AN: For those who are unfamiliar with the His Dark Materials universe, this is basically all you need to know (taken from the wiki).
"A dæmon /ˈdiːmən/ is a type of fictional being in the Philip Pullman fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials. Dæmons are the external physical manifestation of a person's 'inner-self' that takes the form of an animal. Dæmons have human intelligence, are capable of human speech—regardless of the form they take—and usually behave as though they are independent of their humans. Pre-pubescent children's dæmons can change form voluntarily, almost instantaneously, to become any creature, real or imaginary. During their adolescence a person's dæmon undergoes "settling", an event in which that person's dæmon permanently and involuntarily assumes the form of the animal which the person most resembles in character. Dæmons and their humans are almost always of different genders."
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WARNINGS FOR: Eventual smut, both het and slash. Kate/Tony and Tony/Gibbs. Canonical character death. And angst of course, because no one would believe that I wrote it if it didn't have a healthy dose of angst.
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Chapter One: Meetings
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"I've been lonely for so long. And I've been hurt so deeply. If only I could have met you again a long time ago, then I wouldn't have had to take all these detours to get here."
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84
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It was almost like the start of a bad joke.
In the years to come, Leroy Gibbs would become very familiar with bad jokes.
An ex-marine and a Baltimore cop walk into a room. The Baltimore cop is cocky, arrogant. The kind of man that sets Gibbs' teeth on edge.
What happens next is the punchline.
What happens next is the rest of their lives.
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Anthony DiNozzo's mother was a firm believer in fate. Everything happened for a reason, she would tell him.
His mother loved books and she loved movies. Most of all, she loved her son; loved him with the fiery passion of a woman who had little else left to love. She would read to him endless passages from musty old poetry books while he wriggled and squirmed on her lap, his daemon restlessly flickering from one colourful, feathered form to the next, both eager to be away.
They lived in a big house that echoed with emptiness. Anthony sometimes wondered why only the front rooms were filled with furniture, the rooms he wasn't allowed to play in. When he asked his mom she said that they were a stage, and murmured something about appearances. Anthony liked that most of the rooms were empty. It meant that when she sang while home alone, her voice was easily heard no matter where he was. The clicking of his daemon's claws on the polished floorboards when she took canine form would remain a soothing noise to him long after he ceased to remember why he liked the sound.
If he was good, his mother would watch movies with him with her nightingale daemon a silent watcher over them all. She'd run her fingers through his hair and quote the lines off by heart. Her daemon would whistle along sometimes, tuneless and dull. In all the time Anthony knew him, he never sang.
If he was bad, she'd frown at him and click her tongue, and his daemon would become a whimpering puppy with her tail tucked between her legs, cringing for supplication. She never stayed mad for long.
She didn't stay for long.
After his mother died, Anthony would listen to his father gripe about how she had never been happy; how their lives together had been lessened by her misery in the home that he built for her. For a while he believed him, because he was his father and his father couldn't possibly be wrong.
He'd thought that about his mother, but then his mother had left him.
When he grew older it occurred to him that a cage is a cage, no matter how gilded the bars, and perhaps his mother had been right all along. The smell of old books made him feel ill and brought back memories of a bony knee and the rustle of wings that rarely opened in flight.
He swore he'd never be like that.
They couldn't cage him if he didn't stay still long enough for them to close the gate.
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Leroy Gibbs didn't even allow for the dust of Stillwater to be shaken off his boots before he firmly moved on to the next part of his life. As far as he was concerned, every moment had led to this.
This house with this wife and his daughter a brilliant light that made everything else shine the brighter for reflecting her.
Shannon's Rule #1. Always trust your daemon.
And his daemon was happier than she'd ever been before in the moments when they were a family. Shannon's delicate-limbed roe deer daemon watching over them with liquid eyes as Kali chased their daughter's daemon around in endless circles. Kali's vivid red coat would be the only clear thing he would remember of these times when they were gone.
He would dream of a fox chasing something, but he never knew what she was chasing, and in the end the fox was always alone.
He was the best at his work, of course he was. He trusted his gut, and his daemon. They were never out of sync. The sniper with his fox daemon at his side; two sets of ears and eyes working in perfect harmony.
His success only meant he wasn't home when he was needed.
Leroy Gibbs didn't believe in fate. There was nothing predestined about his family dying while he was too far away to stop it.
There was nothing predestined about the two gravestones, one with a deer daemon gilded into it, and the other the fox and deer standing together. Her parents' daemons, because her own had never settled. Would never settle.
Gone to Dust before given a chance to live.
There was nothing predestined about him hunting down the man responsible. It was his choice, his actions, that directly led to the bullet through Pedro Hernandez's skull and windshield as Kali shrieked her pain and fury for no one to hear.
There was no fate. Just actions and reactions. Everything that happened could be traced back to a road he'd taken previously. He carried the weight of it all.
When Pedro Hernandez died, Kali's red coat shifted and settled again.
He made a name for himself at NIS. The ex-marine sniper with the coal-black fox daemon with eyes as icy blue as her human's. A loner. A hunter. The best at his job.
And the knowledge of it burned him.
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Anthony believed in fate because his mother had, and because he'd seen too much not to.
Ten was a big year for him. Ten was walking in and finding his mom on the floor with gold glittering on her clothes and the nightingale nothing but a fading memory.
Ten was his father bringing another woman to her funeral, and Anthony running away from the confusion of it all.
Ten was climbing his favourite tree in the middle of winter as Fitz swooped around his head as a furious cawing raven. It was his foot slipping on the slick branch and sending him plummeting to the ground as ineffectual claws grasped helplessly at his shirt. Ten was breaking his arm and going unnoticed under that tree as his father complained to the mourners about him inheriting his 'mother's flighty disposition'.
It was Fitz finally dropping the brightly coloured exuberant forms she'd spent the last ten years showing off in and settling as a long-limbed canine, howling until someone heard and came to lift the pale, frozen child out of the snow.
As far as Anthony was concerned, it was fate that meant there was someone to hear his daemon's howls, and fate that led to him being alone in a hospital room with lungs heavy with sickness; the only sign of his father a gift basket with best wishes written on it in an unfamiliar hand.
"I miss mom," he admitted just once to his daemon when he was home again in the empty house.
"Don't," she advised him warily, lowering her head and folding back large velvet ears. "Everyone leaves in the end. Don't get attached."
"Except you." It wasn't a question.
She jumped up on the bed next to him, curled around him as his breath still wheezed in his chest. "Except me."
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Caitlin Todd grew up in a house with three boys and an older sister who gave as good as she got. Her life plans never included two and a half kids and a mortgage.
Her sister was always too old, too cool, to hang out with the 'kids' so Kate spent a lot of her childhood tagging after her brothers. Later, she would wonder if this explained her penchant for finding trouble no matter where she went.
"I don't wanna play with no girl," snapped one of her brother's nameless friends when she was eight and her brothers were infinitely older and wiser than her. His daemon sneered at hers with white fangs, a large tabby cat, fierce and bold.
She could be bold too. Baoth shifted to a hawk and sneered back, wings mantled as a warning against sharp talons that dug into her shirt and left holes for her mother to sigh over.
"She's not a girl," Roy said with a laugh, glancing at her. "She's just our sister."
Kate didn't want to be 'just' anything. She didn't belong to anyone.
She spent her life proving that.
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Somehow he lived past Shannon and Kelly's deaths, even though he'd never intended to.
Living, after all, was easy when the people around him refused to let him contemplate otherwise.
Ducky arrived in his life and sectioned himself off a corner of Gibbs' brain, refusing to move out again. His easy smile was mirrored by his porcupine daemon's face, both cheekily adamant that they had every right to his friendship, and yet endlessly grateful that he gave it to them. Even Kali cautiously gave way to their friendliness, although ever aware of the porcupine's sharp quills and slow, rare temper.
Fornell was more subtle. They clashed, often. But they always ended up back in Gibbs' basement, ruffled and bruised and ready to try again. Five divorces between the two of them, they remained constant.
And if Fornell was the only one to know of his loss, of the two graves that haunted him, they never spoke of it. Every year on the anniversary of Gibbs' greatest failure, they would both get quietly drunk and say nothing of importance.
Then there was Paris and Jenny Shepherd, and their daemons matched in more ways than one. It was fervent, breathtaking and over far too soon, and something nameless in Gibbs' gut twisted when he saw the two foxes lying together; copper coat vivid against black.
It ended, like almost everything did eventually.
"You don't have to go," he'd said, as close to asking her to stay as he'd ever been.
She tilted her head, so much like her fox, and smiled with a sadness that reached her eyes. "You have serious trust issues, Jethro. We'd destroy each other."
He looked away first. "You trust too easily."
"Says the man who's been married three times," she teased him back.
Four, he thought, but he didn't say it.
She wasn't wrong, after all.
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Kate lost her virginity at the age of seventeen to a boy she'd known since pre-school.
It wasn't exactly what she'd expected the experience to be like, but it was probably what she got for sleeping with a guy purely because he was cute and available, while she was bored and just a little bit drunk on life and wine coolers.
And probably a little bit because her brothers would have been pissed if they knew.
Even as she kissed him she couldn't help but remember that this was a guy who used to deliberately spray milk out his nose at lunchtime. She wondered what he remembered of her from back then. She asked him, once they were dressed again and awkwardly fumbling for conversation.
He shrugged, his daemon a glossy skunk in his lap. "I don't remember you much. You didn't really stand out."
True or not, it bothered her. "We used to play football together sometimes," she argued.
He smiled. "You always used to run away with the ball."
When he left she watched Baoth fly around her room as a small hawk of some kind and considered whether or not she regretted it. It didn't really feel like anything had changed. There was no mysterious 'awakening' of her womanhood like she'd almost come to expect after reading the books her mother and sister had both foisted upon her.
"He's an idiot," Baoth said finally, landing on her mirror and thoughtfully preening his speckled feathers. "We weren't running away. We always knew exactly where we were going."
It was a weird thrill when she realized. Something had changed, and it was infinitely more exciting than the sex. "You've settled. What are you?"
Wings shrugged carelessly. "No idea. Something fast."
"Something brilliant," she said proudly, examining his rufous back and the dark blue-grey sheen to his wings and head. No one would forget her with a daemon as pretty as him.
She intended to be remembered.
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Tony acted the clown throughout school and Fitz helped him play the part. Paws too big for her body and legs too lanky, she gambolled around as though she was always in the process of falling over, tongue lolling out of her mouth in a permanent doggy smile. She put people at ease. Daemons were quick to trust her, and by extension, him.
He learnt how to smile from his father, and how to wear that smile as a mask from the loneliness of boarding school.
He slept with girls and he liked it well enough, Fitz snuggling up to their daemons and humming happily along. Completely at ease until the act was over, and then she'd pull away and turn into a solid wall of prickling fur and disinterest, ignoring everyone including him until they were alone again.
He slept with a guy once and it wasn't at all the same. It was rougher and needier somehow, and left him aching in more ways than one. Fitz acted strange for days after, alternating between over-the-top playfulness and a bristling anger that clawed at his own temper. He didn't do it again.
He drank. Made friends. Lost them again. He moved constantly after school, rarely settling down. Even at college he made sure to find multiple groups to hang out with, never the same one in succession, always on the outskirts of fitting in. It was safer that way. He'd be remembered as the charmer, the fun party guy, but never for anything deeper.
There was a house fire and a choice and maybe it was fate that led Tony past it just in time to hear a child scream.
Maybe it was fate that saved the boy and not his sister.
Fitz's fur stunk of smoke and fear that night as he held her close and tried not to think of the boy screaming as though his heart was breaking. Maybe it had been.
"That was good, what we did today," Fitz reassured him. "Maybe the best thing we've done. We could do that again."
"The girl died." The girl. He didn't even know her name. How could they do that again without it destroying them?
"We could help people. We like helping people."
How would someone like him help people? The answer seemed simple and almost clichéd. Tony snorted, remembering black and white films and play-acting them out together. "Bit obvious isn't it, a guy with an Alsatian daemon becoming a cop?"
She thought about it for a moment. "But we'd be good at it," she said finally.
He didn't say it out loud, but he agreed with her.
They were right.
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"Don't marry her, Tobias. You think we got divorced for the hell of it?"
Fornell rolled his eyes at him, leaning back against the bare wooden table in Gibbs' basement. He ran a hand thoughtfully over the bruising on his chin. Gibbs didn't apologise for it.
"When are you gonna learn to let things go, Jethro?" Fornell said. His bat daemon clung to his jacket, rolling her eyes at him as well. "Give her a chance. Maybe we have what you the two of you didn't."
Gibbs choked back another mouthful of cheap whiskey, feeling the burn of it down his throat. "Well, you haven't got any brains, that's for sure. Diane is going to chew you up and spit you out."
"You don't look very chewed up."
A muffled squeak of amusement from the jacket front. "That's negotiable," the bat muttered.
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He treated work like he did everything else; never staying still long enough to become tied down. If he hit two years at a place, he'd be gone within the week.
When handing in his resignation at his fourth PD, his boss had looked at it and sighed, taking the paper with reluctance. "Your daemon doesn't suit you," he had said.
Tony looked down at Fitz, lying at his feet with her mouth half open in a yawn. "I'm not German enough to pull off the dog-cop routine, am I?" he joked, keeping his face open and relaxed despite the kick of trepidation the man's words brought him.
"Alsatians are dependable. You're anything but."
He laughed it off. But he kept the words close, committed them to memory in the little part of his mind he kept of everything wrong about him.
Why can't you take anything seriously?
He's just like his mother… highly strung.
You're anything but.
He deserved it, really.
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Tony DiNozzo was the worst kind of cop. Self-centred and arrogant, with a hint of smugness that set Gibbs' teeth on edge. The sooner this case was over and he'd seen the last of the man with his ridiculous hair and expensive shoes that together probably cost more than Gibbs' car, the better.
At least, that was his first impression.
He'd never been gladder to be wrong.
He could count the number of times Kali had talked in the last month on one hand, with fingers left over. He liked it that way. They didn't need words. When she did talk, he always listened.
"He's a good cop," she remarked, watching Tony act the fool for his co-workers, none of them looking past the silly smile he kept pasted on his mug the whole time. "Probably the best they have."
"He's an idiot."
"He's wasted here. They'll burn him out. You can see past the show, they can't."
"What do you want me to do about it? He's not my problem."
She didn't answer, just closed her eyes and ignored him, but he got the message well enough. They didn't need words.
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Their first meeting wasn't exactly prophetic.
A clash of daemons, Fitz pinning the smaller fox to the ground as Tony tackled her human. The fox looked almost comically small under the dog's wide paws.
Later he would wonder how he got the jump on a trained special agent so easily.
It never really occurred to him that Gibbs had let him do it.
The case was over and Tony crept around the Baltimore PD, once again at a crossroads, and this time the bitter taste of betrayal was there to help him on his way.
The man, Gibbs, sidled up to him and watched him through narrowed blue eyes, eerily mimicked by his daemon. Tony had the unsettling feeling that he was being taken apart by those gazes, judging him and deciding just what exactly he had to offer them.
For some reason, he didn't mind.
"Maybe being a cop isn't for me," he found himself admitting to him, despite the fact they barely knew each other. Yet another sign it was time to move on.
Gibbs smacked his hand over the back of Tony's head. Gently, but still. Tony stared at him.
"I don't have a lot of rules," the man said slowly, without breaking eye contact. "But rule #5 is you don't waste good. You're good."
"Told you so," Fitz said smugly.
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It took six months.
Six months and Gibbs moved into position and didn't think to check that Tony was on his six.
He just knew.
As it turned out, trusting somebody was as easy as just knowing they'd be there if you needed them.
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"This is a big assignment, Todd. There's a lot riding on this."
You fuck this up, you're out on your ass, was the unspoken message behind his tone. Kate nodded briskly and kept her face blank, Baoth still on her shoulder. The American kestrel had proven to be just as eye catching as she'd guessed he would be when he first settled. Now she just had to live up to his promise. "Understood. I won't let you down, sir."
Security detail on Airforce One. Letting him down would be the least of her worries if this went wrong.
"You know," Agent Baer told her smugly as she walked out of the room. "They only picked you for this because Keplin is out sick."
"They picked me because I'm good," she snapped.
"Prove it," he said, walking away without a second glance. She pulled a face at his back, succumbing to a childishness she rarely let show these days.
She'd worked hard to get to where she was, but sometimes she hated this job. It was a boy's club, and she had to fight tooth and nail to claw her way up the ranks.
Maybe what happened next was fate. It certainly wasn't by design.
One thing was for sure… meeting Tony DiNozzo was never in her plans.