FIC: The Third Day (Tony, Gibbs, Team, OC, R)
Chapter II
Tony had not seen Lucas in over five years. Even on his rare visits to Baltimore, he had avoided any place where their paths might intersect even by accident; he had not followed Lucas’s career or wheedled any stories of him out of Pete.
He had dedicated himself so entirely to forgetting Lucas and what had happened between them in his final days in Baltimore that it wasn’t until right then, with Lucas’s polished wingtip shoes pointed towards his desk and his lazy, shark-like smile aimed right at his jugular, that he realized how much Lucas hung over him still and how awful a mistake it had been to ever pretend otherwise.
He realized it all at once-his mind was built to favor epiphany over slow deduction-and at the same time, he realized that he was having trouble breathing. McGee was no longer perched on the edge of his desk but crouching down in front of him, one hand resting on his knee, and Tony felt a dark, hot flush of shame warm his face. McGee was dim, though-dim and far away, obscured from him by some thick and glittery veil-and although he could hear people talking, his ears were stuffed with cotton, and the individual words dampened into faint and distant drumbeats. Only the pressure on his knee felt real. He was hot-so hot-and he pulled at his tie for what felt like hours before McGee undid it for him, one cool hand now against Tony’s burning cheek.
He could hear Gibbs; Gibbs alone broke through the thick static. He didn’t know if that was because Gibbs was Gibbs or because Gibbs was yelling; he thought that it was maybe both.
“You get the hell out of here right now-I don’t care where, just fucking go-out on your own feet or out through the morgue, I don’t really give a damn-”
Then he could hear McGee, too. McGee was calling to him as if he were asleep. “Tony? Tony? You hear me?”
He parted his lips. They were very, very dry. “I hear you, Probie.”
“Finally,” McGee said, and sat back on his heels. “Ziva’s getting Ducky. Just stay still.”
“I heard Gibbs,” he said.
McGee gave him a very thin-lipped smile. “You and the whole building.” Looking a little uncertain, he put his hand back on Tony’s knee and held it there. Tony didn’t tell him to stop. “You passed out. Sitting down. You eat breakfast?”
“I’m not a morning person.” He couldn’t concentrate very well on what he was saying: McGee was fully in focus now, at least, but his own head still felt thick and swimmy, as if he’d just resurfaced from a blackout. “Gibbs? Where’s Gibbs?”
“Right here.” A Styrofoam cup materialized somewhere to his left and he reached for it without making contact. Gibbs tried it again, lowering it this time into his hand and holding it still until his fingers curled around it. “Orange juice. Drink it.” He moved his hand down to grip Tony’s arm.
The juice was lukewarm-someone had probably set a carton down by the morning donuts-but it was sugary enough, and he sipped at it slowly, feeling it sweep the cobwebs out of his head. McGee and Gibbs were still watching over him, still absently chaffing warmth back into his cooling skin, but now he knew that he shouldn’t let them: he was only comfortable with being pampered when he wasn’t really hurt. With anything else, he preferred to lick his wounds in private. Anything else left him too painfully exposed. He turned a little in his chair, like a key twisting free of a lock, and they let him go-he could still feel their attention and their worry, heavy on his heart, weighing him down so that he didn’t dare get up without their permission.
He spun the orange juice around in the cup and watched it swish against the sides. “Lucas.”
“Gone,” Gibbs said.
Tony would not look at him. “Yeah. I know. But he’ll come back. He didn’t come all the way here just to catch up, get a few drinks, compare scars.” He maneuvered a shred of pulp underneath his thumbnail and then slurped it up between his teeth. “And if he just wanted his big dramatic moment, he had five years to make it. Something bad’s going on.”
Gibbs nodded. “Later.”
“He said that if I’m not careful, I’ll be dead.” He thought, at least, that he had heard that before the veil had been thrown up over his head, letting him fall into that fuzzy darkness.
“He’s the one that should be careful,” Gibbs said. The scowl was fixed on his face, his eyes narrowed dangerously close, and for a second, Tony teetered on the edge of forgiving him completely.
He wasn’t stupid-he knew that Gibbs hated Lucas for his sake and he knew, too, that Gibbs had been the one to call him out from the dark, Gibbs the only thing he could hear when he was sliding backwards through his own history, knew that the juice and the worry and the anger had to mean something-everything-but he could forgive and forgive but he couldn’t forget. Even now, even knowing everything, even face-to-face with Gibbs, even able to reach out and take whatever acknowledgment or love or whatever he would need, he couldn’t. Wouldn’t. Not when that one single fall from grace had meant so much.
Gibbs must have seen something in his face, some hesitation, and he squatted down again-carefully, minding his bad knee-and said, “Tony?”
“I’m fine,” he said. “I’m okay.”
“That, dear boy, seems to be very much in question.” Ducky had him by the chin, tilting his head upwards, before Tony even really saw him-his head wrenched to the side, he could just make out Ziva, curling and uncurling her fists, restless and frustrated with worry. He thought she might yell at him in Hebrew again. That had been pretty spectacular.
“Hi, Ducky,” he said. “Good weekend?”
“Better than yours, I’m afraid. Eyes open, Tony.” Ducky squinted down at both his pupils and then freed his head with a brief pat to the cheek. “Ziva told me about your apartment. My most sincere sympathies. I would offer you a bedroom, but I’m afraid my mother seems to remember you rather unfavorably.”
“Thanks,” he said, “but I’m already time-sharing McGee’s couch.”
Ducky gave Gibbs a brief, cool glance. “Oh?”
If he had to deal with one more person who was just blown away by the thought that he hadn’t run to Gibbs in the middle of the night with his pillow and blankie, he was going to scream. Instead, he made himself smile and answer Ducky’s questions: no breakfast, but also no recurring blood sugar problems; yes, seeing your apartment turned into an ash-heap was pretty stressful; yes, he would absolutely try to find a rent-controlled apartment. He was almost feeling like himself by the time their little interview was over, Ducky winding down by apparently concluding low blood sugar and stress, until Gibbs said:
“Lucas Bayer dropped by.”
Ducky paused with one glove dangling from his fingers. “Detective Bayer? From Baltimore?”
“Baltimore?” McGee said.
Gibbs only nodded.
“Ziva mentioned you had a visitor that you-” here he nodded at Gibbs, “reacted rather badly to, but I never considered-good Lord, it’s been years.”
“Five,” Tony said. “Five years. And some change.” He’d meant the nickel and dime kind, a few odd days and months tossed onto their tangible five-year gap, but now he thought it worked just as well in the other direction: it had been many, many changes since they had last seen each other. He gripped the cup so hard his fingers poked through the side. “Do we have to do this all out here? Can’t we go somewhere else?”
He looked to Gibbs by reflex and Gibbs nodded. “Abby’s lab?”
“That’s fine,” he said.
He didn’t think about it because he knew the consequences of it: knew that Lucas had wrenched his neck around so that he was always looking backwards now, knew that his sense of time was now painfully out of joint, knew that if let himself realize it, he’d know that he was seeing Pete’s lab in his head and not Abby’s. But Tony had a good handle on what he did and did not let himself know and so he let it slip away from him into the dark, along with his knowledge of how he had looked to Gibbs as easily as a compass turned north. There were some things he just didn’t need to know.
They watched him carefully all the way there, refraining from putting their hands on his arms or between his shoulders to keep him steady and upright, but still so attentive-it was like a constant itch just out of his reach. He had never been watched so closely. He could put up with it from Gibbs-there’d been times when he’d even wanted it from Gibbs-but not McGee, not Ziva, not Ducky. He kept his eye on them, kept them safe, not the other way around. Tony was a sucker for the status quo because he needed to know who was his and who was not. They mixed him up.
He’d looked out for Gibbs, though-would look after Gibbs still, if Gibbs would only let him, no matter how angry he was-but that was different. He wasn’t Gibbs. They knew that.
But they looked after him anyway. They got him into a chair as soon as they were in the lab and Gibbs drew Abby aside, offering some kind of quiet and brusque explanation for the unexpected invasion. She had come to Baltimore with Gibbs and Ducky, he remembered that now: he’d liked her from the start, with her pigtails and her short skirt and her Caff-Pow. She had met him there but she had never met Lucas; he didn’t know what, if anything, Gibbs had told her about why he had come home to DC with Tony trailing behind him. Probably didn’t matter. NCIS was the fucking Island of Misfit Toys, anyway. She couldn’t have been too surprised that Gibbs had dragged home a stray.
He looked up when Gibbs came over again-when they all came over again-and they formed a loose and lazy half-circle around him, leaning against cabinets and slouching into seats and wrapping their arms tight around their chests. All of them. Good thing Tony had never been shy about performing in front of an audience.
When it became apparent that they weren’t going to ask him any questions, he decided to start on his own. “He was my partner in Baltimore. Senior partner. I wasn’t a rookie, but that’s what happens when you get bumped around from place to place. Expiration date like a carton of milk. Everybody’s sloppy seconds. That was the joke.”
“What are sloppy-”
“Some other time, Ziva,” he said. “Let’s just say it wasn’t very nice.”
“Because the people in Baltimore sucked,” Abby said. She handed him Bert. Tony obediently hugged the stuffed hippo until it farted contentedly against his chest.
“Gibbs tell you that?” He knew that he hadn’t. He wouldn’t have.
She shook her head. “Pete.”
He might have guessed. He smiled and petted a tattered little bit of plush fur behind Bert’s ear. “Well. Pete didn’t suck.”
“But everybody else did?”
Sometimes he forgot that McGee came to them out of Norfolk, their little holding-pen for wannabe field agents and technical support, mostly level-headed kids that played basketball in the evenings and did crosswords puzzles and Sudoku during the day. He never had that. He worked night shift homicide in cities with no great love for cops; he swapped shifts and worked forty-eight hours straight on one push; he got shot and stabbed and scratched and bruised. And though people could be nice, they were just as often pissed off and tired, tense and frustrated, with no time for a rookie that wouldn’t-so the rumor was-stick around long enough to be worth anything anyway. They had no patience for him and his then-preppy haircut and his knockoff Gucci shoes, his family with money and his smart mouth.
Lucas had liked him, though-Lucas had liked him right away. That was what he had tried to explain to Gibbs back in the beginning, that was what Gibbs hadn’t ever understood.
“Not everybody,” he said. “Not always. Just near the end. Things got a little screwed-up.”
“So why is your old partner here?” Ziva had her head tilted back; he could mostly just see her in profile. He knew he didn’t have to explain to her about how people could get mean when they were locked in a hopeless situation.
“I don’t know,” he said. “That’s what worries me. We didn’t part on the best of terms.”
I can’t guarantee that anyone’s going to come when you call for backup, Lucas had said, leaning against the door-frame, his eyes two shades darker than normal, his voice sad but nonetheless sincere. I hope they don’t.
He saw that they wanted more of an explanation, but he didn’t know how neat a one he could give: he had never wanted them to know about those last days, about that last case. He did not want to explain how he had once braided Christmas ribbons into Lucas’s daughter’s hair and how later he had photographed her blood drying tacky and maroon on a playground slide; he didn’t want to explain how burned-out he had been even at the beginning of it, with his plastic smile and his repeat appearances on channel eight; he didn’t want to explain even the physical consequences of it, even his black eyes and pistol-whipped jaw, even his wide-eyed and fidgety sleep deprivation, even the bullet he’d caught at the very end. He’d tried hard to leave all that behind. Didn’t he deserve that? Didn’t he get to have a fresh start?
But already he saw it sifting through his fingers-like trying to hold onto a fistful of sand-and he heard himself start to tell them before he even knew that he would.
The Story of the Three Dead Girls, he called it. In his head, he’d renamed it a hundred times, never content with whatever tag he was using to not think about it. The Story of the Three Dead Girls was as good a name as any.
As best as he could, he gave them just the bare skeleton of it, just the case and nothing else, as if between all their deductions and mistakes and dead bodies, they had just retired back-stage to smoke cigars and play checkers, as if there hadn’t been nightmares and worry and sleeplessness and late-night phone calls and bruises. He tied it up so neatly that he didn’t realize until he reached the end that, by the way he’d told it, they couldn’t possibly understand what Lucas would have against him, why he would get dizzy and stupid just from Lucas showing up.
So he tried it again, his voice a little rustier, and added back in what he thought they could stand. How Lucas had resented him for making the deal with Gibbs. How he had left Tony with a black eye and a bloody nose. How Tony’s phone had rung and rung and rung all night long with so many people wanting to know if he was sorry that he’d killed that little girl, his partner’s daughter. How Lucas had once asked him if he thought they could have done better by themselves. By the time he finished, he was hoarse and his eyes were stinging-he hadn’t wanted them to know this, he had wanted them to think he’d always been happy-and Ziva brought him another cup of water and Abby rubbed his hand.
McGee was pale, like he was just a second away from being sick. “You never said.”
“It doesn’t make for good conversation.” He moved his thumb across the back of Abby’s hand. “But it was one case in two years, McGee. That wasn’t, like, an average week.”
He could feel Gibbs wanting to argue with him because he almost wanted to argue with himself: it was like a tickle in the back of his throat. But he knew he was right. He had been happy there sometimes. He’d even considered staying there, outlasting his expiration date. He’d had a good partner; he’d had friends. His happiness wasn’t as much of a freak accident as Gibbs seemed to think.
He shaped the words in his head like he could point them at Gibbs and pull the trigger: You think that I won’t leave because I’m happy here, but I was happy there, too, before things went to hell. I can always leave. That’s the one thing I’m really, really good at.
But there were threats that, even now, he wasn’t angry enough to make.
He swished the water around in his mouth and tried to clear his head. “If Lucas is here,” he said, drilling the point of it once and for all into their heads-stay with me, stay in the present, don’t look too hard or think too much about everything I just said-“then it’s not good news.” He knew, at least, one way to find out. He didn’t think that Pete could know too much about what was going on, or he would have gotten a warning and not pulled a Southern belle swoon right out in front of God and everybody, but he might know something, and that was better than the blind-deaf nothingness he had now.
“I just need to make a call,” he said to Gibbs. He took his cell out-at least one thing he was glad he’d bothered to save-and did a quick address book scan. He stood up this time. He couldn’t just sit there and look up at them and wait for the bomb to drop. “Just a minute.”
“Not Bayer, right?” McGee shifted back and forth on his feet and looked at no one in particular; Tony thought he probably realized that was a pretty stupid question.
He answered it anyway. “Not Lucas. Old friend.”
The phone rang twice before Pete answered with, “Don’t you have work to do? Oh shit, you got the plague again, didn’t you? Who does that more than once?”
“No plague,” he said. “Do you have a minute?”
“Fewer people died today than usual. You might be cutting into the time I was going to spend watching Doctor Who in the AV lab.” There was a tiny pause. “You don’t usually call me from work. Are you going undercover?”
Lucas’s reappearance had sharpened his memories-he could almost see himself with Pete, their feet propped up on spare chairs, passing popcorn back and forth in the lab, watching pirated episodes of Quantum Leap on a laptop with a cracked screen. He had no idea how to do deal with this: he didn’t want to tell Pete because telling Pete would mean that it was real, forever, and once it was real, he couldn’t wake up, shake the past off his body like a blanket, and come back into the world he’d made for himself. Tony didn’t go backwards; that was the one firm rule he had made for himself. He didn’t look behind him, he didn’t retrace his footsteps, and if he had nightmares that were more like memories, that was no one’s business but his own. What he wanted-
Now, that was quite the list. What he wanted was to not have an ash heap for an apartment; to let go of this stupid, chest-tightening anger; to not have to reopen all his old scars; to talk to Pete for a couple minutes about slow days and good sci-fi; to let McGee take him out and buy him breakfast and Armani. He wasn’t sure how he reconciled the saved apartment with the new Armani suits, but he didn’t care-everything in him was tied up in some stupid knot, wanting and wishing and undoing and tightening, everything interconnected and tangled and painful and precious. He wanted to keep it.
He cut it in two, instead: cleaved everything about himself that mattered neatly along the dividing line between past and present.
“Lucas is here,” he said.
He heard something fall on the other end of the line; heard something break. He wasn’t sure, though, whether he’d heard it or only felt it.
“Lucas,” Pete said.
They were all looking at him, faces tight and pale, undeniably worried; he turned away and plugged one ear with his finger so that he could concentrate, drown out or bury the knowledge of their concern.
“Gibbs made him leave,” he said, “but he’ll come back.”
“Bad pennies,” Pete said. He sounded quiet; far away.
“Do you know why?”
It was the closest he could come to an accusation. He knew that there must have been some kind of warning back in Baltimore-some rumor, some circulated e-mail, some oracle, some astrological sign. Red sky in the morning, Tony take warning. And Pete hadn’t told him.
“Yeah,” Pete said. “Maybe. I didn’t know he’d-Tony, I had no idea he’d come see you.”
“I don’t like being blindsided.” He heard his voice get louder, shriller. Someone-Ziva, he thought-put a warm hand on his back. He didn’t shrug her off. He might need someone to hold him up before this was finished. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I had to weigh my options. It’s not something I would’ve wanted to bring up if I could avoid it.” He sighed. Tony could almost see him on the other end of the line, pinching the bridge of his nose to stave off the beginnings of a headache. “Tony. It’s about the Martinez case.”
He took a step backwards; Ziva’s hand pressed a little harder between his shoulders. He had to winnow out the sound of his own heartbeat and ragged breathing, had to ask the question, but the phone in his hand seemed far away and Pete even more distant, inescapably quiet and static-fuzzed, just out-of-focus. He moved back to his chair, Ziva spinning it around like a top to meet him, and fell into it. Ziva was careful with him. One hand on the back of his neck, one hand on his shoulder. Listening, he was sure, to the slight jumps and falls of Pete’s voice on the other end of the line, Pete trying to make sure Tony was still there.
He said, “Martinez?” and his voice sounded funny to his own ears. Too loose, almost, as if it had unraveled from the rest of him and fallen away.
“They picked him up in a bust a couple months ago,” Pete said. It all came out of him in a rush, like a pricked balloon, and Tony wondered how long Pete had known, how long Pete had been afraid of this. “I heard he was trying to make a deal, trade in some bigger fish. The chief doesn’t want that to happen-bird in the hand, other clichés like that-and he said that they should find a way to get something more on Martinez. More than just the drug charges.”
“So they came to me,” he said.
The pain. The uncomprehending totality of the pain and the darkness. Lucas, afterwards, sitting on the edge of his hospital bed, knotting balloons around the bars, saying, You wouldn’t say anything, wouldn’t even blink-I thought you weren’t going to wake up. I didn’t mean to hurt you more. I just-you wouldn’t say a word.
“I never thought they’d go that far,” Pete said. “I swear, I would’ve told you then.”
“I know,” he said. He sunk his head forward, letting the rush of blood heat up his cheeks and ears. His vision was dark; filtered through too many years, too many sick and stupid tragedies. “But I can’t help them. They know that. I can’t tell them what else he was doing-I don’t remember.” He reached up behind his shoulder and grabbed Ziva’s hand. He needed her to hold him here, to keep him from flying backwards through his own past, needed her to stop him from falling again. “Pete. You know that. They know that. I don’t remember.”
“I know,” Pete said. “But they think you will.”
“And Lucas-”
“Lucas says you have to.” A small break; just enough time for everything to shatter. “Lucas says you already do.”