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Tony had known that Gibbs and Vance didn’t see eye to eye, but he had never expected this. Of course, Gibbs had crossed a line. Still Tony didn’t consider killing a man who you knew had killed your wife and daughter and couldn’t be brought to justice to be a flagitious crime.
Unfortunately, Vance didn’t see it the same way. This was good for Tony. He’d been offered a new job as team lead of the MCRT, but he’d refused.
He couldn’t take a promotion if it mean Gibbs suffered a demotion. Gibbs called him a fool and told him to take it, but Tony wouldn’t. Needless to say Director Vance did not take this well.
Because Tony refused to take the team lead position at the cost of Gibbs’ demotion, the whole MCRT was disbanded again. McGee went back to cyber crimes. Gibbs actually took retirement instead of being sent to agent afloat. Tony didn’t want to deal with the politics anymore and instead decided to start his own private investigation service.
It galled him that Gibbs was punished for one thing he did wrong, but directors who did many worse things wrong were never punished. As such, he invited Gibbs to join him, but Gibbs declined not wanting to ruin the reputation of Tony’s business before it even started. Tony’s personal belief was that if people wouldn’t hire his company due to Gibbs working there he didn’t want them as customers anyway, but Gibbs wasn’t listening.
He appreciated that Gibbs was willing to take responsibility and admit that he was wrong and in Tony’s eyes that was enough to redeem the less than legal move Gibbs had made over twenty years ago. He wanted Gibbs to work with him. He knew Gibbs had skills that would be useful in his investigations, but he wouldn’t force Gibbs to work with him if he didn’t want to. Tony knew his business still had to prove it’s worth and he hoped that Gibbs would be more open to joining him once it was established.
A few friends tossed some investigations his way from police or other federal agencies and Tony went to work on them. It was easy to prove that he had the skills and soon, he was awash in police and federal government cases to do. More cases came in than he could reasonably handle on his own, but he didn’t want to make the mistake of growing too fast and was being very picky about who he hired to help out.
Abby was his first hire and she eagerly joined him to help ease the workload. She hadn’t liked the way Vance treated Gibbs in the first place and had been happy to be able to work somewhere with her family. Gibbs didn’t work the cases with them, but he regularly showed up with lunch and Abby was happy to regularly see her two favorite guys again.
Ziva had been forced to join another team, but none of them were as lenient as Gibbs had been and she was soon sent back to Israel. McGee though continued to work in cyber crimes, but he was growing more and more discontent. He liked the geeks, but he missed his team, especially after Abby left.
He didn’t want to beg Tony for a job, but he couldn’t imagine staying at NCIS much longer. Things had only gotten worse after the MCRT disbanded. McGee usually kept his head down and didn’t let politics bother him, but even he couldn’t believe what Vance was doing.
Vance had been told to clean house and he seemed to be taking that to the extreme. All the joy that he’d had when working at NCIS originally had been completely sucked out of the job. When he explained his problem with approaching Tony to Abby, but his desperate need to leave NCIS, she called him an idiot and told him to just ask Tony.
McGee waffled about it for a while longer still, reading about how well Tony’s business was doing. Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore and sent Tony an email asking if there was any room for him at his private eye office. Tony’s response shocked McGee.
“Of course,” it read like all Tony had been waiting for was for him to ask.
McGee turned in his resignation immediately. That was something he realized after working without Tony for a while, Tony actually tried to grow his skills. In cyber crimes, most of his skills stagnated and he hated it.
With McGee joining the private eye agency Tony had setup, Abby thought everything was perfect. They were still helping solve crimes. Many police stations reached out to Tony to go over their cold cases that they didn’t have time to go through.
He had a special rate for police and government investigations. He cared more about getting resolutions for the victims than for the money. He took on personal investigations as well, which more than covered the lower rate for police and government.
Gibbs wasn’t the bastard that he’d been when at NCIS. They got to see a happy Gibbs, which took a bit of getting used to for McGee, but he liked the change. It really did feel like a family.
Tony still hated the way Vance dealt with the little matter of Gibbs murdering Hernandez. He knew Vance had done worse in his past, but he wasn’t going to let it get him down. In reality, what he had now was more than he had ever had at NCIS and he loved it.