yet!" I'm sure that it won't take four years again, though. R&R, honorable readers, and thanks for stopping by.