FIC: The End of the Road (Tony, McGee, AU, PG-13)
This is, I think, the last of the long-lost Tony and McGee stories--I think it's also my last post-"Twilight" AU. Written in the gap between seasons two and three and set ten years after "Twilight," when Tony and McGee have taken very different roads and somehow ended up in the same place. Dark, pessimistic, and a little choppy. I think it might have worked better as a longer story, with time to bring them both to a better place, but they're stuck in this one. I do like the ultimate punchline, though.
“The boss says that we’ve remodeled since your time,” Jake said, picking through the maze of desks with ease. “You might need some help finding your way around.”
The cubicle walls had grown higher in the last ten years; the desks had been scrunched closer together. The set-up made McGee feel claustrophobic. He stayed a few feet behind Jake, who wouldn’t shut up, and tried to remember how far apart the work stations had been before. He resented the implied closeness. There was a cup of coffee on one of the desks, leaking through the Styrofoam and seeping into the notepad underneath. Jake followed his eyes.
“He drinks a lot of coffee,” Jake said.
“Oh,” McGee said. “He didn’t used to.”
Jake gave him a small, disinterested smile. “I guess things have changed, yeah?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I’ve got the file if you want it now.”
McGee had expected more mystery than this. He had expected Jake to be a wide-eyed disciple, beckoning him back into NCIS headquarters and asking poignant, prying questions. Everything seemed more ordinary and low-key than that: he was not the prodigal, he was a consultant, and Jake didn’t care that he had once been an NCIS Special Agent. There was no level of mysticism here; just paperwork and desks in a tightened circle. Coffee soaking into a legal pad. Some homecoming.
He looked at the file and tried to gather nuance, but there were only snapshots of bodies and dark notes in Courier. No spelling mistakes. Precise, economical, to-the-point. The officers had all been found stripped of their decorations and bound with razor wire at their wrists and ankles. All of them were in uniform. They had wanted him because of the cryptographs inscribed in the floorboards: lines of computer code that meant nothing when referenced with the victims’ computers. Lines of code with no validity at all, for anything, actually.
Somehow, they had reasoned their way to him and he had gotten the call from Jake: he would figure out the codes, they would pay him, and the transaction would be completed.
Six Navy officers bound with wire. It was strange, but he hadn’t lost the trick of looking at them. He had thought that it would come as a shock, plunging back into all of this, but instead he only felt numb. The graphic photographs meant nothing to him.
He had seen worse, after all.
“You got anything?” Jake asked. He was playing Minesweeper, little arrows detonating pixilated bombs across the gray field.
McGee didn’t look up. “It takes longer than that.”
“The boss said that you were the best, back in the day,” Jake said.
“He never said it then.” The codes could be combined, maybe, and fed into the suspect’s computer. It would be something worth trying, if there were any suspects. He set them up side by side, trying to make them interconnect. “Did he tell you anything else?”
“He said you used to work here,” Jake said, shrugging. “Was there something else to tell?”
(blood smoke tears)
“Not so much,” McGee said. “We weren’t really friends.”
*
After the funeral, Tony had left an indentation in the passenger side door of McGee’s car. Gibbs had shouted at him. McGee had driven him to the hospital, Tony bleeding all over the interior, and waited in the emergency room while Tony had his hand splinted and stitched back together. They were both still in their funeral suits, double-breasted and black, and McGee filled out forms and read Life magazine. Tony came out doped up and smiling at him, big and goofy, with dried blood on his crisp white shirt.
On the radio in the car, someone was singing an aria, high and sweet.
Suddenly Tony was grabbing at his arm. “Pull over, McGee, pull over, pull over.”
McGee did. He looked at the sun while Tony threw up his pain medication.
The cars speeding by them blared their horns, furious, and McGee turned off the radio so they wouldn’t have to hear the rest of that sad, beautiful song.
*
He scribbled formulas for an hour, trying to see how the variables in the lines of code would work if used in mathematical applications, and coming up with mostly impossible, meaningless numbers. Jake had given up asking about his progress after the first few snappish remarks. McGee thought about requesting some aspirin, but after the first twenty minutes, the headache budding in his temples became reassuring rather than painful. It was a distraction.
He heard the quiet snap as Jake X-ed out of Minesweeper and turned his chair, pretending again to be busy and professional.
Maybe it had been years, but McGee still recognized the undertones of that snap to attention. It was more than a show for his benefit now. This meant that authority was present.
“I don’t trust our IT guys with something like this. If it were just numbers, fine, but with mortality in the equation, they’re useless. No experience. And most of them just get huffy, anyway, like the suspect’s corrupting holy computer science with the blood of the innocent.”
“So you called me,” McGee said. “I’m touched.”
Tony gave him a cool, meaningless smile. “I told the Director I wanted the best.”
Tony had gray in his hair now that he hadn’t bothered to dye out: strewn aimlessly through the brown in tiny silver strands, it made McGee think of scattered ashes. Tony’s expressions had grown tighter and the lines around his eyes had multiplied, but he still looked the same, really, even with the extra weight of a decade slung across his shoulders. He was still Tony, hollow and brittle and smiling, and for the first time since McGee had stepped foot in the building, he felt the surge of familiarity.
“This isn’t my area of expertise,” he said, indicating the equations he had been playing with. “But if you found me, I guess you’d know that.”
Tony barely glanced at the sheet of paper. “I trust your math,” he said. “Drink?”
“Your cup is leaking,” McGee said, senselessly, and Tony picked it up and let the tepid coffee run down his wrist, under his shirtsleeve, before tossing it in the trash.
“Jake,” he said, “get McGee a drink and some Advil, why don’t you?”
When Jake had disappeared from the bullpen, McGee said, “Nice parlor trick,” and tried to sound amused instead of annoyed.
“Parlor trick?”
“Knowing I had a headache. Was I squinting, did I rub my temples, what gave it away?”
“You used to get headaches working newspaper cryptographs, I figured this wasn’t that different. No parlor trick.” Tony sat down and ran one finger absently across the soggy notepad. “I appreciate the Christmas cards, by the way. Nothing helps me celebrate peace on earth and good will toward men like tacky snowmen postcards from New Mexico. Of course, half the time I’m here and trying to clean up someone’s blood, so maybe it’s appropriate. Reindeer wouldn’t have killed you.”
“Montana.”
“What?”
“It was Montana, not New Mexico.”
Tony’s smile didn’t falter. “Whatever.”
“You’re shorthanded, aren’t you?”
Tony didn’t even blink. “I’m looking for a third agent and you caught us between temps. We manage. We have more teams now than we used to, anyway, so the case load isn’t as heavy as you remember it.”
Just heavy enough for you to have an excuse to work on Christmas, McGee thought. He missed Montana, where the air in the mountains was cooler, and he had even started to cautiously climb. Montana was far enough from D.C. for the occasional Christmas card to be only a small sacrifice. But when he tried to think of the jagged rocks underneath his fingertips, he saw Tony taking his gloves off as he came into the office, stepping underneath strung holly to reach the sanctuary of his desk.
“Montana,” he said again, “not New Mexico,” and looked down at the numbers and the letters he’d written, all of them squirming, and stared at the paper until Jake brought him the Advil.
*
They didn’t become friends after Kate died.
Tony’s phone number ended up at the top of McGee’s speed dial, and he tried not to think too much about that, but they were never friends. It was a coping method. They had tried to let revenge consume them, but Gibbs had taken that away and made it only his, personalized it in some way that they could not, and excluded them. They were in the cold because he wanted to protect them, maybe, but they were still cut out. And so they formed a tenuous connection over morning runs: exhausting themselves nearly to the point of passing out and still searching for the oxygen, for the energy to run one more mile past the point where she had been shot. They were tied together by mutual self-destruction.
If they had been friends, McGee would have told Tony that things had to stop after he had split the seams in the new punching bag. Instead, he taped Tony’s hands up and bought a bag secondhand, one that had been tested and worked supple, and let Tony attack that.
If they had been friends, Tony would have told McGee that things had to stop after he had spent six hours in the firing range, pulling the trigger until his hands were rubber. Tony only watched him, from the corner, all six hours, and never said a word.
But one night, in the office late but not truly working, McGee had looked over at Tony sleeping at his desk, sprawled back in the chair, and it mattered that Tony was waiting for him to leave. It meant something.
And, with guilt twisting in his throat, he had left earlier than he’d planned, stirring Tony awake as he left. He listened for the quiet footfalls behind him - - it had become habit - - and for the first time, he recognized that Tony was doing more than following him: Tony was guarding him in the parking garage until he reached his car. But that wasn’t friendship, because when he pulled back and his headlights lit up Tony’s face, he could see desperation mingled with exhaustion: Tony trying to protect the only thing he had.
Slowly, McGee lifted his hand off the wheel and waved, like a salute.
Not friends, maybe, but partners, and survivors, and it didn’t so much matter anyway. They were alone.
*
After the fifth meaningless errand, Jake took the hint and stayed away. Without his presence as a buffer, McGee was hyper-aware of Tony’s every action, and had to curb the impulse to flinch every time Tony tapped a pencil against his desk or leaned back in his chair. He shouldn’t have come back - - that had been a mistake - - and he should never have forgotten one fundamental truth: he had never been able to talk circles around Tony. Tony had always been able to find some small, throwaway barb to get under his skin. He had always been able to find McGee’s weaknesses, sometimes to exploit them and sometimes to guard them, but McGee had the feeling today was going to be more about exploitation.
He had been stupid, thinking that he could come back and exchange awkward smiles and heal all of the old wounds. He had been so stupid. Tony hadn’t forgiven him.
“Out of practice, McGee?” Tony asked idly, turning his coffee cup on his blotter like a top. “There used to be a day when you’d have this wrapped up in ten minutes and be telling me how easy it was. How you would have had it covered during orientation at MIT.”
“Computers have gotten more complicated, Tony, not just smaller. Now there’s even more technology I know that you don’t.”
“Ten years at a desk job in Montana? I bet technology is all you have, Probie.”
The decade of time between them was torn from under his feet. The name itself was a ghost.
“Don’t call me that,” he said coldly. “I’m serious, Tony, don’t say that again.”
Tony only smiled at him. McGee wondered how easily suspects responded to that smile these days, now that it was cold and artificial, tacked up on his mouth like a picture. Or maybe Tony could do better, but he wasn’t trying. He probably wouldn’t try, not for McGee. Not anymore. There had been days before Kate’s death when the right pratfall, the right joke would have made Tony light up like a fireworks show; and there had even been days afterwards when he had been able to coax some small, resigned smile from Tony.
The last time McGee had seen Tony smile was at the airport, ten years ago.
He thought that that might be the last time anyone else had seen him smile, too.
“Making any headway yet?”
He had a made a mistake coming back. More than the desks had changed. Everything in this world had been pushed closer together, and he couldn’t move without tripping over a corpse.
“Actually, no,” McGee said, and shuffled the papers together. “I’ll give your name to an old friend in Boston, okay? He specialized in this.”
“Things busy in Montana?” Tony raised his eyebrows. “If you couldn’t spare the time, why not spare the plane ticket? No, don’t answer, I think I know. Poor McGee. Didn’t run away far enough, did you? And you were dumb enough to come back. Were you expecting a warm welcome? You wanted me to kill the fattened calf for you or something?” He snapped his fingers. “Oh. I know. Maybe you thought if you pulled your head out of your ass and moseyed in, Gibbs and Kate would still be alive.”
McGee thought of loneliness, and time.
“Do you really want to do this in here, Tony?”
Tony looked at him for a second longer than he should have. It was long enough for McGee to sense his surrender.
*
“Montana,” Tony said.
They were standing in the airport and eating the biscotti Tony had insisted McGee buy for both of them, and McGee kept his eyes on the rain outside the terminal instead of on Tony.
“I’m doing a favor for a friend,” McGee said. “I’ll be back within a week, tops.”
“That’s what I told everyone when I left Peoria.”
“Eat your biscotti and shut up,” McGee said. “I’m not you.”
Tony took another bite of the cookie. “No, you aren’t,” he said, and it sounded as if it were a compliment, which McGee didn’t want to think about. “Just a favor for a friend?”
McGee thought of how he had emptied his apartment, how the boxes were stacked like cocoons against the walls, only waiting for him to ship them somewhere. He had applied for extended leave, which Tony knew, but Tony didn’t know about the job offer or that McGee had been slowly coming around to it, liking the idea of not having to scrub any more blood out of his clothes. Computers and comfortable chairs. It didn’t have the same ring to it as “saving the world, protecting the innocent,” but he thought it might be easier to come home to.
“Just a favor for a friend,” he promised.
Tony had almond crumbs on his mouth and when he turned his head to smile, the rainwater on the glass patterned his cheek.
He didn’t hug McGee goodbye at the gate, but McGee supposed that he might have, if he had known.
*
He worked on the encoding until Tony’s shift ended, but he was only delaying the inevitable. He had lost his touch, couldn’t connect numbers to crimes, and wasn’t sure that he wanted to. Still, it made him feel young again; a failure; probationary. Tony left him with Jake for the rest of the evening, let the kid putter around and do jack, and the only significant realization McGee had was that Tony had chosen compliance over competence when selecting his agents. They weren’t the best and he hadn’t wasted his time trying to make them that way. Maybe that was why Tony had to work on Christmas, because no one else had the talent to pick up the slack. Or maybe Tony only wanted it that way.
Tony drove him to the airport and McGee waited for something. Some harsh word, some blow. He wouldn’t have blamed Tony for hitting him.
But when Tony finally said something, he didn’t sound angry. He just sounded exhausted.
“I tried to get in touch with you when Gibbs died,” he said. “I didn’t even have your phone number. Ari put three rounds in his chest and that night I dug through all my address books trying to figure out if you had ever once given me the number for your cousin’s house in Bozeman. You didn’t even come to his funeral.”
“You killed Ari,” McGee said, swallowing. “I saw it on the news.”
“You didn’t come to the funeral,” Tony said, as if all truths narrowed down to that. “He was dead and you were gone and you didn’t even return my letter, you son of a bitch.”
“Looks like you found your own way to handle it,” McGee said, because what right did Tony have to sit in judgment on him? “What did you do, Tony? Did you think you were becoming Gibbs? You think that’s what he wanted? You don’t remind me of Gibbs, I don’t care how much coffee you drink or how many times you yell at Jake. Gibbs kept his agents.”
“Yeah, he kept them. He had us all wrapped around his little finger but it didn’t really work out of him, did it? He went wrong after Kate died and you know it, McGee. Loving Kate didn’t stop her from dying and it didn’t stop him from dying, either.”
“What’s going to stop you from dying?”
“What makes you think I’m looking for a way to stop it, McGee?”
And with only the green lights from the clock to show Tony’s face, McGee could believe that he wasn’t. That maybe he never had. In the dark, in the silence, he could believe that Tony had bumped from city to city, from warm body to warm body, with survival only an incidental. He believed it was true now, that this new Tony, with the lines under his eyes and the coffee cups in his trash can, with his supervisory position and his cold smile, didn’t honestly care whether he kept breathing from one second to the next.
At last, he couldn’t look anymore, and could only stare out the window. He thought of Bozeman, of sunlight, and of family.
Kate had already been dead by the time he made it to the rooftop; Gibbs had already been lost by the time he got Tony’s overnight-expressed letter. And maybe Tony had already been gone by the time McGee bought him biscotti in the airport, because he saw nothing of the man he had known when he looked across the car.
But maybe Tony wasn’t beyond reach.
“They’d be ashamed of you,” he said, meaning what you do, who you’ve become.
The second Tony smiled at him, he knew that he had lost.
Tony’s eyes never moved, still tracking the motion of headlights through the dark. “They’re dead, McGee,” he said. “And anyway, they’d be ashamed of you, too.”
*
He called Tony from Bozeman only once.
“I’m staying,” he said, and over the line he heard Tony’s breath catch, as if something else had just been taken from him.
“The boss says that we’ve remodeled since your time,” Jake said, picking through the maze of desks with ease. “You might need some help finding your way around.”
The cubicle walls had grown higher in the last ten years; the desks had been scrunched closer together. The set-up made McGee feel claustrophobic. He stayed a few feet behind Jake, who wouldn’t shut up, and tried to remember how far apart the work stations had been before. He resented the implied closeness. There was a cup of coffee on one of the desks, leaking through the Styrofoam and seeping into the notepad underneath. Jake followed his eyes.
“He drinks a lot of coffee,” Jake said.
“Oh,” McGee said. “He didn’t used to.”
Jake gave him a small, disinterested smile. “I guess things have changed, yeah?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I’ve got the file if you want it now.”
McGee had expected more mystery than this. He had expected Jake to be a wide-eyed disciple, beckoning him back into NCIS headquarters and asking poignant, prying questions. Everything seemed more ordinary and low-key than that: he was not the prodigal, he was a consultant, and Jake didn’t care that he had once been an NCIS Special Agent. There was no level of mysticism here; just paperwork and desks in a tightened circle. Coffee soaking into a legal pad. Some homecoming.
He looked at the file and tried to gather nuance, but there were only snapshots of bodies and dark notes in Courier. No spelling mistakes. Precise, economical, to-the-point. The officers had all been found stripped of their decorations and bound with razor wire at their wrists and ankles. All of them were in uniform. They had wanted him because of the cryptographs inscribed in the floorboards: lines of computer code that meant nothing when referenced with the victims’ computers. Lines of code with no validity at all, for anything, actually.
Somehow, they had reasoned their way to him and he had gotten the call from Jake: he would figure out the codes, they would pay him, and the transaction would be completed.
Six Navy officers bound with wire. It was strange, but he hadn’t lost the trick of looking at them. He had thought that it would come as a shock, plunging back into all of this, but instead he only felt numb. The graphic photographs meant nothing to him.
He had seen worse, after all.
“You got anything?” Jake asked. He was playing Minesweeper, little arrows detonating pixilated bombs across the gray field.
McGee didn’t look up. “It takes longer than that.”
“The boss said that you were the best, back in the day,” Jake said.
“He never said it then.” The codes could be combined, maybe, and fed into the suspect’s computer. It would be something worth trying, if there were any suspects. He set them up side by side, trying to make them interconnect. “Did he tell you anything else?”
“He said you used to work here,” Jake said, shrugging. “Was there something else to tell?”
(blood smoke tears)
“Not so much,” McGee said. “We weren’t really friends.”
*
After the funeral, Tony had left an indentation in the passenger side door of McGee’s car. Gibbs had shouted at him. McGee had driven him to the hospital, Tony bleeding all over the interior, and waited in the emergency room while Tony had his hand splinted and stitched back together. They were both still in their funeral suits, double-breasted and black, and McGee filled out forms and read Life magazine. Tony came out doped up and smiling at him, big and goofy, with dried blood on his crisp white shirt.
On the radio in the car, someone was singing an aria, high and sweet.
Suddenly Tony was grabbing at his arm. “Pull over, McGee, pull over, pull over.”
McGee did. He looked at the sun while Tony threw up his pain medication.
The cars speeding by them blared their horns, furious, and McGee turned off the radio so they wouldn’t have to hear the rest of that sad, beautiful song.
*
He scribbled formulas for an hour, trying to see how the variables in the lines of code would work if used in mathematical applications, and coming up with mostly impossible, meaningless numbers. Jake had given up asking about his progress after the first few snappish remarks. McGee thought about requesting some aspirin, but after the first twenty minutes, the headache budding in his temples became reassuring rather than painful. It was a distraction.
He heard the quiet snap as Jake X-ed out of Minesweeper and turned his chair, pretending again to be busy and professional.
Maybe it had been years, but McGee still recognized the undertones of that snap to attention. It was more than a show for his benefit now. This meant that authority was present.
“I don’t trust our IT guys with something like this. If it were just numbers, fine, but with mortality in the equation, they’re useless. No experience. And most of them just get huffy, anyway, like the suspect’s corrupting holy computer science with the blood of the innocent.”
“So you called me,” McGee said. “I’m touched.”
Tony gave him a cool, meaningless smile. “I told the Director I wanted the best.”
Tony had gray in his hair now that he hadn’t bothered to dye out: strewn aimlessly through the brown in tiny silver strands, it made McGee think of scattered ashes. Tony’s expressions had grown tighter and the lines around his eyes had multiplied, but he still looked the same, really, even with the extra weight of a decade slung across his shoulders. He was still Tony, hollow and brittle and smiling, and for the first time since McGee had stepped foot in the building, he felt the surge of familiarity.
“This isn’t my area of expertise,” he said, indicating the equations he had been playing with. “But if you found me, I guess you’d know that.”
Tony barely glanced at the sheet of paper. “I trust your math,” he said. “Drink?”
“Your cup is leaking,” McGee said, senselessly, and Tony picked it up and let the tepid coffee run down his wrist, under his shirtsleeve, before tossing it in the trash.
“Jake,” he said, “get McGee a drink and some Advil, why don’t you?”
When Jake had disappeared from the bullpen, McGee said, “Nice parlor trick,” and tried to sound amused instead of annoyed.
“Parlor trick?”
“Knowing I had a headache. Was I squinting, did I rub my temples, what gave it away?”
“You used to get headaches working newspaper cryptographs, I figured this wasn’t that different. No parlor trick.” Tony sat down and ran one finger absently across the soggy notepad. “I appreciate the Christmas cards, by the way. Nothing helps me celebrate peace on earth and good will toward men like tacky snowmen postcards from New Mexico. Of course, half the time I’m here and trying to clean up someone’s blood, so maybe it’s appropriate. Reindeer wouldn’t have killed you.”
“Montana.”
“What?”
“It was Montana, not New Mexico.”
Tony’s smile didn’t falter. “Whatever.”
“You’re shorthanded, aren’t you?”
Tony didn’t even blink. “I’m looking for a third agent and you caught us between temps. We manage. We have more teams now than we used to, anyway, so the case load isn’t as heavy as you remember it.”
Just heavy enough for you to have an excuse to work on Christmas, McGee thought. He missed Montana, where the air in the mountains was cooler, and he had even started to cautiously climb. Montana was far enough from D.C. for the occasional Christmas card to be only a small sacrifice. But when he tried to think of the jagged rocks underneath his fingertips, he saw Tony taking his gloves off as he came into the office, stepping underneath strung holly to reach the sanctuary of his desk.
“Montana,” he said again, “not New Mexico,” and looked down at the numbers and the letters he’d written, all of them squirming, and stared at the paper until Jake brought him the Advil.
*
They didn’t become friends after Kate died.
Tony’s phone number ended up at the top of McGee’s speed dial, and he tried not to think too much about that, but they were never friends. It was a coping method. They had tried to let revenge consume them, but Gibbs had taken that away and made it only his, personalized it in some way that they could not, and excluded them. They were in the cold because he wanted to protect them, maybe, but they were still cut out. And so they formed a tenuous connection over morning runs: exhausting themselves nearly to the point of passing out and still searching for the oxygen, for the energy to run one more mile past the point where she had been shot. They were tied together by mutual self-destruction.
If they had been friends, McGee would have told Tony that things had to stop after he had split the seams in the new punching bag. Instead, he taped Tony’s hands up and bought a bag secondhand, one that had been tested and worked supple, and let Tony attack that.
If they had been friends, Tony would have told McGee that things had to stop after he had spent six hours in the firing range, pulling the trigger until his hands were rubber. Tony only watched him, from the corner, all six hours, and never said a word.
But one night, in the office late but not truly working, McGee had looked over at Tony sleeping at his desk, sprawled back in the chair, and it mattered that Tony was waiting for him to leave. It meant something.
And, with guilt twisting in his throat, he had left earlier than he’d planned, stirring Tony awake as he left. He listened for the quiet footfalls behind him - - it had become habit - - and for the first time, he recognized that Tony was doing more than following him: Tony was guarding him in the parking garage until he reached his car. But that wasn’t friendship, because when he pulled back and his headlights lit up Tony’s face, he could see desperation mingled with exhaustion: Tony trying to protect the only thing he had.
Slowly, McGee lifted his hand off the wheel and waved, like a salute.
Not friends, maybe, but partners, and survivors, and it didn’t so much matter anyway. They were alone.
*
After the fifth meaningless errand, Jake took the hint and stayed away. Without his presence as a buffer, McGee was hyper-aware of Tony’s every action, and had to curb the impulse to flinch every time Tony tapped a pencil against his desk or leaned back in his chair. He shouldn’t have come back - - that had been a mistake - - and he should never have forgotten one fundamental truth: he had never been able to talk circles around Tony. Tony had always been able to find some small, throwaway barb to get under his skin. He had always been able to find McGee’s weaknesses, sometimes to exploit them and sometimes to guard them, but McGee had the feeling today was going to be more about exploitation.
He had been stupid, thinking that he could come back and exchange awkward smiles and heal all of the old wounds. He had been so stupid. Tony hadn’t forgiven him.
“Out of practice, McGee?” Tony asked idly, turning his coffee cup on his blotter like a top. “There used to be a day when you’d have this wrapped up in ten minutes and be telling me how easy it was. How you would have had it covered during orientation at MIT.”
“Computers have gotten more complicated, Tony, not just smaller. Now there’s even more technology I know that you don’t.”
“Ten years at a desk job in Montana? I bet technology is all you have, Probie.”
The decade of time between them was torn from under his feet. The name itself was a ghost.
“Don’t call me that,” he said coldly. “I’m serious, Tony, don’t say that again.”
Tony only smiled at him. McGee wondered how easily suspects responded to that smile these days, now that it was cold and artificial, tacked up on his mouth like a picture. Or maybe Tony could do better, but he wasn’t trying. He probably wouldn’t try, not for McGee. Not anymore. There had been days before Kate’s death when the right pratfall, the right joke would have made Tony light up like a fireworks show; and there had even been days afterwards when he had been able to coax some small, resigned smile from Tony.
The last time McGee had seen Tony smile was at the airport, ten years ago.
He thought that that might be the last time anyone else had seen him smile, too.
“Making any headway yet?”
He had a made a mistake coming back. More than the desks had changed. Everything in this world had been pushed closer together, and he couldn’t move without tripping over a corpse.
“Actually, no,” McGee said, and shuffled the papers together. “I’ll give your name to an old friend in Boston, okay? He specialized in this.”
“Things busy in Montana?” Tony raised his eyebrows. “If you couldn’t spare the time, why not spare the plane ticket? No, don’t answer, I think I know. Poor McGee. Didn’t run away far enough, did you? And you were dumb enough to come back. Were you expecting a warm welcome? You wanted me to kill the fattened calf for you or something?” He snapped his fingers. “Oh. I know. Maybe you thought if you pulled your head out of your ass and moseyed in, Gibbs and Kate would still be alive.”
McGee thought of loneliness, and time.
“Do you really want to do this in here, Tony?”
Tony looked at him for a second longer than he should have. It was long enough for McGee to sense his surrender.
*
“Montana,” Tony said.
They were standing in the airport and eating the biscotti Tony had insisted McGee buy for both of them, and McGee kept his eyes on the rain outside the terminal instead of on Tony.
“I’m doing a favor for a friend,” McGee said. “I’ll be back within a week, tops.”
“That’s what I told everyone when I left Peoria.”
“Eat your biscotti and shut up,” McGee said. “I’m not you.”
Tony took another bite of the cookie. “No, you aren’t,” he said, and it sounded as if it were a compliment, which McGee didn’t want to think about. “Just a favor for a friend?”
McGee thought of how he had emptied his apartment, how the boxes were stacked like cocoons against the walls, only waiting for him to ship them somewhere. He had applied for extended leave, which Tony knew, but Tony didn’t know about the job offer or that McGee had been slowly coming around to it, liking the idea of not having to scrub any more blood out of his clothes. Computers and comfortable chairs. It didn’t have the same ring to it as “saving the world, protecting the innocent,” but he thought it might be easier to come home to.
“Just a favor for a friend,” he promised.
Tony had almond crumbs on his mouth and when he turned his head to smile, the rainwater on the glass patterned his cheek.
He didn’t hug McGee goodbye at the gate, but McGee supposed that he might have, if he had known.
*
He worked on the encoding until Tony’s shift ended, but he was only delaying the inevitable. He had lost his touch, couldn’t connect numbers to crimes, and wasn’t sure that he wanted to. Still, it made him feel young again; a failure; probationary. Tony left him with Jake for the rest of the evening, let the kid putter around and do jack, and the only significant realization McGee had was that Tony had chosen compliance over competence when selecting his agents. They weren’t the best and he hadn’t wasted his time trying to make them that way. Maybe that was why Tony had to work on Christmas, because no one else had the talent to pick up the slack. Or maybe Tony only wanted it that way.
Tony drove him to the airport and McGee waited for something. Some harsh word, some blow. He wouldn’t have blamed Tony for hitting him.
But when Tony finally said something, he didn’t sound angry. He just sounded exhausted.
“I tried to get in touch with you when Gibbs died,” he said. “I didn’t even have your phone number. Ari put three rounds in his chest and that night I dug through all my address books trying to figure out if you had ever once given me the number for your cousin’s house in Bozeman. You didn’t even come to his funeral.”
“You killed Ari,” McGee said, swallowing. “I saw it on the news.”
“You didn’t come to the funeral,” Tony said, as if all truths narrowed down to that. “He was dead and you were gone and you didn’t even return my letter, you son of a bitch.”
“Looks like you found your own way to handle it,” McGee said, because what right did Tony have to sit in judgment on him? “What did you do, Tony? Did you think you were becoming Gibbs? You think that’s what he wanted? You don’t remind me of Gibbs, I don’t care how much coffee you drink or how many times you yell at Jake. Gibbs kept his agents.”
“Yeah, he kept them. He had us all wrapped around his little finger but it didn’t really work out of him, did it? He went wrong after Kate died and you know it, McGee. Loving Kate didn’t stop her from dying and it didn’t stop him from dying, either.”
“What’s going to stop you from dying?”
“What makes you think I’m looking for a way to stop it, McGee?”
And with only the green lights from the clock to show Tony’s face, McGee could believe that he wasn’t. That maybe he never had. In the dark, in the silence, he could believe that Tony had bumped from city to city, from warm body to warm body, with survival only an incidental. He believed it was true now, that this new Tony, with the lines under his eyes and the coffee cups in his trash can, with his supervisory position and his cold smile, didn’t honestly care whether he kept breathing from one second to the next.
At last, he couldn’t look anymore, and could only stare out the window. He thought of Bozeman, of sunlight, and of family.
Kate had already been dead by the time he made it to the rooftop; Gibbs had already been lost by the time he got Tony’s overnight-expressed letter. And maybe Tony had already been gone by the time McGee bought him biscotti in the airport, because he saw nothing of the man he had known when he looked across the car.
But maybe Tony wasn’t beyond reach.
“They’d be ashamed of you,” he said, meaning what you do, who you’ve become.
The second Tony smiled at him, he knew that he had lost.
Tony’s eyes never moved, still tracking the motion of headlights through the dark. “They’re dead, McGee,” he said. “And anyway, they’d be ashamed of you, too.”
*
He called Tony from Bozeman only once.
“I’m staying,” he said, and over the line he heard Tony’s breath catch, as if something else had just been taken from him.