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1.
Truth be told, this isn't the first time Tim's had this dream, though the setting is new. Usually it's more utilitarian, not these silver-lined walls, and the white floor swelling up like an enormous exotic mushroom into a sort of shell, or couch, maybe. The surface is satin-smooth to the touch, with a give like thick velvet, firm but plush, and warm as a hot-water bottle. Overhead, the ceiling's glow is soft, forgiving as moonlight.
The room is not of this world. And there's no door, no entryway. No hint as to how he got here, or how Abby got here. Tim's in the boxers and t-shirt he wore to bed; Abby is in one of her frilly antique nightgowns, the one with tiny multi-colored skulls embroidered on the cuffs.
She blinks at him. "McGee?"
To the left, the opaque silvery wall goes misty, like a windshield on a cold day. Blurry, shadowy shapes become visible behind it, grayish child-sized figures with overlarge heads, straight out of every late-night special on UFO sightings that Tim's ever seen.
Before either of them can speak, one of the figures gestures with inhumanly long fingers, and a compartment in the wall slides open, revealing an array of equipment. It's all earth-made, though not everything is familiar to Tim; his imagination is clearly working overtime. Small wonder; it's been a long few months, and fantasies are better than nothing.
Abby glances into the compartment, and her mouth splits open in a grin. "Oh, so it's one of those dreams," she says.
"Looks like," Tim replies, and Abby gladly opens her arms to him, the way she always does in these. She's warm and supple and smells like smoke, and musk, and...is that pepper?
Tim wrinkles his nose, trying not to sneeze. "My newest order from BPAL just came in," Abby whispers in his ear. "What do you think?" Then she nibbles, catching his lobe in her teeth, and Tim squirms and Abby laughs, rippling through her body in trembling, exciting waves.
It's not the first time he's had this dream, though when Tim's alarm clock blares him awake the next morning and he discovers he got his boxers half-off in his sleep, he has to admit it was one of the more memorable variations.
2.
The dream room is the same as the night before, silver walls, white floor. But tonight it's not Abby standing opposite Tim, but Ziva, her hair loose in a black cloud around her face, wearing a red t-shirt that falls just below her hips. Whether she's got anything on below that, Tim can't see. She doesn't have a bra on, anyway.
It's not the first time with Ziva, either—he'd wonder about himself if it were—but usually she's not looking at Tim so suspiciously. At least not that Tim recalls, though to be honest, he doesn't make a point of remembering the beginnings of these dreams. "McGee?" Ziva demands. "What is this? Where are we, what are we doing here?"
"We're dreaming," Tim explains. "Or, I'm dreaming—you're in my dream."
Ziva frowns. "Why am I in your dream?" She looks around. "And why would you dream about being in a—what is this, an insane asylum?"
"No," Tim tells her, "it's...um...it's an alien spaceship."
On cue, the wall fogs over, revealing the shapes of their otherworldly observers.
"Alien?" Ziva lifts one leg and kicks her bare heel hard against the translucent surface. Unsurprisingly, nothing happens; she doesn't leave a dent in the spaceship. There's hardly even a thud. "Who are they? What are they doing to us?" Cupping her hands around her face, she presses her nose to the wall, trying to see better through it. "Is this an interrogation? Do you have nightmares like this a lot, McGee?"
"Um, not that much...and no, it's not. A nightmare. Or an interrogation, exactly. The aliens, you see, they're studying us. Humans. Human...physiology. And we're their, um, research subjects."
"Why?" Ziva knocks her knuckles on the not-glass. Behind it, the aliens don't move, watching silently.
"Why what?"
"Why are they studying us?"
"Because—that's what aliens do. For fun. Or profit. I don't know, that's not important. What's important is that if we do what they want, they'll let us go."
Ziva, groping along the edges of the wall trying to find a seam, turns her head back toward him. "They'll let us go if we do what they want?"
"Those are the rules," Tim says.
"Hmm. What do they want?"
The aliens have excellent timing; as soon as she asks it, the one on the right gestures, and the compartment slides open again. Its supplies have been refreshed, and a couple things added, Tim sees, and feels himself blush.
Ziva leans over to get a look inside the compartment, then looks back at Tim. She takes in his red face, says, "I see," and smiles. It'd be sexy if it didn't remind him quite so much of Mr. Mulligan's Doberman Pinscher that lived down the street when he was growing up. Arthur had always wagged his stubby docked tail wildly whenever Tim walked by in the morning. Tim had begged his mother not to make him bologna sandwiches for lunch, but she never listened...
"So, this is the only way out of here?" Ziva asks, picking up one of the more exotic accessories from the compartment. The way her fingers curl around it, it's not the first time she's seen one like it.
Tim swallows, trying to wet his suddenly dry mouth. Just a dream, he tells himself, and crosses his fingers, hoping he won't wake up too soon. "I'm afraid so."
Ziva arches her eyebrows. "Not too afraid, I hope," she says, advancing on him. "Come here."
Her grip on his arms isn't as bruising as he expects, and her lips are softer and sweeter than he would have guessed. Her breasts under the t-shirt, though, those feel just like he thought they would, pressing against his chest. "You—you're okay with this?" Tim asks breathlessly. "You don't think it's perverted, or exploitive, or embarrassing, that I'm dreaming about you..."
"You are not the only one who dreams, McGee," Ziva says. "And I see no reason why I should be embarrassed by my own imagination, or yours. Besides, I've seen aliens like this before."
"You've been abducted by a UFO?"
"No, but Tony showed me a movie, The Watchers of Venus—it was rather different science fiction from your favorites, McGee. More nudity, less—what did you call it? Techno-twaddle?"
"Technobabble," and Tim is babbling himself—you would think he could pull off a fantasy seduction in his own dream, but those are the breaks for having a vividly realistic imagination, and Ziva's toned, strong body arching against his is pretty darn vivid indeed—"though that's only in some series, there's a few with real science—"
"I don't know if Tony's movie had any real science, but it was educational," Ziva says, and holds up the accessory she was playing with before. "Shall I show you?"
The next day, Tim can't quite bring himself to look Ziva in the eye; he feels his ears heat up whenever he tries. Still, the advantages of an active imagination are totally worth it.
3.
Tim goes to bed early that night, looking forward to his next nocturnal escapade, and is gratified to find himself in the silver and white room seemingly the moment after he sets his head on the pillow and closes his eyes.
That enthusiastic anticipation lasts until he turns around, and sees, standing before him—"Tony? What are you doing here?"
"Me? What are you doing here, Probie?" Tony demands, crossing his arms over his bare chest. He's wearing boxers and nothing else—midnight blue silk, rather than Tim's plain gray knit ones.
"I'm supposed to be here, this is my dream!" Tim cries, indignant. "But you're not! You're supposed to be—I don't know, Eileen Francisco, maybe."
"Eileen Francisco, in CT Operations? In your dreams, McGee!"
"Exactly! Or maybe Seven of Nine, or Summer Gleason—but definitely not you! Not in my dream!"
"Whoa, your dream? How do you know this isn't my dream?"
Tim stops mid-protest with his mouth open, gaping at his coworker suspiciously. "...If this is your dream, Tony, then what am I doing here?"
"You tell me! You're the one invading my nightmare—speaking of which, where are we? This place looks like a—"
The aliens behind the wall choose that moment to make their appearance. Tony squints at their foggy white shapes, then looks at Tim. "Never mind, this must be your dream after all, McGeek."
"Oh, and which one of us owns three copies of Close Encounters of the Third Kind on DVD, huh?"
"That's a classic!" Tony argues. "What was I supposed to do, wait years for the 30th anniversary edition to come out? Besides, do you see Teri Garr anywhere around here? Totally not my dream."
"Maybe it is mine," Tim grudgingly admits, not volunteering the information that this is a recurring fantasy of his. Dream-Tony is every bit as obnoxious as the genuine article, and this situation is stressful enough without giving him additional fodder. What was his subconscious thinking, putting Tony here?
"So what are we doing here?" Tony says, tapping his fingers on the translucent wall like a kid bothering the fish tank at the dentist's office. "Hey, you in there, what's the story? Hello? Bonjour? Aloha?" He makes a V with his fingers. "Live long and prosper?"
"And you call me the geek?" Tim mutters.
Behind the wall, the shadowy blurs of the aliens don't move, standing silent sentry as always. Tim's learned to tune them out (well, in all honesty he keeps forgetting they're there. He'd rather not think about what it says about his innate exhibitionist impulses that he's dreamed up an alien audience. And he'd really, really rather that Tony not think about it, either.)
"Tough crowd," Tony says, and sits down on the mushroom-couch-thing. It sinks under him, compressing like an expensive memory foam mattress, and Tony's eyes widen in surprise as he's cradled by the velvet-warm softness. "Huh," he remarks, stroking one hand idly over the swelling furniture as he overlooks the room. "You know, this reminds me of a film..."
Tim sighs. "Let me guess—The Watchers of Venus?"
"No, that's..." Tony sits up. "Wait, you've seen that? I had no idea, McPervert! Have you ever gotten hold of the sequel?"
"The sequel?"
"The Watchers of Uranus. I've looked, never been able to—hold on. What about this setting reminds you of cheesy '80s softcore porno?"
Beside the couch, the wall compartment slides open. Tony peeks inside. "...Ah. Never mind."
Tim's ears are burning again. "I'm...um..."
"Let me guess—these guys aren't going to let us go until we make good with this stuff." Tony grimaces at the alien observers, then peers up at him. "I don't know about you, Probie."
"What, me? This doesn't have anything to do with me!"
"Your dream, your debauched subconscious desires."
"It's not—I don't—"
"Though I guess it is my fault, too," Tony admits. "Working side by side with a guy as hot as me, no one can blame you for getting ideas."
"Ideas?" Tim splutters. "It's not like I fantasize about you, DiNozzo!"
Tony looks pointedly around the room. "And this is...?"
"It's just a dream! It's not literal, it's symbolic of—I don't know—frustration at work, that's probably it. I'm tired of you—uh—dominating me, so I'm, um, taking revenge..."
"Revenge? Who's going to be dominating who, here?"
"H-how should I know?" Tim stammers. "Neither of us have experience with, uh, this..."
"Neither?" Tony stretches, arching his back like a cat, muscles flexing. He's got far better upper-body tone than Tim does, without working out any more often. The bastard. "Speak for yourself, Probie."
Tim feels his eyeballs bulge in their sockets. "Tony, you—?"
"Three months as an Agent Afloat, how do you think we spend all that time at sea?"
"But women serve on aircraft carriers—"
"They do. But there's still Navy traditions to uphold. And if you want to fit in—which, as an Agent Afloat, you do, as much as you can..." Tony shrugs. "It's not so bad.
Tim tries to decide if the images flashing unbidden through his mind would be better labeled 'not so bad' or 'scarring for life'. A bit of both, perhaps. Also there's something decidedly improper about fantasizing (however involuntarily) when actually in a dream. Talk about redundancy. "So you know how to—to use. This equipment. And all."
Tony's look is pitying as he gets up from the couch-thing. "Oh, my little McVirgin, you didn't learn much at Johns Hopkins, did you."
"I'm not a—look, I don't know why you're here, but it's just a dream. If we try, we can wake up. I mean, I'll wake up, since you're not real anyway—"
"Funny, that. I sure feel real," Tony says. "Besides, you're apparently the one dreaming that I'm experienced, may I remind you."
"That's—I—you're—" Tim's taken a couple steps back without realizing it, and now his back is against the wall—the translucent wall with the aliens behind it; he can see them out of the corner of his eye. He's at a better angle to see Tony, approaching him with a look in his eyes that might be murder. Tim hopes it is. Sort of. "Tony, I didn't mean it about the dominating, and I'm sorry my subconscious is using you for some unknown reason—this is just a dream, it isn't my fantasy, I swear, I've never thought about you like that—"
"How do you know I haven't?" Tony asks. He's Tim's height; they're standing nose-to-nose, Tony's hazelish eyes locked with his, darker than Tim usually thinks of them as being.
"Th-this—you—"
"Tim," Tony says, "relax," and kisses him hard.
For all his protests, Tim would be lying if he said he'd never wondered about Tony's... amorous adventures. Not fantasized, just...mused, in the most abstract sense, on occasion—all those women, how much might he have learned from them?
Quite a lot, it turns out.
And it's not like it means anything; it's only a dream, after all, only in his head. However clearly Tim remembers it the next morning, it's not like anything really happened. His sheets are still clean, and the vague soreness—deep, but weirdly sort of pleasant, the way fatigue after a long workout can be pleasant—is just from sleeping on his mattress the wrong way.
He gets into the office before Tony that morning, and when Tony does arrive he's preoccupied, too distracted by some internet site or other to pay much attention to Tim. Which suits Tim fine. Because it was only a dream—a nightmare, really, definitely not an erotic fantasy, nothing erotic about little green men forcing you to have (mindblowing) sex with a male teammate. It's not something he wants to be reminded of.
Later, out in the field, Tim tells himself he's only testing his observation skills, judging the accuracy of his mental imagery, when he finds himself speculatively eying Tony's ass under his loose jeans, wondering how it compares to last night's view.
4.
The latest homicide case keeps Tim at NCIS until nearly midnight, and when he finally gets home he scarcely remembers falling into bed before he finds himself dreaming. Looking around the silver walls for the fourth night in a row, Tim considers the Jungian implications of the UFO imagery, and wonders if he ought to mention this to someone.
...No, better not say anything. It's bound to end with him lying on a couch in a psychiatrist's office, and Gibbs doesn't have much patience for patients, physical or mental. Still, Tim's seriously starting to wonder about his psychological health. "Hey, Palmer."
Jimmy Palmer turns around. "Agent McGee? What is this?"
That's it; he's swearing off coffee after eight P.M. "Dream," Tim tells him. "I'm dreaming."
"About...aliens?" Jimmy asks, as the extraterrestrial voyeurs appear on cue.
"Yes, I'm a nerd," Tim snaps.
Jimmy cringes. "I, um...I read Chariots of the Gods a dozen times when I was eleven," he confesses.
"Then you probably know more about them than I do."
"Not really," Jimmy says hastily. "Do they talk? Have they said anything to you?"
"They don't need to talk to me. They're my figments. Symbolic representations of subconscious desires. Or else something entirely different," Tim adds, because really, if Jimmy Palmer is one of his desires, then he needs to sit down and have a long talk with his subconscious.
"What are they there for, then?" Jimmy asks. "In your dream, what are the gray guys symbols of?"
Tim glances at the place on the wall where the compartment will open, and shakes his head. "Nothing much," he says firmly.
"And what am I a symbol of?" Jimmy sounds genuinely curious.
"I have no idea," Tim says, and sits down. Not on the inviting couch-thing, but against the wall, his back blocking the space where the compartment is. The silvery surface is a little colder than the floor, room temperature rather than skin temperature, and not as soft. He stares across the room at the watching aliens, defiantly puts his hand over his arm and pinches, hard. Then swallows a whimper. That hurt, more than dreams ought to. And he didn't wake up.
"I don't think that actually works," Jimmy ventures from his corner. "You have to practice to master lucid dreaming. Dr. Mallard was telling me the other day about this man he met in Tasmania, who could—"
"Palmer," Tim says, flattening his voice into his best Gibbs impression. Tony would have laughed at him, but Jimmy claps his mouth shut.
They sit quietly for a while, until Tim feels like his capillaries are going to burst in the vacuum of silence. How does Gibbs do it? "I'll wake up eventually, Palmer," he says.
"Yeah," Jimmy agrees. "Um, what do we do until then?"
Tim feels the wall behind him move, the panel bumping into his back with a denied click.
"What was that?" Jimmy asks.
"Nothing," Tim says. "Uh, do you know how to play Botticelli?"
Six rounds of Botticelli, fifteen rounds of Twenty Questions, and four rounds of I Spy later (where it's determined that the raised part of the floor between them may be a bed or a couch, but not a recliner, and certainly not a table, where the heck did he even get that?), Jimmy yawns and remarks, "Are you sure you don't know what they want?"
"What do you mean?"
"It's time for my alarm clock to ring," Jimmy says, "and we're still dreaming." He holds up his arm to show off his digital wristwatch. "See, it's past 5 already."
"You get up at 5 AM? And why are you wearing your watch, anyway?" It doesn't match Jimmy's green plaid pajamas. Or the general dream mien. Erotic fantasies usually aren't timed, in Tim's experience.
Not that this is an erotic fantasy he has any experience with.
—Not that there's anything erotic about it, either.
"Sometimes I forget to take my watch off before going to bed," Jimmy says. He looks over at the translucent wall. Blurry figures are still visible behind it, though they've moved around in the intervening hours, coming and going on enigmatic extraterrestrial errands. "You're sure they'll let us go, if we wait?"
"They don't need to let us go, I just need to wake up." Though Tim has no idea how long that will take. Time-sense in dreams can be distorted; he's had dreams that he would swear took days or weeks.
Virtual weeks in this empty room, with only the medical examiner's assistant for company—what did he ever do to his subconscious, anyway? Tim sighs and bites the bullet. "I know what they want," he says, stands up and moves away from the compartment.
Jimmy peers at the space nearsightedly—he apparently didn't wear his glasses to bed. Then his eyes go round as his head yanks back. "Is—is that—"
"Uh-huh."
"You mean—they want..." Jimmy looks around the room. "But there aren't any girls here?"
"No," Tim says, and waits.
After a moment, Jimmy's eyes expand to roughly the size of golf balls. "Oh."
"Palmer," Tim says, "I know this is...unusual."
Jimmy gulps. "I'm not really—that is, I haven't—"
Tim takes pity on his dream coworker. "It's okay. We don't have to do anything you don't want to do."
If Jimmy's eyes get any wider, his eyeballs going to pop right out of their sockets. On the other hand, if his face gets any redder, they might boil. "I—it's not—" he stammers, "—not that I—it's just a dream, right? A really crazy dream?"
"Right," Tim says, and takes a step forward, experimentally. Jimmy doesn't move, stiff as if his feet have been nailed to the floor. He's a bit shorter than Tony or Tim, and doesn't work out much, if you don't count lifting bodies. And even without his glasses he looks like a geek, at least as much as Tim does himself.
"So—it doesn't mean anything," Jimmy squeaks.
"Nope."
Jimmy gulps a deep breath, staying rooted. "And you don't mind? Because I didn't think you—Agent DiNozzo, maybe, but—"
"Jimmy," Tim says, "Relax," and his voice doesn't break until the last syllable. And by then he's too close, past the point of no return. He doesn't turn his head quite enough, so their noses bump, and his lips are too dry, and Jimmy steps on his toe. But it's not the worse kiss he's had by a long shot—college was pathetically educational on that front, at least—and Jimmy looks kind of breathless and rumpled after they break apart, and maybe he's not as smooth as Tony, but yeah, this isn't so bad.
It's so not bad, in fact, that Tim doesn't even mind that he sleeps through his alarm clock, for all that he gets to work twenty minutes late and has to endure Tony's snide and altogether too perceptive cracks about having too much fun in his dreams.
He doesn't think anything of it, though. Not until he drops by Abby's lab for an update on the reconstruction of the late Lieutenant Hamill's wiped hard-drive, and happens to find Ducky already there.
Tim doesn't know why he stops outside her office, just out of sight, when he hears the chief M.E.'s voice, unless it's lingering embarrassment about what he was doing to said M.E.'s assistant in his dreams this morning. Which is ridiculous; Ducky would probably be fascinated, and could tell him what the heck it meant, psychologically speaking, and besides it's not like a few dreams utterly beyond his conscious control are anything to be embarrassed about—
"I was wondering if he might have mentioned something to you," Ducky is saying.
"No, I haven't seen Jimmy today," Abby says. "What's wrong?"
"There's nothing exactly wrong," Ducky replies. "It's just that Mr. Palmer was atypically tardy this morning, and has since been distracted all day. Which is, in itself, not that atypical, but he has a certain look about him—I asked him if he had perhaps entered into another injudicious romantic tryst, but he denied it."
"Maybe because you called it injudicious," Abby remarks. "Or maybe he just was partying a bit too hard last night?"
"He did look a little unrested," Ducky says, "though he claimed he retired early."
"He could have had a bad dream," Abby suggests. "Some guys are ashamed to admit a nightmare kept them up."
"You may be right," Ducky says. "Just yesterday Tony mentioned that he'd had an unsettling dream, but when I asked him about it, he refused to elaborate."
"It must be the week for it," Abby says. "I had a weird one myself a few days ago—well, not really weird, I've had lots stranger. And it wasn't a nightmare, not at all. But what was weird was that the next day, Ziva told me she had the same dream—and I hadn't told her about mine yet, so she couldn't have been inspired by it. Totally wild coincidence."
"Interesting," Ducky remarks. "Of course, seeing as we all work in the same place, and spend as much time together as we do, it's not so surprising that we might cross paths in our dreams as well. As a matter of fact, some of the indigenous peoples of Australia have a—"
At which point Tim, stumbling backwards, bumps into Abby's lab table and starts some piece of equipment or other beeping in violated protest, interrupting the conversation.
While Abby makes her report to him, Tim anxiously studies her, but doesn't see any telltale awkwardness in how she looks at him, and Abby grins and teases him unabashedly, like always. Though right before he leaves, he asks, trying for casual and hoping that the tremor in his voice isn't as obvious as it sounds to him, "Hey, Abby, is that a new perfume?"
Abby beams at him. "You noticed! I just got it this week, today's my first time wearing it to work. You like it?"
"Sure...it's from, um..." Tim searches his memory for the name. "BTAL?"
"BPAL—right on! You know your scents, McGee," and she gives him a peck on the cheek as a reward.
The unlikely bouquet of smoke and musk and pepper as she leans in is exactly as he remembers. He bites his tongue before he asks Abby whether the new tattoo on her inner thigh is really in the shape of a shark tooth, or is it actually the Star Trek icon.
It doesn't prove anything, of course. Maybe he's misremembering the dream.
And that an Internet search shows that there were two '80s pornos called The Watchers of Venus and Uranus, all that means is that he shouldn't leave the TV on and tuned to the Playboy channel when he goes to bed. Not that he actually subscribes to the Playboy channel, but maybe his cable provider got his order confused with Tony's...
All circumstantial; none of it proves anything.
And that, when he musters up the courage to look Ziva in the eye for the first time since Tuesday, she meets his gaze and immediately looks away, with her lips quirking in what looks like a satisfied and all-too-familiar smile...that doesn't mean anything, either. Not any more than how he apparently can make Tony blush, just by staring at him.
"What are you looking at, McGeek?"
"Nothing, Tony."
And if, when he goes down to Autopsy with the rest of the team to hear Ducky's latest findings, Jimmy takes one look at him, squeaks like a rusty mattress spring and ducks into the freezer, that's just wild coincidence, like Abby says. It doesn't prove anything.
Still, that night, when the clock strikes midnight, Tim doesn't move from his typewriter, or bother to change into his pajamas, just puts a new, louder CD on the stereo and gets himself another cup of coffee. He's got a degree in computer programming; this is hardly the first time he's pulled an all-nighter. He has a manuscript due in a couple months anyway, and tomorrow's Saturday; he can afford to be a zombie for a day. And a night without dreams will do wonders for his mental health.
So he's still wide awake when a brilliant white light flashes from nowhere, blinding him, and when he opens his eyes...
5.
"Please," Tim begs. "You don't understand—the other nights, that wasn't like this. What I—they—we—what we did. That was a mistake, and I owe everyone big apologies, if I can actually get them out without someone dying of embarrassment, which is highly unlikely, but anyway—it's not the same."
Behind the translucency, the blurry alien forms are as stolid and unmoved as ever.
"I thought I was dreaming," Tim says, "so this is—it's not just—look, I know this seems like simply the next stage in your experiment, and it appears logical enough, by certain definitions of logic, which don't include earth logic, but then it hardly would, with you—but anyway, I might have been a willing if uninformed subject before, but it's not the same now. Everyone else, that's one thing, but this—you have to believe me, even if we both look like ordinary humans, this is totally, totally different..."
His appeal falls on deaf ears. If they even have ears. Slowly, mercilessly, one of the pale figures raises its long-fingered hand, and points to the open compartment, restocked from the night before.
Tim swallows so loudly that it echoes in the hollow pit his stomach has become, and turns back around.
Across from him, standing in the middle of the silver-walled room with his arms folded, tapping one foot, Leroy Jethro Gibbs lowers his brow and says, "You gonna explain what's going on here any time soon, McGee?"