Author's Note: This was supposed to be for the LJ drabbles, but it's too long. Prompt: "light bulb moment." Angst, ahoy. I apologize for nothing. Tibbs, if you squint.
WARNING: CHARACTER DEATH.
MAKE IT 'TIL THE MORNING
Bad coffee. Bad takeout. Bad moods.
A bad guy out there somewhere.
In short, just another day.
Tony makes an inappropriate joke and makes himself laugh. Ziva makes a face that resembles someone who's unwillingly sucked on a lemon.
"What?" he asks them all, but especially Ziva. "Who pissed in your Wheaties?"
McGee laughs at that, although he tries to hide it.
Gibbs glares at all of them.
Just another day.
They're at the scene. McGee's wrapping up an interview with the eye witness, some professional beggar with nice kicks and an earnest, go-getter expression and a beat-up cardboard sign that reads, "anything helps." Ziva, she's got an armful of numbered placards and a mag light and at least a dozen knives hidden on her person.
Gibbs supervises, even while Duck squats near the body, saying, "Well, Jethro, if the blood is any indication…"
And he watches Tony, who's got the camera in his hands and who's now staring toward the crowd of looky-loos gathered despite the rain. Gibbs waits for that look — a look that says he's figured something out.
That light bulb moment.
He once told Kate that he doesn't keep DiNozzo around for his personality. And it's true, mostly.
There it is. That look. Gibbs opens his mouth, takes a step toward him. Except—
There's a small backpack, left abandoned in the grass. Most likely it had been dropped by their dead sailor. That's what they assume.
Gibbs knows it's there.
Tony knows it's there, too. He's standing right next to it.
It's harmless.
Tony breaks from where he's been standing and staring.
Is it someone in the crowd?
After that, there's nothing.
"Jethro… Jethro…"
Someone keeps saying that, saying his name over and over.
Again, after that, there's nothing.
He wakes up to an empty room. Darkened. Walls painted a soothing shade of green. His body feels numb. His mind feels numb.
Instantly, Gibbs knows where he is, because he's woken up in places like these several times too many. There's gentle beeping, and an empty chair by his bedside. The drapes have been drawn shut.
He closes his eyes and tries to remember what he'd been dreaming.
A dream, not a nightmare.
"It would have been instantaneous," Duck is saying in that soothing, rational voice of his.
He doesn't want to hear about it. Doesn't want to hear about all the ways it was painless, merciful, quick, or instant.
The fact that it happened at all pisses him off. It breaks him down into nothing.
McGee comes, eventually. He's withdrawn and shy. He doesn't talk much. Says "hello" and "how are you doing" and "been enjoying some leave time." Nothing deep or meaningful comes out of McGee's mouth.
Gibbs doesn't push, and neither does McGee.
It's possible they could communicate via the mutual misery in their eyes, and they try, until McGee looks away. Pulls himself away because suddenly everything is real again.
"Thanks for stopping by," Gibbs manages to say.
And if McGee is surprised, he doesn't show it. He shrugs. "I have to get over it at some point, I guess."
Only then does Gibbs notice the anger that boils down deep inside McGee. It's the kind of anger that derails and destroys.
Somehow, he feels like he's just gotten to know this man.
Ziva is not McGee. She relays her experience with bald detail.
She sits with Gibbs one afternoon. A sunny day, from what he can tell from his window. It doesn't suit his dark mood, the clinical depression he now inhabits.
She recounts that night. How she sat with McGee in the shower, how she washed bits of Tony from his hair and his body, how it had taken hours and how he seemed incapable of doing it himself.
He doesn't want to hear this. He doesn't need to hear this.
"We did not know yet if you would make it 'til the morning."
"Well, I did," he says. It hadn't been his choice, and knowing what he knows now…
"I know what you are thinking, Gibbs."
He won't doubt that she does.
He's thinking he should've gone the way of DiNozzo. Wishing he could've spared him. Because the hole that's swallowing them all right now is deep and seemingly without end.
Ziva says, no smile, no emotion, "Tell me what kind of devotion prompts someone to do what Tony did for you."
She's not one to mince words. She already knows how devoted Tony was, but she thinks he might need the reminder.
And in short, he doesn't.
"He didn't do it for me, Ziver," he says quietly.
"You were walking right toward it."
"He didn't do it for me," he repeats. His voice breaks at the end.
Ziva stands up. She squeezes his hand. As a goodbye, she says, "I know you will not disappoint him."
He doesn't know if that's a threat, a statement of truth, a personal belief, or all three.
It takes weeks for him to pry the memory loose, and once he does, he wishes he hadn't.
Tony's on the ground. On top of the bag.
But after that, there's still nothing.
Gibbs is okay with that; he doesn't want to be McGee.
Often, he sees it again, in his mind's eye.
Tony's light bulb moment. That brain and those instincts whirring.
Thinking two things at once: what's happening, and what do I need to do.
Just a split second to decide. Not enough time to go for his gun.
But just enough time to drop.
Gibbs opens his mouth, steps forward.
Somebody pushes a button, but Tony's already there.
He's a ruin of a man. He knows this. There's only so far the soul can bend before it breaks.
But Gibbs keeps up with it, doggedly. He has to, for McGee and Ziva and Abby, and he wants to, for Tony.
There's a shred of his psyche that wants it for himself, too.
He keeps woodworking. Keeps reaching out to friends and family.
He's already named the new boat taking shape in the basement. The Why Not, because why not?
Time begins to buffer the pain, and the sorrow, and the missing him.
Sometimes, he has dreams about Tony, and in every single one of them, he's smiling.
fin.