Tony sniffed the air when he awoke. There was something nearby that his brain was telling him was meat, but it smelled odd in a way he couldn't describe. Of course, he couldn't quite find the words to describe even half the things he smelled now that he was a cat. It was almost like his nose had been stuffed with cotton balls all his life, and they'd just been removed to reveal a world of unfamiliar and quite often rank odors.

Stretching to get the kinks out of his back since he'd been sleeping curled up in a tiny ball with his nose practically pressed against his ass which also smelled, he padded over to where McGeek was sitting at the end of the bed.

"I got you a burger." McGee said. "I'm not sure how much you'll like it though, since I never really appreciated them until I was human again. Of course, most of mine were picked out of the trash..."

What the hell had McGee been doing eating out of the trash, and what did he mean by human again?

He would've pondered those questions further, but his stomach gave a rumble and informed him that he was very hungry. Following the odd meat smell, he found a burger that was larger than his current head sitting on the nightstand next to the bed. Pouncing on it, he took a bite...

Bleargh. What the hell was this? It looked like a burger, but it tasted greasy and foul, and something he couldn't describe. He'd spit it out if he could, but apparently cats weren't made that way.

That was another thing he was getting used to now that he was awake and supposedly not in shock, and he still wasn't certain that it wasn't a hallucination of some sort that McGee or hallucination McGee was playing along with. How could someone become a cat?

As he backed away from the evil burger thing, McGee chuckled.

"I didn't like cooked meat all that much either." McGee said "But, I figured you'd try to kill me if I put the cat food out first."

Again, what the hell was McGeek talking about? It almost sounded as if he'd been turned into a cat before.

"So, seeing as I know you're not going to want mice since you've been raised in the 20th century and never faced starvation, what'll it be? Wet or dry?" McGee asked as he held up a small brightly colored sack that looked weird with his skewed color perception and a small tin.

He made a low growling noise in his throat. He may not like burgers in his new four-legged shape, but that didn't mean that he was going to be diving into the Meow Mix.

"Tuna it is then." McGee said as he opened the tin that reeked of fish and metal and emptied it out on a plate.

Curious, he went over and sniffed the contents of the plate.

"It's just tuna DiNozzo." McGee said.

Hoping that he wasn't chowing down on Fancy Feast, he went and took a bite, then another, and another...

Timothy who'd once been known as Thackary, and Blackie, Fluffy, Sooty, Hell-Beast, That Damn Cat, and Shoo! watched his friend eat. He had been tempted to open a can of wet food, but he knew that DiNozzo was still rather firmly attached to his humanity and wouldn't appreciate it, so he'd opened a can of tuna instead. He himself had gone through an adjustment phase after he'd been turned into a cat, so he had some idea what Tony was going through. He'd started off on birds himself before he'd finally gave in and ate rodents during that first hard Winter during which he'd discovered that as well as being a cat, he couldn't die.

For three-hundred years he'd been a cat, and then suddenly he'd found that rather than going to the afterlife to be with his family he had to adjust to being a human being again. He didn't entirely know what had brought him and his sister back to life after he'd stepped off the grounds of the cemetery and joined her, and there were times that he feared it because it had occurred off of hallowed ground. There were times when he feared that his return to life was not God's will, not a reward for what he had been forced to suffer through, and compensation to his sister for a life unnaturally taken too soon. There were times where he feared that he'd be shot or hit by a car and learn that he was cursed to walk the Earth for all eternity, this time in the shape of a man.

In the early days, when people would look at him like he was a stranger before blinking and suddenly knowing him as "Timothy McGee" whom they'd known for years, he'd felt like throwing up each time it happened as something like that strongly smacked of the Dark Arts. The only thing that had kept him from running or trying to see if he could actually die this time had been Agatha. The young girl who had turned into a canny old woman had told him that he and his sister were a blessing, the blessing her grandson and his wife had waited twenty years to receive. She had begged him to melt her grandson's heart which had grown cold and hard over the years, and had begged him to be the son the man had been praying for.

Though he probably should have, he hadn't found it in his heart to refuse, just as he hadn't found it in his heart to leave a young girl who needed someone to be there for her alone. He may not have entirely succeeded in his task, especially since he did not get along with the man all that well, but the older McGee was no-longer as frigid as he had been before, and the woman he now called Mother didn't have that look of hopelessness in her eyes which had faded every time she saw Emily back in the beginning when every few minutes the McGees would blink and a new memory that hadn't been there before slotted into place.

There were times when he felt like a terrible fraud, but he owed it to Agatha who had watched her family just about rip itself apart before he and Emily had arrived.

Now, he was going to have to look after DiNozzo. Whether this would have happened to the young man or not if he'd gone to his eternal rest like he should have was debatable. But, with someone who had gone through the experience before by his side, his friend should be able to adapt to the situation better than he would have should it be found that things couldn't be reversed with the final extermination of the witches who had turned him into a cat.

DiNozzo swallowed the last mouthful of tuna on the plate. Now that the needs of his stomach had been met, he was better able to focus on certain oddities. Namely how a certain Elflord was far too calm and accepting of the situation, and how said Elflord had spoken of not being human. Noting that the laptop from earlier was open and so was the Word program, he went over to it.

ttttalk mcgeek he typed.

McGee sighed.

"It all started about three-hundred and twenty years ago..." McGee said, launching into a tale of a young Pilgrim boy and three witches.