Who thinks that Penny should see her mommy? I do! I do! Love to you all, thanks for reviewing! Please keep it up because your comments brighten my morning (which is hard at 6am). Emmz, if you are out there, I miss you. It's been like a week! Love u! xxxx

Chapter Six: I'll Do It

"Anthony. Anthony, wake up."

Six year old Tony felt himself being shaken away, much to his annoyance. It was a Saturday morning, and his basketball practice had been cancelled so he wanted to spent a morning sleeping in for once. Of course, he enjoyed basketball, but he hadn't been playing it for very long. "Dad?" he asked, rubbing his eyes as he instantly recognised the empty voice of the man who was shaking him. His father looked down at him, and Tony, still half-asleep, didn't spot the red-rimmed eyes of his father.

"Breakfast," his father said simply.

Confused, Tony slipped out of bed, not bothering to pull the covers back over afterwards. He didn't even bother to change out his pyjamas like he usually did in the mornings. He just followed his father downstairs, all the more confused. He never got woken up for breakfast on weekends - only ever on a school morning. When he reached the kitchen, he couldn't smell the bacon frying of the sausages cooking or the toast toasting. He couldn't smell breakfast. Where was the cook? Where was the maid?

"Where's Mom?" he asked his father, as the two of them sat at the kitchen table opposite each other.

His father held out his hand, and Tony reached out carefully, putting his hand inside his father's. Something was wrong, and he knew it. "I am about to tell you something very important, Anthony, although it is not something nice. It is going to hurt for a while, but I need you to be brave and strong."

"Where's Mom?" he asked again.

"Anthony, you know that recently your mother has been ill..."

"Where's Mom?"

"Do not interrupt me, Anthony," his father told him, keeping the harsh edge from his scolding tone but it still served to keep Tony from asking again. If anything, the lack of discipline in his father's voice was what stopped him because he knew that it meant something was very wrong. "Your mother was sick, and sometimes when people get sick they do not always get better."

"But Mom told me she was going to get better," Tony frowned. "The doctors gave her a medicine."

"The medicine had stopped working a long time ago, son," he told him.

"Why?"

"I don't know, Anthony. No one knows. It just happens sometimes."

"Is that where Mom is?" he asked. "With the doctors again? I heard you go out in the night with Mom. I heard the car."

"Yes," his father confirmed. "I took your mother to the hospital after you feel asleep. The maid stayed here so you were not alone, but your mother was very ill and I had to take her back to the hospital."

"But she just got home again yesterday!" he complained. She was meant to be there. She was meant to be at his basketball match tomorrow. She promised. She promised him. No matter what.

"She got worse, Anthony," his father told him. "We cannot help her here like the doctors can at the hospital."

"Did they help her?" he asked. "Can she come home again?"

His father shook his head. "No, she can't."

"But she promised to be at my game tomorrow," he argued. "She promised.

His father squeezed his hand, looking at him with an intense gaze. "Anthony, son, the doctors did everything that they could to help her, but I'm afraid your mother passed away early this morning."

There was a long silence in which Tony wondered whether he had heard his father correctly. He didn't know what to do. His father was seated before him, the picture of strength at a moment of loss, and he didn't know what to do. Tears were in his eyes, on his cheeks, dripping off his chin...

"But she promised..." he whined as he began to sob.

Tony snapped awake with a start. For a moment, he lay there, breathing hard as if he had been running. He hadn't been running though, he had been dreaming, or rather, he'd had a memory, and a disturbing one at that. He ran his hands over his face, wiping away the cool sweat that covered his skin. He hadn't dreamt about that day for many years. That day. The day his mother died. The last time he had allowed himself to cry other than the one time he had indulged in tears after Kate's death.

The temptation to go back to sleep was great, but he knew from the sun streaming through the curtains that it was too late in the morning to do that. He shook himself, sitting up in bed. It had been a long night and he hadn't got much sleep with the combination of memories and not wanting to move in case he woke Penny up.

Oh, and Penny had told him that she loved him.

That had been a key reason in him not being able to sleep. It hadn't been thoughts of Alicia completely that had kept him restless, but the girl he had known for a little over six hours. He'd allowed her to curl against him in bed, and she had told him that she loved him. She hadn't even mistaken him for someone else, as she had clearly said 'daddy'. He'd spent a long part of the night asking himself what that meant. After a day, Penny had fallen in love with him as a father, even though he was withdrawing himself because he didn't know what to do.

What did that mean? Did being a father automatically bring him to love her in return? He hadn't been able to say it back, mainly because his throat had dried up into something resembling the Grand Canyon when he had croaked out a tiny goodnight to her, but he later realised that he hadn't really tried to say that he loved her. How did you know if you loved a child? Wasn't it something you were meant to know without needing to spend a sleepless night thinking about it like he had?

That worried him even more. If he had to think about it and you weren't supposed to, did that mean that he didn't love her, or worse, that he wasn't capable of loving her? Sure, he was doubtful that he'd make a good father, but surely he was capable of loving a child, even if he was a disaster at domesticity? What about the feeling of warmth he'd gotten when she had curled up against him? Did that mean anything, or was it simply body heat that warmed them or the fact that it was blood that bound them?

He'd have sat there all day worrying if he let himself, and he knew that Gibbs and Ziva would be the first to break his door down and drag him out of his bedroom. So, he went to haul himself out of bed, pausing when he realised that Penny was standing on the carpet beside his side of the bed.

She was still wearing the pyjamas he'd rescued from the cabinets at her grandparents house, her dark hair so wild and untamed that, through his early morning eyes, she resembled Ziva slightly. She stared at him, silent until she was sure he was properly awake, and then she tilted her head to one side.

"Go see mommy now?"

It was amazing to see how both Penny and Alicia brightened the moment they were in the same room together. Three weeks is too long for a child to be separated from a parent, Tony realised, as Penny instantly forgot about him when the door to Alicia's room was opened before her. She dropped his hand and ran into the room, managing to scale Alicia's bed with an admirable determination. "Mommy!" she exclaimed with excitement.

Alicia instantly wrapped her arms around her daughter, who ignored the many tubes and wires connected to her mother's arms. "Penny, oh sweetheart, I've missed you so much." As she held onto her daughter, she looked up, her eyes connecting with Tony as he stood awkwardly in the doorway. "Thank you," she mouthed to him. He just half smiled and nodded as a reply.

Penny soon lifted her head from her mother's shoulder, showing her face with many pecked kisses. "I missed you too, mommy," she said between kisses.

"Have you been a good girl?" Alicia asked her.

She nodded. "Daddy says I can stay with him now so I don't have to stay at Grandpa's no more," she said, grinning in Tony's direction, showing Tony just how grateful she was for the previous day's rescue.

"I'm glad, angel," Alicia smiled, smoothing down Penny's wild hair. It was brushed now, but not so much tamed. She didn't seem phased by it's bushy appearance, and Tony realised that he'd only ever seen Penny when her hair was desperately in need of a wash, and that this was probably her natural hair type. "Are you okay?"

Penny nodded enthusiastically again. "Yeah. I like Daddy's friend."

Wow. That had changed the mood quickly. Alicia looked at her curiously. "Daddy's friend?"

Penny continued to nod. "Her name's Ziva. She's cool."

Alicia just raised her eyebrow at Tony, who quickly stepped in to dispel any absurd ideas that were going through her head at that moment. "Ziva's my partner at work," he told her. "She helped us out with bath time last night."

"That was nice of her," Alicia said, with a strangely encouraging glint in her eye.

"Trust me," Tony said, stepping further into the room and allowing his tired body to collapse into the chair beside the bed. "If there was one person other than you who could convince me to do this, it would be her."

"It's good that you'll have her, then," she acknowledged.

Tony nodded sadly. "Yeah, I guess so."

The door to the room opened from where Tony had closed it behind them, and a young nurse came into the room. She didn't look a day older than twenty, with shining red hair and green eyes which lit up when she saw Penny. "Penelope, it's lovely to see you again," she remarked in a heavy Irish accent.

Penny turned to the voice. "Hi, Lauwa," she smiled.

Laura. Alicia had mentioned this nurse before, Tony remembered from yesterday. This was the nurse that been there with her since her illness had really started to affect her.

"How are you?" Laura asked her.

"I'm okay," Penny told her, and then pointed at Tony. "This is my Daddy. I'm staying at his house now."

"I'm glad to see that," the nurse smiled.

Alicia looked at Laura, and spoke quietly to her. "Laura, could you possibly watch Penny for a moment whilst I speak with Tony?"

Laura nodded. "Of course." She turned to Penny, holding out her hand. "How about some candy, Penny?" she tempted.

At the mention of candy, Penny was off and down the hall with her mother's nurse without so much of a goodbye to either of her parents. In her absence there was a deep silence, one that made Tony uncomfortable. "You look well," he remarked simply.

Alicia smiled. "I feel well," she told him, but at his hopeful look she reworded it. "Not well, better. A lot better, actually."

"I'm glad."

"You, on the other hand, look exhausted."

He rubbed the back of his neck with his hand. Were the bags under his eyes that obvious? "I didn't get much sleep last night," he admitted.

"Which means you didn't sleep at all," she assumed.

"I had a couple of hours," he corrected. "Yesterday was a long day. I had a lot to think about."

"You have to take care of yourself too, Tony," she reminded him.

"I am taking care of myself," he told her. "But it's not just me anymore, is it?"

She looked away from him for a moment. "Tony-"

"I'll do it, Alicia," he said, causing her head to snap back round to him. "I'll take care of her."

Alicia smiled, perhaps the most real smile she'd ever had other than when she had seen her daughter for the first time in three weeks. "Thank you, Tony, so much."

"She's like you," he explained. "One smile and that's it."

"Hook, line and sinker?"

"In less than a second," he confirmed.

She smiled, "That's all it takes with kids," she remembered, knowing how she'd felt when Penny had first been placed in her arms.

"Yeah," he agreed simply.

"Was she okay at my fathers?"

He skirted around his answer, not wanting her to know what had really happened. She was ill, and didn't need to know about the pain he'd taken Penny away from. It would only distress her and he didn't want it to be plaguing her mind like it clearly had been for the past three weeks. "She missed you a lot," he told her instead. "She was upset."

"But she knew who you were?"

He nodded. "Straight away. All she wanted to do was come and see you, and I told her that we'd come every day, and that she was coming to stay with me, and that was it. No questions asked."

"My father didn't give you any trouble?" she asked, a hint of worry in her voice.

"I didn't see him. Your step-mother gave me the usual scum-on-her-shoe look, but that was to be expected."

Alicia smiled sadly. "I always got the impression that she didn't want Penny around."

"Well, you don't have to worry about that anymore," Tony pointed out.

She nodded. "You're right. That leaves just one more thing you have to promise me."

"What's that?" he asked, almost hesitantly considering the magnitude of yesterday's favour.

"When I'm gone and things settle down, I want you to change Penny's surname to DiNozzo."

"What?" he asked, more shocked at the fact that she assumed things would ever settle down without her.

"She's yours now, Tony," she said simply. "It was selfish of me not to give her your name to begin with, but I never intended on telling you-"

"Okay, I'll do it," he agreed, before he had to hear a speech about why she had really left.

She smiled, leaning back against the pillows again as weakness began to tug at her. She was exhausted just from talking, and Tony could see that she needed sleep. "Thank you," she whispered, her voice scratchy.

Penny came back into the room, candy in hand and full of excitement. "Mommy, Lauwa brought me candy!"

Alicia smiled tiredly. "That was nice, did you say thank you?"

She nodded. "Yeah."

"Good girl."

"We'd better get going, Penny," Tony interrupted. "Mommy's tired and I've got to go to work."

She looked at him unfairly. "But we only just got here!"

"We'll come back tomorrow, I promise," he assured her quickly.

She sighed heavily, mimicking a teenager. "Okay," she half-complained, before leaning on her toes to kiss her mother again. "Bye, Mommy, I love you lots."

Alicia smiled, gathering all her strength to hug and kiss her daughter. "I love you too, angel. Be good for Daddy."

Just a short chapter before I go to work. Next chapter we'll see what Abby's hiding!