Disclaimer: NCIS belongs to DPB and CBS/Paramount. I'm just playing with the characters. If that ever changes, I'll let you know.
A/N: Multiple thank yous, as always, to my co-conspirator, Alaidh. Enjoy, folks!
Chapter 1Tony pressed the red button on the remote he'd picked up from the passenger seat of the car and waited for the tall metal gates to open before driving through. He stopped a moment, and looked up at the house through a light drizzle – the gray end of a gray day. The façade of the mock-Tudor mansion was just as he remembered it – six steps up to the front door, a well-lit conservatory to the left, currently only occupied by plants, as far as he could tell. The driveway ran around to the right in the direction of a pair of electronically operated garage doors.
Tony frowned at the steps, noting that there wasn't a ramp or any other means of access on this side of the building. He slowly drove around to the garages, hit the green button, and waited for the door to open. The vacant space revealed by the ascending right hand door was the one closest to the exit at the back of the house, and next to his mother's silver Mercedes sedan, so he knew she was home. Once again, the internal door leading directly into the house was inaccessible to him. However, there was another door, and it only had a small lip to negotiate onto the path that led round to the back patio.
A few minutes later, Tony was knocking on a panel of one of the glass patio doors. He had a sports bag balanced on his lap, a jacket slung across the top, and his backpack suspended from the back of the chair.
"C'mon, c'mon," he said, hugging his arms. He regretted not putting on the jacket after getting out of the car. He hammered on the glass again, wondering if he should make his way around to the kitchen, even if that meant leaving the shelter of the polycarbonate roof of the patio. Looking out from the shelter of the patio, that idea instantly lost its appeal as it was starting to rain again. He cupped his hands around his face and peered through the glass, just able to make out the scene through a gap in the gauze curtains. He could see part of what appeared to be a huge, tastefully decorated Christmas tree in one corner of the room, but not much else. He was just searching in the top of the backpack for his cell phone – Plan C – when a uniformed maid entered the room. Tony knocked again, and found it hard to restrain a laugh when the girl jumped out of her skin. "I'm Tony," he said loudly. "Can you let me in?"
The girl pulled back the curtain and unlocked the door from the inside, stepping back to let him pass, before closing and locking it again.
"I'm terribly sorry, sir. Mrs. DiNozzo wasn't expecting you until much later," the girl said.
"That's okay," Tony said, rubbing his cold nose, feeling it tingle in the heat of the room. "What's your name?" he asked with a tentative smile.
"Brittany," she replied.
"Is my mother at home, Brittany?"
"Yes, sir," she replied.
Tony turned on a dazzling smile. "Can you tell her I'm here?"
"I'll just go and…" The girl fled, visibly flustered now.
Tony kept grinning as she left, then turned his attention elsewhere. He put the sports bag and his jacket down on the floor and moved further into the room, noting how little it had changed in the three years or more since he'd last been there. There was a pile of glittering packages under the tree he'd noticed earlier. A multitude of colorful cards adorned the mantelpiece in the sunken, more intimate section of the room in front of a fake-log fire. He noted with pleasure that a gently sloped ramp had been installed over the stairs, and grinned at the thought that he was considered worthy of one of his mother's "fireside tête-à-têtes."
He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, scenting pine and furniture polish and then catching a whiff of his mother's expensive perfume as she entered the room behind him.
"Anthony."
Tony swiveled the chair in the direction of the voice. Irene DiNozzo's smile slipped slightly as her son turned to face her, although she quickly recovered. Tony, seeing the little hesitation, flashed one of his million-megawatt smiles. "Hi, Mom." He dutifully presented his cheek to be kissed. "You're looking well."
"So are you."
"This place hasn't changed much" he said, gesturing at he room.
Tony's mother shrugged. "You probably want to freshen up after the journey" she said, changing the subject. "We…I've converted your father's office to a bedroom for you. It has a…"
"Private bathroom. Yes, I know," Tony finished for her. "Thanks." Wonder what he thought about handing his office over to the black sheep of the family, he mused. Something of his thoughts must have communicated itself to his mother.
"Your father has an office upstairs" she said. "Much bigger room."
Tony's eyes widened for an instant, then he shrugged.
"He didn't really mind, you know," Irene DiNozzo stated, although she seemed to lack conviction. "Come. I'm afraid you caught us on the hop a little. We didn't expect you to arrive so early."
"Got away earlier than I expected," Tony replied, picking up the sports bag and following her into the short hallway. A moment later, she swung open the timber door into the side room that had formerly been Tony's father's domain.
Instead of the heavy wooden desk, book case and various other tables holding computer, fax machine and so on, a pair of overstuffed chairs and a coffee table, the room now only held a timber-framed bed, bedside table and a low chest of drawers. The thick pile floor rug had been removed to reveal the honey-colored floorboards beneath. The bed, he noted with pleasure, was actually his own from his former bedroom upstairs, which he rightly guessed had been handed over to his father as an office now. It was a little higher than he was used to, but that had been taken care of by the installation of a trapeze – a little piece of overkill on the part of his mother, but he let it pass without comment. Tony moved further into the room and placed his two bags on top of the drawers before opening the bathroom door to peer in curiously.
He became aware that his mother was still standing anxiously in the doorway of the room. Having cast his eyes over the flip-up shower bench, raised toilet and grab-rails, he turned back and gave her a beaming smile.
"Is it okay?" she asked.
"Great. Looks kinda permanent to me. You hoping for repeat visits?"
"Well…I-I…"
Tony gave her a cheeky grin, and she relaxed, knowing she'd been had.
"Thanks, Mom. It's perfect," he said. "Can you give me a few minutes to freshen up…"
"Sure. I'll be in the TV room," she said.
Tony raised an eyebrow. "Okay. Won't be long," he said, closing the door after her. Tony exhaled a sigh of relief when she was gone. He was more tense than he'd pretended to her face. He stripped off the heavy sweater and gloves he'd worn for seven or so hours in the car and pulled a lighter sweater out of his bag, leaving it on the bed while he visited the bathroom to splash water on his face. It amused him somewhat to have displaced the father who had all but disowned him. He paused for a moment to reflect on this – Mr. Perfect handing over "his" space to his somewhat less than perfect son – a son so flawed that he had cut him from his life more than three years before – there had to be some sort of poetic justice in that. Tony now had no chance of ever fitting into his father's scheme of how things should be in a perfect world – a terrorist's gunshot nearly seven months before had irrevocably ended any thought of that. Not that he really cared. He would never fit in with his father's plans and had taken great pleasure in doing exactly the opposite for most of his adult life. Indeed, he wore his imperfection for the world to see like a medal of honor – injured in the line of duty, but still in the saddle. He took a certain amount of pride in the fact that he was now back to working his normal 16 to 17 hour days – albeit in modified form, making time for therapy and gym work around his working hours as best he could. Anne, his therapist and friend, fitted him in whenever and wherever it was possible – at his apartment before or after hours, and even during one memorable all-nighter, in the bedroom of a safe-house, having talked Gibbs into letting him help out, while a red-faced McGee manned a surveillance camera in the next room. He had no idea what McGee thought he was doing with the attractive Australian girl who had slipped in unobtrusively through the back door of the house as instructed by Gibbs, but Tony teased the young man mercilessly about it.
Tony grinned to himself as he pulled the lightweight sweater over his head. He quickly ran a hand through his tousled hair and was ready to go. His hand loomed for a moment over the phone he'd left on the dresser beside the bag, then he resolutely left it there, and headed out into the passage in the direction of the TV room. He stopped outside the door for a moment, surprised to hear two voices coming from the room – one his mother's and another, older female voice responding. The rustle of clothing and a couple of metallic clicks carried into the hallway before a snatch of canned laughter from a sitcom on the TV drowned out all other sound.
He took a couple of deep breaths before pushing the door open wider, while still trying to identify the other voice.
A/N: OK, FFN has done it to me again - deleted all the punctuation before the inverted commas. Hopefully, I've caught them all, but if I haven't just let me know.
Since writing this, it has come to my attention that a certain character's mother is dead. This is my AU, however, and I reserve the right to give him a mother if I feel like it. :)