Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by the writers, producers, et al of the television show 'NCIS'. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person, internet persona, or other being, living or dead, is completely coincidental and unintentional unless otherwise noted.

A/N: Well… this is it, amigos. Last chapter. Hope y'all enjoy it.


Sand, Sun, and Sotol

Farewell, good magician. I will try to go home. – Schmendrick, The Last Unicorn

Liz kept most of her attention on the intimidating mutt that wriggled around Ziva and, of what little remained, the majority of it was focused on making sure that the strengthening sunlight wasn't having too adverse an effect on Áłtsé Hashké. In retrospect, she should have known better.

The prairie dog burrow showed up out of nowhere.

Tony, who was mostly focused on making sure he remained upright and mobile, despite Jethro's attempts to entice Ziva into playing, happened to glance up at just the right moment – he knew a split-second before it happened just what was going on, but he didn't get the chance to even shout a warning.

Ziva didn't realize anything was wrong until she heard Elizabeth make an odd sort of strangled whimpery scream. She exchanged a quick glance with Tony, who simply jerked his chin in Liz's direction and shifted his hold on his crutch. "Stay," Ziva directed the command to Jethro. The dog immediately sat; his still-wagging tail thumping up a minor cloud of dust from the ground.

Ziva rushed the ten yards or so to where Cambry had fallen. As she got closer, she could hear Liz cussing.


"I don't get it either, Timmy," Abby's voice was only a little hard to hear over the puttering roar of the dirtbike as it idled at the crest of a low rise in the desert terrain. "But Jethro's only about ten miles south of you – almost due south, in fact."

An idea surfaced in Tim's mind as he mentally pictured the spot in relation to where he was now and the location the satellite imagery had indicated his partners' plane had gone down. "Huh…"

"What?"

"Hey, I'll call back in ten minutes, okay, Abs?" Following Gibbs' example, McGee flipped his cell closed without waiting for a response. Exchanging it for the long-range CB each of the search and rescue team had been outfitted with that morning, he called ahead to Lilliana Marcos – the off-duty pediatric surgeon who'd been wearing the teddy-bear scrubs the night before – who was currently searching the grid closest to where Gibbs was hovering in the helicopter.

"Whacha need, chief?"

Tim suppressed a small smirk that formed every time one of the small group of bike-bound searchers called him that. "Keep an eye out for a German shepherd, would you, Marcos? If I'm right, he's probably already found our people."

"You've gotta be kiddin' me," crackled back over the radio set, nearly obscuring Lilliana's 'sure thing'. The new voice was punctuated by a horse-snort. Tim vaguely recognized the voice as belonging to someone by the unlikely-sounding name of Jericho. "You mean ta tell me that dog'uv yours what had ya so worked up this mornin' is beat us to the punch?"

Tim chuckled and nodded, knowing and not caring that the man on the other end of the line couldn't see him. "Pretty sure that's the case. You're in Charlie group, aren't you?"

"Yep."

"Pass a relay along to the boss. Let him know he needs to focus his search about ten or twelve miles east of the crash site."

"Gotcha," Jericho replied before the line was once again filled with silence. Tim turned his gaze to the south, squinting through the bright sunlight even with the protection of extremely dark shades. He glanced down at the fuel gauge and nodded again. Gibbs could yell at him all he wanted – if he even would – but Tim just knew he wasn't in the right place.

He slammed the bike into first and left a plume of dust behind him as he kicked it into second. Had anyone been there – cough, Tony, cough – they would have had a hard time reconciling the manic glee on his face as he pushed the bike up through third gear and into fourth, weaving around cacti and yucca at a near-suicidal speed with a grin totally unrelated to the McGeek who'd spent far more time than was healthy rooted in front of a computer screen.

For all that he'd not been on a bike in nearly fifteen years, there were some things a person just couldn't forget. Forget the Porche; when we get home, I'm going to trade it in for something a bit more cost efficient. Besides, if I do it right, I'll wind up with enough extra to buy that little Suzuki motocross bike that's been sitting with that for-sale sign on it the last three months. I already know where a couple of trails are.

Yeah, dirt-biking was dusty and dirty and dangerous, but no German-engineered sports-car could really compare with the true freedom of a feeling like flying, the ground only a thick layer of leather and a few inches of thin air away from his heels…

Tim didn't even realize he was laughing.


"Goddamn mother-fucking son-of-a-bitching giant goddamn ass-licking rats! Overgrown goddamn fuckin' gophers!" and that was all Ziva could really catch before the syllables began morphing into an interesting mix of Mexican slang and what she could only assume was similar epithets in Navajo.

"Lizzie?"

"What?" the brunette snarled, not even getting up from her crumpled position.

"Are you okay?"

"Do I sound oh-fuckin'-kay to you?" Elizabeth punched the ground and took a deep breath. She held it for a count of three before letting it out in a slow exhale. "Felt somethin' go in my leg when I landed. Dunno if it's broke, but wouldn't surprise me none. Just the way this week's been goin', ya know? Do know, though, I ain't about to try an' stand up just yet."

There wasn't much Ziva could say, so she kept quiet and headed back to Tony. She helped him shuffle-hop his way to a cluster of beige boulders that were a few yards from where Lizzie'd fallen. The cluster of rocks were of a size to have almost been planned as seating places, were it not for the improbability of someone having hauled them to the middle of nowhere.

Sidetracked as they were, none of the three really noticed the noise of a helicopter at low altitude five miles behind them, nor of the slightly less-distant roar of a dirtbike approaching from the north.


Tim's grin didn't falter the slightest as he coaxed the bike up over low rises and around obstacles in his path. It was almost a dance, seeing how close he could skim past a clump of sage or a stand of prickly-pear without actually running over/into them, all the while coaxing the 250cc motor to the upper limits of its comfort-zone.

As the terrain changed subtly, Tim's grin grew broader. He kicked the bike into fifth gear and fed it as much throttle as the bike would give him. He rose up into a slight standing position on the pegs, shifting his weight back, centering most of it over the rear wheel.

Timing it perfectly, he jerked back on the handlebars as the ledge of the gully came up, and for an endless, heart-stopping moment, Tim and the bike were airborne.

And then his brain finally kicked back into 'go' mode. Nice one, Timothy. Now where are you going to land?


Gibbs could see small specks he knew were the scattered members of the search and rescue party from his seat in the small helicopter. He and the pilot had found the arrow in the little valley where nearly no sign of the downed airplane remained, but the universal ground-to-air emergency signal was unmistakable. They had already started moving eastwards, in a slow and methodical zig-zag pattern, hoping to catch up to whoever had made the sign when the relayed message from Tim had filtered through the searchers.

Gibbs had the pilot move a little faster eastwards, trusting that McGee wouldn't send him on a wild goose chase with Tony's and Ziva's lives on the line.


Liz knew that brand of pain all too well. It was the sharp, stabbing sensation that meant plaster and crutches and six-to-eight weeks of bathing with a garbage bag duct-taped over one limb or another. There was no mistaking it.

Knowing what it was didn't make her feel any better.

About five minutes after landing in the dirt, she finally admitted defeat and called Ziva over to give her a hand in getting to the cluster of boulders where Tony was waiting.

Not three minutes after getting settled on the sun-warmed rock, Tony shifted his gaze from Liz and the tight lines of pain making her eyes crinkle at the sides to Ziva's bandaged arm to his own knee caged in its DIY brace and sighed. "Now what?"

"I don't know, amigo. I'm fresh outta ideas." In fact, Liz had only ever really felt this close to helpless tears of frustration once before – about ten years earlier, right after her first (and only other) unintentional crash.

"I, too," Ziva said, "do not know what to do now. I suppose I could –"

"Wait a sec, do you hear that?" Tony interrupted, using the duct-taped crutch to pull himself vertical.

"Hear what, Áłtsé Hashké?" Lizzie's voice was caught somewhere between frustrated and desolate.

"That!" Tony pointed back the way they'd come.

Ziva cocked her head to the side and smiled as the sound reached her.

"What is it? All's I hear's some fucktard out rippin' up the countryside on a crotch-rocket." Elizabeth – not the most patient person to begin with – lost any semblance of the virtue when suffering broken bones without the aid of a decent opiate.

"A what?" Ziva couldn't stop herself from asking – the term hadn't been one she'd come across before and the mental images 'crotch-rocket' produced in her mind were slightly more than mildly alarming.

Liz flung her hand northwards. "Off that-a-way. Maybe a mile or two. Fucker on a dirt bike. You think if y'all fire a round or two the idiot'll realize we're here?"

Though Liz's idea had merit, the never got to test it out, as the approaching noise from the helicopter made it something of a moot point.

The fact that the dirtbiker who Liz seemed to hate just on general principle and his somewhat awe-inspiring entrance also arrived moments after the helicopter came within visual range also made the idea unneeded.


Had Tim realized that his boss would have been watching, he probably still would have taken the jump. He had just enough freewheeling adrenaline coursing through his blood at the time that most of his brain had simply shut down and enjoyed the ride. Until both wheels were in the air and that single flash-point of panicky clarity that an untried jump always and without fail managed to instill in him and suddenly, from Tim's perspective, time simply stopped.

The sky was a perfect shade of crystalline blue, a few fluffy popcorn-clouds casting intermittent shadows on the ground. A hawk circled off to the east, about a mile or so north of the line Gibbs had come in the helicopter. And speaking of the helicopter, it hung in the sky like the world's largest dragonfly, sunlight glinting off the bubble-shaped windows and flashing off the rotors as they spun, drawing imperceptibly closer in that moment of stop. A sharp spike of joy burbled up out of his chest at the sight of a battered and scruffy Tony leaning on a slightly-less-scruffy Ziva standing huddled together less than a dozen yards off to his right.

And then the magic moment shattered.

Reacting purely on instinct, Tim pulled in the clutch and stomped the bike down to neutral while pulling back on the handlebars and re-centering himself over the rear wheel. He pinpointed where he was going to land and had but a nanosecond to prepare.

The rear wheel connected with the ground, followed by the front, and Tim couldn't help the tiny addition of showmanship to the landing – he pulled the front brake and skidded the bike into a near-perfect circling plume of dust roughly twelve feet from Tony and Ziva.

He could tell that Tony didn't have the slightest clue as to who he was through the helmet.


The look on Tony's face had been priceless when the dirtbiker had removed his helmet – amusing enough that Liz felt she could forgive the man for tearing up the countryside on the damn thing. Although, looking back on it later, she wasn't so sure it was the look on Áłtsé Hashké's face so much as the morphine that had shown up about half an hour later when Doc Marcos showed up – morphine always did screw with her time-sense.

Now, after three days in Del Sol (one of the better hospitals in El Paso), she was clumping around in a walking boot. She'd wound up with a fractured fibula – the docs in the ER said she'd probably hairlined it during the crash and stepping in the burrow had simply made it worse – but she continued to blame the 'ass-licking giant gophers', much to the amusement of Ziva and Tony.

Ziva's arm would sport a new scar, but the germ-killing properties of the creosote stick which had caused her injury to begin with had ensured that would be the only lingering reminder of their minor misadventure.

Tony was only slightly worse off than Liz – the specialist who'd taken care of making sure his dislocation was appropriately taken care of warned him repeatedly that if he wasn't careful with the injury (for the next six to eight months), he'd likely wind up needing a Teflon replacement. Though Ziva had only had to spend one night in the hospital, both Liz and Tony wound up spending a full three nights sharing a room, getting re-hydrated, and having their injuries tended to. Liz probably could have gotten out after the second day, but she knew that if she left, Tony wouldn't really have any reason to stick around and make sure his own injury was on its way to healing.

The day she and Tony were finally released, they were met outside by Ziva, McGee, and Gibbs – to Lizzie's surprise, Ziva and McGee bundled Tony into one car, chattering something about fish tacos – while the older man walked beside her to a parked rental. "Hope you don't mind," he said, "but I told your friend I'd pick you up. Had to come get DiNozzo, after all."

Liz shrugged, "Hell, I don't care none who picked me up, so long as I can get home sometime today."

As Lizzie indicated which turns to take to get them back to her airfield, she studied Gibbs. The same sixth sense that had her recognizing Áłtsé Hashké for what he was and that had alerted her that Ziva was a fellow násgdóítsoh had her realizing that this was someone else who was more than he appeared. (1)

She was trying to figure out if he was a ma'iitsoh or an 'atsá or maybe a ma'e when he interrupted her thoughts. (2)

"This is probably the first time someone's ridden with me and not commented on my driving."

Lizzie chuckled. "Sweetheart, I'm a stunt-pilot by trade. You honestly think you can do better than that with all four wheels on the ground?"

Gibbs echoed her chuckle and took a right turn to bring the rental onto the road that would lead back out to her airfield. "Good point."

The two were silent for another few minutes, and Liz could tell Gibbs was trying to work himself around to saying something. Ma'e, she thought. Only ma'e is so sparing with his words. Well… Né'éshjaa' is quieter, but he doesn't really strike me as an owl. Had she been given the chance, she likely would have pegged Ducky as an overly-verbose né'éshjaa', if only for the man's unceasing wisdom.

As the rental pulled up to a stop next to her battered pickup truck, still parked outside the hangar of her tiny, neglected air strip, she decided to do what she did best on the ground. "Look, I know you got somethin' on your mind, so do us both a favor an' spit it out already."

"Saw the wreckage. Satellite photos," he started, but stopped before saying anything of any real meaning.

Liz waited. She knew what the man was trying to do, and she further knew it wasn't something he did often. It'll do him good.

"Anyone else," he tried again, "and I doubt any of you would've walked away."

Lizzie quirked an eyebrow at him and gathered the bag of clothes she intended to burn and the paper sack from the hospital's pharmacy from the floorboards at her feet.

Gibbs shook his head minutely and shifted his gaze to the diminutive brunette next to him. "Just wanted to say… I owe you one. Anyone else been flying that night, I'd probably be down two agents. Just wanted to say thanks."

Elizabeth grinned. "You're welcome. Any of y'all ever make it down here, gimme a holler. I'll give y'all some tickets to my next show. Really give ya somethin' ta think on then."

The wicked little wiggle of eyebrows she gave to punctuate her last statement had Gibbs returning a smaller version of her smile. "I'll hold you to that," he said as she climbed out of the car.

"Good," Liz replied. "Now, don't you an' Áłtsé Hashké an' Násgdóítsoh an' that kid of y'all's have a bad guy to catch?"

Gibbs chuckled and nodded.

As the rental disappeared into the late-afternoon haze, Liz disappeared into her hangar and set about finding some quality caffeine to get her levels back up to normal.

Finite Incantatum


A/N2: And I've said it before, and I'll likely say it again – yes, I do sorta have a thing for motorcycles.

For those of you who might be interested, Lizzie might be making another appearance in an as-yet-undetailed fic; it won't be a sequel, though, so don't look for her to be running around with the NCIS crew again (at least, not yet) – I've just got a vague idea for her to know the boys from SPN (maybe the versions currently playing in my RFYL 'verse). Anyway, that's still some ways off in the future – up next, I hope to finally finish a few of my WIPs and get those side-stories to RFYL out of my head and into cyberspace where they belong.

1. Násgdóítsoh – puma (Navajo)
2. Ma'iitsoh – wolf; 'atsá – eagle; ma'e – fox (Navajo)

Since this is a new fandom for me, I would really like to know what y'all think…good? Bad? Too OOC? Lemme know, please.

03/16/2010 - Edited to fix a sentence that hadn't originally had its ending.
04/17/2010 - Re-edited that damn sentence that still didn't read right.