Back in April, I held a Tibbs iContest on my LJ. You can check out all the entries and the winners here.

I promised the winners I'd write them all a story inspired by their icon. Originally, I offered to do drabbles - fics of 100 words exactly. But when I came to do them, I found I wanted them to just be as long as they wanted to be - so I went with that.

My apologies for how long it has taken. First I wanted to finish Two Wolves. Then I broke my ankle and didn't write anything for a long time. So, I'm delighted to finally be able to post them now.

The stories vary in size from 300ish words long to nearly 4000 words long. I started out thinking I'd keep them very short, in the spirit of a drabble, but somehow each one kept turning out longer than the previous one! Please don't assume any value judgement from their length; I just looked at each icon and went where my imagination took me, whether it was a short ‘joke' fic, or a longer, more angsty story. Or, you know, lots of spanky BDSM ;-).

Sometimes, my imagination was surprising; the best Tony icon is a story largely about Gibbs, and the best Gibbs icon is a story largely about Tony. Go figure! I tried to keep all the stories to one scene - except for the best BDSM icon fic which, once I had the idea, I knew would have to be comprised of several short scenes in order to do what I wanted with it, which was to contextualise the icon.

I did my best to capture some feeling or truth that struck me about each icon. I hope I succeeded. I'm posting the three shortest stories today, the longest one tomorrow, and the final one on Sunday.

Please make sure to admire each icon before you read - the stories work much better that way!

Thank you again to all the entrants of the iContest for making it such a great competition. You all rock!

Today's stories are: Hot, The Fifth Mrs. Gibbs and Stubble. Check back tomorrow for The Word, and on Sunday for Sexy...