The door was locked.
This was the first locked door they'd come across during their search, and Gibbs allowed it to buoy his hopes that this was where Tony was being held. He nodded to Fornell, following close behind him, and with his cover, kicked the door open. Automatically scanning the room for danger, one part of his brain catalogued the room's contents, before the rest of him was even aware of it.
The sight that greeted him was like a flashback to one of his frequent nightmares. The room was bare, like a cell. No decorations, no furnishings, just a metal bed in the centre of the room, directly below a skylight. The nightmare image was lying on the bed.
Tony.
Naked, and motionless, and the cause of Gibbs's heart trying to simultaneously leap out of his mouth and sink to the bottom of his stomach. Too late, he was too late.
How long had he been standing there, staring, unable to look away, unable to move further into the room? It felt like seconds and hours at the same time. When his brain finally managed to get a message to his feet, and he got closer, he could see more details. The glistening wetness on the dusty floor around the bed, where blood had dripped down. The unnaturally pale skin and the utter stillness of his friend. The fact that Tony's eyes were open and staring into nothingness, the usual light and sparkle gone. The way his hair was darkened at the ends, where it had soaked up some of the blood which had saturated the thin mattress.
He was close enough now to reach out a hand and brush his fingers against Tony's face. It was still warm, and he drew his hand back with a gasp. He'd expected the coldness of death.
He tentatively reached out again, this time feeling at the neck, praying to a god he didn't believe in for a pulse. Nothing. There was nothing. That anything could have been worse than finding Tony dead he would never have thought possible, but he was still warm, he was so clearly only just too late. Half an hour earlier and Tony might still have been alive. The time that he had wasted, back at the office, in cautiously searching every room here - if he'd just come straight ...
But he'd left Tony behind, and Tony was dead. As Gibbs leant over his friend's body to close his eyes, he noticed it. The single tear track drying on Tony's cheek. He slumped down onto the floor, trying to control the nausea welling up inside him, trying to stop his own tears.