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Published:
2020-11-04
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2005-08-12
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The successor

Summary:

Set after Twilight. Sooner or later Kate was going to have to be replaced, but that didn't mean Gibbs was going to like it. Gibbs POV

Chapter 1: Jethro Gibbs

Chapter Text

Title: The Successor
Author: Ceindreadh
Email: Ceindreadh@eircom.net
Website: n/a
Permission to archive: Yes
Fandom(s): NCIS
Genre (general, hetero or slash) Gen
Pairing/Characters: n/a
Rating: FRT 13
Summary: Post fic to Twilight. Life goes on.
Warnings: None
Disclaimer. I don't own the NCIS characters, I'm only borrowing them, and I promise to return them in minty fresh condition when I'm finished.

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It was six months later when she*walked into my life.

Six months after Special Agent Kate Todd had died in the line of duty. Hah, line of duty. She hadn't been killed 'in the line of duty'. She had been killed because she was my colleague, somebody I cared about. Her death hadn't been a result of her actions as an agent, it had been her proximity to *me* that had killed her.

She had been murdered plain and simple by a cold-blooded cowardly assassin named Ari. He hadn't even had the balls to kill her face to face. No, that bastard had shot her from a distance, giving her no chance whatsoever to defend herself, and every day I woke up and promised myself that he was going to pay.

But Ari had proved to be just as elusive as ever, and in the meantime, life went on. Director Morrow told me that we didn't have the resources for personal vendettas. Ari would remain on our wanted lists, but without any new information coming in, we had no way of finding him. So we went back to our jobs, back to solving murders, tracking down terrorists, but never the one we wanted.

It was two weeks after Kate's death...Kate's *murder* that the first replacement arrived. Not that anybody could ever take her place, but boy they tried. That first one was on some sort of investigative exchange program from Australia. She lasted about three weeks before transferring to another office. I'm not saying I was a total bastard to her, and I'm definitely not saying that she deserved any of the shit I threw at her. She was a good agent, a competent investigator, could shoot like Annie Oakley and more than hold her own in a fight. Heck, she even managed to keep Tony on a short rein. But she had one major flaw that couldn't be cured...she wasn't Kate.

And so she left, and so did all the others, both male and female agents that they tried to palm off on me as a replacement. Some lasted a few days, others only a few hours. One showed up at 9am, got sent for my coffee at eleven and never returned. DiNozzo joked that she'd transferred to the Arctic rather than come back, but I knew he was lying...we don't have any agents stationed up there. The longest that anybody lasted was this one kid that stuck it out with us for two weeks. Of course that was probably because for ten days of those two weeks DiNozzo and I were investigating a case in Gitmo and he'd been stuck in the office on his own until we came back.

It became a joke with DiNozzo. We'd get a new recruit and he would instantly predict how long it would be before I scared them off. It was almost uncanny how accurate he could be, although I had a sneaking suspicion that if one of the probies looked like lasting longer than he had predicted, that Tony was not above throwing a little scare into them himself to help them on their way.

Why did I do it? It was for their own good. Kate had died because she was one of my team...because she was close to me and because Ari knew how much it would hurt me to lose her. I was under no illusions that Ari's aim had been off and he had hit Kate by accident. He had hit the target that he had intended to hit because he knew it'd hurt me worse to watch one of my team die.

So Kate was dead because she was on my team and that day I swore that it would never happen again. There was no sure way that I could guarantee the safety of anyone on my team, so I did the next best thing and made sure that there wasn't anybody on my team to be in danger.

McGee was easy to get rid of. There was always some sort of computer related project going on that his I.T. skills would be ideally suited for. A couple of weeks after Kate's death and he'd been offered a new posting. I couldn't understand half the words in the job description, but McGee was plenty qualified and it was a promotion and it got him transferred out of the line of fire.

DiNozzo wasn't as easy to get rid of and God knows I tried my best. I pulled all the strings I could to get him another posting, but somehow for one reason or another no matter how good an offer Tony was given, it was never enough to persuade him to transfer.

He called me on it a month or so later. "I know what you're doing, Boss," he told me. "You want to fix it so the next time Ari takes a potshot at you that there'll be nobody about to get in the way. Well it's not gonna work, I'm not going anywhere."

"You'll go quickly enough if I fire you," I snapped back at him. He looked a bit taken aback. And I admit that it wasn't the first time it had crossed my mind. But I couldn't do it to him. Tony was a good agent and it wouldn't have been fair to screw up his career with a black mark like that on his resume. On the other hand, better that than see him lying on the ground in front of me with his brains blown out.

"Boss, look you need somebody around to watch your back, right? Right boss?" I ignored him at first, but I had to admit that he was right. Not to his face of course. But I stopped trying to get him transferred out and concentrated my efforts on making sure that nobody else transferred *in* to the danger zone. DiNozzo, once he'd figured out what was going on, was just as willing to play the part of the partner from hell in order to ensure that the newbies didn't hang around.

Until *she* showed up. I heard her before I saw her, she'd stopped at DiNozzo's desk and said she was supposed to report to Special Agent Gibbs...two 'B's. She even had my name written on a bit of paper so as not to forget it.

So Tony pointed her in my direction and I gave her my usual spiel about how we didn't need a new agent and she could just report back and get a new assignment. I went back to what I was doing, only to look up a few minutes later to see her still standing there.

"I was told to report here," she said again. "If you don't want me here then fine, but you're going to have to cut the orders for me."

She must have noticed how exasperated I was getting because she quickly added, "Look, I know that I'm the latest in a long list of agents who've come and gone in the last few months, so I'm not gonna take it personally if you want me to take a hike. But this is my first time in DC for while and I'd kinda like to stick around for a few days, so how about I sit in a corner for a while and then at the end of the week if you still want to transfer me out then at least it won't look so bad on my file, okay?"

If I'd had less coffee that day then I'd probably have told her to take a hike but four cups in and I was feeling mellow - or at least as mellow as I get - so I said she could stick around...but not at Kate's desk.

I glanced over at her once or twice as she sat at McGee's old desk. Her file was on the screen in front of me. Four years in NCIS, a few commendations on her file, by all accounts a model agent. But still not Kate. And to me all she was was just another potential victim for Ari or anybody else trying to get to me. So I figured I'd send her packing at the end of the week. Heck, it might get Morrow off my back if I at least occasionally appeared to give the newbies a chance.

Of course life would have been a lot simpler if I'd kept to that resolve. But after a few hours of tidying paperclips on the desk she asked me if she could do something to make herself useful around the place, so I dumped a bundle of phone records on the desk and told her to go through them and find any calls between about a dozen different numbers. And when she'd sorted through that there was another stack of records to go through and by the end of the day she'd cleared a bunch of paper trails that would have taken DiNozzo all day and half the night, *and* she'd managed to prove that our prime suspect in a robbery had a cast iron alibi.

That in itself was almost enough to make me get rid of her on the spot, but I'd promised her a week, so I did the next best thing. I told Tony to take her to lunch the next day. Hey, I said *I'd* give her a week. If she couldn't last that long then that was *her* problem.

Only thing was, it didn't work. She and DiNozzo came back from their lunch break laughing over a shared joke and as soon as she took a bathroom break DiNozzo was at my desk in a flash, his face lit up like a kid with a stray puppy. "Can we keep her, Boss? Please, please? She's fun and she's smart and you wouldn't believe half the cases she's worked."

"You want her to stick around?" My voice was even as I looked him in the eye.

"Well yeah Boss. I mean, no disrespect but she's a heck of a lot easier on the eyes than you are."

I shrugged. "Well if you really like her that much. And I'm sure you won't mind getting her blood on your face next time Ari shows up." I knew from the look on Tony's face that I'd gone too far. "Shit," I swore under my breath. "Look, Tony, I didn't mean that, okay? She's a good kid and a good agent, and in other circumstances I wouldn't mind having her on the team. But it's just too dangerous. I don't want to have to sit through another memorial service for somebody who got in the way. I don't want to have to tell another family that their daughter isn't coming back because she was working on my team. She's leaving at the end of the week, is that clear?"

"Crystal clear, Boss," said Tony, in a subdued voice. Head down he started to head back to his desk and then turned back to me. "You know, Kate would have hated this. She'd have hated the thought that her death was screwing you up so badly that you were pushing everybody away. Shit, she'd be the first person to tell you that it's all part of the job we do. We have to move on Boss, we can't keep looking over our shoulders just in case somebody's got it in for us. We have to get on with our lives. Kate would have wanted that." He walked away again and this time didn't look back.

The truth hurts and I spent half the night working away at my boat and trying to ignore what DiNozzo had said. But I couldn't forget it for the simple reason that he was right. I prided myself on being able to tell a good Agent from a mediocre one within five minutes of working with them. In any other situation I would have grabbed at the chance to add her to my team. Heck, that's how I'd picked up Kate. But how could I do it again, knowing that I might as well paint a bulls eye on her forehead.

I watched her the next day. We were all working late and she'd ordered take out and I watched as DiNozzo tried to steal a French fry from her plate only to get a plastic fork to the back of his hand. It was the sort of trick he'd have tried on Kate, only Kate would have probably just yelled at him to keep his hands off her food and then DiNozzo would have teased her about something or other. And it was like Kate was whispering in my ear, telling me to take a chance, that we all have to move on.

So on the Friday when she was packing up her things I told her that she could stay to finish up the case she'd been helping us on. And after that case was another and then another, and six months after that she was still there.

And while I never quite shook the feeling that agents on my team might as well wear a target on their backs, I did move past it. Probably helped by the fact that we eventually tracked down Ari and as luck would have it, he resisted arrest. Kate would have been proud of the fact that I actually *did* try to take him alive, and it really was a good shoot. It was probably appropriate that Kate's successor was the one whose bullet was the actual fatal one. Although how Ducky was able to tell from all the bullets which one had killed Ari, was anybody's guess. Nobody felt like arguing the point. Instead the whole team went out and drank a toast to Kate's memory.

So life went on in NCIS. Kate hadn't been the first agent to die on my watch and I knew she wouldn't be the last. Losing an agent was never going to get any easier but that was part of the job. And having a team around me that I could trust was always going to make the job a lot easier.

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