Blah Blah Blah Blah....ANGST
That title is an inside joke that machi_neko will get. The rest of you...godspeed (SUNDAYBREAKFASTPORN!TONY).
...Oooh, that's right!! I forgot to tell you all that my oft-mentioned, artistically inclined, bestest of best friends FOREVAH Lauren finally gave in and got her own lj, didn't I?? Well, she did!! So if you're interested in even more randomness than I can present on my own, go check out machi_neko.
Our good CSI-obsessive buddy (diehard Nick/Greg shipper, and the Angst is strong in this one) Susan also has a lj now as well as geministep. So ya'll can go bug befriend her now too.
All I had to eat for breakfast was a venti Starbucks coffee. All I had for lunch was a bottle of coca cola. Then I finally had three pieces of pizza for dinner via the first meeting of the Anthropology Club. Then I went to the second meeting of Fight Guild, and had a york peppermint patty...
I had no sleep last night, so I'm really not in the mood to babble as I usually would.
Lindsey was uber impressed with all the decorations we put up for her birthday last night after she went to sleep (sooo many streamers and balloons...the colors, they blind me).
Lost pwned tonight. Locke = much of the flashbacks of woe, and the present day faith wibblings of "Damn it, I'm trying to hate you over here, so stop that right now!". Jack = much of the emo face of woe and denial of destiny. Desmond = much of the "Help Me, He Crazy". OMGWTFCreepyOldSkoolVideo?!!? Sawyer = much of the badass cool. Ana = not much of the suck at all, to the fandom-wide amazement of all. Next Week: Jin Speaks English ("WHAAAAAAAAT?!?") That is all.
Tomorrow my first class is canceled, so I have no class until 4:30. I am so sleeping in, because I am beyond beat. I'm not even setting my alarm tomorrow, because if I need to sleep soo much that I sleep until THAT late, I don't need to go to class that bad, thanks very much.
And because my muse likes to sneak up on me when I least expect it and club me over the head until I have no choice but to comply, I ended up writing the first chapter of the currently untitled sequel to "Nightfall".
Don't...get to used to it, guys. I'm still desperately trying to finish up Metamorphosis, and the repurcussions of my recent foray into the Danny Phantom phandom (get it? HA!!) aren't going to go away overnight. Mainly I had to do this because I've been downloading so many NCIS episodes lately that all the fandom had to go somewhere...
It’d been another hard day at the office and Timothy McGee was, frankly, downright thrilled to be home. Sure, “home” was an apartment that ranked about a 4.5 on the scale where 10 was a penthouse and 1 was a cardboard box, but it could have been worse; he still had vivid memories of the off-campus housing during his grad student days at MIT. The apartment was his space, with his things. It was comfy. It had all the necessary amenities. It was mostly clean. And most importantly of all, it was safe.
He stopped on the way to pick up his dry-cleaning and return some library books, so by the time he got home it was already starting to get dark, the sun having set almost an hour beforehand. McGee got inside, locked the door behind him, and put his stuff away. Then he changed into some more comfortable clothes, grabbed a can of beer, and settled down to watch the History Channel. Not the most perfect way to spend the evening exactly, but there were certainly worse.
Of course, it was always the most perfect (or close to perfect, anyway) of plans that went awry. Somehow, he managed to be clumsy enough to slice his thumb on the tab of the beer can. Cursing lightly, McGee retreated to the bathroom and put a band-aid on the cut. Sighing at himself in irritation, he rested his hands on the sink basin and looked distractedly into the bathroom mirror. His eyes quickly focused, however, as the bathroom door reflected in the mirror moved right in front of his eyes. Like…someone had just leaned up against it or something.
Except there was absolutely no one reflected in that mirror except McGee himself, and he was nowhere the door.
“Hiya, Probie!” a shockingly familiar voice greeted him jubilantly, and McGee came perilously close to screaming like a little girl. As it was, he drew in a very sharp gasp and spun around hard, slamming his back into the basin as he pressed back away from the door as much as he could. With both mouth and eyes wide, he stared into what was, according to the mirror’s reflection, supposed to be empty space. The reality of it, however, was that the space was very much occupied by McGee’s former coworker. Very former coworker, what with him being supposedly dead and all.
Anthony DiNozzo, a man so indomitable that even death couldn’t keep him down. Quite awhile back, DiNozzo had supposedly been killed in the line of duty, brutally murdered by a serial killer the team had been stalking at the time. He had been cremated, buried, and dutifully mourned. Life had somehow moved on, even if things were admittedly a lot less colorful and…interesting…in the absence if his presence.
Then, over a year after the fact, the remaining NCIS team members had made a very shocking discovery. DiNozzo was…well, not alive. He was still very much dead; they hadn’t gotten that part wrong. The odd complication, however, was that he was still walking around. The serial killer that had done him in, whom they had previously taken as a very enthusiastic vampire fetishist, was actually the real thing, and she had brought DiNozzo over, made the NCIS special agent into a member of the walking dead. At first, Gibbs, their boss, had wanted DiNozzo to somehow return to work with them, but that idea had quickly been dismissed by the young vampire. The team had been sent home with orders to forget any of this had ever happened, burdened with the confusing knowledge of what had happened to their coworker and that they would never see him again. At least, that had been the plan. But now here he was, eight months later, in McGee’s apartment.
First he was dead and gone, and then he wasn’t. Then he was supposed to vanish from their lives forever, but now it looked like he was back. McGee wished DiNozzo would just make up his damn mind for once.
“Hee, I scared you didn’t I?” Tony grinned at him from the doorway, like it was just another night, like nothing had ever changed. But it wasn’t; McGee could see the sharp points of his fangs when he smiled, and his eyes gleamed red instead of their former human shade of blue. He leaned slightly against the door, relaxed as if he had every right in the world to be sneaking up on McGee in his own home. “Sorry about that, but I couldn’t resist.”
McGee just stared at him for what had to be at least a full minute, mouth gaping, practically convinced he was about to go into a shock-induced seizure of some kind, if such a thing were even possible.
“The door was locked,” McGee finally blurted, not even sure where else to begin.
“Oh, come on, McGee,” Tony snorted, giving him that same superior look he always used to whenever McGee had admitted ignorance of something Tony was convinced he should have already known, “you really think a locked door is going to stop a vampire? Please.”
“But…don’t you guys need to be invited in, or something?” McGee continued to goggle at him, still not fully accepting that Tony was even there. It was so much easier to think that it was some kind of hallucination, or maybe a dream. Not that he’d admitted it to anyone else, but Tony had more than a few appearances in his dreams in the time following his death. Of course, it only figured that that little occurrence had been starting to fade, only to resurge after the discovery that Tony was still around, complete with fangs and a very significant lack of pulse.
And there’d been more than a few nightmares with Tony swooping down on him, fangs bared wide, eyes gleaming with the madness of hunger…
“That’s another myth,” Tony interrupted McGee’s frightening train of thought, sighing like he was disappointed in him. “Besides, even it was, it wouldn’t matter, since you’d already…” He stopped, blinked. “Oh wait, you never did invite me in when I was alive, did you? I just barged in.” McGee stared at him, finally managing to nod slowly, up and down. “Well then, it’s just like old times, huh?” Tony laughed, grin reappearing like magic. If he’d still been human, McGee would have been tempted to ask him what the hell he was on. In fact, he was sorely tempted to ask all the same.
“You’re bleeding,” Tony observed suddenly. Despite the fact that McGee’s hand was positioned on the sink edge so that it was basically impossible for Tony to see the bandage, he was looking straight at the hand containing the injured thumb. Which meant…he was smelling the blood. McGee swallowed hard to keep a scream from escaping as his heart started beating several times faster, his nightmares coming back to his memory rapidly.
“I cut my thumb on a beer can,” McGee explained, his voice relatively quiet because he didn’t trust it not to break if he tried talking any louder. “It’s just a little scrape.”
“Yeah,” Tony frowned distractedly, and he gave an obvious sniff of the air that had McGee gripping the sink’s side even tighter than before, “I can tell.”
“When’s the last time you…ate?” McGee asked, his voice rising a pitch towards hysteria. Was Tony purposely trying to scare the living daylights out of him, or was he really just so comfortable with what he’d become that it didn’t occur to him how terrifying this all was? McGee wasn’t sure which would be worse.
“Ate?” Tony repeated blankly. He blinked once, and then his eyes widened in recognition. “Oh, you mean…yeah, no worries,” he gave McGee what was probably supposed to be a reassuring smile and patted his stomach. “I took care of that before I got into town.”
“Terrific,” McGee squeaked.
“Brought you a little something,” Tony brought a bottle of top-shelf liquor with a grin and a flourish from where he’d been hiding it behind his back. “A lot better than beer, huh?” Still smiling to himself, he turned and headed back towards the living room area, obviously expecting McGee to follow. McGee was tempted to pull the bathroom door shut, lock it, and hide, quivering, in the corner of the shower until Tony went away, but he was a little too out of it from shock right now to take what would obviously be the smarter course of action. Besides, like Tony had said, a locked door wasn’t much of a detriment to a vampire. So McGee trailed slowly after him out to the living room, shuffling his feet and mentally questioning his own sanity all the way.
“Nice to see some things never change,” Tony commented, smirking at the elaborate computer equipment over at McGee’s desk. “Think you’ve got enough geek gear? If you ever brought a girl back here, she’d take one look and run away screaming.”
“I’ve brought plenty of girls back here, if you must know,” McGee defended himself automatically. “And most of them happen to think that that’s a pretty sweet set-up.”
“She-geeks, then,” Tony said dismissively, setting the booze bottle down heavily on McGee’s desktop and scattering a carefully organized list of videogame cheat codes that had taken almost two months of downloading to gather. “They don’t count.”
“Tony, what are you doing here?” McGee finally gave up on trying to play along with the normalcy charade and went straight for the obvious.
“I…just wanted to talk,” Tony looked up and glanced at McGee over his shoulder, looking taken aback. “What, you’re not happy to see me?”
“What happened to goodbye forever?” McGee demanded. “What happened to you never being able to come back?”
“It’s supposed to work that way,” Tony admitted softly. He turned around, leaning against the desk as he stared distantly at the floor. “But I really missed you guys. I couldn’t stop thinking about what you must be doing, wondering what you might be up to since I left. And now that you all knew about me…well, it just seemed stupid not to come back for a visit.”
“And you came to see me first?” McGee didn’t even try to keep the incredulousness out of his voice.
“Do you realize how awkward a conversation with Gibbs would be right now? And Kate…let’s just not go there. Assuming I could even get into her home,” Tony snorted derisively. “Ten to one she’s got a crucifix nailed over the front doorway.” He sighed, shaking his head. “And I really don’t feel like reenacting Interview with a Vampire with Abby right now. So…I decided to look you up.”
“Lucky me,” McGee practically spat. His fear was making him a good deal more irritable than usual.
“You’re not happy to see me,” Tony inferred flatly.
“Not happy to…Tony, this is insane,” McGee exclaimed. “You died. Then you came back, but you wouldn’t…come back. With us. You said it’d never work. You told us to just act like you were really dead. Really dead. And then, eight months later, when maybe certain people are finally getting used to the idea, here you are again, figuring you can just break into my apartment and have a nice cozy little chat like nothing’s wrong!”
“Technically, I didn’t break in,” Tony remarked, “and who says that there isn’t nothing wrong?”
“I say, Tony,” McGee snapped. “I say. Maybe you never had any respect for my opinion back when you still needed to breathe air like the rest of us mere mortals, but you sought me out, so I’d think it deserves some respect now!”
“Yeesh, what’s got your shorts in a twist?” Tony scowled, like McGee was making a scene for no reason at all.
“I have a vampire in my apartment, that’s what!” McGee declared shakily. “You guys have been portrayed as pure evil for an awfully long time for me to feel comfortable with you just showing up like this.”
“That’s right, McGee. I’m pure evil,” Tony said sardonically. “Right. And when I’m not too busy raping virgins and burning down orphanages, I go around kicking puppies just for fun.” He gave McGee a disgusted look. “Get a life.”
“I have a life, Tony, and even if I didn’t, at least getting one would be an option for me,” McGee returned sharply. Tony recoiled like he’d been struck.
“That was low,” Tony’s voice got very thick, hurt and anger starting to churn up in the back of his eyes.
“You just as much as told me you killed somebody a few minutes ago!” McGee protested, not giving in.
“You asked me if I’d eaten. Excuse me for thinking you wanted an answer!” Tony snapped.
“You didn’t have to be so goddamn easy-going about it!” McGee blurted. He backed up against the sofa, shaking his head slowly from side to side as he stared at Tony in a mixture of fierce determination, disbelief, and fear. “God, Tony, do you even know who they were? If they have a family somewhere, people who are going to miss them, mourn them?” He swallowed hard, eyes wide and his disgust evident in the unsteadiness of his voice. “Or did you just grab someone and take a big juicy bite? What are we to you now, anyway? People? Or just Happy Meals with legs?”
“No!” Tony cried, looking shocked McGee would even say such a thing. “I still think of you as people, I just…” He trailed off, frowning deeply as he struggled for the right words.
“Don’t care?” McGee finished harshly. “You know that your victims are living, breathing people with their own lives, their own stories…and you just end it. You don’t care, so long as you get to live another day.” He swallowed again, giving a small, hysterical laugh. “I guess I should be glad that you managed to grab a bite on your way into town, though. Otherwise you’d just drain me like an oversized juice box, wouldn’t you?”
“I can’t believe you’d say that,” Tony whispered hoarsely. He stared at McGee with wide, hurting eyes. There was no anger now, just disbelief. “I can’t believe you’d actually think I could ever hurt you guys.”
“Maybe not on purpose, Tony, but what if you were really hungry?” McGee demanded. “What if you’d had to go a really long time without blood, and the first thing you stumbled across was me, or Abby, or Kate, or Gibbs, and we were already bleeding…”
“It’s… it’s hard to…” Tony swallowed hard, closing his eyes. “You don’t understand…”
“I understand,” McGee suddenly reached behind the couch and pulled out his gun from where he’d stashed it earlier. With a loud click, he pointed it right at Tony, his arm completely steady. “I understand that I can’t trust you.” For what seemed like the longest time, Tony just stared at him in shock.
“What are you doing?” he finally demanded, his voice hoarse.
“Get out, Tony,” McGee commanded.
“You can trust me, McGee, I swear,” Tony protested. “You can trust me!”
“Sure, I can trust you,” McGee snapped. “Until you get hungry, or until your life depends on it, or until Cassidy tells you to kill us all.” Tony opened his mouth to disagree and then quickly shut it again, swallowing heavily as he struggled to think of something to say. “Get out,” McGee told him before he could get the chance to speak.
“Not that this is going to make things any better, but you do realize that the gun won’t-”
“Kill you? No, I know,” McGee’s voice shook with emotion and fear, but his hand never wavered as much as a fraction of an inch. “But I figure it’ll still hurt like hell.”
“Please, Probie, I just wanted to…” Tony started to whisper.
“I can’t, Tony,” McGee choked. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I really am.” He squeezed his eyes shut for a second before quickly opening them again, his face set into a mask of determination. “I wish I could trust you. But I can’t. You want to talk? Fine. Someplace public, with other people around. Someplace I can feel safe. We can talk then. But not here, not now.”
Tony shook his head and started to speak, but McGee cut him off.
“I really don’t want to have to shoot you, but I swear to God I will, if I have to.” He shifted so that he was gripping the gun with two hands, just like they taught back at the academy. “Leave now, Tony. Before one of us does something we’re going to regret.”
“Too late,” Tony told him softly. “It’s already done.” He hung his head and started to turn towards the door, but stopped as his eyes caught on the bottle of alcohol still sitting on the desk. “You can keep the booze; it was a gift.” Tony slowly looked up, meeting McGee’s eyes. He sneered bitterly “That is, if you trust me not to have poisoned it or something.” In a motion almost too fast to follow with the human eyes he pulled the door shut behind him, slamming it so hard that the walls rattled and a framed photograph fell off with a bang.
McGee dropped his gun like it was on fire, letting it clatter loudly to the floor. He stared at his apartment door, just knowing without having to look that even if he ran to it and pulled it open as fast as could, Tony would be nowhere to be found. He would be gone, vanished into thin air, just like he did when he died almost two years ago, just like he was supposed to when he left them again shortly after that. The night would be empty and cold, and Tony would be…McGee honestly had no idea where he would be. Back in the old days, when Tony was still human and they were still a team, he would have probably been able to guess, but now he hadn’t a clue. McGee didn’t know what sort of things Tony did for fun anymore, and that scared him almost more than anything else that had happened that night.
The man McGee had once known so well that it was occasionally frightening had turned into a complete stranger, and he had no idea why.
Numbly, McGee picked his way over to the fallen picture. It was a black and white photograph in a cheap gold frame he had picked up at Sears one day on a whim. It had been taken shortly after McGee had joined the team as a field agent, just long enough after his transition in status that he was actually starting to feel like he really belonged. Three figures stood in the center, clad in matching black jackets and NCIS ball-caps. To the right was Caitlin Todd, giving that dry smile that you knew was only seconds away from turning into an eye roll. To the left was Timothy McGee, beaming nervously like a kid on the first day of kindergarten. But the figure in the center was Anthony DiNozzo, and he was giving the camera his full hundred-watt grin as he pulled the other two close to him, one arm over each of their shoulders.
McGee couldn’t remember who’d taken the picture, or why, or even what the three of them had been doing at the time. He thought it had been taken with a spare roll of crime scene photos, because he had a distant memory of Abby developing it and giving it to him as a joke. It had gotten buried underneath the stacks of papers at his work desk, until that fateful day he had found it again.
He was rummaging distractedly through his desk, trying to find some copy of a report he had misplaced that he needed to turn in. He was in a hurry to find it, because it had only just occurred to him that his good suit was still at the cleaners, and he wanted to pick it up before they closed so he could wear it to the funeral that weekend. And all of a sudden, he had shoved something aside, and there it was. Not the stupid report, but the picture. McGee had seen it and picked it up, and first he had smiled, because it was just so Tony. And then he had started to cry.
He felt like the world’s biggest, weakest idiot, bursting into tears over a simple back and white photograph, but that was exactly what he did. He just sat down at his desk, buried his head in his hands and cried.
He’d made a copy of the picture and given it to the DiNozzos at the wake. They’d put it up on that little corkboard, along with the pictures of Tony when he was in high school, when he was playing basketball at OSU, when he was a rookie police officer working the beat, and all of the others. Then after the last mourners had been cleared out and the tired family was ready to go home, they’d pulled it back down and taken it with them. But McGee had kept the original. He’d gotten the frame and he’d hung it up on the wall, because he’d wanted to make sure that that silly, classic grin never left his memory, never faded from his mind with time.
Like it ever could, even if he had wanted it to.
McGee held the frame in his hands, and he slowly traced the outline of Tony with his fingers. Special NCIS Agent Anthony “Tony” DiNozzo, memorialized in bold black and white, preserved for all of time. And McGee told himself that the stupid picture had made him cry once before, and that that was enough for one lifetime, really.
The problem with photographs was that they weren’t like memories; they couldn’t change because you wanted them to, or get fuzzy with recollection. They preserved things exactly as they were, providing a chance for a bold contrast between the present and the past. This picture in particular had captured the human, living Tony DiNozzo, and it was impossible to forget when you compared it with the version of Tony walking around these days. It wasn’t just that his eyes were too dark, or his skin was too pale. It wasn’t just the fangs or the long nails. It was something that you couldn’t describe physically, something that you shouldn’t be able to see by looking at a picture, but that was there all the same.
It was that sparkle in his eyes, that hidden laugh that was always looming every time he smiled. Everything Tony had done, every movement, every word, had always had this jolt of energy behind it, something that you felt and just made you know he was glad to be there, happy to live his way through each and every single day. He had just been so…alive. It was a horrible word to use in a comparison nowadays considering, but it was the only word that really summed up what was missing: life.
Now everything had gone darker, colder. Even when Tony was smiling and laughing, everything just felt so wrong. There was a bitterness, a tiredness hiding behind each and every smile. He had died, and looking at him now you could never forget it. In one horrible, unimaginable moment, a monster had swept down and stolen his light away.
“What happened to you, Tony?” McGee demanded of the smiling ghost in the picture, knowing it could never give him the answers he sought. The DiNozzo in the photo never could have imagined a time of such misery and darkness. These were concepts completely alien to someone so determined to live each and every single day to the very fullest, and damn the cost. “What did they do to you? What happened?”
And McGee hugged the frame to his chest and told himself that he had already cried over the stupid picture once in his lifetime, and that once, really, was more than enough.
...Oooh, that's right!! I forgot to tell you all that my oft-mentioned, artistically inclined, bestest of best friends FOREVAH Lauren finally gave in and got her own lj, didn't I?? Well, she did!! So if you're interested in even more randomness than I can present on my own, go check out machi_neko.
Our good CSI-obsessive buddy (diehard Nick/Greg shipper, and the Angst is strong in this one) Susan also has a lj now as well as geministep. So ya'll can go bug befriend her now too.
All I had to eat for breakfast was a venti Starbucks coffee. All I had for lunch was a bottle of coca cola. Then I finally had three pieces of pizza for dinner via the first meeting of the Anthropology Club. Then I went to the second meeting of Fight Guild, and had a york peppermint patty...
I had no sleep last night, so I'm really not in the mood to babble as I usually would.
Lindsey was uber impressed with all the decorations we put up for her birthday last night after she went to sleep (sooo many streamers and balloons...the colors, they blind me).
Lost pwned tonight. Locke = much of the flashbacks of woe, and the present day faith wibblings of "Damn it, I'm trying to hate you over here, so stop that right now!". Jack = much of the emo face of woe and denial of destiny. Desmond = much of the "Help Me, He Crazy". OMGWTFCreepyOldSkoolVideo?!!? Sawyer = much of the badass cool. Ana = not much of the suck at all, to the fandom-wide amazement of all. Next Week: Jin Speaks English ("WHAAAAAAAAT?!?") That is all.
Tomorrow my first class is canceled, so I have no class until 4:30. I am so sleeping in, because I am beyond beat. I'm not even setting my alarm tomorrow, because if I need to sleep soo much that I sleep until THAT late, I don't need to go to class that bad, thanks very much.
And because my muse likes to sneak up on me when I least expect it and club me over the head until I have no choice but to comply, I ended up writing the first chapter of the currently untitled sequel to "Nightfall".
Don't...get to used to it, guys. I'm still desperately trying to finish up Metamorphosis, and the repurcussions of my recent foray into the Danny Phantom phandom (get it? HA!!) aren't going to go away overnight. Mainly I had to do this because I've been downloading so many NCIS episodes lately that all the fandom had to go somewhere...
It’d been another hard day at the office and Timothy McGee was, frankly, downright thrilled to be home. Sure, “home” was an apartment that ranked about a 4.5 on the scale where 10 was a penthouse and 1 was a cardboard box, but it could have been worse; he still had vivid memories of the off-campus housing during his grad student days at MIT. The apartment was his space, with his things. It was comfy. It had all the necessary amenities. It was mostly clean. And most importantly of all, it was safe.
He stopped on the way to pick up his dry-cleaning and return some library books, so by the time he got home it was already starting to get dark, the sun having set almost an hour beforehand. McGee got inside, locked the door behind him, and put his stuff away. Then he changed into some more comfortable clothes, grabbed a can of beer, and settled down to watch the History Channel. Not the most perfect way to spend the evening exactly, but there were certainly worse.
Of course, it was always the most perfect (or close to perfect, anyway) of plans that went awry. Somehow, he managed to be clumsy enough to slice his thumb on the tab of the beer can. Cursing lightly, McGee retreated to the bathroom and put a band-aid on the cut. Sighing at himself in irritation, he rested his hands on the sink basin and looked distractedly into the bathroom mirror. His eyes quickly focused, however, as the bathroom door reflected in the mirror moved right in front of his eyes. Like…someone had just leaned up against it or something.
Except there was absolutely no one reflected in that mirror except McGee himself, and he was nowhere the door.
“Hiya, Probie!” a shockingly familiar voice greeted him jubilantly, and McGee came perilously close to screaming like a little girl. As it was, he drew in a very sharp gasp and spun around hard, slamming his back into the basin as he pressed back away from the door as much as he could. With both mouth and eyes wide, he stared into what was, according to the mirror’s reflection, supposed to be empty space. The reality of it, however, was that the space was very much occupied by McGee’s former coworker. Very former coworker, what with him being supposedly dead and all.
Anthony DiNozzo, a man so indomitable that even death couldn’t keep him down. Quite awhile back, DiNozzo had supposedly been killed in the line of duty, brutally murdered by a serial killer the team had been stalking at the time. He had been cremated, buried, and dutifully mourned. Life had somehow moved on, even if things were admittedly a lot less colorful and…interesting…in the absence if his presence.
Then, over a year after the fact, the remaining NCIS team members had made a very shocking discovery. DiNozzo was…well, not alive. He was still very much dead; they hadn’t gotten that part wrong. The odd complication, however, was that he was still walking around. The serial killer that had done him in, whom they had previously taken as a very enthusiastic vampire fetishist, was actually the real thing, and she had brought DiNozzo over, made the NCIS special agent into a member of the walking dead. At first, Gibbs, their boss, had wanted DiNozzo to somehow return to work with them, but that idea had quickly been dismissed by the young vampire. The team had been sent home with orders to forget any of this had ever happened, burdened with the confusing knowledge of what had happened to their coworker and that they would never see him again. At least, that had been the plan. But now here he was, eight months later, in McGee’s apartment.
First he was dead and gone, and then he wasn’t. Then he was supposed to vanish from their lives forever, but now it looked like he was back. McGee wished DiNozzo would just make up his damn mind for once.
“Hee, I scared you didn’t I?” Tony grinned at him from the doorway, like it was just another night, like nothing had ever changed. But it wasn’t; McGee could see the sharp points of his fangs when he smiled, and his eyes gleamed red instead of their former human shade of blue. He leaned slightly against the door, relaxed as if he had every right in the world to be sneaking up on McGee in his own home. “Sorry about that, but I couldn’t resist.”
McGee just stared at him for what had to be at least a full minute, mouth gaping, practically convinced he was about to go into a shock-induced seizure of some kind, if such a thing were even possible.
“The door was locked,” McGee finally blurted, not even sure where else to begin.
“Oh, come on, McGee,” Tony snorted, giving him that same superior look he always used to whenever McGee had admitted ignorance of something Tony was convinced he should have already known, “you really think a locked door is going to stop a vampire? Please.”
“But…don’t you guys need to be invited in, or something?” McGee continued to goggle at him, still not fully accepting that Tony was even there. It was so much easier to think that it was some kind of hallucination, or maybe a dream. Not that he’d admitted it to anyone else, but Tony had more than a few appearances in his dreams in the time following his death. Of course, it only figured that that little occurrence had been starting to fade, only to resurge after the discovery that Tony was still around, complete with fangs and a very significant lack of pulse.
And there’d been more than a few nightmares with Tony swooping down on him, fangs bared wide, eyes gleaming with the madness of hunger…
“That’s another myth,” Tony interrupted McGee’s frightening train of thought, sighing like he was disappointed in him. “Besides, even it was, it wouldn’t matter, since you’d already…” He stopped, blinked. “Oh wait, you never did invite me in when I was alive, did you? I just barged in.” McGee stared at him, finally managing to nod slowly, up and down. “Well then, it’s just like old times, huh?” Tony laughed, grin reappearing like magic. If he’d still been human, McGee would have been tempted to ask him what the hell he was on. In fact, he was sorely tempted to ask all the same.
“You’re bleeding,” Tony observed suddenly. Despite the fact that McGee’s hand was positioned on the sink edge so that it was basically impossible for Tony to see the bandage, he was looking straight at the hand containing the injured thumb. Which meant…he was smelling the blood. McGee swallowed hard to keep a scream from escaping as his heart started beating several times faster, his nightmares coming back to his memory rapidly.
“I cut my thumb on a beer can,” McGee explained, his voice relatively quiet because he didn’t trust it not to break if he tried talking any louder. “It’s just a little scrape.”
“Yeah,” Tony frowned distractedly, and he gave an obvious sniff of the air that had McGee gripping the sink’s side even tighter than before, “I can tell.”
“When’s the last time you…ate?” McGee asked, his voice rising a pitch towards hysteria. Was Tony purposely trying to scare the living daylights out of him, or was he really just so comfortable with what he’d become that it didn’t occur to him how terrifying this all was? McGee wasn’t sure which would be worse.
“Ate?” Tony repeated blankly. He blinked once, and then his eyes widened in recognition. “Oh, you mean…yeah, no worries,” he gave McGee what was probably supposed to be a reassuring smile and patted his stomach. “I took care of that before I got into town.”
“Terrific,” McGee squeaked.
“Brought you a little something,” Tony brought a bottle of top-shelf liquor with a grin and a flourish from where he’d been hiding it behind his back. “A lot better than beer, huh?” Still smiling to himself, he turned and headed back towards the living room area, obviously expecting McGee to follow. McGee was tempted to pull the bathroom door shut, lock it, and hide, quivering, in the corner of the shower until Tony went away, but he was a little too out of it from shock right now to take what would obviously be the smarter course of action. Besides, like Tony had said, a locked door wasn’t much of a detriment to a vampire. So McGee trailed slowly after him out to the living room, shuffling his feet and mentally questioning his own sanity all the way.
“Nice to see some things never change,” Tony commented, smirking at the elaborate computer equipment over at McGee’s desk. “Think you’ve got enough geek gear? If you ever brought a girl back here, she’d take one look and run away screaming.”
“I’ve brought plenty of girls back here, if you must know,” McGee defended himself automatically. “And most of them happen to think that that’s a pretty sweet set-up.”
“She-geeks, then,” Tony said dismissively, setting the booze bottle down heavily on McGee’s desktop and scattering a carefully organized list of videogame cheat codes that had taken almost two months of downloading to gather. “They don’t count.”
“Tony, what are you doing here?” McGee finally gave up on trying to play along with the normalcy charade and went straight for the obvious.
“I…just wanted to talk,” Tony looked up and glanced at McGee over his shoulder, looking taken aback. “What, you’re not happy to see me?”
“What happened to goodbye forever?” McGee demanded. “What happened to you never being able to come back?”
“It’s supposed to work that way,” Tony admitted softly. He turned around, leaning against the desk as he stared distantly at the floor. “But I really missed you guys. I couldn’t stop thinking about what you must be doing, wondering what you might be up to since I left. And now that you all knew about me…well, it just seemed stupid not to come back for a visit.”
“And you came to see me first?” McGee didn’t even try to keep the incredulousness out of his voice.
“Do you realize how awkward a conversation with Gibbs would be right now? And Kate…let’s just not go there. Assuming I could even get into her home,” Tony snorted derisively. “Ten to one she’s got a crucifix nailed over the front doorway.” He sighed, shaking his head. “And I really don’t feel like reenacting Interview with a Vampire with Abby right now. So…I decided to look you up.”
“Lucky me,” McGee practically spat. His fear was making him a good deal more irritable than usual.
“You’re not happy to see me,” Tony inferred flatly.
“Not happy to…Tony, this is insane,” McGee exclaimed. “You died. Then you came back, but you wouldn’t…come back. With us. You said it’d never work. You told us to just act like you were really dead. Really dead. And then, eight months later, when maybe certain people are finally getting used to the idea, here you are again, figuring you can just break into my apartment and have a nice cozy little chat like nothing’s wrong!”
“Technically, I didn’t break in,” Tony remarked, “and who says that there isn’t nothing wrong?”
“I say, Tony,” McGee snapped. “I say. Maybe you never had any respect for my opinion back when you still needed to breathe air like the rest of us mere mortals, but you sought me out, so I’d think it deserves some respect now!”
“Yeesh, what’s got your shorts in a twist?” Tony scowled, like McGee was making a scene for no reason at all.
“I have a vampire in my apartment, that’s what!” McGee declared shakily. “You guys have been portrayed as pure evil for an awfully long time for me to feel comfortable with you just showing up like this.”
“That’s right, McGee. I’m pure evil,” Tony said sardonically. “Right. And when I’m not too busy raping virgins and burning down orphanages, I go around kicking puppies just for fun.” He gave McGee a disgusted look. “Get a life.”
“I have a life, Tony, and even if I didn’t, at least getting one would be an option for me,” McGee returned sharply. Tony recoiled like he’d been struck.
“That was low,” Tony’s voice got very thick, hurt and anger starting to churn up in the back of his eyes.
“You just as much as told me you killed somebody a few minutes ago!” McGee protested, not giving in.
“You asked me if I’d eaten. Excuse me for thinking you wanted an answer!” Tony snapped.
“You didn’t have to be so goddamn easy-going about it!” McGee blurted. He backed up against the sofa, shaking his head slowly from side to side as he stared at Tony in a mixture of fierce determination, disbelief, and fear. “God, Tony, do you even know who they were? If they have a family somewhere, people who are going to miss them, mourn them?” He swallowed hard, eyes wide and his disgust evident in the unsteadiness of his voice. “Or did you just grab someone and take a big juicy bite? What are we to you now, anyway? People? Or just Happy Meals with legs?”
“No!” Tony cried, looking shocked McGee would even say such a thing. “I still think of you as people, I just…” He trailed off, frowning deeply as he struggled for the right words.
“Don’t care?” McGee finished harshly. “You know that your victims are living, breathing people with their own lives, their own stories…and you just end it. You don’t care, so long as you get to live another day.” He swallowed again, giving a small, hysterical laugh. “I guess I should be glad that you managed to grab a bite on your way into town, though. Otherwise you’d just drain me like an oversized juice box, wouldn’t you?”
“I can’t believe you’d say that,” Tony whispered hoarsely. He stared at McGee with wide, hurting eyes. There was no anger now, just disbelief. “I can’t believe you’d actually think I could ever hurt you guys.”
“Maybe not on purpose, Tony, but what if you were really hungry?” McGee demanded. “What if you’d had to go a really long time without blood, and the first thing you stumbled across was me, or Abby, or Kate, or Gibbs, and we were already bleeding…”
“It’s… it’s hard to…” Tony swallowed hard, closing his eyes. “You don’t understand…”
“I understand,” McGee suddenly reached behind the couch and pulled out his gun from where he’d stashed it earlier. With a loud click, he pointed it right at Tony, his arm completely steady. “I understand that I can’t trust you.” For what seemed like the longest time, Tony just stared at him in shock.
“What are you doing?” he finally demanded, his voice hoarse.
“Get out, Tony,” McGee commanded.
“You can trust me, McGee, I swear,” Tony protested. “You can trust me!”
“Sure, I can trust you,” McGee snapped. “Until you get hungry, or until your life depends on it, or until Cassidy tells you to kill us all.” Tony opened his mouth to disagree and then quickly shut it again, swallowing heavily as he struggled to think of something to say. “Get out,” McGee told him before he could get the chance to speak.
“Not that this is going to make things any better, but you do realize that the gun won’t-”
“Kill you? No, I know,” McGee’s voice shook with emotion and fear, but his hand never wavered as much as a fraction of an inch. “But I figure it’ll still hurt like hell.”
“Please, Probie, I just wanted to…” Tony started to whisper.
“I can’t, Tony,” McGee choked. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I really am.” He squeezed his eyes shut for a second before quickly opening them again, his face set into a mask of determination. “I wish I could trust you. But I can’t. You want to talk? Fine. Someplace public, with other people around. Someplace I can feel safe. We can talk then. But not here, not now.”
Tony shook his head and started to speak, but McGee cut him off.
“I really don’t want to have to shoot you, but I swear to God I will, if I have to.” He shifted so that he was gripping the gun with two hands, just like they taught back at the academy. “Leave now, Tony. Before one of us does something we’re going to regret.”
“Too late,” Tony told him softly. “It’s already done.” He hung his head and started to turn towards the door, but stopped as his eyes caught on the bottle of alcohol still sitting on the desk. “You can keep the booze; it was a gift.” Tony slowly looked up, meeting McGee’s eyes. He sneered bitterly “That is, if you trust me not to have poisoned it or something.” In a motion almost too fast to follow with the human eyes he pulled the door shut behind him, slamming it so hard that the walls rattled and a framed photograph fell off with a bang.
McGee dropped his gun like it was on fire, letting it clatter loudly to the floor. He stared at his apartment door, just knowing without having to look that even if he ran to it and pulled it open as fast as could, Tony would be nowhere to be found. He would be gone, vanished into thin air, just like he did when he died almost two years ago, just like he was supposed to when he left them again shortly after that. The night would be empty and cold, and Tony would be…McGee honestly had no idea where he would be. Back in the old days, when Tony was still human and they were still a team, he would have probably been able to guess, but now he hadn’t a clue. McGee didn’t know what sort of things Tony did for fun anymore, and that scared him almost more than anything else that had happened that night.
The man McGee had once known so well that it was occasionally frightening had turned into a complete stranger, and he had no idea why.
Numbly, McGee picked his way over to the fallen picture. It was a black and white photograph in a cheap gold frame he had picked up at Sears one day on a whim. It had been taken shortly after McGee had joined the team as a field agent, just long enough after his transition in status that he was actually starting to feel like he really belonged. Three figures stood in the center, clad in matching black jackets and NCIS ball-caps. To the right was Caitlin Todd, giving that dry smile that you knew was only seconds away from turning into an eye roll. To the left was Timothy McGee, beaming nervously like a kid on the first day of kindergarten. But the figure in the center was Anthony DiNozzo, and he was giving the camera his full hundred-watt grin as he pulled the other two close to him, one arm over each of their shoulders.
McGee couldn’t remember who’d taken the picture, or why, or even what the three of them had been doing at the time. He thought it had been taken with a spare roll of crime scene photos, because he had a distant memory of Abby developing it and giving it to him as a joke. It had gotten buried underneath the stacks of papers at his work desk, until that fateful day he had found it again.
He was rummaging distractedly through his desk, trying to find some copy of a report he had misplaced that he needed to turn in. He was in a hurry to find it, because it had only just occurred to him that his good suit was still at the cleaners, and he wanted to pick it up before they closed so he could wear it to the funeral that weekend. And all of a sudden, he had shoved something aside, and there it was. Not the stupid report, but the picture. McGee had seen it and picked it up, and first he had smiled, because it was just so Tony. And then he had started to cry.
He felt like the world’s biggest, weakest idiot, bursting into tears over a simple back and white photograph, but that was exactly what he did. He just sat down at his desk, buried his head in his hands and cried.
He’d made a copy of the picture and given it to the DiNozzos at the wake. They’d put it up on that little corkboard, along with the pictures of Tony when he was in high school, when he was playing basketball at OSU, when he was a rookie police officer working the beat, and all of the others. Then after the last mourners had been cleared out and the tired family was ready to go home, they’d pulled it back down and taken it with them. But McGee had kept the original. He’d gotten the frame and he’d hung it up on the wall, because he’d wanted to make sure that that silly, classic grin never left his memory, never faded from his mind with time.
Like it ever could, even if he had wanted it to.
McGee held the frame in his hands, and he slowly traced the outline of Tony with his fingers. Special NCIS Agent Anthony “Tony” DiNozzo, memorialized in bold black and white, preserved for all of time. And McGee told himself that the stupid picture had made him cry once before, and that that was enough for one lifetime, really.
The problem with photographs was that they weren’t like memories; they couldn’t change because you wanted them to, or get fuzzy with recollection. They preserved things exactly as they were, providing a chance for a bold contrast between the present and the past. This picture in particular had captured the human, living Tony DiNozzo, and it was impossible to forget when you compared it with the version of Tony walking around these days. It wasn’t just that his eyes were too dark, or his skin was too pale. It wasn’t just the fangs or the long nails. It was something that you couldn’t describe physically, something that you shouldn’t be able to see by looking at a picture, but that was there all the same.
It was that sparkle in his eyes, that hidden laugh that was always looming every time he smiled. Everything Tony had done, every movement, every word, had always had this jolt of energy behind it, something that you felt and just made you know he was glad to be there, happy to live his way through each and every single day. He had just been so…alive. It was a horrible word to use in a comparison nowadays considering, but it was the only word that really summed up what was missing: life.
Now everything had gone darker, colder. Even when Tony was smiling and laughing, everything just felt so wrong. There was a bitterness, a tiredness hiding behind each and every smile. He had died, and looking at him now you could never forget it. In one horrible, unimaginable moment, a monster had swept down and stolen his light away.
“What happened to you, Tony?” McGee demanded of the smiling ghost in the picture, knowing it could never give him the answers he sought. The DiNozzo in the photo never could have imagined a time of such misery and darkness. These were concepts completely alien to someone so determined to live each and every single day to the very fullest, and damn the cost. “What did they do to you? What happened?”
And McGee hugged the frame to his chest and told himself that he had already cried over the stupid picture once in his lifetime, and that once, really, was more than enough.