Disclaimer: I own neither NCIS nor its characters. This is for entertainment purposes only, I make no money from these ventures.

Author's Note: Thank you everyone who reviewed my last ones, and thank you as always to my beta readers, especially kate98 who keeps staying up late at night to get things back to me. Any errors are my fault and stubbornness alone, and not theirs.

Talk Therapy

Talk to somebody. Everybody was telling him that these days. Ducky said he should talk to somebody, Abby said he should talk to somebody, the brass wanted him talking to somebody, hell, even Gibbs told him twice to talk to somebody about it. Problem was, he didn't want to talk to anybody, because, well… what he had to say wasn't anything people wanted to hear.

He looked up at the tall building in front of him. Cedar Ridge Psychiatric Facility. Plenty of head-doctors here. He strode up the front steps and opened the heavy doors, letting the cool air of the air-conditioned lobby out to play. At reception he talked to the pretty aide on duty, she pushed a book and pen across the counter at him and he dutifully signed it. A. DiNozzo. She buzzed him through a set of even heavier doors that closed quickly behind him, cutting him off from safety and civilisation. There, he was patted down, checked over for sharp objects, hard objects, anything that could – in any conceivable way – be used as a weapon. Put these guys in charge of airport security and 9/11 would never have happened. Forget something so obvious as a box-cutter, here you couldn't even have a ball-point pen or a credit card. Those, and his watch, his class ring, even his shoelaces he surrendered, watching as they were packed into a little steel box. Stripped down, divested of identity, of anything precious or valuable. It seemed about right.

He wound his way through the corridors, drawing a few stares along the way. He wasn't a doctor, but he wasn't a patient either, so who the hell was he? They didn't ask though, in the polite way that head-docs had. He was obviously supposed to be here and if they weren't involved, they didn't want to be. They had enough stresses in their lives, they didn't need to take the chance that he'd become another one.

He found the right door and paused slightly before knocking.

"Come in." The voice was pleasant, cultured even.

He opened the door and stepped inside, his stomach dropping as he did. This was nuts, coming here. But he had to, or Gibbs would never get off his case, or worse, he'd do something about it.

"Anthony. I'm glad you could come." The old man smiled, his eyes crinkling up at the corners. He waved a piece of paper at Tony and gestured towards a chair. "Sit down. I'm just finishing up something here."

"Yeah, sure." Reflexively he checked the seat before lowering himself into it. His eyes met the old man's and he relaxed a little. But only a little.

"Now, what did you come to talk to me about?"

No sense dancing around it. "A friend of mine was killed. She was standing right next to me when she was shot."

"I see."

"One second we were talking and then…" He closed his eyes, feeling the memory again. "She just stopped and there was a warm spray on my face, like a shower in the morning. It felt kind of nice, actually." And then realisation had kicked in, and the horror with it. The spray was warm because microseconds before, it had been a part of Kate, living tissue that now decorated him. "Some of it got in my mouth…" It tasted kind of salty-metallic, what was once Kate was now a part of him, blood binding her to him as it mixed with his saliva and slid unbidden down his throat. Turning him into a vampire, one of the walking dead. All these details and more, he handed out, turning the images to words and ridding them from his mind.

"Were you close to her?"

Tony shook his head, irritated. "I just said. I was standing right next to her."

"No, I mean, did you have feelings for her."

"She was a friend." So, yes, he did have feelings. He didn't have siblings growing up – that was, after all, the definition of an 'only child' – but Kate had kind of been like a sister-figure, he guessed. Annoying, bratty… just like a sister was supposed to be, or so he'd heard. "A colleague."

"So you trusted her deeply."

"Yes." Trusted her as though his life depended on it, just like she trusted him. Which just went to show that you should never trust a rich-kid, because they don't know anything about sacrifice. "I trusted her."

"Was she pretty?"

"Very pretty." That he could admit, that he'd always admitted. Very pretty, at times verging on damn hot. Tony knew, because he was a connoisseur of such things. He appreciated beautiful women, accepted them as proof there was a God and he was kind, because only that kind of God would take the time to make something so precious and wonderful.

They were silent for a while, each listening to his own thoughts.

"Is this the first time you've tasted blood?"

"No." No, it wasn't. It was, however, the first innocent's blood. It was the first taste where Tony could not be held accountable, where he did not make the decision to end a life.

"But she isn't the problem, is she? The problem is others." An uncanny observation, but then the man had practice. He knew all about guilt and pain, had heard a million confessions of deepest, darkest hurts and fears.

"Yes." Gibbs, McGee, Abby… all wanting something…

"They want you to be hurt, to be sad. They want you to feel what they feel."

"Yes."

"Do you?"

Did he? He wasn't sure. He missed her… there was a space in the other desk that used to be filled with snarky comments and the crunch of health food, and it didn't seem right that all of a sudden there was silence. No, he decided, what he was, was angry. Angry, because now he had to work with the distraction of quiet, angry because Gibbs kept treating him like he was made of cut crystal – valuable but infinitely breakable. Angry, because she'd disrupted his life by getting herself killed and doing it all over him. All those hours getting poked with needles… again, just after getting over the Y-Pestis thing. Because he'd ingested her blood, and the doctors, damn doctors wanted to be sure that Kate wasn't carrying anything communicable that Tony's weakened immune system wouldn't be able to handle. "No. I'm mad."

His companion chuckled. "Well, you've come to the right place for that."

"Yes." Tony didn't laugh. "I have, haven't I?" For a moment, his speech betrayed his past, all the private schooling his father spent half a fortune on for the son to throw away and become – of all the damned things in the world – a cop. No, dad had not been happy about that. Maybe he had been afraid that it would be Tony instead of Kate, but somehow Tony didn't think so. It was the bad ROI… all that cash layout so that Tony could make a subsistence living rather than adding to the family's fortunes. He'd told Kate he missed the money, but that wasn't entirely true. He missed the comfort the money could bring – not having to budget just to live in a crappy three room apartment and still have decent clothes. He didn't miss the strings attached, the ass-kissing and subservience that went along with asking for it.

Now there was a massive difference between Gibbs and Dad. Sure, they were both hard-ass sons-of-bitches – literally, in Dad's case, Tony couldn't stand Grandma DiNozzo and avoided her at all costs, another bad habit according to his father – but Gibbs had good reason to be. Gibbs was a bastard because being a bastard kept him and others alive. Dad was a bastard because he thought he was entitled to be one by virtue of new money and old hurts.

"Anger is natural, Anthony. It's good that you feel it. Everyone gets angry."

"Even Jesus." Kate would have been surprised at that remark. Wasn't she the good Catholic girl and Tony a debauched fool who could only name the seven deadly sins because they were in a movie and he'd done them all? Greed, envy, pride, gluttony… check, check, check and check. Lust, double check. Sloth… just look at his apartment and its week-old pile of dishes and takeout cartons, the only thing neat being the line-up of empties behind the sink. And wrath… Only a precious few had any concept of how boundless Tony's wrath could be.

"Yes, even Jesus, when he discovered the money-changers doing business in his father's temple. To be angry is to be human. There's no shame in that."

"I just want things to go back to the way they were." So it was selfish. Big deal. Tony never pretended he wasn't a selfish guy.

"And you're angry because it won't happen."

"Yes." Oh, that was what pissed him off more than anything. Why shouldn't God just fix things, put them back the way they'd been when Tony was happy?

The door opened and an orderly came in, shocked to find two people in the room instead of one. He stammered apologies and Tony stood up.

"It's okay… I have to leave anyway."

"Remember, Anthony," the old man said, "Things aren't always the way they seem at first."

"Yeah." After all, no one would think such a skinny, kindly-looking old man was anything other than harmless. You could let down your guard around him, trust him, until you remembered that the geek had killed five women, drained them dry of blood and neatly buried the bodies in the soft dirt out back of the Church rectory. Oh, yeah, and he'd been a priest too… Kate would have gotten a kick out of that. Tony's first crime scene, back in those rookie days of not knowing better, of thinking that you could spot the crazies straight off, of thinking that you couldn't be normal in daylight and get off on killing people in the darkness. Saving their souls by cutting them out of the sinful body. A mission from God.

Talk to somebody. They never said to whom. At least he didn't have the guilt of exposing someone else to this darkness who wasn't already there and who might be damaged by it. It was a favour, really, letting the old man live his fantasies of blood vicariously through the younger one.

He wound his way out, picking up his things after being checked over once again. Not everyone came to smuggle things in, some came to bring them out. Then he stepped out into sunlight, not shrivelling away like a good vampire should, but letting it warm him. He pulled out his sunglasses and put them on, then got into his car and drove away.