I don't own NCIS- been watching since the first season, though


"Aht lo leh-vahd"

He was smarter than they thought. Sometimes, it pissed him off when they just didn't notice things. So many small clues, little slip-ups. A small part of him yearned to admit that sometimes he did it on purpose. Just once he wanted to break his cover. Seriously- the Hebrew... Three times now he'd spoken to Ziva, called out in her native tongue, and she never put two and two together. They were convinced he didn't speak Spanish no matter how many times he hinted. Jenny knew. She knew a lot more than anyone. And a lot less than she should. Still, she offered him Rota. She knew about the Spanish. The Italian? Well, that was fairly simple. The Family insisted. And it had proven useful- at times. The suits? Raised in an extremely proud family and somehow everyone seemed to forget that it wasn't just Senior's Italians. The British Paddington's held traditions with great fervor. He was raised privileged. Then his mother died and her family money was held until his twenty-first birthday and his goddamn father manipulated the courts and had him disowned at twelve. The softer way of saying emancipated. The military boarding school... that had been the compromise. Stash him away from prying eyes. He earned his way. When his birthday came- well, his dad had tried to dip into it, but when Tony was emancipated, he lost his access. It was a nice little nest egg... DiNozzo hated it. He bought his suits with his own money, hard earned. And a phys ed degree? Required advanced anatomy classes and a hell of a lot more than everyone seemed to assume. And he never said that was his only degree. People preferred idiots, though. No one, not even his team guessed. The piano playing, the singing... All the movie quotes? Sometimes an eidetic memory was useful. Then again, Tony thought of Kate. The bullet entering her brain through her skull, powering through the frontal lobe, and blowing out the back, scattering blood and brain matter- part of the desiccated hippocampus, no doubt, across the barren rooftop, into the face of Tony Dinozzo, sealing the scene forever in his was so much more, so very much more, than they saw. Sometimes he felt the secrets would destroy him.

But sometimes, the times that were the most important, he knew that it was his secrets that made him stronger. And that was what was important.