A/N: This is my first attempt at a Dark Angel/NCIS crossover fan-piece, so (although I don't think it needs saying, necessarily) I would appreciate if flames were kept to a minimum.

…There is a specific universe that this fits…

Special Agent Anthony DiNozzo donated his sperm in 1991; according to several sources that say Tony was born in 1971, he would have been twenty at the time. We all remember the episode where the Sperm Bank contacts him and he discovers that no one wanted his sperm. What if, by sheer chance, someone had really stolen it and created an exact clone? In this piece, that clone is Logan Cale. He is seventeen years younger than Tony, but exactly the same in appearance. This being said, in this DA Universe, the pulse did not occur, but we are in present-day Dark Angel. Therefore...Welcome to 2019, where Tony is forty-eight; Ziva is thirty-seven; McGee is forty-two; Abby would probably be somewhere in her thirties and Gibbs would most likely be near his sixties (which is difficult for me to imagine..).

…This being said…

Just keep all of that in mind as you read. Things will be disclosed throughout the fic.

…I could not have…

Done any of this without my beta, surferdude8225. ::smiles:: Thanksss!

…Now…

For our feature presentation…

Disclaimer: I do not own any characters of the Dark Angel or NCIS fandoms. They are the creations of their writers, producers, and directors. I also do not own Michael Weatherly or Jensen Ackles, which makes me very sad. I wish I owned a Joshua, but…Alas…I don't.

The elevator dinged and out stepped Ziva and McGee, laughing and apparently very jolly for such an early hour at the office. Tony watched them enviously as he wrote notes about their current case in a notebook. "Good morning," he greeted, eyeing both of the other agents and then returning to his task.

"Same to you, Tony," Ziva said with a smile. "McGee was just telling me about how Jethro—"

He held up a hand. "Did he do something disgusting? Dogs tend to do some pretty disgusting things, so if he did something that would qualify as disgusting, please refrain." McGee just quirked an eyebrow and carried his laptop bag to his desk and sat down. "Oh, so I take it you've got a dog with no manners?" The younger agent shrugged. "Well, you know what they say, Old McDonald: pets really are like their owners." Tony winked at Ziva and went back to reading through his notes.

"Tony, do you want to know what happened or not?" McGee asked, frustrated. "Or are you going to insist on being a child, as you always do?"

The Senior Field Agent set down his papers, sending a mockingly huffy glare at his teammates. "I do not always act like a child."

Ziva bit her lip, and then with twinkling eyes said, "Well, McGee, he does have a point…he has been rather grown-up-like lately." Tony grinned appreciatively. "Now we just need to make it a regularity." And, just like that, his face fell again.

"What's with you and your double-sided comments lately, Zee-vah?" he pouted, standing and sauntering over to the woman's desk. "Seems as though you're getting a bit careless with them."

"I am not getting careless with them," she snapped. "You are just being overly sensitive." To McGee, she muttered, "Must not be getting any 'action' right now." The techno-geek just smiled cheekily and typed on his keyboard as though he'd heard nothing.

Tony just shook his head and went back to his desk. He would deal with her later. His forty-eight-year-old common sense (hidden from public view for at least two-thirds of his life) told him that there were more important things to worry about.

"Logan…Max…gettin' busy!" Joshua panted under his breath. "Logan…Max…gettin' busy!" He was on the scent and knew it led to one person: Logan Cale, ex-journalist as well as ex-Eyes Only. Or, at least, the one who shared DNA with Logan. The Dog-Man knew he needed to find the guy immediately, or all hell was going to break loose. Well, not Logan, necessarily. Logan had said the man Joshua was supposed to look for would look like Logan, but wouldn't actually be him. In fact, the scent would lead the transgenic to a man who was older than Logan was, but who was vital to their cause.

Joshua came to a dead point in front of a building with a sign out front that read 'NCIS'. Below it was the breakdown of the acronym: Naval Criminal Investigative Service. He glanced between the sign and the door several times, smelling the air. "Logan."

He entered the main doors with his head down and asked the receptionist to page the name on a slip of paper he pulled from his pocket. She nodded, eyeballing him warily, and punched in the number of the man in question. "Special Agent DiNozzo, there is a man downstairs to see you. Shall I have him escorted up?"

The transgenic sensed he was being watched and looked up to see a red light and a lens trained on him. Joshua stared at it, remembering the video cameras from the news stations at JamPony during the time the Transgenics held the Ordinaries hostage. Since that time, he had been travelling on foot through woods and along highways, making his way to Virginia. It had, so far, taken him about six months. He was tired, hungry, and without any money to buy food or rent a hotel room. He had been attacked by a mountain lion in Kansas and a coyote in Indiana, but had fought both of them off successfully. The truth was, Joshua was just too loyal to Max and knew that since she needed him, he needed to follow through on his promise. He was going to find this man.

A security guard approached him and led him through a box that had red and green lights. The man must have expected it to flash red, but when it didn't, he kept walking, leading Joshua to a gilded elevator. From there, they went to the second floor, and then down an orange-painted hallway. Joshua kept his head down, but his eyes were always moving; he saw a woman whose back was facing him, and then two men across from her who were turned toward him. The one farthest to the woman had cups covering his ears, with a band around his head, and wasn't paying attention. When Joshua saw the man closest to her, he knew he was in the right place.

"Joshua," the Dog-Man barked, holding out his paw-hand proudly and lowering his hood. "Max is my friend."

The other man stood and took his clawed hand gingerly, his face showing traces of fear but his eyes alluding to a compassion deeper within. "Special Agent Anthony DiNozzo…how may I help you, Joshua?" he introduced himself, releasing Joshua's paw and leaning on the desk in front of him. "Or is it Max that needs helping?"

"Joshua and Max…soldiers."

"What happened to a soldier?" a woman from across the bullpen called and crossed over, as if supplying backup. "I am Special Agent Ziva Davíd, Agent DiNozzo's partner."

Joshua sighed, looking between the two. "Max need help." In broken syllables, he explained the situation in full, and when he ended, the two NCIS agents were staring at him in disbelief. "Joshua…Max…soldiers."

"I think…" Tony began, glancing at Ziva, "…that this is something only the FBI can handle. I can get an agent if you—"

"No!" Joshua growled. "Has to be you."

The other man shook his head and Ziva placed a gentle hand on Joshua's arm. "Joshua," she murmured, "what happened to you?"

"Nothing."

She took a deep breath. "I know that Halloween is coming up, but if this is some sort of prank—"

Joshua broke into a grin. "Tricks and treats!" He clapped, and then barked a few times, before jumping up and down. "I can be with the upstairs people instead of the downstairs people!"

Tony squeezed the bridge of his nose. "Look, Joshua; is your friend in trouble?"

"Bar code on neck. X-5. We all in trouble."

The two agents looked at each other incredulously. "I really don't understand," Tony murmured, taking a seat. The man with the cups on his ears looked up, spotted Joshua, and hastily stood, removing the cups from his head.

Approaching the three, the man pointed at Joshua and gasped softly. "You're…you're one of them." Joshua tensed slightly out of fear. "You're a transgenic." The Dog-Man nodded meekly. "Hi, I'm Special Agent McGee," he said, and then declared to the others, "We gotta get him to Abby."

"What?" Tony asked. "Why?"

"Because first of all, we need to hide him. If he's here and asking for help, he's obviously not a danger to us, but he is in danger himself," the other man directed. "Second of all, Abby and I were just talking about the transgenic scare last night. She'll know what to do about him. But make sure that Gibbs and Vance don't see him, okay?"

The other two agents gave him a bewildered nod and Joshua lifted his hood again. The four made their way to the stairs (in order to avoid whoever this Gibbs person was, McGee had explained) and into a laboratory. Joshua was instantly on edge until he saw a girl in dark hair, clothes, and makeup run out.

"Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh," she squealed. "Timmy! You brought me one!"

McGee rolled his eyes. "No, Abby, he needs help. I only heard the last part of his explanation but he needs help. That's all I know." The woman's jaw dropped and she sat down on a stool. Joshua cast Tony a look that told him to stay, but the other two agents filed out as he began his story. When he was finished, Abby got up, crossed over to Joshua, and hugged him, her eyes wet.

"Joshua, I'm so sorry. People are idiots."

The transgenic grinned. "You sound like Max. Idiots."

Because that's what the world was made of. Complete, stark-raving-mad idiots.

"Do you think he found him?" Max whispered, squeezing Logan's latex-encased hand. "Do you think…he's…do you think he's okay? You don't think he got whacked, do you?"

Logan nodded. "You know Joshua. He's a dog. He knows how to follow a scent trail, Max, and if you remember, he found me just by smelling." The transgenic girl nodded. "Therefore, I think you should relax, have some wine, and then wash your glass so I don't die." They shared a laugh, but it was tense and almost forced. Besides, all of his wine was back at his apartment, probably smashed or shot by now.

Max shrugged and whispered, "I wish I could see him and know it was all alright. What if the guy doesn't believe him? He's probably not going to drop his spy gig and travel with a transgenic all the way to Seattle, the dead city…"

"Remember, Max," Logan said gently, "all of America's basically dead." Washington D.C. was pretty much the only part that wasn't, and while he knew it, and she knew it, they both knew that she was also on the top of the America's Most Wanted list in D.C., so to get a federal agent's help for her was going to take finesse. "Trust in Joshua. His common sense may be off sometimes, but if I know him as well as I think I do, he'll be alright."

He raised a good point, but the truth of the entire situation still hung over their heads like a heavy, putrid smoke. The lives of the transgenics in the United States were running on stolen time. Eventually, it would run out, and when it did, they needed the public and the government to be on their side for once.

Mole stuck his head in from the main room of their underground headquarters. "Are you two done playing hanky-panky? Or do our lives have to be put on hold again?" Max clenched her jaw and let go of Logan's hand, but to the man in question it felt as though she were throwing it. "Good! Now, get your asses in here and let's fix the world, shall we?"

The couple sighed. Would it ever be fixed, or were they just wasting whatever valuable time they had left?

"Okay, so, would it bother you if I drew blood?" Abby babbled, flitting from station to station in her lab. "I mean, it's not necessary, but if I'm going to help I need to know exactly what I'm dealing with."

Joshua shrugged. "Yeah." He hated getting his blood drawn, and while he really wanted Max to be proud of him, he simply didn't want to be stuck with anymore needles. He'd saved Logan before. This wasn't any different. He pulled his arm away at the last minute. "I trust you."

"I know." Abby's face was that of pure innocence, her eyes shining with unconditional love and hope pouring from her black smile. "I promise; I'm going to help you." The Dog-Man watched her and then decided she was alright, allowing her to once again have access to her arm. "I love dogs, you know. I saved one once and named him Jethro. He was accused of murdering a Petty Officer, but I knew he hadn't done it. I almost lost my job because I wouldn't let them take Jethro away from me. I wanted to prove his innocence first…" she murmured as she tied a tourniquet around his upper arm.

Transgenic eyes met light olive Ordinary ones. "What happened?"

The Goth smiled as she held his gaze, picking up a syringe. "Well, here I am. I wasn't fired, thank goodness, and I proved that Jethro hadn't done it." As she finished drawing his blood, she pressed a square of gauze into the crease of his elbow. "And now, Jethro is safe and sound in McGee's apartment."

Joshua stared at her as she pranced over to an odd-looking machine and prepared slides of his blood. "What are you doing?" he asked, following her.

"I'm going to run a series of tests on your blood and then locate the different DNA strands in your system," she explained while she worked. After slipping the slides into the machine, she fluttered over to the counter to shed her gloves.

"Abby?" Joshua said as a bark and she turned around to grin at him. "Can you do that…with all DNA?"

Abby nodded. "Yep, pretty much. As long as I've got something to test!" He reached inside his pants' pocket and pulled out a small plastic bag. "What's that?"

"Hair…Logan's." He held the bag out to her. "Do you have…Tony DNA?"

She pressed her lips together and shook her head. "No…" Joshua's hopeful stare drooped considerably but she broke out in a grin. "But, I can get some!"

"I can't believe this." Tony bashed his head against his desk for the eighth time in a row. For the past half hour, he had sat there, saying the same sentence and then hitting his head. "It's just too much to believe." Sitting up, he groaned, "Ziva, McGee; can you honestly believe this is happening?"

Ziva stared at him in boredom. "That what is happening, exactly?" she asked. "That you have a clone? That the sperm bank actually sold your sperm? That there is such a thing in our world as a half-dog-half-human creature? What?"

"All of it," he wailed, and collapsed on his desktop. "There's a company named Manticore that creates creatures and transgenetic things that are apparently soldiers that work for the government to perform special ops and I, Anthony Daniel DiNozzo, Special Agent of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, didn't know about it. I, Anthony Daniel DiNozzo, who works on a daily basis with the Marines and Navy, didn't know about it. How can I even call myself an investigator when I don't know what the hell is going on in my own country?"

Ziva crossed the bullpen and softly touched his back. "There has to be a reason for this. Besides, I am interested in knowing what they possibly could have done with your DNA without telling you. Is that not some sort of human rights' violation?" She racked her brain for anything she could have read years ago in her study books for the Naturalization test.

"Apparently," Tony sneered, "once my sperm is sold, anything can be done with it. I guess when they called a few years ago and said that it was thrown out because no one wanted it…"

"If they wanted your DNA," McGee suggested from across the way, "there was a better way of getting it than telling you that no one wanted to use you as a prototype, when in fact, they did."

"Yeah, McGoogle?" Tony snapped. "Find one. I don't have time for this. There's a dog-man in the basement and, apparently, there's another one of me in Seattle who's paralyzed, but, after a freak transfusion with a transgenetic—"

Ziva gently corrected, "Transgenic…"

"—transgenic, can all of a sudden walk and is in love with this other transgenet—transgenic woman who's twenty freaking years old and climbs walls and fights crime." Out of nowhere, he stood and walked over to the window. "I'm just going to launch myself through the paned glass," he said through a daze. "It's all just a really bad nightmare and the moment I hit the ground, I'll wake up." He laughed in amazement.

His partners were at his side immediately, the former-Mossad agent easing him down into a chair that the computer nerd had rolled up behind him. "Sit. Relax. This is not a dream. This is happening. And you need to accept it."

"How can I?" Tony whined, folding over to prop himself up on his knees. He rocked back and forth gently, sure that he was going insane. "How can I accept this? What do they want from me?" He looked down and saw a pair of spiked, studded, knee-high boots and followed them with his eyes up to the beaming face of Abby. "Oh, no."

She shook her head, an understanding grin adorning her face. "Tony, it's just one little piece of hair, or maybe some spit." The Senior Field Agent stared up at her and said nothing, so she bent down, yanked out a piece of hair, and held out a cotton swab. "Come on, you do this for a living. Give Abby something to play with!"

Finally, Tony took the swab and ran it along the inside of his cheek, handing it back to her. She stowed it in a glass tube and pranced off. "Now, what was that about? Did it even happen? Oh, God, I'm going crazy!" As he looked between his two teammates, he felt the wait on his shoulders shift. "'What about Tony? He's lookin' forward to the hotel, I bet.' From The Shining. 1980. Good flick." He let out a sigh and stared out the window. "I can honestly tell both of you that if I were in any other place, I would want to go to a hotel. But do you know where I want to go now? Do you? Do you?"

Ziva shook her head but knelt before him. "Tony, we are going to figure all of this out, even if it means that we three have to go to Seattle."

"No. 'I don't want to go there, Mrs. Torrance.' I don't, and I won't," he insisted, and she brought her hands up to cradle his face. "What." It wasn't a question.

"You need to stop with the movie quotes and focus on what Joshua has told you." Ziva smiled reassuringly. "We are a team, Tony. What does a team do?"

Tony rolled his eyes and said almost begrudgingly, "A team works together."

"Good," she told him, squeezing his hand. "Let us go talk to Joshua and see what he has planned for us."

"So," Tony mumbled, rubbing his eyes with the bank of his palms, "you're saying that we have to take time off from work, fly to Seattle, go to this lovely Terminal City place, and save a bunch of science experiments from their gruesome end? It sounds like something you'd find on the SyFy network…" After a pregnant silence, he took a deep breath and looked up at Joshua. "Why did you come for me?"

Joshua's face lit up at being acknowledged and Abby scratched his head as she would a dog's. "You…Logan…Same hair."

"You came here because we look alike?" the Senior Field Agent groaned. "How is that even logical?"

The half-canine shook his head. "You…Logan…Same hair," he repeated.

Finally Abby spoke up. "Your DNA is exactly the same as Logan's," she blurted. At Tony's stunned expression, she elaborated, "I ran a test four times, as odd as that probably seem, since I've got all of these machines. But they just kind of, I don't know, backed up what I found."

"Lay it on me, Abs," Tony requested, resting his chin in his hands.

"Alright." Excitement sparkled in Abby's olive eyes and she held up a sheet of paper. "The test I ran was on the mitochondrial DNA. I extracted the DNA from the mitochondria found in the shaft of both hair samples and multiplied them by, like, a hundred. I've got a ton of this stuff now, and nothing to use it on!" Ziva gestured for Abby to continue. "Oh, right. So, then, I gave the DNA to Major Mass Spec and asked him to compare the two. And, voila! They are identical."

Tony slowly blinked at her several times before saying, "So somehow, in some sick way, this Logan Cale person is both my kid and myself? At the same time?"

Abby furrowed her eyebrows, her nose crinkling upward. "No, silly. He's you. He's all you. There isn't another set of chromosomes. It's just you." She looked rather pleased with herself as she hopped up onto a stool. "I love genetics. It's so incredibly, awesomely, genuinely, extremely amazing." Sipping on her Caf-Pow!, she motioned for Joshua to sit and he got down on all fours. "Anyway, Tony, you and Logan have the same DNA."

"Beat this bitch," Joshua ruffed sadly. "We will never beat this bitch…"

Everyone stared at him in confusion and he just looked up at Abby, who translated. "Apparently, this Manticore place made a virus and put it in this Max girl. It doesn't harm her, but it was targeted to the Logan guy's DNA, so if they so much as touch each other, Logan will die." She took another long sip on the straw and then added, "They're in love, too, so it makes it really difficult. Talk about Rule Number Twelve…That's gotta be wretched."

The transgenic nodded. "Bitch."

"Sounds like it, Joshua," Abby agreed, running her hand over his head.

Tony lifted his chin off of his hands and eyed Joshua carefully. "But how am I supposed to help, then? If Logan's DNA and my DNA are exactly the same, that just means that if that Max chick touches me, I die. I don't want to die."

Abby shrugged. "Guess I'm coming with you to Seattle, then, huh?"

Ziva looked at her. "Who says we are going?"

The Goth stared at the former-Israeli and huffed. "I don't get to go on any fun excursions! My life is boring! It's all about DNA and forensics and ballistics, right? Wrong! I'm stuck in this stupid lab all stinking day and all I want is a little freedom!" She stomped her foot childishly and Joshua nuzzled her leg, effectively calming down. "Besides, I'm one of the few people out here who knows enough about genetics to fix whatever's happening! I can make this right!"

McGee spoke up for the first time that meeting. "It would be pointless for me to go. I don't fight and I know more about computers than genetics...Biomedical Engineering only got me so far in college. Whatever information you need from me can be sent via cell phone." He looked between all of his colleagues. "I vote that I stay behind and the rest of you fly to Seattle."

Ziva shot him an odd look. "Why would I need to go?"

Joshua scanned her appearance. "Abby told me you fight," he said simply. "This is a fight."

She knew what he meant, and nodded. "Then I suppose I have to go." She looked at Tony. "Why fly, when we can drive? Joshua would never be able to board a plane, and besides that, even if he did, once he got there, he most likely would not step foot in an airport alive."

Tony sat in thought and then broke into a small, but scheming, smile. It was more of a smirk, but his team took it as a good sign. "Guess this means we're going on a road trip!"