Summary: If things had been bad with Kate and Tim, he was sure they weren't going to be better with this new Director and 'Liason Officer'.
Disclaimer: "NCIS" and associated characters and situations are the property of Belisario Productions and are used for entertainment purposes without permission or intent to profit. Minor 'Criminal Minds' crossover at the end...
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"Taking A Gamble"
By J.T. Magnus, 'Turbo'
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"You've got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em,
Know when to walk away and know when to run.
You never count your money when you're sittin' at the table,
There'll be time enough for countin' when the dealin's done."
- Kenny Rogers, 'The Gambler'.
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For the first time in his life, Tony DiNozzo let himself follow in his parents' footsteps and drink until he was truly, absolutely drunk. The bottle of Macallan 18 had come from Ducky a few years back to commemorate his first year with NCIS, but he doubted the old doctor would have approved of the way in which he was drinking it like it was a bottle of water after a week in the desert, straight out of the bottle in fact. It seemed like there was some truth to that old saying 'in vino, veritas'; 'in wine, truth' - even if it wasn't wine which he was drinking. He was so drunk that his usual deflections and subversions, even the ones that he used with himself, weren't coming. Over the last three plus years, he had worked himself into a bad position because he thought he was being 'loyal' and 'hardworking' and it was looking like he was the only one that had really thought that. What he had worked himself into was between a rock and a hard place with one foot on a banana peel and the other foot in a grave, to mix metaphors; it wasn't a very comfortable or good place in which to be and was part of the reason for his present state of drunken thoughtfulness.
He sat at his piano, not even touching the keys. Just the presence of one of the few good things, perhaps the best thing, to have come out of his childhood was helping him to think. There were bad memories associated with it; being paraded around like a show dog, claiming he couldn't play to woo Wendy... but even when he was in single digit ages, he could play piano and lose himself in the music, forgetting all the problems in his life. Ironically enough, it was probably the genesis of his later interest in movies, something else in which he was able to easily lose himself, focusing on the acting, cinematography and storyline instead of anything in his own life. Throughout the years, when things had turned bad, he'd turned to movies to help himself make it through.
He'd forced himself to remember Tom Hagen's admonition to Sonny Corleone that even the attempt on the Don's life was just business in 'The Godfather' when Francesca Macaluso had looked at him with hate in her eyes instead of the love of the last year when her father was arrested.
Sam Spade telling the girl that had killed his partner and he'd fallen in love with in 'The Maltese Falcon' that he'd be waiting if she got out or he'd remember her if she got the chair after discovering that Danny, his own partner, had been dirty had been a comfort, for what little comfort it had been.
Even 'Casablanca', where Rick Blaine had put Ilsa Lund on the plane with her husband despite her willingness to stay with him in Casablanca when Wendy had left him literally hours before their wedding had helped to remind him that sometimes, as Bogart himself had said, 'The problems of three people don't amount to a hill of beans in this world'.
Right then, though, he was having trouble deciding which movie fit best with the present situation. The way it had gone from a partnership to 'Team Gibbs' - specifically Gibbs, his two attack dogs and whatever Abby happened to be at the moment... with him as an afterthought except for when they needed a punching bag.
A person didn't survive most of a decade as a cop - including two years in a corrupt force and time deep undercover in the Philadelphia Mob - without two things; a strong sense of self-preservation and a bullshit meter more finely tuned than Sir Elton John's piano. Tony had both and was proud of them. They had saved his life before on enough occasions that he tried to listen to them whenever they started acting up - thanks to his boss's lack of self-preservation or care for his subordinates, Tony didn't always get to listen to them, but he tried - and right now they were screaming like teenage girls at a pop idol's concert, front row seats and backstage passes included and they were screaming about the new personnel changes at the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. With them screaming that loud, Tony decided to do what every good cop does when his instincts are screaming at him, he started calling his informants to find out what they knew that he might yet not. It wasn't even that hard to check some records, talk to a few contacts and remind a son or two of his father's old business partners of the trouble they had gotten into together in years past and find out what he'd wanted to know; the fact that the new Director was best friends with Ari-of-the-Kind-Eyes' sister - horror of horrors, he actually knew how to do research, even finding out that Ari Haswari's father was Eli David, Deputy Director of Mossad and also father of, wait for it, Officer Ziva David. Not only was the new Director friends with the David family, she was also Gibbs' former lover and that meant that Agent-Gunnery Sergeant 'Not The Law, oh, Lord, but My Rules be done' and Officer 'Ari is innocent no matter who he harms'...
Who, for some strange reason was now a 'Liason Officer' with NCIS, a position that never existed before her friend had become Director, despite not being a Law Enforcement Officer, Marine, U.S. Navy, an investigator or any combination thereof...
...they were going to have even more free-reign to do whatever they wanted. And if the last two years with Gibbs and even a short experience of David told him anything, what they wanted would be headslaps, DiNozzo Endangerment - sometimes he actually thought he should be on the Endangered Species List along with pandas and wolves - pitting agents against each other while letting the lowest ranked act like they were in charge, all the while violating the law and regulations left, right and center. He didn't have to have McGee's precious MIT degrees to figure out that it wouldn't end well for Anthony D. if he stuck around for the new way of things.
And if there was one lesson that he actually had learned from his father, it was self-interest. The senior Anthony DiNozzo was very skilled in self-interest. It was actually part of the reason Tony went out of his way to help others, to help distance himself from 'The Real Anthony DiNozzo' as Senior sometimes referred to himself. That didn't mean, however, that he didn't know how - and when - to help himself; and it certainly seemed to be the time for it. Maybe even the last time for it, if his fears were right, before he got in far too over his head and he didn't have another chance to save himself. If he made the mistake of staying until everyone had dealt with Kate's murder and everything else connected to Ari Haswari, he was thinking that he wouldn't be able to leave because he'd start to think he was an important part of the team and couldn't leave them shorthanded. He'd start focusing on solving cases and forget that he also had to take care of himself, not just victims and families. He was drunk enough to admit to himself that he was afraid that if he didn't get out now, he'd end up used up, chewed up and spat out like yesterday's wad of gum.
That was when the perfect movie association hit him; 'The Shawshank Redemption', released in 1994, starring Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman, based on a novella by Stephen King. It was about a man named Andy Dufresne who went to jail for a crime he didn't commit because he couldn't prove his innocence, how hope and knowing he was innocent had kept him going for two decades in prison, and how he'd finally made his escape after the one person that could have proved his innocence was killed by a corrupt Warden to keep Andy there where the Warden could use Andy's civilian skills as a banker to launder money. There had been a line repeated by both Andy and his best friend Red that Tony was suddenly remembering; 'Get busy living or get busy dying.'
Gibbs was the Warden, Tony himself was Andy, he didn't know who Red was - maybe Brad? - and just like the Warden wouldn't let Andy go because of what he could do with money, Gibbs would never left Tony go because of what he could do with an investigation. Gibbs would use the victims and their families to guilt trip Tony into staying, probably tossing in some falsely supportive comments about 'needing' him at times just to keep the tone right, and Tony'd stick around because he wanted, he needed to help others. But Tony would slowly be killing himself in the process.
That realisation forced him to make a decision and Tony found himself quoting the movie out loud to reinforce that decision, "'Get busy living or get busy dying'..."
Setting the bottle down on the floor next to the piano bench, Tony spun around and stood up. Staggering slightly, he crossed the room to where his cell phone - his personal cell phone, not the one issued by NCIS that was subject to Gibbs' ridiculous Rule 3 which ignored the simple fact that sometimes a person had to be out of contact for their own safety, especially when undercover or on a stake-out - was laying on a table and picked it up. Unlike that selfsame Supervisory Special Agent, Tony had used the same phone for years and opening its contacts menu showed it; in addition to newer numbers like Gibbs' current cell phone - for however long it might last this time - or NCIS itself, it had older numbers in it that he never could bring himself to delete for whatever reasons... 'Wendy', 'Danny', he paused for a moment over 'Frankie' - Francesca, who he still sometimes wondered what would have happened if he'd told her father everything and crossed the street, if he'd become part of the Family for real and married her - then he kept scrolling through the list of names and numbers until he reached another one that was left over from that same time period.
Fornell had delivered offers for Tony to cross over to the FBI over the years, but Tony knew they had never actually originated with him. The Macaluso undercover operation might have been Philadelphia PD on the ground, but they had been backed by the FBI and Tony had impressed his FBI handler during the op. The other man still thought highly of Tony and never hid the opinion that he felt the former-Detective was going to waste at NCIS, so he sent the offers via-Fornell both to remind Tony of that and attempt to entice him over. Now it seemed that the man was about to get his wish; with his old handler's name highlighted, Tony pressed the 'talk' button and waited for the connection before speaking.
"Hey," Tony said, waiting and listening to the person on the other end of the phone's response. When they finally finished, a faint smile developed on his face, possibly the first real one he'd experienced in close to two years. "I've reached the end of the yellow brick road. Bring me home, Good Witch."
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Half a country away, the FBI agent who had been Tony's handler when he'd gone under in the Macaluso Family and who still considered the young man a friend smiled faintly at the words. Those very same words would have been Tony's call for an emergency extraction all those years ago; today, they had a not-entirely different meaning.
"Put on your ruby slippers and start clicking your heels, Dorothy, we're on our way," Jason Gideon smiled faintly before pressing the 'end' button on his cell phone, then selecting a name from his contact list and waiting until they picked up. "Fornell? DiNozzo's made the call. Go get him."
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Author's Note: Yes, I ignored Fornell and Gibbs' team not knowing each other in "Yankee White". Since it seemingly was ignored after that in the series itself, I concluded that it was either forgotten about or simply retconned away. In this instance, I decided to go with the retcon and have Tony, at least, have known/known of Fornell pre-series.