Title: "Grayscale"
Rating: FR15 (rated for strong language, sexual situations, graphic imagery, and violence)
Category: GEN
Genre: Casefile, Drama
Characters: Tony DiNozzo, Tim McGee, and team + original characters
Spoilers: Season 12
Author's Note: Set approx. one month post Season 12 finale (spoilers!) Contains canon pairings only. Tony-centric with McGee playing a pivotal role.
Acknowledgments:
Thanks go first to Madeline (Fingersnaps) for the prompt and for supporting me through the writing process. Also musical thanks to Radiohead and Thom Yorke for writing really creepy, weird music that fueled the muse for this one. Super very special creative thanks to Sarah (flootzavut) for tolerating my crazy babbling, and to Sheila (hazelmom) for also listening to a fair bit of babbling and even a few annoying text messages before I'd even put a word on paper, and for her suggestion of one plot point I decided to add (after I initially shot it down.) Thanks all!
Warnings: Dark themes & subject matter; crime against a child, major trigger (attempted suicide)
GRAYSCALE
to preface it
"One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl… Three for a girl. I'm stuck on three, I just can't get any further. My head is thick with sounds, my mouth thick with blood. Three for a girl. I can hear the magpies—they're laughing, mocking me, a raucous cackling. A tiding. Bad tidings. I can see them now, black against the sun. Not the birds, something else. Someone's coming. Someone is speaking to me. Now look. Now look what you made me do."
from The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins
July 8, 2015
Early morning.
Stumbling across the gravel access road, he carried something awkward and bulky in his arms. He scaled a low metal fence, climbed up the boulders that blocked the harbor from the open bay. He tripped up more than once, twice, almost falling but always catching himself. Drunk, or close to it. A small arm swung loosely from the bundled sheets—little fingers Crayola stained, wrist red and raw, pink bandaid on a thumb.
Under white moonlight, the Chesapeake's currents swirled strong on one side, calm on the other. All of it black. Endless and black. Pinprick lights shone from the far shore, blinking, some white, more red. The tide gulped and gurgled against the rocks.
They reached the end of the breakwater, and there he mumbled, "Look what you've done. Look what I've done"
Dawn would break in an hour, or longer. But for now the darkness pressed in from all sides as the moon dodged in and out behind clouds, winking at the quiet harbor below.
He wedged the bundle between the rocks, just above the water, and that's where he left it.
"Look. Look what you've gone and made me do."
That's where he left her.
July 16, 2015
Interrogation Room B, NCIS
Lewis Wilson — marine, grieving father, murder suspect — had aged decades since the day a fisherman found his daughter's dead body on a rock jetty miles from home.
He'd aged decades since that phone call. Decades since he'd been informed that nothing would ever be right or good or whole again. He hadn't remembered what was said, what platitudes had been extended his and his wife's way. The useless phrases, rote and tired: "We'll do everything we can." "I'm sorry for your loss." "We're gonna get the bastard who did this." Everything from that point on — the phone call: "your daughter is dead." — had melded into a blur of numb shock.
But before that, from the moment he and Tracy realized Lucy was gone, taken, stolen, GONE — everything had hurled onward at a frenzied, frantic pace. Because she was still out there. Somewhere. Waiting for them, her loving parents, to rescue her from wherever dark place she'd been hidden. There was hope.
Until the phone call. Until seeing her. Cold. Gray. Pink bandaid on her thumb — she'd gotten stung by an ant the day before. Oh, had she cried, and cried, and cried, and they'd kissed it all better. Marker stained hands — she'd been drawing the morning she was taken. The stick horse and the stick people and a shape that might have been the family dog, the masterpiece stuck to the refrigerator.
More platitudes. Sad faces. Pitying faces.
The grief had come to stay, lodged somewhere near his heart — right next to where he kept his little girl, now a gaping hole. His wife — her mother — was broken, like a bird struck by a stone, wing shattered, fluttering in circles on the grass.
The anger had come, too. Rage.
Violence.
And now he sat here at a table in Interrogation Room B. The lighting was bright, clinical. Probably showed all the lines in his now decades' too old face. Across the table sat a man he'd come to vaguely know over the past several days. He wore a suit and tie, as usual, expensive, and he held a file with his name on it. Maybe it contained everything about him. His life. His guilt. His act of cold rage.
Gunnery Sergeant Lewis Wilson: Marine, grieving father, murder suspect.
But they'd prepped before this, rehearsed it, because this man, Special Agent Anthony DiNozzo, already knew what he'd done.
Hadn't witnessed it. Hadn't heard a confession. But he knew.
He stared at DiNozzo's hands as if for the first time. Inspected them. Nails kept short and neat. Trigger finger callused from too much time on the trigger. No ring, but today there was a pink bandaid around one finger. Like Lucy's.
It had started to peel. Like Lucy's.
They'd rehearsed this.
After the questions, he walked out of the room into the hallway, dazed, where another agent escorted him back to the main entrance. There were some sympathetic looks, most from the blond agent who accompanied DiNozzo in the room, and some doubtful looks, most from the tall, skinny agent who stayed outside.
He felt DiNozzo watching, felt the weight of his eyes on his back. Following him. He wondered when he'd collapse under it all, the grief, the guilt.
Lewis Wilson: marine, grieving father…
Killer.
This was either some sort of twisted game, or fate was smiling on him, taking pity on him.
Wilson: mouse.
DiNozzo: cat.
And that cat had let him go.
Tony stared at Wilson's back until he'd turned the corner.
Wilson didn't have the face of a killer; then again, it wasn't easy to tell, most times. His was the face of a father — grieving, angry, confused. A man bent to his breaking point. Maybe he wouldn't have done it if Tony hadn't given him the idea, vague and obscure as it was. Just that small bit of information.
Truth was, Tony didn't see Gunnery Sergeant Lewis Wilson sitting on the other side of that table; he saw Gibbs. All he saw was Gibbs. And that's what made this situation even worse.
That's why Tony did what he did.
That's where the seed began to germinate.
After he pocketed the shell casings.
After he told McGee — none too gently — that he'd "handle it."
After a dozen other unrelated events weeks, months, years before.
Something clicked. Then it broke.
And he knew it was wrong, but he did it anyway.