Disclaimer: I own neither NCIS nor its characters. This is for entertainment purposes only.
Author's Note: This was written before the season finale aired, thus takes place before then. Thank you to Kate98 for the beta.
Tony waited. Despite what people thought, waiting was his forte. Waiting somewhere with Gibbs was not his forte. Gibbs insisted waiting was something to be done while silent and still. Which just went to show that Gibbs did not know how to wait. Even Abby, great as she was, wasn't as good a waiter as Tony. Well, not waiter, waiter, as in guy who brings the food – no way would Tony do that – but waiter as in person who waits.
Voices called and the line moved slightly, but not enough. He still had time left. He counted the ceiling panels directly in front of him, then did an extrapolation to determine how many panels of that particular size would be needed to cover the entire square footage of the store. McGee would probably tell him he got it wrong, but what McGee didn't know (Gibbs might know, Tony wasn't sure just how much Gibbs knew about anything, probably a lot) was that Tony tended to be right a lot more than he ever let on. However, Tony learned early that the only thing worse than being a smart person was publicly being a smart person (being smart enabled him to learn this before he made the mistake), so he elected never to let anyone know just how smart he really could be. People were so much less threatened by someone who appeared happy and stupid. Not only that, but the ability to appear so was a godsend in police work. The criminal class, after all, was largely comprised of people who were incredibly stupid but liked to think they were incredibly smart. They also liked to think they could outsmart the cops, so when they found themselves confronted with a dumb cop who appeared to have the attention span of a two-year-old on a gallon of sugar, well, it was amazing the things they said that they thought he wouldn't be able to figure out.
Which brought up another thing. Why was it that people always linked a short attention span with low intelligence? Didn't they realise that lack of attention usually indicated boredom? Didn't they clue in that it was so much easier to become bored when you were smart?
Then again, most people just tended to see what they wanted to see. They ignored the clues screaming right in their faces and just saw the happy-go-lucky B+ student with his eighty-percent average. B+ always seemed about right; it was high enough to make him attractive (or at least acceptable) to post-secondary educational institutes, but not so high as to grab the 'geek' label. The clue was in the eighty-percent, and how it was only an average because five-times-eighty-divided-by-five (or however you wanted to figure it out) came out to eighty every time. Even dear-old-Dad didn't guess the secret, just grew resigned to having a son who clearly didn't have the brains to follow him into business.
Nope, people liked Dumb-Tony and talked to Dumb-Tony and were even sometimes nice to Dumb-Tony, things that rarely ever happened to Smart-Tony, so Smart-Tony saw very little daylight. Besides, Dumb-Tony was fun to play. He got to do things that he'd never get away with if he were smart, like bug Kate and McGee.
Not that it was all an act. Some things just came naturally. He began to plot how to get under Kate's skin this week, then tried to come up with a possible way to scare Abby (a much more difficult task than getting under Kate's skin. Kate really needed to toughen up or she'd never make it in law-enforcement. She was too pretty, really… and there were guys out there way, way worse than Tony), that is scare Abby in a way that Gibbs would allow and that wouldn't break any major laws. He snapped his fingers a few times until some lady with her six, screaming, out-of-control kids glared at him in a way she wouldn't at her herd of brats, or they wouldn't be running around screaming and climbing on things like that. He wished for a moment he had Abby here… Abby was good with kids, she could scare them into behaving like that. His fingers snapped again, of their own volition, startling him. Uh-oh. He checked his watch. Two hours, twenty-three minutes and eighteen seconds since he last had anything to eat… how could he have done that?
He stared at the line in front of him. How dare they be moving so slow? Didn't they know that there was a dangerously hungry man here? So many people missed that. Like Kate, the not-so-Great. What kind of a profiler was she anyway, that she couldn't make a simple connection? All the time she spent harping on Tony's choice of food, when Tony's choice of food was the only thing keeping her safe for harping on Tony's choice of food. High sugar. Quick boost. Food to keep things okay, but he hadn't had any recently, not recently enough. He stared around at the slow moving line, at the obstructions keeping him away from the one thing that would save all of these people's lives. Food. Real, honest food. He could sense the calm settling in, that deep down, reasonable calm that could only be achieved through years and years of building inner-rage. All the things he tried not to be, compressed into one brilliant, ruthless and above all nasty little persona. No, Tony… don't, Tony…
What was going on, anyway? He zeroed in on a little old lady. She was the problem, arguing with one of the clerks. Someone else stepped in to try to help out, and she kept screaming and insisting that she was right, even when the world could see that she was wrong.
"I'm sorry ma'am, that will take just a moment, we have…"
"Don't you think I've been waiting long enough?"
Tony could see the look on the poor clerk's face, like she couldn't deal with much more abuse, like she was tired of being looked through, looked over and generally treated like some sort of servant because some bitch wanted to get picky about things. Not only that, but battle-axe wasn't the only person waiting here.
Excuse me, lady, why don't you just shut up? Everyone turned to stare at him. Too late, he realised that the line was crossed: thought became word became deed and some old lady was in for it now.
"What did you just say?"
"You're the one that's making all the special requests, lady. I think you can see it's rather busy, and now you're holding all of us up. That does not make me happy." A small, horrified part of Tony could feel himself grinning. Grinning and angry meant that bad things were going to happen, and this was a little old lady, and there were kids here, and he really didn't…
"I'm entitled…"
"Oh, God, you're entitled, well, excuse me." He tried to fight back, tried to shut himself up. Gibbs was going to kill him for this. Gibbs would find out… Gibbs had a way of finding out everything. "Of course, you are far, far more important than any of the rest of us, especially the people who have to listen to you abuse some poor innocent little girl who is just trying to help you out. In the meantime, you're holding all the rest of us up, too. I'm hungry, I'm cranky, and frankly I don't care that you're picky and want everything to be done just right. As a matter of fact…"
In retrospect, he should have seen it coming. Gibbs would have seen it coming, Kate would have seen it coming, hell, even McGee should have seen it coming. But Tony was too busy trying not to be… Tony. He never saw the old lady's purse coming in at eye height, and then there was pain and there was blood and people were screaming. On the good side of things, the blood and pain were his, which meant that everyone else was still alive and breathing – hopefully. He didn't think he was beating anybody to death at this moment. Oh, good. Because that wouldn't play well at the office at all.
&
"Nice, Tony. What happened?" Kate didn't even try to hide her amusement, which meant she had no clue. Of course, she wouldn't, and Tony wasn't planning to tell her any time soon.
"Huh?" He tried to pretend that a black eye and stitches weren't obvious at all.
"DiNozzo!" Tony jumped at the sound of Gibbs behind him. "What happened to your eye?"
He winced, then winced again at the pain of wincing. The problem with stitches in the corner of the eye was that it hurt every time you moved your eye, and Gibbs had that effect, the effect of causing both pain and winces. He also knew he couldn't fake his way through this one. "It was an accident, Boss."
"Accident?" Of course, Gibbs knew it wasn't an accident. Gibbs knew everything.
"It was Bad-Tony. I tried to stop him, but…"
Gibbs stopped dead. "DiNozzo?"
"Yes, Boss?"
"What's special rule number six?"
Tony watched Kate and McGee exchange quizzical glances. Rules they'd heard of, but they didn't know yet about the special rules, rules applying only to Tony himself. "Bad-Tony is not allowed out in public."
Gibbs picked up a chocolate bar from Tony's desk and chucked it at Tony's head. "Don't forget it, DiNozzo." He kept walking, but Tony hadn't missed the slight flicker of fear on Gibbs' face. Bad-Tony, Bad-Tony unleashed was bad enough even to scare the most scare-proof ex-Marine Tony'd ever had the experience to run across.
Tony unwrapped the candy-bar and started munching, knowing the kinds of thoughts that had to be running through Kate and McGee's minds. It was Kate who spoke them though – Kate could never leave something alone even when the common sense of even the densest of human beings (like McGee, for instance) said to just forget it, or if you couldn't forget it at least to not talk about it and aggravate the situation.
"'Bad-Tony?'" He could hear the disbelief in her voice, not to mention the smirk.
Arrogant, profiling, nasty-little… he swallowed and took another huge bite. "Speak not of the devil, Kate."
"Come on. Next you're going to tell me you have an evil twin."
Tony smiled. "No. He's me. And if Gibbs is afraid of him, don't you think you should be too?"
"Bad-Tony." Now she just sounded sceptical and not smart-assed, at least. "So, you're implying there's a Good-Tony. When do we meet him?"
Tony leaned in close, face to face. "Don't tempt me, Kate. There's always special rule number thirteen." Lucky for her though, the beast had been fed. Bad-Tony wouldn't care that Kate was a girl, that Kate was smaller, and that it wasn't nice to go picking on girls. Other people picking on girls (or similarly helpless people) could make Bad-Tony very, very angry… He turned and walked away, thanking God, Gibbs and Bad-Tony for giving him something more to torment her.
"Special rule…" Already it was driving her nuts. Kate didn't like puzzles she couldn't solve.
"Ask Abby." Abby, like Gibbs, had seen and thus believed, but Kate had not seen and thus would never believe, because no one could reconcile the image of Bad-Tony at his worst with the Tony they saw every day, the Tony who was coming back as the sugar hit the system. So even a recitation of special rules would not be enough to convince her, even rule thirteen which, unlike the other dozen, was not devised by Gibbs (indeed, it was unlikely that Gibbs even knew about special rule thirteen, or he'd insist that it be taken off the list), but instead came from the realm of reality. Bad-Tony doesn't care about special rules.
But all was safe now. Only thirty-three seconds since his last mouthful of chocolate bar, which gave him at least an hour before he needed something substantial. In the meantime, Kate was irritated, McGee was confused, and as soon as Kate talked to Abby, Abby would be scared. Life, in all, was good, even if it did sometimes give him a black eye.