Thanks to everyone who took the time to read and/or review the first chapter of this. :) Feedback is always appreciated.

Once upon a time, young Jimmy Palmer used to bring home stray animals he found in the neighbourhood. Cat or dog or bird, once – albeit briefly – even a carpet python, much to the horror of his mother who felt the same way about reptiles that he did about his father's suggestion that he played football.

The python lasted about as long in the house as he did at tryouts, but it didn't stop him from bringing home other animals.

Like Mister Mistoffelees, the black polydactyl cat from the park who wouldn't eat anything but egg and anchovies, which made for rather interesting smells when he curled up beside you. Or Boner, the dopey-eyed mutt with a missing leg that didn't seem to stop him from mounting anything with two or more. Both long gone – one of feline leukaemia and the other after deciding to fixate on moving cars as the object of his misguided affection.

The thing about strays is that they're really just looking for someone to notice them, to take them in and give them somewhere they belong.

Looking around at the motley crew of assembled med students in the cafeteria, Jimmy wonders if this sentiment applies to more things than just amateur veterinary care. It's no Grey's Anatomy – or at least he hopes not, because he knows how often the linens in the on-call rooms get changed here and the thought of sleeping on secondhand sex sheets is enough to make the bite of pastrami on rye turn to dust in his mouth.

"Dr Jimbo!" a too-familiar voice calls heartily, and for a minute Palmer's not sure whether to be grateful for the distraction or annoyed that Brad Schiffer (fellow med student of the homo sapiens idiotus genesis) still doesn't get that his name is Jimmy, dammit.

And they're not really doctors, not yet, so really everything about the title rings false, like a game played by children who aren't sure yet how things work. They don't warn you about the long nights of little sleep, endless stitches and enemas, and being corralled by impatient nurses when you take more than four minutes to answer your pager.

(Which is probably for the best, because had he known what he was getting himself into, he might have spent the rest of his life hosing out pens and dodging claws and teeth)

"Brad, how are you?" he replies not-quite-enthusiastically, when what he really wants to say is 'I have three minutes left of my lunch break and I don't want to spend it listening to your self-important blather.' But that sounds entirely too much like something Ducky would say, if Ducky was capable of being that rude and had specified lunch hours.

"Kickin' it sweet," Brad says, throwing himself into a chair in a way that makes Jimmy a little envious of the man's way of making every small movement into something that makes the nurses pay attention. And true to form, when he looks around him, no less than three are staring. "Got to watch a spleenectomy in the OR this morning," he adds with a Cheshire Cat grin. "And when I say watch, I don't just mean from the gallery. Dude totally had Gunther's and would've been in for a world of hurt if I – "

…if the next sentence out of his mouth is an attempt to take credit, Jimmy's going to channel his inner Agent Gibbs and shut this guy down, so help him…

" – hadn't remembered that talk you gave about diagnosing acquired enzyme disorders in the porphyrin pathways. Nice work, Doctor Palmer." It seems genuine, even if Brad's helping himself to Jimmy's potato chips as he says it.

Maybe tuning in to Radio Gibbs can wait awhile.

"Guess all that frou-frou flashcarding and roleplay crap sunk in, huh?"

Mister Palmer, a voice says in his head just as he's about to tell Brad where he can stick his flashcards, there are some battles from which you simply cannot emerge the victor.

"Brad – " Jimmy starts in a strangled voice, watching his chips disappear into a place where – if rumours are to be believed – many nurses have looted and plundered before. The salty snack is just the latest thing to give up the fight. There's a suspicious-looking hair caught between Brad's central and lateral incisors.

You'd think a guy would at least take the time to floss afterward. Dental hygiene is everyone's friend.

And besides, you never know when you're going to end up cold and naked on a slab with a medical examiner picking pubic hair out of your teeth for closer examination.

Brad. Naked.

Ugh.

"You okay, man?"

"Sure," Jimmy says instead, figuring that even if the days when he took a voice recorder into the morgue to catch Ducky's every word are over, he still gives pretty good advice. Even if the fact that this advice comes via Jimmy's subconscious is a little – well, odd. "Break's over though, so I have to get back before – "

"Gruuuunts!"

The way Dr Samuels is looking at him as he says it, he's going to be stuck on SCUT for the rest of the day, and that's enough to make anyone wish that certain ex-assassins would put their innate scariness to good use.

"Before that happens," Jimmy finishes with a sigh, wondering if Ziva does contract work.

"Jimmy!" Abby squeals as soon as he steps into the lab later that night, flinging herself at him in a way that would be almost hot in its exuberance if he wasn't just a tiny bit intimidated by the pigtailed forensic scientist. She's got that whole Gothic-and-coffin thing going on, after all. "Wow, I haven't seen you in the longest time! How's it going over at G-Town and have you saved anyone's life today and oh, Tony's going to be so mad that he wasn't around when you came by but he's out with Ziva at the Old Ebbitt Grill – "

An early dinner at one of the best restaurants in DC? Yep, he really needs to raise his bet.

" – following a lead – "

Or not.

" – but they should be back soon and have you been working out or something?" The statement is closely followed by hands squeezing his biceps and holy Caf-Pow he's not sure whether to grin like a madman or to squirm under her touch like a virgin in a brothel. He settles for something in between, but from the way Abby raises an eyebrow it might have come out a little more leery than he intended.

Right, Jimmy, time to say something cool to salvage the situation.

"I, uh – " Anytime you want to jump in now, suave-alter-ego-Palmer, "Maybe it's all the enemas."

It's not only the complete opposite of suave, but also… well, it doesn't even make sense.

Abby blinks and steps back like she's made of ice and he's just told her he's on fire. Which clearly, judging by the black cloud of anti-suave floating around his person, he's not. "Kinky," she says with a measured look, and it's only then that he remembers the other thing that enemas can be used for.

At this rate, he'll never be eating anything ever again.

Abby thankfully keeps talking while he's trying not to groan out loud. "Anyway, whatever you've been, um, experimenting with in your spare time, I still missed you. I think Ducky does too, because he keeps dropping by the Labby to tell me stories about his own days in med school."

"Is Dr Mallard around?" Jimmy manages, grateful that Abby's dropped the kink-association thing. Then again, keeping her on any one topic for any length of time is a bit like trying to force a feather to float in a straight line (during a tornado), so it might not be about her desire to save him from further embarrassment. "I thought I'd bring this back."

He waves the textbook that's ostensibly his reason for stopping by – look at him playing Secret Agent Man, so stealthy with the cover story – and Abby's face goes from fond exasperation to dawning comprehension in a matter of seconds.

"Did you try the morgue?" It's just a few degrees shy of the wounded tone she uses on Gibbs sometimes when he tries to get her to follow the flight plan, and he's not quite sure whether to be pleased about that or not.

"Not yet," he says slowly, watching her. "Thought I'd come by here first. Just in case, y'know, he was in here… regaling."

The smile spreads across her face like the sun breaking through storm clouds. "Admit it, Jimmy. You're madly in love with me. Take me on the evidence table, you great hunk of medicine man you. " Teasing now.

"Who's doing what with who, now?" McGee says blankly from the doorway, looking like he's just walked in on his kid sister having sex with his drinking buddy. "Uh, hi, Palmer."

"Nobody's doing what with anyone other than themselves," Jimmy is quick to clarify, except that sounded a lot less embarrassing in his head.

"You're not wrong," Abby sighs wistfully, and McGee just stares at both of them (…deer in headlights, patient being told he's contracted genital herpes during a business trip that didn't include his wife…) for a good thirty seconds and then turns around and – there's really no other word for it – flees the lab.

That'll smash previous Guinness World levels of awkward later, but in the now Jimmy and Abby are too busy laughing like loons to think beyond the next few side-splitting moments.

"Don't take this the wrong way," Abby gasps when she's able to breathe again, "But I sort of hope you flunk out and get your butt back here where it belongs."

It's the first time in days that Palmer hasn't felt like a stray.

"So I hear you're the reason why McPrude came back from Abby's lab looking like someone wiped his hard drive," a Cheshire-Cat-grinning Tony says later that night, balancing their drinks on a tray like he's been doing it his whole life. Which if what he's told Jimmy is to be believed, maybe he has.

"Left him speechless for a whole hour. You get an A for effort," he adds, handing over said A-for-apple(tini) with only a hint of smirk. They've long since learned not to question people's drink choices or frequency, ever since the infamous '08 Tequila Shooter Showdown that left Tony being practically carried into his apartment by Jimmy and a very self-satisfied (and somehow still upright) Ziva.

"So I said to Jimmy – "

Abby is obviously taking advantage of McGee's hasty trip to the men's room to fill Tony and Ziva in on what happened this afternoon, much to the amusement of both of them.

And speaking of which, he's pretty sure there's something going on there.

He wouldn't quite bet his own life on it, given what one of the pair used to do for a living, but he'd bet, say, Brad's. But at least Ziva doesn't look like she's ready to draw down on anyone that looks at her a bit oddly or for a second too long, which is a good thing in Jimmy's book. There's a certain appeal to seeing the hunter experiencing what it's like to be hunted in a 'high school bully gets what's coming to him' sense, but it's no fun to watch when it's someone you consider a friend.

The two of them keep looking at one another sneakily from the corner of their eyes, and every so often a leg bumps into Jimmy's under the table, almost as if whoever's limb it was got lost on the way to its intended destination. He and Michelle used to –

"World to Palmer," Ziva says somewhere just outside his headspace. When he looks up, she's looking at him curiously, while also pretending not to look at Tony to see if he'll pick up her (probably) intentional error. Nobody who speaks that many languages can be that dense when it comes to nuances. Whether Tony genuinely thinks that Ziva's grasp of idioms is that bad – or whether he just likes the idea that he can teach her something useful too much – is anyone's guess. It's just a thing they do, like the speaking without words thing, or the 'Ziva sneaking up on Tony' thing, or the pranking McGee thing.

Tony and Ziva have quite a lot of things, when he thinks about it.

Maybe all the little familiar games keep them from killing one another, because really, he can't see how they don't spend most of their time either arguing or –

"Palmer, if you're thinking what I think you're thinking, you better un-think it quick smart," Tony warns suddenly – he's like a movie-powered magnet for dirty thoughts – then blinks innocently when Ziva raises her eyebrows in his direction.

"And you say that my English lacks sophistication," she says simply, and somehow even the rebuke (and Tony's answering retort) sounds a little like a prelude to other more horizontal… things. Or maybe Jimmy's just got sex on the brain tonight.

"Do I need to separate the two of you?" Gibbs interjects, and they all look up at him disbelievingly.

"Boss! Who's minding the basement?" Tony says a touch too loudly – how many beers did he have before Jimmy arrived? – and then yelps in feigned protest at the smacks he receives from Gibbs, Abby and Ziva. Yelping never sounds that manly when Jimmy does it. Some people have all the luck.

"Morgue's been quiet," Gibbs says, nodding a greeting at Jimmy, which in Gibbs-speak means we miss you banging around the place. "You back soon?"

"Two weeks." If I don't get chewed up and spat out by my idiot supervisor first.

"Okay." Can't wait to have you back.

"Yeah." I miss NCIS – well, mostly you guys – like a eunuch misses his… missing parts.

Maybe there's something in the whole 'word conservation' idea after all.

"Ducky can't make it," Gibbs says in as gentle a tone as Gibbs ever says anything in, which is really not very gentle at all (but the effort is appreciated). "Got a call from the nursing home. Vanessa thinks the coat-rack is trying to strangle her while she sleeps."

"You know your life sucks when even the furniture has it in for you," Jimmy offers, because that's better than admitting that he's a little disappointed at the news, and then they're all staring at him like it's another day in the morgue and he's just commented on the size of the deceased's, uh, hands.

He doesn't mind too much. Familiar games are sometimes better than the truth, after all.

McGee slips into the booth beside Jimmy – without quite meeting his eye – and Abby snorts from the other side of the table, muttering something about taking matters into her own hands. McGee almost spits his mouthful of beer across the table, while Tony and Ziva pretend that they're not taking advantage of the distraction to steal sly glances at one another. Gibbs just rolls his eyes at the lot of them; like he's about to put them all in individual corners to think about what they've done wrong.

Jimmy can't help but grin, because sometime while he was away they've all stopped being awkward and touchy around one another and the cogs and gears and wheels of the team's machine are back to working how they used to. He definitely can't take credit for that, but he can sit back and enjoy the show.

Plus, he's going to rake in enough money in a certain pool to buy himself a new quilt.

/end Palmer experiment. Hope you enjoyed, and if you did - or if you didn't, either is okay - and feel like feeding the feedback beast... ;)