FIC: The Third Day (Tony, Gibbs, Team, OC, R)
Picture Season Four without the La Grenouille entanglements; then add Rictus.
Chapter I
In the ashy, sound-stricken panic that followed the alarms, Tony saved only a handful of possessions. He remembered to take his gun from the drawer of his bedside table, his wallet and keys from the same, his cell phone from the tangle of his sweat-soaked sheets, and six photographs snapped securely into an empty Pulp Fiction DVD case; everything else lit up with the rest of the building, a four-story flame against the inky and starless sky.
Standing on the sidewalk with the rest of his neighbors, he could only wrap his arms tight around his own chest, his gun digging into his armpit and his cell and DVD case poking his ribs. The firemen were a rush of tan and yellow, streaking to and from the building with red, sweaty faces and no time for his questions-did everyone get out okay? Everyone heard the alarms? He did his best to do a head-count, checked for old Mrs. Garrick and her scrawny grandson, counts off all thirteen of the women he’s thought about dating, and verified the continued existence of the four he actually had taken out at one point or another. But it wasn’t enough. He felt useless outside, painfully ineffective, unable to save anyone-not even able to save enough stuff-but he has the good sense to not barge back into the building, run blindly through the flames, looking for people that probably weren’t even there.
Still, responsibility was hard to shrug off at the end of the day, and it was disorienting to simply stand by and gawk with everyone else. His hand up to his eyes, he could almost make out the third floor and the east tower, could guess at which room had been his.
“It’s going up too fast,” he said. It was no use trying to communicate now, though-the crowd had already shaped into close-knit groups from which he was excluded-families and loved ones curling around each other, people plugging their ears so they could shout into their phones about what was happening. So he stood alone-there was no one he wanted to call, anyway-and watched as the flames slowly subsided to smoke and ash.
Too fast. Too fast and-he thought-too hot. He hadn’t worked a lot of arson cases but he’d had a few; he thought he could guess that some kind of accelerant had come into play. Maybe that was why the firemen looked so grim, even after it was all over, even after all the rooms had been checked and found empty.
Molotov cocktail. He was careful not even to whisper it, though-sometime soon, it would be somebody’s job to go over and over this scene for clues, and Tony didn’t want to be a false lead any more than he wanted to throw suspicion on himself.
He drifted off when they were still shouting instructions: where they could go, who they could call, what their insurance companies would say. He’d had over a hundred movies slotted into an elegant hardwood bookshelf, he’d had commendations and old letters, an address book of his fraternity brothers and his old girlfriends. A steak zipped into its marinade in the fridge; Armani and Gucci in the closet; his computer; his box of souvenirs from a college backpacking trip; a reluctantly autographed copy of Deep Six; one of his mom’s linen handkerchiefs, folded so long and kept so carefully that he was convinced he could still smell traces of her perfume in the creases. And what had he grabbed? Of all that?
Photographs.
Once he was in his car, he left the dome light on for a minute and opened the DVD case.
The first photograph was of Gibbs. Tony was really the centerpiece of it, leaning back in his chair with his hands laced behind his head; Ducky looking on indulgently and Abby turning her head to laugh, one pigtail a blur of black motion across her cheek. They were all there. If he tried hard enough, he could even remember how Viv had looked standing behind the camera, could almost catch the sight of her shadow on the floor. Once upon a time, he had seen all those things, and the picture had made him smile.
But. It was the only photo he had of Gibbs. Abby had more, and might have given him copies, but Tony’s sentimentality was sparse and secret; one picture had been enough.
Gibbs was looking at Tony, not the camera. He was smiling.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen Gibbs smile; couldn’t remember the last time he had tried to push past anger and exasperation to get to that brief flicker of relaxation and good humor. Even now, his fingers smudging the photo, bathed in the yellow of the dome light, and essentially homeless, he still wasn’t sure that he wanted to try it again. Gibbs had left, hadn’t he? Didn’t that mean that things had to change? It shouldn’t have happened like that. Tony had always been the flight risk, the one with the worn-down shoes and the hitchhiker’s thumb, the restless water to Gibbs’s immovable rock. And Gibbs should have stayed.
He was still angry. Still, in some ways, furious. It hit him sometimes when he didn’t expect it, when he’d almost forgotten it; the weight he thought he’d shrugged off rolled onto his shoulders again and he had to try once more to get rid of it. Sisyphus on the mountain. He knew they saw it and he knew what they thought: he saw it in Ziva’s rare sympathetic glances and heard it in McGee’s awkward, half-formed apologies.
They thought he was angry because Gibbs had come back and because they had gone back to him, tails between their legs, as if they’d been the ones to make the mistake. It wasn’t that. Even with his stuff dumped in a pile on McGee’s desk, even with the sour taste in his mouth, even with knowing that he’d deserved better, it wasn’t that. He’d let that go. He’d forgive all of them almost anything and the only thing that saved him from worse was that they didn’t know it. And what the hell did they think, anyway? That in five years, Gibbs had never been rude, never been careless, never lived up to his bastard reputation? The stories he could tell them. But it hadn’t been unequal, hadn’t been one-sided; Gibbs had forgiven him, too, maybe a hundred times over the years, because sometimes they just smashed up against each other, too unwilling to compromise, and something got broken in the collision.
Five years.
And if anyone had asked him, even a few months ago, he would have said that he could have looked past anything when it came to Gibbs.
It wasn’t Gibbs coming back that hurt. It was him leaving.
He tossed the photo back in the DVD case, snapped it closed, and tossed it in the passenger seat. There. Saved one real possession from the whole damned apartment, saved six stupid photos, and half of them were bad memories anyway.
“Status check,” he said. He put his head down against the steering wheel. “Gun, wallet, cell. Pictures. The useless sentimental get-it-out-of-the-fire grab that always seems stupid when it’s someone else-why the hell don’t people ever save their DVD players?-and, as it turns out, still seems stupid when it’s you. T-shirt. Sweatpants. Thankfully didn’t have to watch my apartment burn down while naked in fifteen-degree weather. Spare clothes in the car, jack, spare tire, knife, bottled water, first aid kit, I don’t know. Useless shit.”
His voice hitched up a full octave at the end and he was embarrassed to realize that his face was wet. He wiped at his eyes with the back of his wrist and then bit the inside of his cheek, hard, to wake him up enough to focus. Enough to drive.
Real inventory? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Not even a place to go.
- - - - -
The surface of the boat was perfectly smooth now. Gibbs had sanded it for months, working into the earliest hours of the morning or until his eyes lost track of what his hands were doing, removing every visible imperfection and working the wood until it was as smooth as glass beneath his bare fingers. Now there was nothing left to do. It was caught downstairs as well as a boat in a bottle but it was finished. He was done. Even when he walked back and forth, inspecting it from bow to stern, he saw nothing that might be reworked, nothing that could be replaced or refined. No more woodworking left; just a few coats of slick varnish and maybe some paint. Done was done.
It was only six, but he couldn’t concentrate in the house anymore, not with that finished and flawless boat trapped in his basement, so he poured himself another cup of coffee and headed in. He used to pass Tony sometimes in the night, Tony leaving from one of his midnight shifts just as Gibbs came in hours early, their separate cases of insomnia not concurrent but at least complementary, but he had not come in early for months and he suspected that Tony had left off working nights entirely. He had lapsed back, then, to old movies and young women, small activities to fill the small hours. Or maybe he had finally learned how to sleep all through the night. Gibbs had no way of knowing.
So when he turned the corner through the dimness of the unevenly-lit early morning bullpen, he almost didn’t notice Tony sleeping at his desk.
He was slumped in his chair, his head tilted uncomfortably far back over his shoulder, his mouth open and emitting a slight snuffling noise, and his arms wrapped loosely around his chest. There were deep lines of pain around his eyes and if Gibbs had to guess, he’d say that Tony had finally gotten old enough for his body to resent spending the night in a desk chair. Asleep, though, he still looked young. He looked the same now as he had looked in Baltimore, rolled onto his side in half-lit hotel rooms with his cell phone curled tight in one fist and held up next to his heart. Gibbs looked for it and, sure enough, there it was-tucked in place in Tony’s breast pocket, held close so that the first ring would jar him automatically from sleep.
Gibbs had never asked about that-he understood too well that there were some questions that ought to go unanswered-but he couldn’t help noticing. It was a peculiar quirk, almost a soldier’s quirk, and that Tony hadn’t felt compelled to make an excuse for it, bury it under needless explanations and jokes, told him that it genuinely meant something.
He’d put that phone back in Tony’s hand himself once, not knowing if the lights or cyanosis were responsible for tinting Tony that ghostly, all-over blue. You will not die. So he had curled Tony’s fingers tightly around the phone and squeezed just once before letting go-You’ll hear me if I call you. I won’t let you get away.
Empty promises; worthless. He’d had no real way to keep Tony from dying and now he had no way to stop him from getting away, had no words that were sure to convince him to stay. He was getting quieter, getting calmer, getting more professional; he’d lost his passion and his playfulness in one fell swoop. Gibbs knew he was to blame for that. He’d just never expected it, not from Tony-he had counted on Tony to understand even when the rest of them never could. And he had taken certain things for granted.
They’d had their share of battles and rough patches over the years and God knew he had seen Tony angry many times before. He would go too far or go too fast and see even Tony’s good-natured tolerance short-circuit, see him draw in a sharp breath and then take off. He would deal with the cold shoulder and the frost that one day suddenly and unexpectedly thawed. Always. But even then, even in the worst of those icy stages of bitterness, he had gotten certain things. He had always seen Tony’s thoughts and Tony’s heart on his sleeve, always known some things without asking.
He was never sure anymore. He looked at Tony and Tony looked back, but there was no connection, no sudden illumination-nothing but quick orders and quicker answers.
He thought now that if he shook Tony awake he might get some kind of reaction, at least-if he shook Tony hard enough, there might be at least a second between sleep and wakening where Tony didn’t remember his anger. When they could talk to each other without all the awkward weight of time and mistakes between them-they had done it before, shrugged off their problems and made their way home.
He leaned back on Tony’s desk and pushed the flat of his hand against Tony’s shoulder. “I know damn well you can’t afford a chiropractor, Tony. You ought to be in bed.”
Tony turned his head slightly and opened his eyes. They were still bleary with sleep. “Mine or somebody else’s?”
There it was, there was the chance he’d been hoping for. He tamped down the corners of his smile and pressed the moment as far as it would go. “Whoever’s got the best mattress.”
“I want the one with the talking sheep,” Tony said. He brushed his thumb against the edge of his cell phone and then shook his head a little, coming back to life-his eyes brightened and then the lights there went out: he made his hand into a fist and brought it down hard on his thigh. “Guess I could get it now.” He pushed himself to his feet and moved past Gibbs, his shoulders stiff and his neck cocked at an awkward angle. “I’ll just get cleaned up.”
Gibbs turned away from him. They had been fine before Tony had remembered. Just fine. That drove anger sharp as a shard of glass through his chest-why couldn’t Tony just forget? Forgive and forget, really, but Gibbs would settle for just half. Merciful amnesia. It would do them all a favor-Tony wasn’t happy, couldn’t be, not with all that rage-Gibbs knew that kind of anger, it soured everything, it was like biting into tinfoil-and all that stiffness.
So forget it, DiNozzo. It can’t be that hard. Not for you.
It was only ten minutes before Tony came back in, his face still damp from whatever toweling off he’d done in the head, his tie swung backwards over his shoulder. He nodded at Gibbs-like they’d never met before, just paying a random courtesy-and settled into his chair and started an assault on the keyboard. His mouth was pressed into a straight line.
He used to have a hard time shutting Tony up.
He used to know everything right away. That was better, but maybe it was gone, and if it was, he needed something to take its place. And maybe if he asked, Tony would answer.
“Something going on?”
Tony looked at him over the computer screen. “Nothing I can’t handle.”
His jaw tightened. “You sleep in here every night now?”
Tony’s eyes darkened. “You know, Gibbs-oh, hey, Probie.” He did not switch his anger off at McGee’s hurried entrance but he clamped it tight around the edges, burying it alive. He even managed a half-hearted smile for McGee. “What brings you in early? Something wrong?”
“The news-” McGee cut himself off, shaking his head. He did look as if there were reason enough for them to worry: he was unusually rumpled, as if he’d thrown on his clothes only on his way out the door, and his face-always open, emotion always legible to anyone-was unabashedly worried. “Your apartment, Tony-I’m really sorry. Everyone get out okay?”
Tony winced and drew back in his chair. “Yeah. Seemed to. Hard to get an accurate head-count in an apartment, but the firemen did a pretty thorough up-and-down before I took off.”
Firemen. Tony’s apartment burned to the ground and he had to hear about it from McGee?
“You should have called me.” McGee sat down on the edge of Tony’s desk. “You could’ve spent the night. You break into my apartment all the time-you know I’ve got room.”
“Didn’t want to wake you up.”
McGee scoffed. “Sure, Tony, because getting woken up would have bothered me so much more than finding out on the news.” His voice softened. “I was worried about you. You okay? You stay with Gibbs?”
“Yes to the first and no to the second,” Tony said. He didn’t even look at Gibbs. He bumped his shoulder against McGee’s arm. “I’m sorry. You know, if it’ll make you feel better, I’ll take you up on that bed tonight.”
“Couch,” McGee said.
“Nope. You’ll be on the couch. I’ve suffered trauma, I need the bed.”
McGee smiled. “What if I sponsor a trip to the Armani store?”
Tony matched his smile but shook his head. “I don’t need a personal shopper, McGee, I just need a place to spend the night until I can find a new apartment.”
“Thom E. Gemcity owes a lot to Agent Tommy.”
It was the right tone to strike with Tony-just the right blend of affection and casualness-and Gibbs watched them haggle, exchanging the comfortable bed for a couple suits and a fresh supply of boxers, with an unpleasant sense of déjà vu. He knew he ought to be glad that Tony could still at least accept a helping hand from McGee, if he couldn’t from Gibbs, but he didn’t have that sort of kindness in him. It used to be his job to smooth Tony’s ruffled feathers, wheedle him into accepting a spare room, and make sure he was safe. He couldn’t delegate those tasks so easily.
“Tony!” Ziva tossed her things in the vague direction of her desk as soon as she was in the door-for some reason, most of them held together in their flight and landed on, at least, the right side of the room. “The news-your apartment-” She waved her hands in the air. Beyond mangling the occasional idiom, Ziva’s English was flawless, but she seemed to have forgotten it and broken into a long stream of Hebrew. Gibbs recognized some of it from the Marines, which made him think she had to be cursing Tony out.
“Ziva. Ziva! Really loud and really not in English.”
She flung her hands down to her sides, looking particularly disgusted, and said, “Your apartment burned down and you didn’t think to tell us you weren’t dead?”
“Don’t worry, Tony. I’ll tell her for you. He’s not dead, Officer David. But if he’s not careful, he will be.”
He hadn’t been watching-he couldn’t be a part of their conversations and too much close attention felt eerily like voyeurism-but he looked up when he heard that voice, because he was sure that he knew it. That barbed sarcasm underneath those honey-rich tones, the steel fist in the velvet glove, cruelty pretending to be kind-he remembered it, associated it at once with weariness and anger, desperation and grief. And Tony. It made him think of Tony, Tony with dark bruises underneath and all around his eyes, Tony young and burned-out, Tony sitting sprawl-legged on a kitchen floor with shock-dark eyes and a bullet in his shoulder. And so, almost at once, he knew without looking.
Lucas Bayer.
Chapter I
In the ashy, sound-stricken panic that followed the alarms, Tony saved only a handful of possessions. He remembered to take his gun from the drawer of his bedside table, his wallet and keys from the same, his cell phone from the tangle of his sweat-soaked sheets, and six photographs snapped securely into an empty Pulp Fiction DVD case; everything else lit up with the rest of the building, a four-story flame against the inky and starless sky.
Standing on the sidewalk with the rest of his neighbors, he could only wrap his arms tight around his own chest, his gun digging into his armpit and his cell and DVD case poking his ribs. The firemen were a rush of tan and yellow, streaking to and from the building with red, sweaty faces and no time for his questions-did everyone get out okay? Everyone heard the alarms? He did his best to do a head-count, checked for old Mrs. Garrick and her scrawny grandson, counts off all thirteen of the women he’s thought about dating, and verified the continued existence of the four he actually had taken out at one point or another. But it wasn’t enough. He felt useless outside, painfully ineffective, unable to save anyone-not even able to save enough stuff-but he has the good sense to not barge back into the building, run blindly through the flames, looking for people that probably weren’t even there.
Still, responsibility was hard to shrug off at the end of the day, and it was disorienting to simply stand by and gawk with everyone else. His hand up to his eyes, he could almost make out the third floor and the east tower, could guess at which room had been his.
“It’s going up too fast,” he said. It was no use trying to communicate now, though-the crowd had already shaped into close-knit groups from which he was excluded-families and loved ones curling around each other, people plugging their ears so they could shout into their phones about what was happening. So he stood alone-there was no one he wanted to call, anyway-and watched as the flames slowly subsided to smoke and ash.
Too fast. Too fast and-he thought-too hot. He hadn’t worked a lot of arson cases but he’d had a few; he thought he could guess that some kind of accelerant had come into play. Maybe that was why the firemen looked so grim, even after it was all over, even after all the rooms had been checked and found empty.
Molotov cocktail. He was careful not even to whisper it, though-sometime soon, it would be somebody’s job to go over and over this scene for clues, and Tony didn’t want to be a false lead any more than he wanted to throw suspicion on himself.
He drifted off when they were still shouting instructions: where they could go, who they could call, what their insurance companies would say. He’d had over a hundred movies slotted into an elegant hardwood bookshelf, he’d had commendations and old letters, an address book of his fraternity brothers and his old girlfriends. A steak zipped into its marinade in the fridge; Armani and Gucci in the closet; his computer; his box of souvenirs from a college backpacking trip; a reluctantly autographed copy of Deep Six; one of his mom’s linen handkerchiefs, folded so long and kept so carefully that he was convinced he could still smell traces of her perfume in the creases. And what had he grabbed? Of all that?
Photographs.
Once he was in his car, he left the dome light on for a minute and opened the DVD case.
The first photograph was of Gibbs. Tony was really the centerpiece of it, leaning back in his chair with his hands laced behind his head; Ducky looking on indulgently and Abby turning her head to laugh, one pigtail a blur of black motion across her cheek. They were all there. If he tried hard enough, he could even remember how Viv had looked standing behind the camera, could almost catch the sight of her shadow on the floor. Once upon a time, he had seen all those things, and the picture had made him smile.
But. It was the only photo he had of Gibbs. Abby had more, and might have given him copies, but Tony’s sentimentality was sparse and secret; one picture had been enough.
Gibbs was looking at Tony, not the camera. He was smiling.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen Gibbs smile; couldn’t remember the last time he had tried to push past anger and exasperation to get to that brief flicker of relaxation and good humor. Even now, his fingers smudging the photo, bathed in the yellow of the dome light, and essentially homeless, he still wasn’t sure that he wanted to try it again. Gibbs had left, hadn’t he? Didn’t that mean that things had to change? It shouldn’t have happened like that. Tony had always been the flight risk, the one with the worn-down shoes and the hitchhiker’s thumb, the restless water to Gibbs’s immovable rock. And Gibbs should have stayed.
He was still angry. Still, in some ways, furious. It hit him sometimes when he didn’t expect it, when he’d almost forgotten it; the weight he thought he’d shrugged off rolled onto his shoulders again and he had to try once more to get rid of it. Sisyphus on the mountain. He knew they saw it and he knew what they thought: he saw it in Ziva’s rare sympathetic glances and heard it in McGee’s awkward, half-formed apologies.
They thought he was angry because Gibbs had come back and because they had gone back to him, tails between their legs, as if they’d been the ones to make the mistake. It wasn’t that. Even with his stuff dumped in a pile on McGee’s desk, even with the sour taste in his mouth, even with knowing that he’d deserved better, it wasn’t that. He’d let that go. He’d forgive all of them almost anything and the only thing that saved him from worse was that they didn’t know it. And what the hell did they think, anyway? That in five years, Gibbs had never been rude, never been careless, never lived up to his bastard reputation? The stories he could tell them. But it hadn’t been unequal, hadn’t been one-sided; Gibbs had forgiven him, too, maybe a hundred times over the years, because sometimes they just smashed up against each other, too unwilling to compromise, and something got broken in the collision.
Five years.
And if anyone had asked him, even a few months ago, he would have said that he could have looked past anything when it came to Gibbs.
It wasn’t Gibbs coming back that hurt. It was him leaving.
He tossed the photo back in the DVD case, snapped it closed, and tossed it in the passenger seat. There. Saved one real possession from the whole damned apartment, saved six stupid photos, and half of them were bad memories anyway.
“Status check,” he said. He put his head down against the steering wheel. “Gun, wallet, cell. Pictures. The useless sentimental get-it-out-of-the-fire grab that always seems stupid when it’s someone else-why the hell don’t people ever save their DVD players?-and, as it turns out, still seems stupid when it’s you. T-shirt. Sweatpants. Thankfully didn’t have to watch my apartment burn down while naked in fifteen-degree weather. Spare clothes in the car, jack, spare tire, knife, bottled water, first aid kit, I don’t know. Useless shit.”
His voice hitched up a full octave at the end and he was embarrassed to realize that his face was wet. He wiped at his eyes with the back of his wrist and then bit the inside of his cheek, hard, to wake him up enough to focus. Enough to drive.
Real inventory? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Not even a place to go.
- - - - -
The surface of the boat was perfectly smooth now. Gibbs had sanded it for months, working into the earliest hours of the morning or until his eyes lost track of what his hands were doing, removing every visible imperfection and working the wood until it was as smooth as glass beneath his bare fingers. Now there was nothing left to do. It was caught downstairs as well as a boat in a bottle but it was finished. He was done. Even when he walked back and forth, inspecting it from bow to stern, he saw nothing that might be reworked, nothing that could be replaced or refined. No more woodworking left; just a few coats of slick varnish and maybe some paint. Done was done.
It was only six, but he couldn’t concentrate in the house anymore, not with that finished and flawless boat trapped in his basement, so he poured himself another cup of coffee and headed in. He used to pass Tony sometimes in the night, Tony leaving from one of his midnight shifts just as Gibbs came in hours early, their separate cases of insomnia not concurrent but at least complementary, but he had not come in early for months and he suspected that Tony had left off working nights entirely. He had lapsed back, then, to old movies and young women, small activities to fill the small hours. Or maybe he had finally learned how to sleep all through the night. Gibbs had no way of knowing.
So when he turned the corner through the dimness of the unevenly-lit early morning bullpen, he almost didn’t notice Tony sleeping at his desk.
He was slumped in his chair, his head tilted uncomfortably far back over his shoulder, his mouth open and emitting a slight snuffling noise, and his arms wrapped loosely around his chest. There were deep lines of pain around his eyes and if Gibbs had to guess, he’d say that Tony had finally gotten old enough for his body to resent spending the night in a desk chair. Asleep, though, he still looked young. He looked the same now as he had looked in Baltimore, rolled onto his side in half-lit hotel rooms with his cell phone curled tight in one fist and held up next to his heart. Gibbs looked for it and, sure enough, there it was-tucked in place in Tony’s breast pocket, held close so that the first ring would jar him automatically from sleep.
Gibbs had never asked about that-he understood too well that there were some questions that ought to go unanswered-but he couldn’t help noticing. It was a peculiar quirk, almost a soldier’s quirk, and that Tony hadn’t felt compelled to make an excuse for it, bury it under needless explanations and jokes, told him that it genuinely meant something.
He’d put that phone back in Tony’s hand himself once, not knowing if the lights or cyanosis were responsible for tinting Tony that ghostly, all-over blue. You will not die. So he had curled Tony’s fingers tightly around the phone and squeezed just once before letting go-You’ll hear me if I call you. I won’t let you get away.
Empty promises; worthless. He’d had no real way to keep Tony from dying and now he had no way to stop him from getting away, had no words that were sure to convince him to stay. He was getting quieter, getting calmer, getting more professional; he’d lost his passion and his playfulness in one fell swoop. Gibbs knew he was to blame for that. He’d just never expected it, not from Tony-he had counted on Tony to understand even when the rest of them never could. And he had taken certain things for granted.
They’d had their share of battles and rough patches over the years and God knew he had seen Tony angry many times before. He would go too far or go too fast and see even Tony’s good-natured tolerance short-circuit, see him draw in a sharp breath and then take off. He would deal with the cold shoulder and the frost that one day suddenly and unexpectedly thawed. Always. But even then, even in the worst of those icy stages of bitterness, he had gotten certain things. He had always seen Tony’s thoughts and Tony’s heart on his sleeve, always known some things without asking.
He was never sure anymore. He looked at Tony and Tony looked back, but there was no connection, no sudden illumination-nothing but quick orders and quicker answers.
He thought now that if he shook Tony awake he might get some kind of reaction, at least-if he shook Tony hard enough, there might be at least a second between sleep and wakening where Tony didn’t remember his anger. When they could talk to each other without all the awkward weight of time and mistakes between them-they had done it before, shrugged off their problems and made their way home.
He leaned back on Tony’s desk and pushed the flat of his hand against Tony’s shoulder. “I know damn well you can’t afford a chiropractor, Tony. You ought to be in bed.”
Tony turned his head slightly and opened his eyes. They were still bleary with sleep. “Mine or somebody else’s?”
There it was, there was the chance he’d been hoping for. He tamped down the corners of his smile and pressed the moment as far as it would go. “Whoever’s got the best mattress.”
“I want the one with the talking sheep,” Tony said. He brushed his thumb against the edge of his cell phone and then shook his head a little, coming back to life-his eyes brightened and then the lights there went out: he made his hand into a fist and brought it down hard on his thigh. “Guess I could get it now.” He pushed himself to his feet and moved past Gibbs, his shoulders stiff and his neck cocked at an awkward angle. “I’ll just get cleaned up.”
Gibbs turned away from him. They had been fine before Tony had remembered. Just fine. That drove anger sharp as a shard of glass through his chest-why couldn’t Tony just forget? Forgive and forget, really, but Gibbs would settle for just half. Merciful amnesia. It would do them all a favor-Tony wasn’t happy, couldn’t be, not with all that rage-Gibbs knew that kind of anger, it soured everything, it was like biting into tinfoil-and all that stiffness.
So forget it, DiNozzo. It can’t be that hard. Not for you.
It was only ten minutes before Tony came back in, his face still damp from whatever toweling off he’d done in the head, his tie swung backwards over his shoulder. He nodded at Gibbs-like they’d never met before, just paying a random courtesy-and settled into his chair and started an assault on the keyboard. His mouth was pressed into a straight line.
He used to have a hard time shutting Tony up.
He used to know everything right away. That was better, but maybe it was gone, and if it was, he needed something to take its place. And maybe if he asked, Tony would answer.
“Something going on?”
Tony looked at him over the computer screen. “Nothing I can’t handle.”
His jaw tightened. “You sleep in here every night now?”
Tony’s eyes darkened. “You know, Gibbs-oh, hey, Probie.” He did not switch his anger off at McGee’s hurried entrance but he clamped it tight around the edges, burying it alive. He even managed a half-hearted smile for McGee. “What brings you in early? Something wrong?”
“The news-” McGee cut himself off, shaking his head. He did look as if there were reason enough for them to worry: he was unusually rumpled, as if he’d thrown on his clothes only on his way out the door, and his face-always open, emotion always legible to anyone-was unabashedly worried. “Your apartment, Tony-I’m really sorry. Everyone get out okay?”
Tony winced and drew back in his chair. “Yeah. Seemed to. Hard to get an accurate head-count in an apartment, but the firemen did a pretty thorough up-and-down before I took off.”
Firemen. Tony’s apartment burned to the ground and he had to hear about it from McGee?
“You should have called me.” McGee sat down on the edge of Tony’s desk. “You could’ve spent the night. You break into my apartment all the time-you know I’ve got room.”
“Didn’t want to wake you up.”
McGee scoffed. “Sure, Tony, because getting woken up would have bothered me so much more than finding out on the news.” His voice softened. “I was worried about you. You okay? You stay with Gibbs?”
“Yes to the first and no to the second,” Tony said. He didn’t even look at Gibbs. He bumped his shoulder against McGee’s arm. “I’m sorry. You know, if it’ll make you feel better, I’ll take you up on that bed tonight.”
“Couch,” McGee said.
“Nope. You’ll be on the couch. I’ve suffered trauma, I need the bed.”
McGee smiled. “What if I sponsor a trip to the Armani store?”
Tony matched his smile but shook his head. “I don’t need a personal shopper, McGee, I just need a place to spend the night until I can find a new apartment.”
“Thom E. Gemcity owes a lot to Agent Tommy.”
It was the right tone to strike with Tony-just the right blend of affection and casualness-and Gibbs watched them haggle, exchanging the comfortable bed for a couple suits and a fresh supply of boxers, with an unpleasant sense of déjà vu. He knew he ought to be glad that Tony could still at least accept a helping hand from McGee, if he couldn’t from Gibbs, but he didn’t have that sort of kindness in him. It used to be his job to smooth Tony’s ruffled feathers, wheedle him into accepting a spare room, and make sure he was safe. He couldn’t delegate those tasks so easily.
“Tony!” Ziva tossed her things in the vague direction of her desk as soon as she was in the door-for some reason, most of them held together in their flight and landed on, at least, the right side of the room. “The news-your apartment-” She waved her hands in the air. Beyond mangling the occasional idiom, Ziva’s English was flawless, but she seemed to have forgotten it and broken into a long stream of Hebrew. Gibbs recognized some of it from the Marines, which made him think she had to be cursing Tony out.
“Ziva. Ziva! Really loud and really not in English.”
She flung her hands down to her sides, looking particularly disgusted, and said, “Your apartment burned down and you didn’t think to tell us you weren’t dead?”
“Don’t worry, Tony. I’ll tell her for you. He’s not dead, Officer David. But if he’s not careful, he will be.”
He hadn’t been watching-he couldn’t be a part of their conversations and too much close attention felt eerily like voyeurism-but he looked up when he heard that voice, because he was sure that he knew it. That barbed sarcasm underneath those honey-rich tones, the steel fist in the velvet glove, cruelty pretending to be kind-he remembered it, associated it at once with weariness and anger, desperation and grief. And Tony. It made him think of Tony, Tony with dark bruises underneath and all around his eyes, Tony young and burned-out, Tony sitting sprawl-legged on a kitchen floor with shock-dark eyes and a bullet in his shoulder. And so, almost at once, he knew without looking.
Lucas Bayer.