Written for miss-porcupine in Livejournal's ncis-ficathon.

Pick Up

Are you scared of the dark? Do you think they'll break your heart?
--Pauley Perrette, Fear

Franks's brother died on the same afternoon a Marine named Bennet was hauled in for questioning over the death of a fifteen-year-old boy.

Franks, at about two in the afternoon, had done the hauling in. His junior field agent, Jethro Gibbs, was in the hospital after a heroic bus-driver had taken him for a school shooter and rammed their car, and Jethro's gun had been taken into evidence. Bennet raved and swore, blamed NIS for bungling the situation that his own conduct had escalated, and Franks had let him rant because it would make the interrogation that much sweeter. The boy, being dead, wouldn't have any say in the matter. Franks's brother, several towns distant, should have had even less.

It was five o'clock before the evidence had gone down to the lab and Franks drove back to the hospital. There were forms to sign and nurses to get around, and Jethro was staring at the ceiling again, with the same look he'd worn too often at the beginning of their acquaintance. Franks threw the windows open because the room smelled like sick people, fumigated the area with cigarette smoke, and whacked Jethro lightly on the top of the skull.

"What part of 'you did the right thing' are you not getting here?" he growled.

Jethro, on his back and forbidden to make any sudden moves until the tests were completed, looked back with red eyes and bit out, "Are you trying to tell me he asked for it? Is that what you were going to say?"

"Don't make me head-slap you again, Probie. You went with your gut and probably saved a whole lotta lives."

"What part of 'he was fifteen years old' are you not getting?" Jethro spat back. "Sir."

"He threw that part away when he decided shooting up his school would make him a man. And his daddy threw it away--" Franks ground on his cigarette, hearing Bennet's voice in his ears again, practically ordering NIS to toddle on down and throw a good scare into the kid -- "when he let him walk out with the gun so he could call us in to make his own point."

Jethro breathed smoke, held on and searched for something to say, and let the breath out finally in a thin, acrid stream. It would be too easy to blame the father, whose reckless, negligent pride had put hundreds of children in danger. It would be too easy to blame the son.

Franks, looking idly out the window, didn't seem to be paying attention, but Jethro knew better than that. The older agent had a knack for hearing things that were going on around him, hearing everything, seeing everything, making connections. He probably knew, right now, that Jethro wanted to do the interrogation, was straining to wring some thread of remorse out of the man who had thought it clever to let his son smuggle an M9 out of the house in his schoolbag. Elsewhere, Franks's brother chose to ignore the tightness in his chest and the chill creeping down his left arm, and presently, the matter was decided.

"I'm going to interrogate Papa in a few hours," rumbled Franks. "When they let you out of here, you're going home to finish your report."

"Sir," said Jethro, "I want to do this interrogation."

"Not a chance."

"I'll write it up later. Let me talk to him. I killed his son."

"Bullshit."

"I shot him."

"I put you in that car."

"I shot him."

"Damn right you shot him."

How can you be so damn calm? Jethro wanted to shout, but the words caught on the way out, crushed between the memory of the delinquent's dull, deadly eyes, his slender hands with their bandaged fingers going for a quick-draw and spasming on their way down, and an old image of a laughing little girl. Sunlight slanted in and Franks leaned back, the smoke eddying around his head.

"I dunno, Probie. One day I'm gonna light out of here and not come back. You've gotta stop listening to me. Look me in the eye and swear your gut's telling you you're responsible."

Jethro's stare was even. "It's telling me."

"Then," said Franks, "you're going to watch."

Instead, though, Franks was called away to identify a body. Jethro carried out the interrogation the way his boss would have done, and afterward was left unsure whether he really regretted not strangling Bennet or simply shooting him, instead of just staring at him until he cried.

.o0o.

Jethro stayed in the office to write up the interview, and Franks didn't call in. The sun slipped away and the building closed down around their workstations. Flipping on a desklamp, Jethro stared at the telephone for a while, then dialed a number and let it ring until he was sure his boss wasn't there. Personal time, he thought, and then caught himself; Franks was a private man, but Jethro had gotten good at reading the traces of things that weren't there anymore.

He found the former Mrs. Franks in the directory, called her anyway to offer condolences. She was home -- a different home, where Franks wasn't: a gloomy epitaph to the late nights, the constant five o'clock shadow, and the personal phone calls that always seemed to end in harsh whispers. She refused to talk to him, and hung up the phone.

Jethro went barhopping.

Never drinking anything, of course. The pain meds were still in his system, which was straining for sleep anyway. He overrode it, dry-eyed, hitting the seven likeliest spots for Franks to have gone. Nothing came up, and he drove past the man's house; the windows were dark, his car nowhere to be seen. Jethro idled on the curb for a few minutes, and then moved on.

Midnight crawled by. Jethro stopped at a pay phone and got his boss's machine again. Whatever had happened, it had done so hours ago, and all Jethro had to go on was a feeling, something in his gut, not enough to back the word of a junior agent who hadn't yet submitted the report about where his last bullet had ended up.

"Seen a guy in an old white Ford go by here? About so high, dark hair, mustache--"

Nobody had.

One day I'm going to light out of here and not come back.

It was luck that did it in the end: luck and a spooked attendant at a way-station where Franks had stopped for gas. Down that road, there were only a few places to go. Jethro parked beside the other car, climbed over the small small lip of grass and looked out over the shore to where Franks, sitting on one of a cluster of surf-polished stones, was silhouetted against the slowly paling sky.

"Thought I told you never to call my ex," Franks growled as Jethro picked his way over and found a seat that was mostly dry.

"Didn't get it from her." Hunching his shoulders against the morning dew, Jethro leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, ignoring a muscle pulling in his back. It would be all right after a few hours' sleep. Franks handed him a flask, and he took it and dangled it between his fingers, but didn't drink.

Franks had seldom talked about his kin, but to Jethro, still raw from his own personal loss, the man's life had slowly revealed itself as a morass of convaluted events. "My brother and I married the same woman twice," he would say in the years ahead, when time had cooled the memories and flecked them with humor. That it had turned out to be the same woman surprised only those who hadn't known her.

"She's making a mistake," Jethro had remarked, the one time he had managed to get his boss out on a boat for the day, and instead of grating out a who asked you, Franks had given him a sidelong look and popped another can and said, "Oh no she isn't. We're all a lot better like this."

Then what was the point!? Jethro had wanted to shout, but didn't.

What's the point of anything, Probie, Franks could have said, but let the silence say it for him.

After a moment, Franks turned his eyes back to the sea and they were alone with no ghosts to bother them. "What'd you come all the way out here for?"

Jethro just looked at him, or past him at the cupped curve of the bay. After two years, that was enough.

Franks reached over, took the flask, and used it to swipe Jethro in the back of the head.

"Idjit."

That was also enough.

They drank and the rising sun lit the ocean up from within, and the clouds floating over it were shot with rose, and the warmth of the morning fell around them.

.o0o.

In the end, Jethro nearly fell asleep sitting there. Franks hauled him back to the car and forced coffee into him until he was awake enough not to fall down his own basement steps, and six months later, when Bennett snapped and came after them, Franks was still there to take him out.

_____

(The original prompt was: Gibbs and Franks. Gen! Either as partners or after. Or before, when Gibbs was a gunnery sergeant with nothing left to lose.)