I just went flat on my back outside on the ice. Besides a sore hip and wrist, this is what came from it.
Gibbs does a lot of talking, but this is AU, and anyways, he's not that mute when he has something he thinks is worth saying.
**Do any of my Croat readers have a good potica recipe to share with me? My gram and grandpa were from Croatia, she made it without a recipe, but I wasn't old enough to learn from her, her potica, sarma and apple strudel were dobra, dobra, dobra and no recipes for any of them!
Gibbs was mad at him, madder than he'd ever been at him since he'd followed the man back from Baltimore. And Tony had never had to lie on his couch in the basement when Gibbs was mad at him.
It was really uncomfortable, and it just made his arm hurt even more, but the angry man wouldn't let him out of his sight.
He hadn't even given Tony a chance to explain, but really, it wouldn't have mattered if he had, Tony wouldn't have been able to tell him why he'd kept his injury from him. It certainly wasn't a good habit to get into on this job, not when other lives depended on him. But they had solved the case, brought
the suspects in and one confession led to the other until there was nothing left but coffee cups and reports to clean up. So he really couldn't see what the big deal was, no one had gotten hurt or escaped custody. Why couldn't Gibbs just go with it, why was he all of a sudden making such a big deal out
of a sprained wrist and some cracked ribs?
"Boss, I don't understand why you're making such a big deal over this, I -"
"Not making a big deal over this, DiNozzo. You are."
"You won't talk to me. You're ignoring me. I didn't do anything wrong!"
Gibbs continued his work, back turned on the younger man, deliberately blocking his face from his sight, but the kid was pushing him to do something even worse.
"I didn't have to come here, I would have been fine at home! If you're so mad at me, why the hell do you want me near you anyways?"
Gibbs whirled on him, his festering anger unleashing with Tony's words.
"I want you near me because you can't seem to look after yourself for love or money, and if I had known that back in Baltimore, I would have..."
He let his words trail off, knowing he'd already said too much, more than he could take back, and enough to give the younger man a few years worth of self-doubt and regret.
Tony adjusted himself into a sitting position on the sofa, making it easy for himself to get a head start when he took off. Except he had no car, and he wasn't sure where his wallet was. Shit.
"Go ahead, Boss. Finish it. You would have what? Let Baltimore PD eat me alive? Never offered me this job? Fill in the blank here for me, shouldn't be too difficult, I've got a bunch of answers."
"You know that's not true, DiNozzo, and none of that shit was what I was going to say!"
"Then what, Boss, 'cause I'm drowning here! You obviously are trying to teach me some life lesson but I'm supposed to figure it out without any help from you? By starting at your angry back all night?"
"Why didn't you tell me, tell anyone you were hurt after falling on that ice? How am I supposed to let you in when you keep me out and won't even meet me half way?"
"Didn't know you wanted me in anywhere, Boss. Thought I was where I was supposed to be, doing what I was supposed to be doing."
"Answer. The. Question. Why?"
Tony shrugged and then winced at the pain it caused his fragile ribs. He'd landed hard on the ice, and it was thick, untreated in a place that humans weren't expected to be walking, much less running.
"I - don't know, I don't know why it matters! There's nothing the docs can do about my ribs or wrist, other than tell me to take a pain killer, which I already am."
"That's not the point, DiNozzo!" Gibbs fired back, truly infuriated now at the younger man's obtuseness. "Where in your life did you learn to think that it doesn't matter if you're hurt? Did I say something to make you think I wouldn't care, 'cause I know I say some not so nice things to you when I'm pissed, but did I ever say, "DiNozzo, if you break your neck, don't come running to me?"
'Well, Boss, you – you set a pretty mean example, I mean – I never met anyone who could suck it up and drive on as well as you do."
"You know damn well that if it's serious I at least go see Ducky about it!"
"I do! And I would! If I thought it was serious."
"So why not tell me, Tony?" Gibbs queried in a softer, catch more flies with honey voice. "What'd you think I would do to you?"
"Tell me to suck it up and quit whining. Why wouldn't you?"
It was Gibbs' turn now to be perplexed at Tony being perplexed. Why wouldn't he care if Tony was hurt, what sort of boss, what sort of friend, wouldn't want to know that?
"Why wouldn't I? Maybe because you're my friend, Tony. Maybe because I care about what happens to my friends, not just my agents. I yelled at you to type that report and get it done so we could get out of there, and you're sitting there typing it with your freaking wrist sprained? Where does this come from, DiNozzo? Your macho college football days? Or trying not to be a target at your police precincts?"
"I – I never thought about it, Boss, just -" he shrugged and winced again and sighed at the fact he couldn't remember not to move those muscles. "I've never been one to talk about my scrapes and bruises."
"These aren't scrapes and bruises, Tony. You let the entire building know when you stub you have a hangnail and don't let your boss know when you crack your damned ribs?"
"In all fairness I just figured I'd bruised them. And when I played college football I had to play through a lot of injuries. Same with police and undercover work. I've gotten used to a high pain threshold, I guess."
Gibbs stared at the younger man, reading his eyes and body language for any signs of subterfuge and found none. The kid was totally guileless when it came to hiding his pain. But there was still something
more behind the answers that Tony gave, and Gibbs wanted to know, if only for Tony's sake.
Tony felt the intensity of his boss' inquiring gaze and began to unconsciously squirm.
"What else do you want me to say, Boss? I wasn't trying to pull anything over on you, I would never do that, not when it came to team safety."
"What about your safety, Tony? Don't you think that's important? That you shouldn't be in pain, that it's not your job to suffer quietly so you don't upset the status quo? Not upset anyone?"
"Boss I – that – it's not the same thing!"
Tony's entire being vibrated panic, but Gibbs steeled himself and ignored it, staying calm.
"What isn't, Tony? What is the thing we're talking about here?"
"My childhood has nothing to do with my adulthood, not when it comes to my job!"
"Not talking about your job now, Tony. Talking about you, and why you think I don't care if you're hurt. Or why you don't want me to know when you are. 'Cause that's gonna stop, and now, or we're going to
have to rethink our strategy here."
Tony shot up from the couch in righteous indignation, and instantly regretted it but would be damned if he showed it. It came through in his voice and eyes, though, and Gibbs winced himself at the action.
"Boss, you wouldn't – kick me off the team 'cause I – 'cause of what happened when I was a kid! That's not fair!"
"Did I say I was kicking you off the team, Tony? Sit down before you pass out."
Gibbs searched the cluttered coffee table for Tony's muscle relaxant pills Ducky had sternly prescribed for him and flipped open the cap, waiting for his second to put out his hand and take one.
"Not a suggestion, Tony. Take one."
Tony stuck his hand out, his face sullen from the treatment he was getting, and Gibbs shook one out of the bottle onto his open palm. Gibbs waited to make sure Tony swallowed the thing before continuing with his talk.
"This isn't about me tossing you off the team, Tony. It's about making sure I know when you're hurting. And it's not just about how it affects the team. It's about you, and taking care of you. I don't know what you went through as a kid, I have my suspicions, but your background check doesn't cover what went on behind closed doors, no matter how deep I go."
"Not open for discussion, Boss."
Tony's voice was hard, almost menacing in its warning.
"Don't want to. Don't want to have to go track that bastard down and make him own up to what he did to you. No excuse in the world for leaving your own kid behind at a hotel. That in itself is worth an ass-kicking of major proportions. But you've gotta learn to watch out for yourself, Tony, I'm not always able to read your version of sign language."
"Nobody ever asked me to, Boss. Don't know how."
Tony's voice was so quiet and shocked that even Gibbs was taken by surprise.
"Well I'm asking you to, Anthony. I know the headshrinkers talk a good line about growing out of your parents and what they did to you, but that's all it is, a line. We are what our parents make us, and there's only so much you can do to change it, most of it all you can do is modify it and learn to work around it. We can pretend it didn't happen, we can tell ourselves it wasn't all that bad, we can read every self-help book there is out there, but bottom line, we carry it with us for the rest of our lives.
"If they were really good parents, we carry their lessons and goodness, and and make our choices from what we learned from them. If they sucked, or if they had big problems, we carry the scars from that instead. And the determination not to walk in their footsteps. But somewhere along the way you have to go back there and see why it is you hide your pain like you do. You haven't gotta tell the whole world you're hurting, Tony, but you need to at least tell Ducky, if not myself. You know he won't make you do anything that isn't totally necessary."
"Never did any good to tell them." Tony said dully, out of the blue. "They were both so absorbed with their own problems that...even if they did hear me, they ignored me. You know they both drank too much. Senior still does. And you probably know that that leads to more problems. So it was always a continual, almost daily inventory of all their aches and pains and ailments, and no one was as wrecked or maimed as them. I swear it was a contest with them, a family game to one-up each other with physical afflictions. Neither one of them knew their worst afflictions were how fucked up their minds were.
"Anyways, I just got so I never bothered bringing mine up. When I had, I was told I didn't know what pain was, I was just a kid, so go find something to do. I fell out of a tree once, broke my ankle. Dragged myself back to the house. My mother told me to go wash up for dinner. The housekeeper ended up taking me to the emergency room. I had to have surgery on it, I was there for three days. She picked me up on the fourth day. No sign of my parents. Have no idea what they were doing while I was lying there bored and scared out of my scull. I think I was...seven. Yeah. Seven. A year before my...anyways. There ya go. My deep, dark secret regarding pain, both physical and emotional. Well, one of them, anyways. I'd forgotten why myself until now. Lots of water under the bridge since then."
Tony had kept his head down, eyes on his fidgeting hands while he talked, and hadn't noticed that Gibbs had leaned back against the boat, arms crossed tightly in front of himself to keep his cool.
He looked up to see a fiery look on his boss's face, and wasn't sure if he should keep talking or run.
"Boss?"
"You know, when I first met you – when you first came here and was going through FLETC and and all that..I kept telling myself to keep my distance. That you were my probie, my subordinate, and I didn't owe you a damned thing past teaching you how to be a good agent and not get yourself or the rest of the team killed. Wasn't sure how long you were going to stay anyways, so there was no point in getting to be friends. Work was everything to me, I had nothing else. I was in the middle of the mother of all nasty divorces, being reminded of what a shitty husband I was, what an unfeeling bastard I'd let myself turn into.
"I had no intention of getting to be friends with you outside of work. And you didn't seem to care that much. Like it was all the same to you if I kept my distance and didn't cross over that line. We're not supposed to, you know. Cross that line of work to friendship, it's an unwritten rule in the military and in this line of work, a step away from the actual rule of no fraternization among officers and grunts.
You get too close to someone, you can't do your job right. Start worrying about that person instead of the rest of the team as a whole and what's best for them. Hadn't had the problem before, wasn't gonna go there with you."
"Then what am I doing spending so much time in your basement, Boss? You some kind of closet serial killer getting in good with me before you chop me up and run me through a wood chipper?"
Gibbs blinked, looking strangely at the young man sitting before him as he digested what Tony had asked until a slow smile emerged on his face. He hadn't expected humor after so much angst from his second in command.
"Well, you're in luck, kiddo, I don't own a skill saw or a wood chipper. But you get what I'm trying to tell you, don't you, Tony? I closed myself off big time after I lost Kelly. Didn't want anything or anyone reminding me of her, or how it was with her."
"Abby must remind you of her."
"In some ways, yeah. But Abby doesn't give you a choice to let yourself stay closed off from her if she wants to be close. You know as well as I do she's like one of her Gulf hurricanes making landfall, there's no holding her back. But you were a different story, I had a choice to stay closed off and let you stay closed off from me. For some reason I broke that unwritten rule and let you in. In all the years of having a team, even after five years of Stan Burley, I'd never done that. Took me three years just to remember his name. Gave him an ulcer the second year, not sure why he stayed after that."
"So why did you let me in, Boss?"
"Can't put it into words, maybe something about you screamed vulnerable hardcase and jolted my protective instincts back into gear. Doesn't matter now, you're on the inside, and there's no tossing you back out, you're mine. And as long as you're mine, you're going to learn that you're not allowed to keep any injury from me, I don't care if it happens on the job or in a grocery store. Anything worse than a hangnail or snotty nose, I wanna know about it. And I'll find out about it one way or the other if you don't tell me, just like I did today, and you won't have the luxury of sleeping it out on your couch here. I'll take you to the emergency room myself and help them do the exam. And you won't like my bedside manner, I can guarantee you that right now. You understand, Tony?"
Tony nodded shyly, the ghost of a smile on his lips that he couldn't hide at the way Gibbs made him feel with his declaration of caring. He had never asked for, nor expected that sort of emotional outpouring from Gibbs, though he knew that on a visceral level he had craved it all along. He had let Gibbs into his universe without ever meaning to, in fact, against every intention he had of keeping his relationship with the man on a work-only level. Authority figures like Gibbs were dangerous, prone to taking and never giving, and not only sucking him into their sphere of emotional abuse, but sucking the very life out of him if he allowed them to, and he had precious little to spare for them.
But none of them had ever gone beyond the vampire phase and into giving something more of themselves other than empty promises. Gibbs had promised to make him a better agent, and Tony instinctively knew that that meant becoming a better man under this boss's tutelage. Slowly and steadily over the course of the last five months, Tony had found a confidence in himself he hadn't known could exist, and a firm direction for where he wanted his life to go. He wondered if maybe now he could stop drifting from city to city.
But that still didn't mean he'd wanted to get to know his boss so well that he spent down time buddying up with him in his basement, for crying out loud.
But here he was anyways, nursing some really stupid, and embarrassing injuries with the man not only ordering him to get some self-worth when it came to taking care of himself, but telling Tony he cared enough about him to want to know he was hurt and step up and hand him some tough love when he needed it.
"I understand, Boss." answered dutifully, but sincerely, his voice a bit watery. "I – didn't – I wasn't trying to pull anything over on you, I just – didn't think it was that big of a deal, I mean – I didn't even hit my head and concuss myself, I figured that alone was a big accomplishment."
"Yeah. I suppose you would think that." Gibbs harrumphed, leaving his post in front of Tony and sitting down next to him instead. "Lie down, play a game on your phone till you fall asleep."
"I'm not gonna fall asleep, Boss, I -"
Tony's words were cut off with a massive yawn, and he winced all the way through it with the muscles it pulled around his aching ribs.
"Ooo. That was...oww."
"Yeah. Adrenalin's wearing off. Starting to feel it now. Lie down. Sleep will help. And a bunch of Motrin."
Tony carefully lowered himself back down onto the old sofa, and Gibbs tossed an old quilt over him with one hand as he grabbed up a paperback to read with the other and made himself comfortable at the end of the old sofa.
"Kind of – embarrassing to get hurt falling on the ice, I mean – not as cool as getting stabbed or run over or something." Tony murmured into his pillow.
"Anthony." a growled warning floated his way.
"You know what I mean, Boss. Falling at a crime scene like one of the Keystone Cops, or Buster Keaton or somebody. One second on my feet, then next second, vooop,bam, flat on my keister. Funniest Home Videos moment."
"And yet another muscle relaxant that turns you into Chatty Cathy. Shut it, Tony."
"Thanks, Boss. Shutting it."
"And leave it shut for more than three minutes. Time it if you need to."
It was quiet for a while after that, and four minutes later, Gibbs looked over at his sleeping house guest and smiled. Mission accomplished; more than one, in fact, and the most important one he hadn't even intended on undertaking – that of letting DiNozzo know where his place was in Gibbs' life and finding out why the kid kept his pain cards so close to the vest. He figured that Tony knew by now he wouldn't get slammed for admitting to being hurt, but obviously that was a lesson late in learning. Now they both knew better, and Gibbs was convinced it was a pretty important learning curve when it came to his partner and friend.