Author's Note: I know it's been quite a while since I last posted. I just keep tripping over real life and writer's block - and neither is getting much better! This chapter is short and owes a lot to William Shakespeare. Thanks for reading!

They weren't his usual silk pajamas, but Ducky stripped down to his t-shirt and found a pair of Jethro's sweatpants. And although it was late, he couldn't fall asleep, so he was pleased to find some fairly interesting books on the bedside table. The man from Stillwater was deep, he realized not for the first time as he looked through the reading material: Orwell, Dickens, Le Carre, even Shakespeare – though that really didn't surprise him. Jethro was a modern day Henry walking among his subjects, always ascertaining the general mood of his troops. Ducky picked up the volume to find that it was Henry IV, Part One and Two. He opened to the first page and found himself reading aloud:

"So shaken as we are, so wan with care, find we a time for frighted peace to pant, and breathe short-winded accents of new broils to be commenced in strands afar remote."

He let the book fall to his chest. New broils, he thought, always a new broil. If only there were time for peace, however frighted, to simply rest and gather one's strength. He hoped that Jethro was resting now, but he knew that the next weeks would be anything but restful.

Reaching back over to the bedside table, he found another play, Henry V, the next in the series. He remembered a passage from his days at prep school, and his fingers quickly leafed through the pages until he found it, again reading aloud, enjoying the taste and feel of Shakespeare's words on his tongue:

"I think the king is but a man as I am. The violet smells to him as it doth to me. The element shows to him as it doth to me. All his senses have but human conditions. His ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but a man, and though his affections are higher mounted than ours, yet when they stoop, they stoop with the like wing. Therefore, when he sees reason of fears as we do, his fears, out of doubt, be of the same relish as ours are. Yet, in reason, no man should possess him with any appearance of fear, lest he, by showing it, should dishearten his army."

Ducky sighed and wondered if the rest of the team knew just how deep the waters really were.

~vVv~