Disclaimer: The NCIS characters don't belong to me and I make no money from these stories. It is purely for entertainment purposes.

Rating: T

Warning: This is not a story for fans of Diane Sterling and if you are a huge McGee fan you might not like it either although he is rather a victim in the story.

Acknowledgments: I want to extend heartfelt thanks to Buckeyegirl0000, Faldo and Arress for all assisting me at various times with this pesky piece for their valuable feedback and BR skills.

Summary: Tobias Fornell theorised to his friend Leroy Jethro Gibbs that their ex-wife Diane had gotten herself transferred so she could work with NCIS because she was interested in rekindling the flame with Gibbs when her current marriage to Victor, faltered. What if he was right about her motives but wrong about the target? AU

A/N Okay this story has been languishing on my computer for months now. You could call it something of a problem child but hopefully like many so-called problem children it has proved to be worth all the angst in the end however I'll let you be the judge. It is a short 4 chapters and is already completed and was inspired by the Season X episode Devil's Trifecta. While I enjoyed parts of the episode - seeing Toby and Jethro reduced to gibbering jellyfish around their ex-wife was pretty funny, there were some things about the episode that just didn't sit right with me. I'll leave the rest of my rationale… er venting about why I wrote this piece to an end note and let you get on with reading the chapter. So I hope you like it:) Let me know what you think!

The Cougar the Geek and a Shotgun Wedding

Timothy McGee, former federal agent, stood at the altar awaiting his bride as she made her way down the aisle, and he wondered how he ended up here? In a shotgun wedding, no less, in 2013? His eyes travelling to the blooming bride, who was more than six months pregnant, her baby bump clearly obvious to even the most myopic of observers, despite the expensive haute couture…um the wedding dress she'd chosen to flatter her pregnant body. Hearing his mom and Sarah sniffling in the front pew as the ceremony was under way, he wondered how this all got so badly out of control.

For the last nine years he had been chasing the love of his life, and he had been so close to snaring her. He could feel her finally weakening, and now they would never be together, even though they were soul mates destined to be with each other. Instead of his Gothic Angel, here he was about to tie himself to Diane Sterling, nee Fornell, nee Gibbs, and two of her former husbands stood on either side of him as his best men as both had insisted (at the point of a Glock in Tobias' case, and a shotgun in Gibbs' on standing up beside him, and who was he to argue with such forceful persuasions? Perhaps even more bizarre was that Diane's latest ex-husband, Victor, was giving the bride away, and the junior bridesmaid was her and Fornell's daughter, his soon to be step-daughter once they were married.

It had started as what Tony referred to as his 'Mrs. Robinson' moment, and McGee put the blame fairly and squarely in the camp of Gibbs and Fornell, who were both too gutless to take their ex into protective custody and have her stay the night at their place. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time and they pounced on him, ordered him to take their ex-wife home for the night in protective custody. And when she demanded he hug her, he just didn't know how to refuse, and she sensed his weakness and took advantage of it. Strong women always seemed to be able to get him to do whatever they wanted and he couldn't say no, and after Diane had poured out her troubles over beer, she had then started digging into his love life. Somehow he found himself confessing about his unrequited longing for Abby and the fact that finally after nine years of waiting and hoping, he thought that Abby was ready for a relationship with him again. He pushed aside the emphatic statement she'd made about them being wrong for each other some years before. That had been ages ago and she was talking about Agent McGregor and Amy, not Abby Sciuto and Tim McGee.

Stupid… Stupid idiot, letting Diane see his soft underbelly. He'd just handed her the means to exploit him and that's exactly what she did. Suggesting that if he was a bit more bad-ass and less vanilla that Abby would come around, convincing him that she could help him become worldlier and less submissive. She guaranteed to help him to stand up for himself around assholes like his hard-ass boss and to give him the skills in the bedroom that would have Abby chasing him rather than the other way round. Diane swore that no one would ever find out about them sleeping together… she promised. And then what did she do when Gibbs and Fornell turned up on his doorstep at dark o'clock and found them asleep together on the sofa?

And what was that about anyway? Since when had Gibbs ever come to his apartment before, in all the eight and a half years he'd been working for him? Seriously, how bad was his luck that the one time his boss turned up on his doorstep and he used his emergency key to let himself in, was when he was in a compromising position with his ex-wife, and he just happened to have her other ex-husband with him who was also a bastard with a gun? Really, what were the odds?! He had the worst luck and his life sucked. Diane, despite her promise to keep their sexual exploits under wraps, was practically broadcasting it to the whole NCIS office, and although he kept denying that anything had happened between them, no one believed him.

Still, when the smuggling case was solved and they all moved on and then Mrs. Vance and Eli David had been killed, everything had spiralled out of control and he'd forgotten all about IRS Investigator Diane Sterling. Then when the crap hit the fan and they all resigned, he had bigger stuff to obsess about. But when Gibbs came back from his black ops mission from who knows where, Diane popped up divorced and pregnant… with triplets, claiming he was the daddy for Pete's sake!

Although the dates matched with that ill-fated night of frankly alarming sexual exploits (which hadn't even moved him any closer to convincing Abby to resume their short lived affair of nine years ago), he'd made sure he used a condom. Um, make that condoms, since Diane had insisted he needed to practise, and she had lots to teach him. God, no wonder he had been so exhausted that he never woke up until Gibbs and Fornell yelled at him. But the point was, he'd taken precautions, and she'd told him she was on birth control.

Regardless, there she was, pregnant and unwed, and Gibbs and Fornell insisted that he do the right thing and take care of his children. He'd tried to contact Tony for support, but he seemed to have gone off the grid ever since they'd resigned en masse, and although he'd called Tony Senior, he didn't know where his son was either. Tim pondered how Tony would react if he knew just how close he'd become to Anthony DiNozzo Senior. Last year when he was in town, he'd given Tim some really helpful financial advice about the benefits of off shore banking to minimise income tax, and Tim had even invested in one of his financial deals and made a healthy profit. After he lost his entire fortune from his first book deal speculating on dodgy hedge funds, he'd become paranoid about it happening again. The fact was that Senior obviously knew how to bounce back from bankruptcy, so it made sense to talk to the Phoenix who'd managed to rise up from the ashes.

He'd even agreed to help Senior to rebuild his relationship with Tony and he'd engineered the Christmas reconciliation with Abby's assistance. She'd thought Tony was being a jackass after he'd tossed his father out of his apartment. Tony didn't know how lucky he was to have a father that didn't criticise his every move, and it was the least he could do for Senior to help him make amends for whatever transgressions about which Tony seemed to harbour a grudge. Sure, he'd told them stories over the years about his childhood, but you really couldn't believe a tenth of what came out of DiNozzo's mouth.

What Tim did know was that Tony was a Drama Queen; he'd given him Hell over locking him out of the car when a dirtbag sicced a pack of attack trained Doberman Pinschers on a case this year. He'd managed to get to safety using the sunroof to get into the car, so Tim thought he was making a mountain out of a molehill… no doubt the same as he did with Senior. The more time he spent with the guy, the more he liked him…he was nothing like the Admiral.

So, while Tony wasn't around to advise him about his shotgun wedding, Senior had been there and offered his support. He strongly advised that before agreeing to marry Diane so his children would have his name, that he insist that Diane sign a pre-nuptial agreement since she was getting ready for marriage number four and she had a reputation - fully justified - of taking her exes to the proverbial cleaners. Senior had also gone with him to have a suit handmade for the wedding at his own personal tailors', and he was here in the chapel as Abby's date, providing him with much needed silent support as he prepared to say his vows. But each time he looked over at Senior, he saw him flirting outrageously with Abby, who in spite of coming to the wedding, was furious with him.

Tim had hoped that she was furious because she was jealous of Diane, but no, Abby was pissed off with him because she'd heard the transcripts of Gibbs' proposal to Diane when they had gone under cover to catch Mr. Big, and was convinced that he and Diane had broken Gibbs' heart, that he still loved his ex-wife. And if there was one thing that Abby wouldn't tolerate, it was anything that might hurt her damned Silver Fox, who could do no wrong it seemed. Frankly, Tim didn't think that Gibbs was in love with Diane, but if he was, then he was more than welcome to her. The only reason he was going through with this sham of a marriage was because she was pregnant, not to mention that he thought Gibbs and Fornell would shoot him if he didn't do the 'right thing'. And there was Abby, looking at Gibbs like someone had kicked his puppy, when it was Tim that needed all the sympathy he could get for having to marry a cougar slash She-Devil like Diane Sterling.

End Notes:

In canon, Diane has pretty much been painted as the devil incarnate with no redeemable features apart from being Emily Fornell's mother and yet in this episode she underwent one Hell of a serious makeover of her character. Returning Gibbs grandfather's watch (which let's not forget she stole ) along with a declaration that Jethro was her Shannon and all of a sudden her character was rehabilitated. Sorry but it just didn't work for me - she cheated on Gibbs, attacked him, cleaned out his bank account and stole something of deep sentimental value to him and essentially did the same thing with Fornell before moving on to the next victim. Nope not feeling any sympathy for her at all and feeling serious irritation with the writers for pulling the same trick that they did with Senior. For 7 years year he was a scumbag of a parent if you could use the word, who at best, emotionally abused and neglected his son but hey along comes the marketing coup of casting a popular leading man R.J. Wagner, and presto, he suddenly becomes a lovable rogue/ conman who really wasn't that bad of a dad after all. (Obviously all in Tony's fertile imagination.) Apparently it is now perfectly fine to disown a child of twelve or forget him in a hotel in Hawaii. Even worse, the team either fawn all over Senior sickeningly, flirt with him or tease Tony unmercifully and offer little emotional support when he is clear conflicted by having him around. In fact they get huge enjoyment out of seeing Tony rattled in a way that none of the others are subjected to when dealing with their own fathers.'

So I set out in my AU story to redress the imbalance and return both characters to their original roles of being evil incarnate lol. The only trouble was that I wrote the first two chapters prior to the new season starting and it always felt incomplete somehow. Then the new season started and I really wasn't sure what to do with it. Thus it sat for the longest time on my computer before I finally ended up writing two more chapters to complete the story in a way that I was happy with. Although maybe Gibbs and Fornell are not so happy but at least I have saved Toby from a fate worse than death IMHO – hooking back up with Diane. Makes me feel like puking at the thought to be honest!