NOTE: Another lengthy delay, for which I apologize—the holidays intervened, followed by a great deal of real life stress, and also, the second half of this chapter proved very difficult to write—you can effectively sum up this chapter by noting that both Tony and Gibbs have serious, serious issues. I also thought about bracketing this chapter with another one, as an apology, but that would only result in a longer delay as I wrote the next chapter—so the next part should be up within a week.

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Chapter XIV

Gibbs heard the bruises before he saw them. He stood in front of the double-mirror in the viewing room attached to interrogation, his hands braced against the frame, and the door behind him clicked open and shut. Then Tony—and he had known that it would have to be Tony, because anyone else that would have had the balls to come in wouldn't have had the good sense to come in quietly—said, "I have something," and it was in his voice. His enunciation had changed. Slightly slurred on the sibilant and all the letters too precise in pathetic overcompensation. Gibbs knew the sound and knew what it implied. He moved his hands together on the frame, a quick and crucial gesture, like an embrace or an attack—he wasn't sure which—and hated Lucas Bayer. He turned around.

He had expected a busted lip. This was different—this was spectacular. The bruise started at the back of Dinozzo's jaw and stretched down to his mouth; there was a fresh scab in the very corner—as he watched, Tony touched it with the tip of his tongue—and his lower lip was puffy. Bayer hadn't used his fists this time. No one's hand left that kind of mark.

"He pistol-whipped you." The viewing room was too small for this kind of realization: he could hear his anger reverberating in the walls.

Tony shook his head and the bruise slid back and forth from the shadows. "It isn't what you think." The syllables were still a little mushy, but he only sounded tired, not defensive, and, because of that, Gibbs was willing to listen—so far Dinozzo hadn't been anything he'd thought, after all. Maybe this was just more of the same.

"What is it, then?"

"I went to see Aaron Deacon. Pissed off his bodyguards." Pissed didn't come out right, it was more of a hiss that ended with Tony's tongue flicking against the scab in the corner of his mouth again. "But I got what I needed."

Gibbs noticed the shift there, but he wasn't sure if Dinozzo did—from we to I. He had moved back into the singular. He had done something on his own and so he'd forgotten that there was anything at all to be done together. Gibbs understood the strange resume now, the alphabet soup career arrangements and the jumps and skips across the country. Dinozzo had gotten too used to being alone, too uncomfortable with anything plural. So when Tony tilted his head back and smiled, showed off that gun-barrel bruise, Gibbs moved the rest of the way forward and put his hand against Tony's chin.

"I want Ducky to look you over," he said. His singular to match Dinozzo's. I want. "And then we'll talk about what you got from Deacon." He brought them back again. Tony did not move. Was it really going to take more? He supposed it was a fair enough trade. He needed Tony and Tony needed to know, and once they covered all of that, they could find what they needed, which was going to be the same thing. He looked back through the glass once, saw Max Prestor looking at him with bright eyes, and said, "Don't do anything like this again. I don't want to spend half of our cases putting you back together. Bayer was bad enough."

Tony turned his head to the side and Gibbs let him slip out of his reach. His fingers were cold.

"Later," Tony said. He was looking over Gibbs's shoulder and Gibbs wondered if he were seeing Prestor or his own reflection. "Ask me later."

"Wasn't asking." It was a test, not a response.

Tony still didn't look at him. "You'll ask if you want me to say yes."

And he would, too. He didn't doubt it. He nodded. "Later, then. You get anything from Deacon besides that bruise?"

Tony finally met his eyes. He looked almost painfully grateful for an instant, but then it was swept into the corners and beneath the mask, and all Gibbs could see was the fierce, unhealthy, hardhearted joy. All of you people are the same, Pete Woley had said, but Gibbs knew cops—knew Baltimore PD by now—and knew that this kind of devotion, this kind of obsession, was rare.

"Lacher," he said. "Lacher bought Seconal two weeks ago." He almost smiled, but the one corner of his mouth wouldn't move properly, so it was more of a grimace. "An anonymous witness, tip hotline kind of thing."

He kept talking; he said something about the utter lack of legitimate channels involved in this investigation, but Gibbs was past hearing him. His mind had frozen, locked tight around Bryan Lacher's name, and he couldn't relax enough to accommodate anything else Tony had to offer.

"His daughter," he said. He couldn't swallow the words, had to spit them out, throw them against the clean and sensible iron-gray walls of the viewing room, had to use them to break the two-way mirror that stood between him and Prestor. The edges of his world were black. He felt Tony's hands on him, on his wrist and on his shoulder, steering him down and away. The solid surface of the chair rose up underneath him and Tony tugged and twisted him into the light again, into the sweetly sensible connections between cause and effect, into a world with a possibility—however scarce—for good. He could see Tony somewhere out there, then too close to him, white-faced and concerned.

"It's all right," Tony said. "Just sit down. No one likes this. No one ever wants this."

Not pity, not sympathy. It was empathy, or at least understanding. And he knew that even if Tony ever wondered why, ever wanted an answer, he would never ask—no more than Gibbs would ever ask what Tony had said or done to earn that bruise, and why the bruise hadn't bothered him, why it had seemed acceptable. No questions. Not when anyone would have to raise their dead to answer them.

"Water? Or, you know, coffee?" That unintentionally terrible smile again. "Scotch?"

Gibbs blinked twice and watched the shadows retreat from his vision, watched the floor stop slowly rolling back and forth underneath them. "We don't drink until it's over," he said. "But I think then we can buy out the bar."

"I take women over whiskey," Tony said. He didn't sound like he was joking. Gibbs remembered their first phone call, when Tony—years younger then, it seemed—had said that if it were a really good night, he wouldn't be in his own bed. Gibbs had known men to choose that way out before, and Tony was young enough to have an easy time of it. Whatever quieted his head for a night was a good thing. "We can still go to the same bar."

Gibbs rubbed the back of his neck, digging his thumbs in to ease the pressure building in the sleep-starved muscles. The thought of a bar, of company, of the end—it was too tempting. He shrugged it away. "You still have a picture of Lacher on you?"

"I'm a veritable one-hour photo," Tony said. He shuffled through several photographs in the inside pocket of his jacket and finally produced Lacher's picture. He folded the rest of them together again and replaced them—they fell back into position, pressed against each other and rustling close to his heart. "You're going to check with Prestor?"

Gibbs nodded. "He might not confirm—he said he was contacted by letter—but if he does, we'll have something more definite than your anonymous tip."

"I'll go in with you."

He moved forward but Gibbs pressed a hand against his shoulder and knocked him back a step. "No, you won't. You'll go down to autopsy and see Ducky about that bruise."

Tony put his hands behind his head, elbows spread out wide, fingers laced at the back of his skull. It was an effort not to do something, Gibbs was sure, but he didn't know what impulse Tony was trying to stop. "I'll have to pass by dispatch on my way to autopsy. Bad idea, boss. I mean, not that I'm afraid of continuing all those conversations in person, but they'd be the people most likely to get me in trouble right now. And I'm in trouble anyway."

"Don't worry about dispatch," Gibbs said. "They're not going to bother you."

He tried to keep his voice even, so that he could whittle the subtext down to nothing, but Tony responded—the hands came down to his sides, as if his strings had been cut, and he started to say something and then stopped. Then, slowly, "The phone calls stopped after you went in. And I talked to Jenkins, he said—he said that he knew you, a little. You talked to them."

It was the surprise that cut into him. Had Tony thought he would let it continue indefinitely, let that damned phone ring and ring and ring for hours, for days? Until the casing split from Tony's desperate grip, until Tony grew hoarse from alternately holding back and letting go?

"You didn't need that," Gibbs said. He said it quietly, directly to Tony without the question of it being for anyone or anything else. No double purposes, no forced compliment, no lever to persuade Tony to move. "No one needs that. And you sure as hell didn't deserve it. You're working for me now. People should know better than to screw with you."

"Okay," Tony said. He lifted the good corner of his mouth in a crooked smile. That was as all right as they were going to get for now. "Thanks."

Gibbs thought about Tony leading him down into the chair without any questions, just accepting that there were some places where, even after all these years, Gibbs could still be hurt. Accepting those gulfs and crevasses in his strength and then building tenuous bridges across them, covering those weaknesses with the stronger parts of himself. They didn't have to thank each other for building those bridges; it was something that had to be done. Gibbs had taken a visceral pleasure in the construction of his own, anyway—the phone calls had made him angry, all that buzzing and all those flashing lights and the wearily resigned look on Tony's face as he took call after call… Tony didn't need to thank him for what he had wanted to do, for what he had enjoyed doing.

So he didn't reply to Tony, just raised his hand and gestured at the door. "Ducky. Now. He can catch you up on the autopsy reports while you're down there." And Ducky would be more able to give sympathy, to worry more openly over the bruise, to offer what Gibbs could not. After all, Ducky had been building bridges for Gibbs for years before Tony Dinozzo came around.

"I don't want to take too long," Tony said. He felt the corner of his mouth, where the busted lip was like a torn piece of leather. "No stitches. I don't have time for the emergency room."

"Stitches if you need them, and if you're in that much of a hurry, you can get them here." God only knew how many times Gibbs himself had been propped up on an autopsy table, ignoring the naked and dead bodies around him while Ducky did his patchwork.

Tony raised his eyebrows. "Stitches in autopsy?"

"Well, he sews up the Y-incisions, so you know he has the equipment."

Tony thought about it, and then gave a precise little shudder. "I—I honestly can't think about autopsy tools being that close to my mouth." He made it to the door before he turned around, hand still on his mouth to cover the worst of the damage and to push the swollen lip into being more cooperative, and said, "It still doesn't feel right, boss. You said that Lacher was insane when you talked to him. I've never met anyone good enough to fake the zombie act."

Gibbs hadn't, either. In his experience, killers covered up their crimes with tears or anger, not the kind of shambling, disconnected despair that had rolled off Bryan Lacher in waves. But he couldn't afford to ignore this kind of evidence, not with three little girls dead already, not with the threat of more corpses strung across his vision. Not when the bastard they were hunting had already been clever enough to produce Max Prestor out of the woodwork to serve as his stalking horse. He would have to grab at what he could, for now. Maybe they would be lucky. Either way, he didn't intend to take any chances.

"When you're done with Ducky, head to the Kelly house. I want to know if they've ever even heard of Lacher."

Tony drew back a little at that, at Gibbs skimming so easily over all of his concerns, but Gibbs was too tired to explain that it was just like before, when he had pushed Tony against the car and told him that what they wanted didn't matter. What mattered was that there was something that had to be done. He'd had to sit with Marcia Kelly and ask her if she'd screwed a man that had murdered her daughter, and he had to—they had to—do this, too. He couldn't remind Tony of that every time Tony forgot. He didn't have the patience.

"Kelly said that the name was familiar—"

"Then find out why it's familiar, Dinozzo."

Tony kept one hand on the doorknob, one hand on his mouth. "And you'll be where, exactly?"

Code words, in their business, for don't bring him in without me.

"At Lacher's." He watched Tony's mouth tighten, half-covered by his hand, and saw his fingertips go white and bloodless as he pressed them down. "I'll keep him in his house until you're sure that they've at least met him. Shown him pictures of their daughter. Something. I won't arrest him, but I won't let him out of my sight. I'm not going to take a man in for killing his own daughter unless I'm damn sure he really did it."

- - - - -

Dr. Mallard's hands were cool. Tony thought that it might have been a transitive property kind of thing, from having had so many bloodless bodies against his fingers over the years, but he also thought that was kind of a disturbing thing to think, so he didn't say it out loud.

And anyway, it felt good. It was the first bit of touch he'd had in days without there being weight behind it: Emily had clung to him, Lucas had hurt him, and even Gibbs had meant something—had only touched him to fix him or to move him into place. Dr. Mallard only meant to be kind. Tony had forgotten that there were people who did that kind of thing. It was sort of nice. Nice enough, at least, for him to not complain as Dr. Mallard maneuvered him up onto the autopsy table and tilted his head back until he stared up into the cold white overhead lamps.

He didn't want or need any lectures about being careful, so before anything could start, he pulled a tattered rabbit out of his hat. "Gibbs offered me a job. I think."

"Yes, he said something about that. Breathe through your nose, please, I need to get a better look at your jaw when it's in its natural position."

"Sorry." He clamped his mouth shut as Dr. Mallard's fingers grazed over the swelling, gritting his teeth a little whenever even that slight amount of pressure made the bruises ache. When Mallard took his fingers away, he said, "Do you think I should take it?"

"I certainly don't think you should stay here."

He twitched the good corner of his mouth. "That's not really an answer, Dr. Mallard."

"Ducky, please. You can step down, it doesn't look like they did any permanent damage, though I'd recommend not letting it happen again if you can help it." He gave Tony a hand down off the table and there it was again, that stupid, pointless contact that made the tight cramp of tension in Tony's chest ease. "If you can work with Jethro, then you'll be happier working with him than anyone else, no matter where you go. But that doesn't sound so believable, does it? You can see why I try to restrain myself from giving advice."

"It's not so unbelievable," he said. Not compared to everything else. Not compared to little Marie Bayer and the Christmas ribbons he'd once used to tie her hair. Thinking of it made something twist inside of him, and he remembered the only reason he'd agreed to come down: "Can I see her? Marie?"

Ducky hesitated. "I'm not sure Gibbs would want—"

"Gibbs isn't here," Tony said. "And it's not his business, it's mine. Show me."

Ducky gave him a quick, searching look, as if he were seeing someone else standing in Tony's place, and then shook his head. Washing his hands of Tony, no doubt. So much for kindness. But he walked to the third drawer in the wall and pulled open the door.

He slid the table out much more slowly than he had opened the drawer; giving Tony time to change his mind, maybe, if Tony had been the kind of person to back away from the doors he'd wanted open. But he wasn't—although he sometimes wished that he could be—and so he walked to the table and pulled back one corner of the sheet. Then, though, although he hadn't wanted to, had never meant to, had never thought he could—he stopped. Why do it? He had already seen her body, already believed in the unforgiving reality of her death. And if the image of her on the slide, wet with the blood that was bright red on the aluminum, hadn't crystallized in his mind, why should it?

"I used to play with her," he said, still holding the sheet in place, still not looking even though another inch of pull would show him her face. "She was sweet. I mean, most kids don't like me, I don't know what to do with them, it's like a slow-motion train-wreck, but she was—I loved her. I loved her so much."

It hurt, and he wanted to explain that: it hurt much worse than the bruise on his jaw, than his already-fading black eye, than Lucas's anger, than dispatch's blame. None of that hurt as badly as it had been meant to, because this had already come and carved him open. What was a scratch when he'd already been scraped raw? What was the rest of it for, anyway? Why did they think that they had to punish him? Like it mattered, like they could do anything to him that would be worse than this, like he had never played with her or told her stories or kissed the tips of her pigtails or loved her at all. She was just gone and they thought they could top that, they thought they could pile on, they thought they could bury him, but they could only bury her. They would have to bury her. He would have to wait here for that, at least, no matter how much Lucas would hate him by then. He would have to be there for that, at least—for Emily, and for that little girl that he'd loved.

He did not pull the sheet back. He could close the door.

He'd loved her, she was dead, and he wanted to remember that she'd been beautiful: that she'd smiled and laughed and done both of them, at least sometimes, because of him.

"I don't get it," he said. "I mean, I really don't."

He smoothed the sheet back down, tucked it beneath the covered curve of her head. He felt that he should do something more, that he should tell her good night, that he should pretend, but now he was too conscious of Ducky, and his parents had taught him not to make a spectacle of himself. So he just tucked her in again, as he had done before, but he couldn't slid her back into the still darkness of the drawer. That would have to wait until he was gone. She hadn't liked the dark and he wouldn't put her in it.

He put his hand on the table next to where he thought hers would be, her cupped little hand with the chipped pink nail polish on the fingers, and pushed himself back into the job. "Seconal? Was there Seconal? I didn't get a chance to ask Gibbs."

"No, I'm afraid not. She wasn't drugged."

She'd felt it, then. She'd felt everything. His teeth clicked together.

"Nothing?"

Ducky took pity on him. "There was peppermint in his stomach. If he used it to lure her away from the other children, it might have been laced with—"

That hit him. That was the first thing to hurt since he had taken the phone call that had told him she was dead; the first thing even to really touch him. He looked up, startled, and then jerked back, stumbling away from Ducky and even from the ghost on the table. His fingers were still bunched up in the sheet and so that came with him, tugged off the table, off the body, and onto the floor in a rush of white—and that, that hurt him too, because he hadn't wanted to see her, he'd wanted to change, but now he couldn't even do that.

He couldn't unlearn the bruises on her body, couldn't ever misremember he nakedness, couldn't forget the blue tint to her lips and the way the same blue on her fingertips clashed with her nail polish.

He spun away and turned into the wall, pushed his face against the chilled metal of the other drawers that held the other bodies, and breathed out until he made enough fog against the drawer that he could go at least a second without seeing anything but clouds. He knew that Marie would be there, though, in every dark place and in every broken body, for the rest of his life. The one thing he had wanted to do differently, the one decision he had wanted to change, and now he couldn't even do that. He'd erased the smiling girl who had bullied him into pushing her on the swings and replaced her with something dead, something cut open. So he had been wrong. They could still hurt him. She could, at least.

"Peppermint," he said. He closed his eyes. "But we told her. We told her and told her. I know Lucas and Emily must have given her a thousand Stranger Danger talks about taking candy, about being pulled out of a crowd. Cops tell their kids, we all do, always. Don't follow someone that wants you to help find their lost puppy. Don't believe someone that says your parents sent them to pick you up. And the candy thing. That's Kidnapping 101."

"She was just a child," Ducky said. Tony heard the sheet rustle back into place and knew that Ducky was trying to do him a favor, was trying to cover things up and make them pretty again, but it was too late for that. "Children don't always listen and no matter how close we watch them, we can't always keep them safe."

"But the peppermint," Tony said. "We must have told her so many times. She must have known. Why didn't she listen?"

Ducky touched his shoulder, fingers still cool, but Tony was past being helped by that.

"There aren't always answers, Tony," he said. "We never get to understand everything."

But I want to, he thought. I want that, and he knew then that he would take the job, no matter what strings Gibbs attached, because he thought Gibbs might be the one person to understand what he was thinking.