"So what's bothering you, Tony?" Gibbs asked after he hit the emergency shut-off switch in the elevator.
Tony huffed out a sigh. "Nothing. I'm –"
"Fine, right," Gibbs finished for him. "I don't buy it, Tony. Something's been eating at you for the past week. You smile and joke like always, but it's all off. And all with Kate and Abby. You haven't said a word to me that wasn't related to a case."
Tony leaned his head back against the metal wall and closed his eyes.
"See?" Gibbs said, his tone softer than Tony had ever heard it. "No snappy comeback, no denial."
Gibbs reached out and touched two fingers to Tony's chin, getting him to open his eyes and really look at him. "No joke to cover the pain."
Tony crossed his arms over his chest, and Gibbs knew the position was defensive but couldn't read the emotion in his agent's stormy green eyes.
"Talk to me, Tony," Gibbs said, as close to pleading as was possible for him. A casual observer would have thought it an order worthy of the Corps' toughest DI. But Tony knew better. "Tell me what I did. What I said to hurt you."
Tony blinked and swallowed hard at the softly spoken words. He sucked in a slow breath, let it out equally slowly. "Nothing, Gibbs. You didn't do anything. I'm fine."
"So it's something I said," Gibbs deduced, thinking back over the past week. He watched Tony struggling to keep his mask in place, watched him trying to even out his unsteady breathing. Wished he'd stop.
"I know it's not easy for you to talk," Gibbs said, deciding to try a different approach since his quiet concern was obviously just causing his agent more distress. "I'm not real good at it, either, DiNozzo. All those ex-wives can attest to that."
Tony's expression remained blank, but even he—master of smoke and mirrors—couldn't block the haunted pain from his eyes.
Gibbs fought back a sigh, starting to lose his patience. "Fine. Don't talk to me."
So he didn't.
Even though he could sense Gibbs' frustration. He tried really hard not to read it as disappointment.
But he did anyway.
Still he did not speak—just waited for Gibbs to hit the button.
And then he did.
Tony lay awake that night thinking about the words his boss had said to him that had knocked his world askew.
He tried not to feel guilty about taking those words the way he had.
He failed.
It was strange, though, because in any other context, the words were vicious, hateful and threatening. In the other context he had heard them, they had been vicious, hateful and a harbinger of events to come. The threat had been delivered, then the threat followed through. The remembered pain of that particular injury had him flexing his left hand even as he lay, warm and safe, in his own bed all these years later.
But still he felt the gnawing teeth of guilt in his gut because he knew—without a doubt, really—that the recent threat had been delivered with no intention of being carried through.
Worst of all, he knew the threat would never have been delivered had the threatener known of the previous threat.
Ah, who am I kidding? he thought. I don't need to think in the abstract. Not now. Not when I am alone, with no one to perform for. No audience means no need to fake it, right?
He knew Gibbs would never have uttered that threat if he had known it had been previously threatened and carried out.
Right?
Two days later, Tony stood at a crime scene in the woods off Interstate 66, flexing his left hand as he always did when the cold made his old injury throb anew. It felt worse than the usual simple ache, and he wondered if it was his body's way of telling him he needed to talk to Gibbs. Just tell him what he'd said, why it bothered him and ask him not to do it again, please.
Right.
Gibbs had been thoroughly distant since the elevator, but he had also been unfailingly polite to Tony when he did speak to him. So much so that Kate and Abby had asked Tony about it this morning. He'd brushed it off with a laugh and a joke.
Polite was the opposite of Gibbs' tone when he barked his senior agent's name and dragged him bodily out of the woods, away from the team, and back to the car parked on the side of the nearly vacant interstate.
"The hell, Gibbs?" Tony yelled when his boss finally released him. They were facing each other, Tony's back to the government-issue sedan, and Gibbs' breath puffing out visibly in the cold air just inches from his agent's face.
"Why didn't you say something?" Gibbs asked, his voice ragged in a way Tony had never heard it—never wanted to hear again.
"What are you talking about?" Tony asked unnecessarily. He knew the answer.
"I looked at your medical records again last night, Tony," Gibbs said, his voice steadier, his eyes boring into Tony's. "You broke half the fingers in your left hand playing football when you were ten."
Tony just stared back blankly.
Gibbs' gaze hardened. "That true?"
Tony knew he was being dared to lie. "Parts of it."
Gibbs surprised him by laughing softly. He stepped back and shook his head. "What the hell am I going to do with you, DiNozzo?"
"Um, let me do my job?" Tony ventured, nodding back toward the woods where Kate and Ducky were no doubt making high-dollar wagers over this very conversation.
"As soon as you drop the silver tongue act and tell me which parts."
Tony ground the palms of his hands into his eyes. "What do you want to know, Gibbs? That he enjoyed hurting me as much as he liked taking over multimillion-dollar companies? I carry that knowledge with me whether or not you threaten to break my fingers if I touch your cell phone. I don't need a reminder, and you don't need to know that crap because you are my boss. It does not affect my job."
"It affects you," came Gibbs' soft reply.
Tony took the soft compassion in the older man's eyes like a kick to the gut, and he reacted in kind. "You think going behind my back to dig up old medical records is going to fix me? Or hauling me forcibly away from a crime scene in front of my coworkers? They're already wondering why you've gone all Miss Manners on me lately, and now I'm going to have to find a way to explain today. If you care about me, Gibbs, then don't—"
"Of course I care about you, Tony," Gibbs interrupted, forcing his volume down from the yell he wanted to use. "I said something that hurt you deeply, and you just stood there and took it. I asked you directly about it, and you gave me the runaround. I'm not him, Tony, and I never will be." He held up a hand to silence his agent. "If I hurt you—hell, if anyone hurts you—I want to know about it so I can fix it."
They stared at each other for an eternity of a few seconds.
"Say something, DiNozzo," Gibbs said finally, unable to take the awkwardness any longer.
The side of Tony's mouth quirked up a notch. "I think we just hit our sap quotient for the year."
Gibbs smiled wryly. "Come on, if we don't get back to that corpse, Kate and Duck'll think we're on a date up here."
Tony snorted as he headed back down the embankment. "More like you needed more time to dispose of the body."