Title: Fracture
Author: missflapjack
Fandom: NCIS
Pairing: Tony/Kate, Tony/Ari
Rating: PG-13, for language and suggestive themes
Disclaimer: Don't own.
Summary: They're haunting his dreams.
Genre: Angst / Romance
Note: *sad face* I don't know where my idea for Tony/Ari came from, but I'm sure I wasn't the first one to think of it. (Actually, I've read a few, and they were all horrible Tony/Gibbs stories, consisting of Ari capturing Tony and raping him senseless and Gibbs having to piece together what's left of his mental stability and eventually having mind-blowing comfort sex with him... you know.) That is so not what I'm writing here, people, I'm actually making Tony fall in love with a killer. And it's depressing. Tony's having dreams of the past, the present, and the future – and they are ceaseless. There's slash, probably more apparent than the little taste of het I added (Tony/Kate, anyone?), and the angst, oh the angsty angst angst. Let it flow over you like an angst waterfall.
The dreams began the night Gerald was shot. Tony had slept fitfully that night, despite the fact that Kate, however shaken, was safe, and then... he dreamed.
Autopsy was dark, chilling and foreboding, like it usually was without Ducky and his inexhaustible reserve of narratives there to soften the hard edge of the room's purpose. Tony stepped lightly forward, jumping like a startled newborn deer when a sharp sound cut through the air. It was his own breath, forced from his lips the moment his bare toes brushed the floor, and he thought, the hell? It wasn't every night that he went to bed and ended up barefoot in autopsy, wearing nothing but a thin undershirt and sweatpants.
Tony glared into the darkness. "Okay, deep-seated emotional baggage, either show yourself now in the form of some ghastly monster or let me get some actual sleep. No? Okay," he said, and folded his arms.
"I imagined you would be taller," the shadow spoke, suddenly, and Tony narrowed his eyes.
"Er, sorry to disappoint you?" Tony had his share of terrifying nightmares after particularly harsh cases and extenuating circumstances, nightmares of dying and being ripped apart, people he loved suffering all kinds of creative torture and then looking at him with cold, horrified eyes and screaming that it was all his fault.
Tony... had an overactive imagination. Tony had many issues, and among them, the fact that he couldn't handle guilt. It ate away at his soul. But he was rarely insulted on his height.
"Caitlin was exactly how I imagined her," was the reply. "Fiery. Competent. But when my life was in her hands, the spark faded. Strange, isn't it?" The shadows shifted, forming the lean shape of a man in dark clothing; a sharp, feral smile glinting in the dark. "I enjoyed her company."
"I'm sure the feeling was mutual," Tony replied sardonically, his lips set in a thin line. He recognized those features from the grainy film image captured earlier. The face with no name.
"Gibbs was clever, yes," the man continued casually, as if they were two close friends in a bar discussing sports. He steepled his long fingers in his lap, tilting his head at Tony. "Nearly caught me, but the poor fellow wasn't quite quick enough, was he?"
Tony said nothing. He remembered the stark fear he felt earlier that day at the prospect of Gibbs dying, not that it was a new feeling, but it had squeezed his heart in a vice stronger than steel. He hated this sharply angled face. His untamed, subconscious reaction was to tear at it.
The man seemed to read his thoughts. "I can see that you are interested," he commented as the room blurred. "We shall meet again, no doubt."
Tony woke feeling constricted and hot, anger slamming his heart around in his chest. For the remainder of the week, no terrorists visited his dreams. On Thursday, he fell asleep on Kate's couch, eyes growing heavy as he stared fixedly at the pale skin of her neck and tangled his fingers in dark hair.
The man was there once more, sitting cross-legged on the cold metal table. He smiled at Tony, chatted about his teammates, and leaned close enough so that he could smell gun oil and oranges, a peculiar combination that tickled at Tony's senses. Tony woke with his neck at a strange angle and his fingers clenched in a fist. Kate only looked at him peculiarly and gracefully rose to fix coffee; thin form almost formless in one of his shirts.
"You talk in your sleep," she mentioned over breakfast.
"What do I say?" Tony asked, curious.
She shrugged and kissed him lightly on the nose. "Nothing that ever makes any sense."
Oranges, Tony thought. Terrorists shouldn't smell like citrus, should they? Isn't there some code that baddies are supposed to be notoriously disgusting?
The dreams were erratic and unpredictable, like rainstorms in March. After finding out the terrorist's name, Tony rolled it around on his tongue, just to try out the sound. Ari Haswari. It sounded rich and exotic, and with something short of shame, he liked saying it.
He liked Ari, the dreams, and the way he smelled, the way he touched Tony like he was a treasure to be revered, the way he spoke in riddles, the firmness of his fingers and the passion in his eyes. Kate was soft and hard in all the right places; her touch a firm anchor that would tug him back to reality when he thought of the man in his dreams, and it wasn't hard to love two people at once, not really.
It was effortless, even when one of them wasn't real.
Tony was falling for a figment of his imagination, a man conjured out of shadows, a man who wanted to kill his loved ones and threaten his home, a man that had even managed to charm the socks off of Kate with nothing but his eyes.
The strangest thing was, it was natural pretending to hate Ari Haswari when he ached for that proximity, when he secretly longed for sleep to come just so he could feel him again.
Kate was velvety, playful and gentle when it came to sex. She tantalized, goaded, folded her limbs around Tony and the closest she ever came to being rough was biting him on the collarbone. "It hadn't even left a mark," Tony teased her afterwards. She hit him with the sharp corner of a Hitchcock DVD. That had left a mark.
Ari was like a dark cloud, spicy-scented and overbearing as he grabbed handfuls of Tony's clothing and pushed until bare skin was visible and pliant, dragging his nails over taut muscle and skin, biting at Tony's ear and gripping at his hips and muttering things that sounded better when they didn't make sense. Kate was often annoyed or amused at how quickly Tony fell asleep in the oddest of places, loudly declaring at work about how Tony was becoming part feline, curling up to nap whenever there was a moment of free time. He was imprisoned in dreams, imprisoned in oranges and dark eyes.
Everything changed the day she died. Tony floated through the hours afterward like, ironically, everything was a dream. He vaguely remembered antagonizing McGee to the point of cruelty, then sneaking downstairs to see Kate and ending up with tears stinging in the corners of his eyes, broken when he saw the autopsy table in the corner that he had tangled up with Ari on so many times, and the dreams, the fucking dreams, they were mixing with his reality to the point of insanity; they had no right.
The night their angel fell, Tony had fervent visions of Gibbs with tear-stained cheeks colored brown like coffee, McGee clutching a basket of grapefruits with a vengeful glint in his eyes, and Ari, always Ari, hitching a leg over his own and whispering promises into his ear. He wanted to squirm free, he had an urge to press his finger to the center of Ari's forehead and hiss, "This is how you will die, bastard," but he always succumbed to the lithe body above him, groaning into firm, sinister lips.
He sometimes wondered what Gibbs would think about Tony fraternizing with a murderer in his dreams. He thought, sagely, Gibbs would laugh.
The dreams cut short after Kate's funeral, when Tony abruptly tried to break his bad habit of sleeping. He went on for quite an admirable amount of time before giving in, too.
"Anthony," Ari whispered as his eyes glittered. "You have not visited me for so long," he said, reaching out to stroke Tony's cheek and pull him closer.
It hadn't been that hard to adopt Gibbs' affinity for coffee, Tony thought privately to himself, and it was with a cowardice for the unknown that the senior agent drank the disgusting, pungent beverage for three days straight, hoping that the fast from sleep would rid him of dreaming.
It hadn't worked out as well as he'd planned.
"You killed Kate," Tony hissed; his anger softening as Ari nodded. He hadn't wanted it to be like that. He had planned to be angry, to lunge forward and claw out Ari's mesmerizing, lethal, dream-weaving eyes. You killed her. You put a bullet in her brain. She was too young. I loved her. I hate you. I am going to kill you, and make you suffer, you bastard, I love you...
Ari looked somber; impassive. "You cared for Caitlyn," he replied.
Tony almost choked as he blurted out "Yes," too quickly for his tongue to form the words; bit back gasps as his vision blurred and Haswari's image distorted. He reached out and pulled at dark cloth; wanting; needing; knowing that there was his angel's killer and all he could do was breath in his scent. Ari pressed a kiss to his temple. Tony whispered apologies, stifled words that he prayed Kate could hear, wherever she was, and Ari calmly murmured his approval. Tony shuddered through sobs that ripped through his throat and left his voice raw.
The next morning, he woke and his knuckles stretched white across a pale, wet pillowcase; eyes searching again for any sign of a Catholic schoolgirl too old to be wearing pigtails, a smile on her face as she tapped him on the nose and made fun of his creepy desire to see her in a plaid skirt.
Nothing. Ever since the dreams continued, Kate hadn't visited him anymore.
As the hunt for Ari prolonged over a short amount of time, as his teammates lived life (albeit cautiously) in their normal routine, never once realizing that Tony knew their killer better than any of them; that he was sleeping with the enemy and he was most likely very mentally unstable, Ari grew more distant with each dream. His image faded; the light in his eyes grew harder. Tony was both torn and relieved at the prospect of the dreams vanishing for good.
Ari kissed him slowly and deeply that night, gazing at him with regretful eyes and Tony held him tight, as if physical touch alone could keep the fantasy alive. "You're leaving me."
"I have to," was the simple answer. "I am destined to die, Anthony. Your dear Kate's death will be avenged."
Tony might have sobbed with release, or horror, but he merely stared blankly into the darkness and linked his fingers slowly with Ari's.
Reality was a poison, and Tony soon learned this. His next dream was not in autopsy, but a musty basement with shadows clinging to the walls. Gibbs was there, a toxic glint in his eye, and Ari, about to fulfill his wish for Jethro's death. Tony whispered, "Don't," but neither of them could hear, and the fierce visage of a woman seemed to materialize at the top of the stairs. She resembled Ari, and Tony couldn't tear his eyes from her resilient gaze.
Long, auburn hair curled over sharp shoulders; cold eyes verged on tears; a firm lower lip stilled as her bullet centered on Haswari's brow. The air smelled of sawdust merged with the metallic scent of blood.
Ari smiled as he fell, or at least Tony imagined that he did, and he jerked awake with wet, salty trails curving behind his ears.
"Kate...?"
He always woke in the present, too late to save either of them.
A day later, when Ziva David materialized in front of his desk, looking exceptionally tough with her hair pulled back in a bandanna, Tony froze.
Note: I know that the period between Kate's death and Ziva's appearance was at least a day, and I prolonged it in here by like three, so just pretend that I sort of cheated and bent the rules of time in this little ficlet, and leave it at that. Pretend it's an AU, whatever. Which it really is, sort of. As far as I know it's impossible to have a relationship with someone in a dream. Do enlighten me if you've had one, I'd like to learn how that works. Purely for research purposes, of course.