The Man Behind the Masks Ch1/?
Title: The Man Behind the Masks
Fandom: NCIS
Season: Season 4 AU
Raiting: T (to be safe)
Pairing: Tony DiNozzo/Jeanne Benoit
Summary: What if Tony had told Jeanne the truth long before the events of Bury Your Dead? Here's my take on what might have happened. AU. Tag to season 4's Friends and Lovers.
Disclaimer: I own no part of NCIS. I just love Michael Weatherly and by extension Tony DiNozzo.
A/N: This is an AU so Tony's background facts will be changed. It is an AU starting at the end of Friends and Lovers and will remain AU from then on. This will be a Tony/Jeanne pairing. If you don't like it, don't read it.
_________________
Tony sat on Jeanne's couch, not moving, not speaking. Jeanne was worried. Not because he was so silent, not because he was so still, but because of the look in his eyes. She'd always been able to read his eyes and now they looked…broken. "What's wrong?" She asked softly as she moved to sit on the coffee table in front of him, placing her hands on his knees. "Tony, what's going on? Talk to me, please."
"I lied to you," he whispered.
"What did you lie about?" She gently prodded.
"Only two things," he replied quietly looking at the floor. "My name is Anthony Giuseppe DiNozzo Jr. and I work for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service."
Jeanne drew back quickly, as if she'd been punched. "What?" She spits out as she moves away from him. Tony looks up at her for the first time that night and sees her confused and angry face. "It's a long story. Can you let me tell you the whole thing? Please?"
It's the despair in his eyes and flatness of his voice that brings her back to him. She sits down on the couch at his side and takes his hand. She truly did love him. Earlier when they had been fighting about her ex, he nearly broke things off with her. He didn't say the words, but she could tell. She realized then how deeply she loved him and she didn't want to lose him. If he felt even a fraction of what she did, it would
be worth fighting for. She needed to know the truth. "Go ahead Tony," she encourages softly.
"Aside from those two things, everything else with you has been real. It's all been true. Even the story about that stupid horse. My father's third wife was to blame for that one. I've never been as honest with anyone as I've been with you. I wear a lot of masks. The cops at my old precinct used to call me The Chameleon because of my great adaptability at doing undercover work. I've been undercover so many times in the past seven years and never once have I messed up or blown my own cover." That time with Jeffrey White doesn't count, he thought to himself. "Even when I'm not undercover, no one gets to see the real Tony. No one wants to see the real Tony…at least not until you.
"When I was a kid, I was open and honest most of the time. My mother was an amazing woman. She was beautiful, talented, and she loved me more than anything. She was a world class pianist and composer. At least until she married my dad. They met in Rome and had a whirlwind romance. Seven months after they met, they got married and two months later I was born in Naples. I have dual citizenship.
"Anyway, things were great for the first year. Then we moved back to the States. My father has an estate in Long Island. He let my mother redecorate as she saw fit, but she only changed my nursery and the sun room. That's where her baby grand piano went and she did all her composing in there. She even set up a recording studio. The room was also soundproofed. When I turned three, she put me in lessons four times a week. But a few months after we moved there, my father changed. He was no longer the caring and affectionate man he was in Italy. He hardened, became obsessed with his business and money and had no problem showing off his trophy wife. He sure as hell wanted nothing to do with me. He hired the nannies and private tutors, but that was it. I never really saw him much. I had my mom though. She was my whole world. She's what started my love of movies. We would sit together for hours and watch old movies together. She always knew different facts about the movie that she'd explain during it. But even focusing all her attention on me couldn't take away the pain my dad caused. She'd drown as much of it as she could in her music. Her songs were always breathtakingly beautiful and heartbreakingly haunting at the same time.
"The first time she touched alcohol more than recreationally was the summer after I turned seven. I hadn't really spent time with other kids so my mom decided I was old enough to go to camp. I spent the entire three month summer at sleep-away camp. When I came back, I knew in an instant things were different. The house had been redecorated in this horrible Louis the XV style. I hated it. I had this new canopy bed that gave me nightmares. I took to sleeping on the settee in the sunroom. So after a few months of that, she redecorated again. That time it was in a contemporary style, so it wasn't bad. She actually kept things like that. But it wasn't just the furniture that was different. She and my father now slept in different wings of the house. My room was in the same hallway as her sunroom, so she took the extra bedroom at the end of that hall. It was fun. The only time we ever had to venture into other parts of the house were for my father's atrocious parties, where I was forced to dress like a sailor, or to go to the kitchen or the yard. She tried to hide her drinking from me, but I found out. She always said I was a natural investigator. She called me her little P.I. She told me I'd make an excellent detective one day. She didn't want me anywhere near my dad's business…didn't want me to become a monster like him.
"We lived like that for a couple more years, me going to camp for three months a year and taking care of my alcoholic mother the other nine."
When Tony didn't say anything else, Jeanne squeezed his hand. "What happened Tony?" She asked softly.
"It was the end of May…a few days after my tenth birthday and about a week before camp was due to start. I woke up in the middle of the night. It wasn't the rain that woke me, I just…I had a bad feeling. I knew something was wrong. So I went looking for my mom. She wasn't in her bedroom or the sunroom. I found her at the bottom of our marble staircase. I screamed. The butler came running. When he saw her, he called 911. I rushed down the stairs and knelt next to her. I held her hand. I didn't notice the blood pooled on the floor. I just stared at her face, calling her name. She never moved. The paramedics pronounced her dead a few minutes after they got there. The cops that showed up determined she tripped on the runner that was bunched at the top of the stairs and fell.
"After they took her away, the butler took me to my room. He cleaned the blood from me, took my bloody clothes, put me in a bath. Once I was clean and in new pajamas, he left me alone to call my father, who was in California on business. I snuck into the sunroom. My mom always kept it locked. Only the two of us had a key. I locked myself in and put on one of her recordings. It was the album she'd made just for me. I found her open journal on the settee so I curled up and opened it. All her pain was written there for me to see, but so was her love for me. Her last entry was written as a letter to me.
Mio Caro Tonio,
I love you more than anything in this world. You are mio tesoro. You've given me the strength to survive these years. I have cherished every moment we've had together and I will cherish every moment we have together in the future. I will always be beside you Tonio. But to get to the future, I must change the present. I've enrolled you in the Rhode Island Military Academy, which will start the day after camp ends. This is not a punishment Caro. It is because you have never been to regular school, so I'd like you to learn the discipline you need to attend one. While you're gone, I will be going into rehabilitation. I am an alcoholic. I know you know that and I know it too. I've known since I started, but I didn't see a way out for us so I didn't stop. I'm sorry. When I finish rehab, I will be divorcing your father. This place is toxic to us both and I have enough money for us to live comfortably forever. I may even get back to music and once again go out on tour. You've been taking care of me for too long mio figlio and it's time I started to take care of you again.
It's raining now amore mio. You know how I enjoy the rain. I think I'll go out and stand in it for a while…let it cleanse me of my sins and failures. Our lives will begin anew tomorrow tesoro and everything will be better. Our lives will be better.
Ti amo, mio bambino caro,
Mommy
Tony wasn't aware of the tears tracking down his face. He was just numb. He didn't want to talk anymore, he didn't want to remember anymore. He just wanted his brain to shut down for a while. He barely noticed when Jeanne took several tissues and cleaned his face. Once that was done, she laid him down on the couch, kneeling next to his head. "Go to sleep Tony," she said softly as she gently ran her fingers through his hair. "Sleep now, I'll be here in the morning." She continued to run her fingers through his hair, humming an old lullaby until his breathing evened out. Only then did she move into the bathroom to wash her own tears away. She couldn't help feeling heartbroken for the poor man she'd come to love. She could tell by the way he'd spoken that he never told anyone this story before. She was determined to finish hearing him out before making any decisions about them.
Once she was composed, she went back to the living room and opened her laptop, planning to keep an eye on Tony tonight. She quickly checked her email, noticing one from her ex. She was surprised at the message it contained. He finally understood that she'd moved on with her life. Even if she didn't have Tony, she would have never taken John back. Too much damage had been done by his betrayal. She could never trust him again. She deleted the photo he'd sent her and just as she was deleting the email, a phone rang. She knew from the sound it wasn't hers, so she searched Tony for his and found it in his coat pocket. She picked up his coat from the back of the couch to retrieve it and an envelope fell out with her name. His voicemail had kicked in by the time she opened the phone. She scrolled through his contacts and found on called "Boss." She quickly sent off a text message to that contact saying Tony wouldn't be coming to work the next day before she turned off the phone. She put it on the coffee table and picked up the envelope with her name. It contained a letter and a flash drive.
Jeanne,
I have fallen for you-harder than I have ever fallen for anyone. In fact, this is the longest relationship I've had since college. I'm terrified of screwing this up because you've gotten in. You alone now have the power to break me. And you saw just how vulnerable I am that night we talked about sex. I didn't mean to give you this power over me, but you have it. I was talking to someone earlier and he made me realize that unless you know the truth, this will blow up on me. I plan to talk to you tonight. I plan to tell you things I've never told anyone. I'm going to let you in completely and trust you not to break me. But I have a feeling that after the shit day I had, I won't get much passed my mother before I just shut down. So everything you need to know is on that flash drive. It's a digital copy of my journal, which I started the day my mother died. It's the only thing to know all my secrets, all my feelings. Sad when a Word document is the only thing that knows anything about your real life. But please read it. I want you to know everything. If at the end, you decide you no longer want to be with me, I'll go away and you'll never see me again. But if you decide to give me a second chance, I swear I will never lie to you again. And I really hope you give me that second chance, because I love you. I don't know how it happened, or when it happened, I just know that it did. You're the only women I've ever felt this way about, Jeanne. Don't give up on me.
Please forgive me,
Tony
___________________
A/N: I do watch a ton of NCIS, but I've been bored so I've been marathoning it lately from the very start (and by very start I mean 2 part pilot that aired as JAG episodes). I'm currently in season 4. This popped into my head this morning. It's my first NCIS fanfiction. Please let me know what you think and if I should continue.
Italian Translations: Mio caro = my darling
Mio tesoro = my treasure
Amore Mio = my love
Mio Figlio = my son
Ti amo, mio bambino caro = I love you, my darling baby
Fandom: NCIS
Season: Season 4 AU
Raiting: T (to be safe)
Pairing: Tony DiNozzo/Jeanne Benoit
Summary: What if Tony had told Jeanne the truth long before the events of Bury Your Dead? Here's my take on what might have happened. AU. Tag to season 4's Friends and Lovers.
Disclaimer: I own no part of NCIS. I just love Michael Weatherly and by extension Tony DiNozzo.
A/N: This is an AU so Tony's background facts will be changed. It is an AU starting at the end of Friends and Lovers and will remain AU from then on. This will be a Tony/Jeanne pairing. If you don't like it, don't read it.
_________________
Tony sat on Jeanne's couch, not moving, not speaking. Jeanne was worried. Not because he was so silent, not because he was so still, but because of the look in his eyes. She'd always been able to read his eyes and now they looked…broken. "What's wrong?" She asked softly as she moved to sit on the coffee table in front of him, placing her hands on his knees. "Tony, what's going on? Talk to me, please."
"I lied to you," he whispered.
"What did you lie about?" She gently prodded.
"Only two things," he replied quietly looking at the floor. "My name is Anthony Giuseppe DiNozzo Jr. and I work for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service."
Jeanne drew back quickly, as if she'd been punched. "What?" She spits out as she moves away from him. Tony looks up at her for the first time that night and sees her confused and angry face. "It's a long story. Can you let me tell you the whole thing? Please?"
It's the despair in his eyes and flatness of his voice that brings her back to him. She sits down on the couch at his side and takes his hand. She truly did love him. Earlier when they had been fighting about her ex, he nearly broke things off with her. He didn't say the words, but she could tell. She realized then how deeply she loved him and she didn't want to lose him. If he felt even a fraction of what she did, it would
be worth fighting for. She needed to know the truth. "Go ahead Tony," she encourages softly.
"Aside from those two things, everything else with you has been real. It's all been true. Even the story about that stupid horse. My father's third wife was to blame for that one. I've never been as honest with anyone as I've been with you. I wear a lot of masks. The cops at my old precinct used to call me The Chameleon because of my great adaptability at doing undercover work. I've been undercover so many times in the past seven years and never once have I messed up or blown my own cover." That time with Jeffrey White doesn't count, he thought to himself. "Even when I'm not undercover, no one gets to see the real Tony. No one wants to see the real Tony…at least not until you.
"When I was a kid, I was open and honest most of the time. My mother was an amazing woman. She was beautiful, talented, and she loved me more than anything. She was a world class pianist and composer. At least until she married my dad. They met in Rome and had a whirlwind romance. Seven months after they met, they got married and two months later I was born in Naples. I have dual citizenship.
"Anyway, things were great for the first year. Then we moved back to the States. My father has an estate in Long Island. He let my mother redecorate as she saw fit, but she only changed my nursery and the sun room. That's where her baby grand piano went and she did all her composing in there. She even set up a recording studio. The room was also soundproofed. When I turned three, she put me in lessons four times a week. But a few months after we moved there, my father changed. He was no longer the caring and affectionate man he was in Italy. He hardened, became obsessed with his business and money and had no problem showing off his trophy wife. He sure as hell wanted nothing to do with me. He hired the nannies and private tutors, but that was it. I never really saw him much. I had my mom though. She was my whole world. She's what started my love of movies. We would sit together for hours and watch old movies together. She always knew different facts about the movie that she'd explain during it. But even focusing all her attention on me couldn't take away the pain my dad caused. She'd drown as much of it as she could in her music. Her songs were always breathtakingly beautiful and heartbreakingly haunting at the same time.
"The first time she touched alcohol more than recreationally was the summer after I turned seven. I hadn't really spent time with other kids so my mom decided I was old enough to go to camp. I spent the entire three month summer at sleep-away camp. When I came back, I knew in an instant things were different. The house had been redecorated in this horrible Louis the XV style. I hated it. I had this new canopy bed that gave me nightmares. I took to sleeping on the settee in the sunroom. So after a few months of that, she redecorated again. That time it was in a contemporary style, so it wasn't bad. She actually kept things like that. But it wasn't just the furniture that was different. She and my father now slept in different wings of the house. My room was in the same hallway as her sunroom, so she took the extra bedroom at the end of that hall. It was fun. The only time we ever had to venture into other parts of the house were for my father's atrocious parties, where I was forced to dress like a sailor, or to go to the kitchen or the yard. She tried to hide her drinking from me, but I found out. She always said I was a natural investigator. She called me her little P.I. She told me I'd make an excellent detective one day. She didn't want me anywhere near my dad's business…didn't want me to become a monster like him.
"We lived like that for a couple more years, me going to camp for three months a year and taking care of my alcoholic mother the other nine."
When Tony didn't say anything else, Jeanne squeezed his hand. "What happened Tony?" She asked softly.
"It was the end of May…a few days after my tenth birthday and about a week before camp was due to start. I woke up in the middle of the night. It wasn't the rain that woke me, I just…I had a bad feeling. I knew something was wrong. So I went looking for my mom. She wasn't in her bedroom or the sunroom. I found her at the bottom of our marble staircase. I screamed. The butler came running. When he saw her, he called 911. I rushed down the stairs and knelt next to her. I held her hand. I didn't notice the blood pooled on the floor. I just stared at her face, calling her name. She never moved. The paramedics pronounced her dead a few minutes after they got there. The cops that showed up determined she tripped on the runner that was bunched at the top of the stairs and fell.
"After they took her away, the butler took me to my room. He cleaned the blood from me, took my bloody clothes, put me in a bath. Once I was clean and in new pajamas, he left me alone to call my father, who was in California on business. I snuck into the sunroom. My mom always kept it locked. Only the two of us had a key. I locked myself in and put on one of her recordings. It was the album she'd made just for me. I found her open journal on the settee so I curled up and opened it. All her pain was written there for me to see, but so was her love for me. Her last entry was written as a letter to me.
Mio Caro Tonio,
I love you more than anything in this world. You are mio tesoro. You've given me the strength to survive these years. I have cherished every moment we've had together and I will cherish every moment we have together in the future. I will always be beside you Tonio. But to get to the future, I must change the present. I've enrolled you in the Rhode Island Military Academy, which will start the day after camp ends. This is not a punishment Caro. It is because you have never been to regular school, so I'd like you to learn the discipline you need to attend one. While you're gone, I will be going into rehabilitation. I am an alcoholic. I know you know that and I know it too. I've known since I started, but I didn't see a way out for us so I didn't stop. I'm sorry. When I finish rehab, I will be divorcing your father. This place is toxic to us both and I have enough money for us to live comfortably forever. I may even get back to music and once again go out on tour. You've been taking care of me for too long mio figlio and it's time I started to take care of you again.
It's raining now amore mio. You know how I enjoy the rain. I think I'll go out and stand in it for a while…let it cleanse me of my sins and failures. Our lives will begin anew tomorrow tesoro and everything will be better. Our lives will be better.
Ti amo, mio bambino caro,
Mommy
Tony wasn't aware of the tears tracking down his face. He was just numb. He didn't want to talk anymore, he didn't want to remember anymore. He just wanted his brain to shut down for a while. He barely noticed when Jeanne took several tissues and cleaned his face. Once that was done, she laid him down on the couch, kneeling next to his head. "Go to sleep Tony," she said softly as she gently ran her fingers through his hair. "Sleep now, I'll be here in the morning." She continued to run her fingers through his hair, humming an old lullaby until his breathing evened out. Only then did she move into the bathroom to wash her own tears away. She couldn't help feeling heartbroken for the poor man she'd come to love. She could tell by the way he'd spoken that he never told anyone this story before. She was determined to finish hearing him out before making any decisions about them.
Once she was composed, she went back to the living room and opened her laptop, planning to keep an eye on Tony tonight. She quickly checked her email, noticing one from her ex. She was surprised at the message it contained. He finally understood that she'd moved on with her life. Even if she didn't have Tony, she would have never taken John back. Too much damage had been done by his betrayal. She could never trust him again. She deleted the photo he'd sent her and just as she was deleting the email, a phone rang. She knew from the sound it wasn't hers, so she searched Tony for his and found it in his coat pocket. She picked up his coat from the back of the couch to retrieve it and an envelope fell out with her name. His voicemail had kicked in by the time she opened the phone. She scrolled through his contacts and found on called "Boss." She quickly sent off a text message to that contact saying Tony wouldn't be coming to work the next day before she turned off the phone. She put it on the coffee table and picked up the envelope with her name. It contained a letter and a flash drive.
Jeanne,
I have fallen for you-harder than I have ever fallen for anyone. In fact, this is the longest relationship I've had since college. I'm terrified of screwing this up because you've gotten in. You alone now have the power to break me. And you saw just how vulnerable I am that night we talked about sex. I didn't mean to give you this power over me, but you have it. I was talking to someone earlier and he made me realize that unless you know the truth, this will blow up on me. I plan to talk to you tonight. I plan to tell you things I've never told anyone. I'm going to let you in completely and trust you not to break me. But I have a feeling that after the shit day I had, I won't get much passed my mother before I just shut down. So everything you need to know is on that flash drive. It's a digital copy of my journal, which I started the day my mother died. It's the only thing to know all my secrets, all my feelings. Sad when a Word document is the only thing that knows anything about your real life. But please read it. I want you to know everything. If at the end, you decide you no longer want to be with me, I'll go away and you'll never see me again. But if you decide to give me a second chance, I swear I will never lie to you again. And I really hope you give me that second chance, because I love you. I don't know how it happened, or when it happened, I just know that it did. You're the only women I've ever felt this way about, Jeanne. Don't give up on me.
Please forgive me,
Tony
___________________
A/N: I do watch a ton of NCIS, but I've been bored so I've been marathoning it lately from the very start (and by very start I mean 2 part pilot that aired as JAG episodes). I'm currently in season 4. This popped into my head this morning. It's my first NCIS fanfiction. Please let me know what you think and if I should continue.
Italian Translations: Mio caro = my darling
Mio tesoro = my treasure
Amore Mio = my love
Mio Figlio = my son
Ti amo, mio bambino caro = I love you, my darling baby