Well, that was quick…It's my hundredth body. - Tony, Twisted Sister

The rules were very specific and very detailed. Any death which was later ruled to be an accident or suicide was duly removed from the list. Civilians didn't count. An abduction which became a homicide didn't count unless the person had been dead all along.

Anyone that Tony, personally, had shot also didn't count, because that was its own, separate list. There were thirteen names on that one, and while Tony had never forgotten them, he tried hard not to remember them, either.

Gibbs sometimes kept things: a shell casing, a lock of hair, or even a photo. Ducky had hauled around one dead girl's ashes for years. Tony didn't need to. He hadn't expected to stay at the agency as long as he did. He'd never made it past twenty or thirty with any of his previous employers. It wasn't until thirty-nine that Tony realized he was going to have something resembling longevity, but by then he was fully committed to the list.

He remembered their names, ages, their mode of death, and how the case had been resolved. It wasn't written down anywhere, because that would be weird, and because he didn't need to. Tony remembered them all with the same part of his brain that remembered every phone number he had ever had.

Number one was a dead sailor, stabbed in the heart by a jealous lover. The knife was still sticking out of his chest and his face was frozen into a contortion of astonishment. Another Probie would have been unnerved by the dead man's wide and staring eyes, but Tony wasn't. Gibbs was proud of that, even if he couldn't admit it.

Number thirty-one was probably the worst, a pregnant Marine brutally murdered by her civilian-contractor husband. The best they could ever come up with was that he'd had adequacy issues.

Kate would have been number seventy-eight, if she counted, which she didn't.

One hundred came faster than Tony expected. Though not all their cases involved a body, others had more than one, so it averaged out to twenty a year. One every two and a half weeks. That was a lot of people.

Number one hundred was a dead sailor, stabbed in the heart in a bizarre revenge plot. Tony found this symmetry strangely satisfying.