Chapter Warnings: Language
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"You woke up screaming aloud
A prayer from your secret god
You feed off our fears
And hold back your tears, oh
Give us a tantrum
And a know it all grin
Just when we need one
When the evening's thin..."
—Building a Mystery by Sarah McLachlan
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Suddenly, Gibbs couldn't stand to lurk here any longer, listening to words that DiNozzo had clearly never intended for him to hear. Banging a drawer to give warning, the agent strolled out of the office, pasting a good-natured scowl on his face.
"Do I even wanna know how your stethoscope got wedged behind the file cabinet, Duck?"
"Ah, there you are, Jethro. We're just about finished," Ducky said lightly. As always, he was smooth—if Gibbs hadn't been eavesdropping, he would never have guessed the intensity of the conversation mere seconds previous. Someday he'd have to put the ME undercover. "Goodness, is that where that dratted thing was. Please put it over with those scalpels. If my assistant actually showed his face for once, I might have my tools in some semblance of order—what's this? Splinters?"
Ducky lifted Tony's hand, scrutinizing his fingers with professional curiosity.
"Your partner sent over your statement. It said that you grabbed your attacker's weapon in the tussle. Could that be the source of these?"
Tony blinked, looking discomfited. "I...actually didn't notice them. I guess I should have gotten checked out at the scene."
"Yeah, you should have." Gibbs made no effort to curb his natural bluntness. "It's evidence."
Tony frowned, opened his mouth, and closed it.
"Well, no matter," Ducky interjected rather hastily, digging into Tony's finger with his tweezers. "Hold still. I think I have it now. You know, this reminds me of a man I treated once, who decided to go tree climbing in the bare. But he was rather intoxicated at the time, and once he reached the top he decided it was actually a fireman's pole. He survived the slide, luckily. But I think his child producing days were over..."
At that, DiNozzo's face actually tinged green. Gibbs couldn't blame him. "Doc, this really isn't helping take my mind off—ow!"
"Oh, do stop whining. There we go, it's all out." Ducky popped the splinter into one of his plastic sample bottles, and rose to his feet. "I'll just run this on up to Abby. I hope you will be careful with that shoulder, Anthony."
Tossing the preemptive rebuke over his shoulder, Ducky left them in silence.
Immediately, Tony slid off the table, clearing his throat. "We probably should get up to the squad room. And I should probably call my partner and update him. He's a worrier. See, he gets these ideas in his head of all these horrible things that probably happened, and if I can't head him off at the pass, it literally takes hours to convince him otherwise—"
The younger man was talking far too fast, clearly unnerved to be alone with Gibbs. The agent bit back a tired sigh. Trying to keep up with DiNozzo's moods was like trying to anticipate a whirlwind. To actually pick out the causeof each shift would require a level of emotional introspection that Gibbs was reluctant to indulge in. But whatever the reason, Tony was currently so unsettled, it was actually uncomfortable to watch.
"DiNozzo." Gibbs cut him off. "You going to walk up to the bullpen like that?"
Tony blinked, seeming to register his shirtless state anew. "I—"
"What? You shy?"
With effort, Gibbs softened his tone so that the teasing was unmistakably good-natured. For the briefest instant, Tony searched Gibbs's face, before cracking a blinding smile.
A truce, of sorts.
At least he'd stopped the anxious babbling. Gibbs wasn't fool enough to think the tension was truly resolved, but he'd settle for putting it hold.
"No, I just don't want to give a free peep show. I may be loose, but I'm not cheap." Tony quipped, attempting a pose that might have been intended to be coy.
Gibbs snorted, easing into the comfortable banter. "Last guy that flirted with me was a hell of lot better at it." Grabbing his bag, he pulled out a worn grey USMC t-shirt—his spare. A bit wrinkled, but it would work.
"Hey, give me time," DiNozzo protested. "I grow on you."
"Like a fungus?" Gibbs shot back, passing the shirt.
Tony adopted a wounded air. "Hey, now. I'm an acquired taste." He regarded the shirt uncertainly.
This, again? "DiNozzo," Gibbs blurted finally, exasperated beyond endurance. "Would it kill you to ask for help?"
Tony stared at him, looking completely astonished.
What did he think that had all been about? Gibbs huffed in annoyance—the kid was going to drive him mad—and gestured for Tony to life his arms. He eased the worn fabric on gently, trying to jostle the shoulder as little as possible.
It was probably testimony to how out of sorts the younger man was that he hadn't thrown in more spectacularly awkward innuendo.
"You know," Tony said, the words muffled as he pulled the tee over his head, "Most couples don't start borrowing clothes until after a least the first few dates."
And...he'd spoken too soon. Gibbs rolled his eyes, amused in spite of himself. "And here I thought you said you were easy."
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"DiNozzo. Desk."
Tony followed the pointed finger almost meekly, and dropped into the seat, gazing curiously around the bullpen. Orange walls? That was a curious choice. Distinctive, if hideous. Otherwise, though, the room looked like a nicer version of every bullpen he'd ever been in.
It was insufficient stimuli to distance him from the anxiety lurking just under the surface of his mind. Deciding that childishness was as good a distraction as any, Tony spun his chair wildly, letting the dizzying sensation banish his jumbled thoughts for a time. Office chairs really had missed their calling as playground equipment. Also, Gibbs's red-haired agent was watching him and looking annoyingly professional in her suit, and it felt good to vex her.
Especially since she looked pretty hot when pissed off.
"Blackadder," Gibbs growled—not an angry growl, just an everyday sort—and sank into his own chair. "Druckenbrod. Background. What'cha got?"
Looking apprehensive, Blackadder stood, grabbing a remote. "Meet Pete Druckenbrod. Fifty-five years of age, and a Navy Chaplain."
A picture flew up onto the screen. Grey eyes, wavy salt-and-pepper hair; a narrow, serious face. Without the bruises, the aging man was almost completely unrecognizable as the corpse Tony had stumbled upon.
"He was born in Brookeville, Maryland, to Frank and Dianne Druckenbrod." She clicked the remote. "They stayed in Maryland until Pete turned ten, at which point the entire family moved to South Africa so that his father could be a pastor at Queen's College."
Tony's cellphone chimed. The ID flashed Adam. "Sorry," he muttered, pressing a button to hang up.
"Any other family?" Gibbs asked, ignoring the interruption.
"No siblings. He has an eighty-five-year-old cousin—"
"Ah, that's our man. The geriatric cousin. It's the oldest trick in the book," Tony interjected in a conspiratorial stage whisper. "You turn your back, and—BAM! He clubs you over the head with his walker."
"—female cousin, in a mental hospital for advanced dementia," Blackadder overrode his absurdity, voice frigid.
Not so much as an eye-roll? Tough nut to crack.
"Otherwise, no. Both of his parents are now deceased, as well. Now, Pete graduated from Queen's, and eventually took over his father's role as pastor, but only for three years, at which point he moved to DC and became a Chaplain for the Navy."
"What prompted that?" Tony asked, curious.
Blackadder answered him grudgingly, not taking her eyes off the screen. "I don't know, but it ran in the family. His grandfather was a celebrated Navy Chaplain."
Ring. Adam, again. Tony hung up hurriedly, and smiled sheepishly when the female agent put one hand on her hip.
"Is that all you got?" Gibbs demanded, swiveling to his feet.
"Not exactly." She clicked the remote again. "Pete has no criminal record, but I did notice a odd pattern in his travels. In the last twenty or so years, he when he wasn't deployed, he's made over thirty trips to South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, and Canada. Given his history, South Africa makes sense, but the others aren't exactly tourist locations, and it's way too clear of a pattern to be a coincidence. But what's the connection?"
"I know," Tony blurted, too surprised she hadn't seen it to wait his turn.
Gibbs raised his eyebrows—in dispute or encouragement, Tony couldn't tell.
The detective got to his feet, moving to join them in front of the screen. "South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Canada—they're all major diamond exporters, associated with De Beers."
Blackadder looked blank.
"De Beers? Only the world's most successful diamond mining company?" Tony asked incredulously.
She shrugged, tossing burnished curls over her shoulder.
"You thinking smuggling?" Gibbs asked, still expressionless.
"Maybe." Tony spread his heads, a questioning gesture. "It's something, right?"
"That's a big assumption," Blackadder bit out, clearly smarting.
"Could be right," Gibbs said coolly, smiling faintly at the detective.
A smile, from Gibbs?
Blackadder deflated visibly, looking down. Tony felt a little bit bad then.
But just a little.
The ex-marine crossed his arms. "DiNozzo. Suspects. What do we have to go on?"
Him? "Um." Tony cleared his throat. "I saw three men around the body, but I think there were four involved, because those ran when they saw me, but someone still jumped me. He might have been the lookout; I don't know. That guy was blond, with a kind of pointy nose. He was tall—at least my height, I think."
"Blond and over six foot, with a pointy nose," Blackadder repeated. "Wow. Great going. With that, we can have a wanted poster out any day now."
The sarcasm stung more than he would have expected.
"Think you'd recognize him if you saw him again?" To Tony's gratitude, there was no hint of derision in Gibbs's steady blue gaze.
There'd been something so memorable about the eyes. "Maybe. I think so."
As if on cue, his phone trilled for the third time.
Tony peeped at the ID, and sighed. "Sorry. I've really got to take this. It's my partner." Ignoring Gibbs's forbidding stare, the detective retreated to the nearby stairwell.
"Hi, man."
"Tony, where have you been?" The deep voice was exasperated. "I've been trying to reach you for hours. NCIS won't share anything with our people. It's a complete nightmare."
Tony banged the back of his head against the wall lightly, twice, in self-recrimination. Of course it was.
He really should have anticipated this.
"Sorry, man. I don't think Special Agent Gibbs actually understands the concept of a "joint investigation," Tony admitted, somewhere between irritated and rueful at the discovery. "Look, I'll talk—"
The phone was plucked from his fingers.
Gibbs leaned against the wall, corner of his mouth lifted in a smirk, and spoke into the mouthpiece.
"Far as I'm concerned, DiNozzo's enough a handful. My lead, my people. You'll get an update later." With that, he flipped the cell shut and tossed it back to Tony.
"Hey!"
"My lead." Gibbs lifted an eyebrow, daring argument. "My choice. He calls you again, ignore it."
"Adam's not going to stop trying to work on the case just because you hung up on him."
The agent's lips quirked. He didn't actually say sucks for him, or do I look like I give a damn, but the intent was plain. "Back to work, DiNozzo. Recess is over."
There was nothing to say in the face of that. Shaking his head disbelievingly, Tony strolled back to his desk, and plopped into the chair. A peculiar feeling was bubbling up in his chest, underneath the dismay. Tony swiveled back and forth in his seat one more time, and prodded the unidentified emotion until it took solid form.
When it did, a slow, startled smile spread across his face.
Laughter. Well-buried laughter, but laughter all the same.
Who the hell did that, anyway?
God—
He'd actually missed working with this bastard.
"Blackadder—keep digging," Gibbs barked, professional case leader once more. "I want emails, a list of deployments, friends, associates; bank balances. Look for any connection to the diamond industry. Anything odd, you sniff it out. DiNozzo." Gibbs jerked his silvery head. "With me. "
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Today, the music in Abby's lab was set at a dull roar—merely deafening rather than actually painful.
DiNozzo nearly hit the floor anyway when the elevator doors slid open, evidently unprepared for the dulcet screams of Cannibal Corpse. "What the hell?" The detective asked—or at least that was what Gibbs thought he asked, given the movement of his lips.
Gibbs just smiled, the pounding beat rendering further response conveniently impossible. Truth be told, he always looked forward to this. Introducing Abby to strangers was the social equivalent of handing somebody a live bomb—sometimes they knew how to diffuse it, and sometimes they didn't.
Either way, it was fun to watch them sweat.
As the music spiked in volume, DiNozzo actually stopped walking, clapping his hands over his ears.
"Abs," Gibbs bellowed, poking his head into the lab. Jet-black pigtails, festooned with what appeared to be plastic Mr. Yuck faces, bobbed along to a rhythm discernable only to their owner. "Abs!"
The tall figure jolted. Spotting Gibbs, Abby beamed, waving wildly. One handed, she grabbed her remote, plunging them into silence.
"Gibbs! Wait until you see—!"
"Does that actually count as music?"
Abby's and Tony's exclamations overlaid, almost enough to render both inaudible.
Almost.
The temperature in the lab plunged to below zero. Light green eyes, outlined in charcoal smears, narrowed to serpentine slits. "Care to repeat that, mystery person?"
The menacing tone would have sent a prudent man running for the hills, but no one had ever accused DiNozzo of knowing when to back down.
Tony strolled into the lab, hands in his pockets. "I said, does that even—"
He trailed off, cheeky expression fading to gobsmacked.
"Abby?"
Her jaw dropped.
"Tony?" She squeaked, eyes growing huge. "What are you doing here? No, never mind, don't answer that—hallucinations don't have to make sense—Gibbs, don't pinch me, I don't want to wake up!"
With that, Abby raced forward, hurling her arms around the detective.
Gibbs wished someone would pinch him.
"I tried the number you gave me so many times," Abby mumbled into Tony's shirt, still clinging to him like a limpet. "But I could never reach you!"
"Sorry, Abby," DiNozzo answered softly, expression genuinely regretful. "That phone got run over by a truck."
What. The. Hell?
Reality had gleefully shifted, leaving Gibbs twisting in the winds of bewilderment. "You two know each other?" The agent managed.
Abby giggled, face transformed with impishness. She swayed back and forth in place, with her arms still looped around Tony's waist. "Do I know him?" She gave a squeeze. "Gibbs, he saved my life!"
"I think you might have saved mine too, Abby," Tony retorted, grinning, apparently unflustered by their impromptu slow dance.
"Tony, feeding you pizza doesn't count as saving your life."
"Sausage, extra cheese? My favorite pizza? After two days spent subsisting on celery and sardines? Close enough."
Of Gibbs's rather limited array of preferred emotional states, 'confusion' ranked somewhere around 'regret' and 'outright misery'—and came into actual use about as often as 'hyper'.
"How do you two know each other?" The ex-marine demanded, at the end of his tether. If they'd had...a fling, he was going to smack DiNozzo's head in. He was going to smack both of their heads in.
But DiNozzo's first.
"We hooked up," Abby informed him cheerily.
Heat flooded to Gibbs's head.
"Abby!" DiNozzo's voice squeaked, his face turning the hue of an overripe strawberry. "That's not—we didn't—that's not funny."
Catching Gibbs's expression, the younger man actually took a step back, dragging the lab tech with him.
Abby giggled throatily. "But it would have been fun. Oh, silly Gibbs, don't look at Tony like that—he's a total gentleman. And anyway, he doesn't have nearly enough tattoos."
"Abby," Gibbs growled in warning, a headache starting to pound behind his temples.
"Oh, you're no fun." Pouting, Abby released her captive. "Tony. Sit there and don't move. We're not done. Gibbs, remember that time two years ago, when I visited the National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research in Peoria on my vacation, because that's where mass production penicillin was produced, and that's just so cool—and I called you and told you that I'd been in a grocery store hold up, but not to freak out, because I knew you would freak out, and I was completely fine, even if we were all in there for two days because the shooter decided to do the whole hostage thing—"
Yes. Gibbs remembered.
It had been one of the more heart-stopping calls of his NCIS career.
"—and even if I did get shot at...and it was all okay because an off-duty cop totally took charge and saved everybody?"
DiNozzo cleared his throat uncomfortably. "That's not exactly—"
"Yes, it is!" Abby insisted. "It's exactly. Tony's a hero, Bossman."
Gibbs stared at them both—at Abby, with her wide, earnest eyes; at DiNozzo, stripped of his playboy persona by Abby's typhoon of a personality, seemingly fascinated by something on the floor. Suddenly he was suffused with a sort of cosmic gratitude.
Abby's Peoria protector was DiNozzo?
There really were no coincidences, after all.
"Yeah, Abs." Gibbs said carefully, staring until the strength of his gaze forced Tony to look up. The detective's face was almost painfully unguarded, as though he expected a rebuke. "I know."
Gibbs expected a flash of pleasure, or a smile; at worst, a volley of deflective humor.
He didn't expect Tony's eyes to grow stony.
"Abby, did you get any results on the samples we sent up?" DiNozzo rose, his voice polite but clipped.
The Goth looked between them, catching the tension in an instant. "Yeah," she said slowly. "The splinters? They're, um, white ash." She looked Tony over, biting a maroon lip, but seemed to think better of whatever she wanted to say. Instead, she turned slowly back to the screen. "It's a really common wood for baseball pats. It would have to be an old, damaged baseball bat, to leave a splinter this big, though. Is this the murder weapon?"
"Since I got whacked with it by the lookout while the actual attackers ran, I doubt it," Tony replied grimly, leaning back against the table and crossing his arms. "But who knows what happened before I got there. Well, except for the screaming. And the dying. That definitely happened."
"You're hurt? You were attacked? Tony!" Abby reached for him again, voice sharpening with concern.
DiNozzo jerked away from her slender fingers. "I'm fine," he said sharply, eyes flashing. "Anything else?"
"Only a little." Abby drooped visibly at the rebuff, slumping. "None of the samples I'm running show any signs of drugs, or poisons, or anything unusual. Our man was drunk, though. Not falling down drunk, but had-a-couple-too-many tipsy."
"Alright. Don't bother running it the blood. It's mine." Unsmiling, Tony stood with the defensive grace of a snake coiled to strike. "I'll be in the squad room."
Every line of his face warned 'do not touch.' Gibbs let him go, simply nodding.
The doors slid shut behind rigid shoulders.
"Is he okay?" A husky whisper. Familiar, gentle hands wrapped around his elbow. Abby gazed up at him, stricken. Her glistening eyes screamed fix it.
Gibbs pressed a kiss to her forehead, running a gentle hand over her silky hair. "Good work, Abs."
It wasn't the reassurance she wanted, but he'd never been one to offer empty promises.
And maybe some things were too torn to mend.
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Chapter Notes: Hi again! Thank you all so much for your alerts, favorites, and particularly your beautiful, satisfying reviews! They prompt me to dance goofily around my bedroom in ecstasies of glee. My cats would also like to thank you, for providing such a spectacle. (And in case you're more of a dog person, they're intrigued by my dancing, too.)
Case fics, I am finding, are rather...interesting, in ways both good and bad, to write . I hope you enjoyed this installment! To those of you I told to expect it, oh, about three days ago...sorry! I was mulling over a couple elements I'd put in, and we also had a houseguest.