FIC: The Third Day (Tony, Gibbs, Team, OC, R)
Chapter III
Gibbs had never been much good with names; some things just slid through the fence-slats of his memory and names were one of them. Martinez, though-he remembered that name. It could not slip through the gaps; it was swollen large with importance, even though Tony had only mentioned it once. Back in Baltimore, when Tony had still been stiff and dry-eyed with exhaustion and still had bruises on his face, he had told Gibbs that the Martinez case was the reason he’d been shuffled off to the sidelines and left to deal with cameras and suicides. It had been an undercover assignment and it had ended badly-
They thought I’d get coked up. That was the theory of choice about how the Martinez assignment went to hell.
How did it go to hell?
In a hand-basket. You know a better way of getting there?
Even then, before he had really known Tony, that had been enough for him to remember. They had lived on a kind of continuous loop, always the same, locked together like magnets, and so he had always worried over Tony and Tony had always made him worry. So when Tony let Woley go and spun towards them, his face shock-white and his eyes large and two shades too dark, Gibbs knew that he had again found reason enough. They were starting all over. He let them handle it for now, though-he let Ziva keep her hands on Tony’s shoulders and let McGee and Abby fuss over him while Ducky checked pulse and pupils and temp. Gibbs was focused on something else.
I can’t tell them what else he was doing-I don’t remember.
Tony tucked his head down between his knees again and said, “I think I’m gonna-”
Gibbs hooked a trashcan with his foot and pushed it to Tony, who immediately grabbed the edges of it and started coughing. Nothing came up. He looked up at Gibbs, a sheen of sweat glinting on his face, and said, “Sorry. Thanks. Gibbs, it’s Martinez, it’s the Martinez case.” He doubled over again, one hand fisted to his stomach, and dry-heaved again. The muscles in his neck were rigid and stood out at sharp angles.
“Easy, Tony,” Ducky said, running one hand along Tony’s spine as Tony twisted and coughed. “Try to relax. You’ll tear your throat.”
“Oh, that sounds like fun,” Tony said. He turned to the side and leaned his head against Abby’s stomach; she immediately buried her fingers in his hair, murmuring something and rubbing little circles into his scalp. Under other circumstances, Gibbs thought, Tony would be eating all this attention up-now he just looked white and tense, letting them take care of him but disliking it nonetheless. Which was why Gibbs intended to stay a step or two behind.
“Who’s Martinez?”
“A bad guy, Probie. Bad, bad guy.”
“A bad guy in Baltimore,” Ziva said. She sounded a little unsettled. Gibbs gave her a quick second glance and she met his eyes-something was wrong. She squeezed Tony’s shoulders once more before letting him go and walking to Gibbs’s side. She said, sotto voce, “I do not know anything about this, Gibbs.”
Tony didn’t hear. “Yeah,” he said, “a bad guy in Baltimore, summer of 2001.” His hands were shaking. He balled them into fists. “That’s why Lucas is here. Pete said-” He swallowed hard and locked the wastebasket between his feet for safekeeping. “Pete said that Martinez wants to make a deal and the department wants to persuade the DA not to go for it. They want me behind them and I guess they sent Lucas to get me. I need-I need to get some fresh air. I need to go outside.”
The look on Tony’s face was one of blank, animal desperation-need was an understatement, and he was only barely hanging on to reason long enough to ask permission before he bolted into clean and untouched air. Gibbs knew the feeling.
Tony probably wanted to go alone, though, and they couldn’t risk that-Tony looked half in the mood to tear off his own skin to get away from himself, and Gibbs wasn’t willing to match Tony’s small store good sense against his furious, bone-shattering instincts. Tony knew how to hurt himself even when Bayer wasn’t showing up and offering to do it for him; Gibbs wanted to keep him safe even from himself.
“Take Abby,” he said. It was probably the right choice. If Tony were going to do something stupid, he wouldn’t do it in front of Abby.
Tony nodded and let Abby help him up, let her array herself underneath his arm like a kind of a crutch. He put one arm around her shoulder and together, slowly, they went outside. Gibbs watched them leave, his whole body tilted unwillingly towards the door, wanting to follow and only barely convincing himself to stay in place. Abby would be anchor enough. Ziva had something she wanted to tell him and anyway, Tony didn’t want him there. And if there was a right time to push against that, to argue with it, to slap some sense into him, it wasn’t now.
Ziva sat down backwards in Tony’s old chair, her feet spread out in an elegant V around the wastebasket. “Do you know about this Martinez case?”
“Not much. Enough to know that it didn’t end well.”
“I’m starting to think that not much did,” McGee said. He sat down in Abby’s chair and put his elbows on his knees. He and Ziva were both still-Gibbs didn’t know how they could stand it. He wanted something to break. He sure as hell didn’t want to sit down.
Ziva’s knuckles were white from where she had them locked around the back of the chair. “I reviewed all of Tony’s pertinent case files when I was constructing a profile for-for Ari.” She did not shudder, did not look at him to see if he still remembered the moment when she had pulled the trigger. She simply went on. “I never saw any records on this case. Nothing from Baltimore and nothing from medical. It’s a ghost case, Gibbs. Only rumor.”
“Rumors that you know, Ziva, or rumors that you’re guessing about?”
She shrugged with one shoulder. “There are always certain things that get left out of official documents, certain things that are better double-checked in person. But I didn’t have that much time. I’m only guessing, but it seems like the sort of thing that could be found out. I’m only telling you what I know. There is no official record of an investigation into anyone named Martinez, let alone one in the summer of 2001.”
“You think Tony deleted it?”
“I am not suggesting anything,” Ziva said. “It just seems suspicious.”
Ducky looked at Gibbs. “If I remember correctly, this wouldn’t be the first time some of Tony’s records showed up in a slightly doctored form.”
“He had friends in high places,” Gibbs said absently. “But those were altered, not lost.”
McGee raised a hand. “What are we talking about?”
If he’d had the time or inclination to focus on anything but the task at hand, he might have pitied McGee, who had gone years blindly assuming that, with his MIT-polished mind and his NCIS-trained instincts, he knew everything about Tony that there was to know. He’d had that knocked out of him. McGee was good enough to blunder through anyway, persistent in his kindness, but he had to be suffering from more than a little whiplash. Gibbs would have to remember that; he’d have to remember to be gentle, if he could. No point in creating any more collateral damage when there had already been enough.
“Tony broke a lot of rules right before he left Baltimore,” he said. “He knew there’d be consequences, some kind of official reprimand. They’d go easy on him just because they’d be glad to get rid of him but they’d have to do something just to save face.”
“And Tony has no reprimand from that case,” Ziva said.
“No. He doesn’t.”
“Friends in high places,” Ziva said. “Who?”
“My guess would be Pete Woley or somebody else in the lab. One thing’s for sure, it sure as hell wasn’t Lucas Bayer. But erasing a reprimand is one thing-a case file’s something else. I don’t think Tony knows the Martinez file is gone, either. Not if he was talking about someone knowing that he couldn’t help them. He doesn’t know. I don’t even know if he knows the reprimand went missing. Never asked.”
“Tony has other reprimands, though,” Ziva said. She folded her arms across her chest. “Why would one more matter so much?”
True. Tony had never hesitated at breaking the rules, had never cared what was politick. He drew his own lines and sometimes let Gibbs draw them for him, but that was as much as he would concede. Still, his commendations outnumbered his reprimands, even before he came to NCIS, and he’d never gotten his hands too dirty-or worse, bloody. Gibbs had done worse than Tony and he knew it. Tony avoided entanglements; Gibbs had chopped them in two. And there had been times when he had pulled the trigger without needing to, times even now, when he was calmer, steadier, when he was sure that he would do it again. He understood revenge in ways that Tony, for all of his now-you-saw-it-now-you-didn’t cynicism, never could and hopefully never would.
There were lines that Tony had never crossed, then, and he hadn’t broken any real taboos in unraveling the mess of the Lacher-Kelly-Bayer murders. So why that one reprimand?
“I don’t know why,” he said. “Maybe it was a going-away present.” It was as good an explanation as any, but it still gnawed at him-why, when Woley already knew that Tony had a job waiting for him in DC? Why would it matter? He shook it off. “Either way, it doesn’t bother me as much as our missing case-file. Tony wouldn’t have asked him to do that. That’s the kind of thing that attracts attention, makes people lose their jobs.”
“Then we don’t have a choice,” McGee said softly. “He’ll have to tell us himself.”
“He’s not responding well to any of this, Jethro. Tony may have exceptional reserves when dealing with stress, but this is already pushing him to the limit. And with his apartment-”
“His apartment.” His hand tightened involuntarily; the blunt edges of his fingernails sank into the calluses at the edge of his palm. “Bayer said that if DiNozzo wasn’t careful, he’d be dead. That fire wasn’t an accident and it wasn’t random. Someone wanted Tony out of the picture.”
“Or to send a very strong warning,” Ziva said. “Arson isn’t the most reliable assassination attempt. If someone wanted him dead, they would have been more thorough.”
Gibbs barely heard her. He was already heading out the door. He had to know for sure.
He found Tony standing with Abby in the parking lot, shivering even while they were bundled into their coats, talking in low voices about music and movies-Tony’s comfort conversation when he couldn’t have comfort food. Tony’s coat was his oldest one, the one Gibbs knew he kept stashed in his trunk for emergencies, one with worn elbows and raggedy cuffs. He hadn’t had time, then, to seize hold of much before he’d been hurried out of his apartment. Quick. And Tony hadn’t hesitated. Good-that was good. He didn’t know what he-but then, he didn’t have to think of that. Tony had gotten out.
Tony saw him when he was only halfway out; Gibbs watched his face freeze in place, a look of wary anticipation. Fuck, when had Tony started looking at him like that?
“Your apartment,” Gibbs said.
“Flammable objects? Places I don’t live in anymore?” Tony shook his head and looked down, his grin hard and inflexible in the strong early-morning winter sunlight. “Tell me you didn’t come all the way out here to tell me that it wasn’t an accident, because really, I got that a while back. But hey, I had the advantage of seeing it get crispy up close and personal. It was burning a little too hot for a wiring accident.”
Anger was hot and sour in his throat. “Were you planning on mentioning that anytime soon?”
“It’s been a busy morning,” Tony said. His voice was sharp as a razor, but Gibbs wasn’t sure which one of them he wanted to cut. “Maybe I just didn’t have a chance.”
Gibbs stepped forward and took both Tony’s wrists, turning them out until Tony was forced to step forward to ease into the awkward position of his arms. The corners of Tony’s mouth drew back, more of a sneer than a smile, and for a second, Gibbs thought that Tony might take a swing at him. Gibbs would have let him. Only once, but if that was what he needed-but that was easy and Tony didn’t do easy, Tony made everything hard.
“Hey,” Gibbs said. He might have shouted it, he wasn’t sure. “You’re pissed. I get that.”
“Fucking brilliant deduction,” Tony said. His face was reddening.
Abby was looking at them both with widened eyes, one hand up over her mouth, and Gibbs was worried about her, too-he hadn’t wanted her to see this-but he wasn’t much good at dividing his attention. He would take care of her when he was done with Tony.
Tony had never admitted to being angry with him before, had never even burned this brightly in his anger-everything with Tony had been frostbitten, said in absences instead of words. Gibbs pushed the moment as far as he could. Tony had, after all, listened to him earlier, responded to him, accepted comfort and care when he’d struggled out of his past as when he’d struggled out of sleep. He could be distracted from his anger, then, but now he was using that same anger to distract him from worse, and Gibbs didn’t want that and wouldn’t have it. But Tony was hard to hold, hard to control, and dangerous. It was like trying to keep his hands on a ticking bomb.
Still, he tried-he had saved Tony once and everything after that was just a reiteration, the two of them always coming full circle as best they could.
So he held Tony in place and for the moment, Tony let him. But maybe not for long, so he had to do this quickly.
But he didn’t know what to say. He’d never needed to say anything before.
“Tony,” he said, and his voice froze in the air. He was never any good at this. “Tony, you don’t tear yourself apart to get to me. I’m right here.” He held Tony steadily. “You want to be mad at me, you do that later. But not right now. Right now you need me.”
Tony turned his wrists slowly; Gibbs let him go. He had to. He had to know if Tony would stay if there was nothing hold him down.
Tony didn’t look furious anymore. He just looked tired. He went to Abby and talked to her for a few minutes, calming her down, drawing her back to him. Then he kissed her on the cheek and pointed her back towards the lab and it was just the two of them, alone in the freezing parking lot, their hands tucked into their pockets for warmth. So Gibbs waited, to see if they would start or finish this time. And if he shook, it was only because of the cold.
When Tony breathed, a fine and icy mist blew out between them.
“I always,” Tony said, “needed you. That’s why I can’t just let it go.”
“Tony-”
But trying to grab hold of Tony now was like trying to put his hands on that frozen breath-he could only hold it for a second before it melted between his fingers and disappeared. Tony, though, was not ice and air: he was still flesh and blood and bone, everything mended and stitched back together at least once, everything still breakable, and if Gibbs couldn’t catch him, someone else would. That was what terrified him. He wouldn’t let Gibbs help him but there were always other people who could hurt.
“June nineteenth,” Tony said. “June twentieth, June twenty-first. 2001.”
Gibbs took the bait, took the lifeline. “What happened then?”
Tony laughed a little. “I don’t know.”
“But-”
“Afternoon of the twenty-first, they pulled me out of this sweltering hot room in this run-down, rat-infested little warehouse. I don’t know how I got there. I don’t know why I was tied to a chair. I don’t know how I got that broken arm, or those bruises, or anything else.” He tilted his head back and looked at the sky, clear and cloudless, painfully blue. “I know I was in there at least two days, because I checked in on the nineteenth, even if I don’t remember it. Lucas would know. And I was so hungry, so thirsty. It must have been a while. I like to think that-that I wouldn’t have been like that-if it hadn’t been so long.”
And then Gibbs knew. He couldn’t swallow. He heard the words come out of his mouth before he knew that he was going to say them. “They tortured you.”
He had some experience with that, with terse questions and unbearable bursts of pain, but it had been a soldier’s torture and he’d had a soldier’s training-he’d known, even then, how to compartmentalize, how to take himself away. And even if he hadn’t, he’d known the risks. He’d understood the contract he’d signed. But Tony-even knowing that Tony had been hit, worked over that way, tenderized like meat, had been bad enough, but he had never thought of what Tony was implying. He had never considered anything so careful, so precise, so prolonged. Tony had never told him.
“I don’t know what all they did to me,” Tony said. “I don’t even know what they wanted from me. But if someone sent Lucas here to quiz me, to find out what I knew then about Martinez’s side-rackets, they need to understand that I don’t know. Someone should have told them that. Lucas could have told them that, but he didn’t. Pete said-” But he swallowed the end of that sentence, keeping it for himself. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“Bayer can’t use you if we don’t let him,” Gibbs said. “We won’t let him.”
Tony looked up again. Gibbs wondered what he saw there. “I don’t think I’m going to have a choice this time, boss.”