Nine Lives
By: thebondgirl
Description: "Well... looks like... I've... finally... run out... Boss," he gasped quietly in the direction of the small opening. "And what is it you've run out of DiNozzo?" The gruff voice sounded just that bit scared, and rightly so. Tony smiled grimly. "Al...mosts." Set after 'Chimera', Season Five.
A/N (October 2021 Update): Wow... has it really been 10 years since I finished posting this story? ...Sheesh, I feel old. Anyway! If you're reading this, then welcome to this golden oldie. For pride's sake, I've gone back through and done a quick proofread to fix the typos I could find, and to try to fix a couple of story inconsistencies that on a recent re-read really irked me. But for the most part, I have left this original story untouched (even the parts where I think I blew past my angst quota by a bit too much, even for me). This is definitely not a perfect story, but I'm still proud of it :) and I think there's still lots here to enjoy, for those fans of shameless whumpage that might still come across this thing. Cheers to a decade of this story being up (crazy to think about, still), and feel free to review if you like - I still read and thrive off reviews on here, to this day!
It was a beautiful night, at least from what little he could see of it. The sky was actually clear for once and he could see a couple of bright stars set against the black. At some point along the line in his varied existence, he'd thought of actually taking the time to learn the names of the constellations, partly out of a curiosity for most everything that he carefully hid away from anyone he was going to be around more than once.
Largely because women loved stargazers.
He never had though. Pity. Could be he never would now.
Tony huffed a quiet sigh, wary of repeating the previous mistake of taking too deep of a breath. Quietly taking stock of his rather bleak position for a moment, he then thought back instead to the deceptively innocuous events of that evening.
It'd been going on 8p.m when the team finally made it back to the bullpen after the raid that had closed their latest case... which strangely he couldn't manage to recall the details of, now. It didn't really matter, he supposed. Tony remembered the important things about those moments. Making a stupid joke to McGee, grinning when Probie laughed in spite of himself. Pretending to be surprised by the head-slap that followed it and to not see the smirk almost hidden behind Gibbs's coffee cup as he passed by on his way to his own desk. Using an obscure movie quote to ask Ziva out for celebratory drinks, and honestly surprising himself with the brightness of his own smile when she laughingly agreed.
Those were the tragically short-lived minutes that remained the clearest in his mind, before his memory became a blur of motion and noise. An alarm sounding throughout the building, lights flashing... running, chaos, trying to keep track of three people in particular, but losing sight of them in the melee... a muffled explosion, the building quaking... screams... nearly out, but going back for something... his world erupting with a deafening roar, the ground falling away, and then... nothing.
Until he opened his eyes and realized where he was... and how repetitively terrible his luck seemed to be these past few years. Really, it sometimes felt like he sashayed out of the hospital, always just in time to earn himself a ticket right back in. Thank god for government agency benefits. And hey, at least he hadn't been kidnapped, poisoned, or bludgeoned this time. Those were probably his least favourite ways to end up on a stretcher. Although, in all honesty, his current predicament might well bump 'kidnapped' out of the top three, provided he lived long enough to see it through.
A sudden cascade of dust from overhead had him squeezing his eyes shut, losing sight of that precious patch of sky nearly 30 feet above him. Unfortunately, he wasn't quick enough to hold his breath and ended up with a lungful of dirt that wrenched out a series of bone-jarring coughs, which left him shaking from pain and exertion once they'd finally subsided. For a while afterward, though he couldn't begin to guess how long with his head spinning and throbbing as it was, all he could do was lay there and focus on the rhythmic, albeit tremulous breaths he could pull in and let out. With the sheer amount and size of the debris that had struck him during and buried him after the explosion and subsequent collapse, he could be fairly certain he'd cracked several of his ribs, though he would bet his month's salary that nothing was actually broken. There wasn't any overt shifting going on as he attempted to breathe, just a hell of a lot of pain and the feeling of stretching like a handful of frayed rubber bands. If he moved as little as humanly possible, he just might manage to keep each of those little bastards in one piece, which would sure as hell make recovery a little easier... assuming once again, of course, that he survived to endure it.
As a general rule he was not an overly pessimistic person, which was no small feat considering his track record, but this one was a real doozie. Tony didn't need to be a doctor or, for that matter, a structural engineer to know that even the infamous DiNozzo luck might not be enough to pull him outta this pot without dropping his ass into the fire. Time simply was not on his side in any respect. Even if they managed to find him and get to him in anything less than five hours and up, he held no illusions about how hard it would be to actually extract him. To get the necessary equipment down here, never mind find the room to operate it, would likely take longer than either himself or the building had left.
With a grimace, Tony opened his eyes once more and slowly turned his gaze down to settle on the steel rod protruding from the side of his stomach and the slow but steady stream of blood, visible even in the relative dark, that had saturated the cloth around it and likely begun to pool in the rubble beneath him. The pain that radiated outwards in all directions from the wound outshone even that in his ribs, threatening to scatter his thoughts and rob him of what little calm he possessed, here, lost in the ruins of NCIS.
Even listening to the sporadic, distinctly ominous creaking and groaning of the destroyed building, and the hiss and crackle of gas lines burning with a shelf-life of their own, he couldn't help thinking quite seriously that this building might just outlast him.