A long chapter, but I wanted to get this wrapped up. Thanks for your reviews, comments, and follows/favorites.
Heading up to Jennifer Shepard's office after his painful encounter with DiNozzo, Gibbs found himself for the first time in years second-guessing everything he thought was the truth. But how nebulous was that? The truth to whom? The warped version of himself that successfully battled his demons on a daily basis to hold back the flood of wrong that he'd unleashed after the death of his girls? The better version of himself that flayed his conscience with guilt over his subsequent actions? After years of hiding his past, both the good that he'd had with Shannon and Kelly, and the vengeful actions that haunted him, he didn't even know what the truth was anymore. And dammit, why did he have to keep paying for something he'd not done, something he'd been thousands of miles away from when it happened.
He supposed that it was bound to catch up with him eventually, and that the consequences would be ugly, but he was still furious. He'd done nothing to incur the wrath of Ari Haswari other than remind him of his father. What the hell? There weren't a million other more deserving bastards out there that filled that quota, Ari had to choose him?
There were too many moving parts to this goatrope situation, and while normally Gibbs could function under all kinds of stress, it didn't usually involve his emotions. He could wall himself off from the pain of the victim's families, while fighting to solve what caused it. Not this time. This time was too close to the bone, and too soon after another staggering loss. Anger was his usual default setting when overwhelmed with an emotion he couldn't deal with. But it was anger that had gotten him into so many of his tough situations. Stopping at the top of the stairs, he reigned in his brewing fury at Jen, at Ziva, even Tony, though he knew the last person on that list was an innocent in all of this. If he could just tell the kid why…but that wasn't on the table, not now, anyway.
Now he had to deal with the Director, and his guts tangled at the thought of their coming confrontation. Like Tony less than an hour before him, he'd bolted into Shepard's office unannounced and uninvited. He didn't care, this needed to be done, and now. If she tried to fire him for it, well, he had options, none of which she would like.
"Jethro. It seems that you and DiNozzo have lost all sense of decorum today."
Gibbs ignored her, and the angry sarcasm behind her comment.
"You threatened to blacklist him, Director? Have you not read his file?"
"I've read enough to know he doesn't take his jobs seriously enough to stay at them for more than two years."
He laughed at her, but not in a kind way.
"Maybe because the people who were supposed to have his back shoved him out into the line of fire to cover their own asses!" he spat, his own duplicity coming through with the accusation.
She flinched, but recovered, still knowing that he didn't miss it.
"What happened, Jen? He get a little too close to the truth for you? Tell you that you were full of shit like the rest of us and maybe you were a poor fit for that chair? Contrary to what everyone here thinks, he's far from stupid. He knows damned well that we're hiding something from him, and after what his partner did to him in Baltimore, he has no reason to cut us any slack."
"He was disrespectful and insubordinate. I won't have it."
At her stunning arrogance, Gibbs lost it, slamming his fist down on the desk in front of her and scattering her pens and papers.
"Goddammit, Jen, do you even hear yourself? He's not the one doing the damage here! We are! He came to give you his resignation in person out of respect, 'cause that's the kind of person he is, and you manage to twist the knife into him until he slaps you down! Good for him, I've got half a mind to follow him right out that door!"
"You wouldn't!" she almost shrieked, the thought of losing her only ally at the agency startling her.
"Oh, don't tempt me, Director! If I stay, it won't be to watch your back, it'll be to watch Ziva David like a hawk! I don't understand why you saw fit to bring her on board after what her brother did - "
"Half-brother." she corrected, unable to stop herself.
"What the hell kind of difference does it make?" he thundered back "Half, full, she was his handler and had the information she needed to pull him back weeks before he came after me, and what'd she do, sit around on her ass while he went after my team! My people, Director! And Kate's dead now because Ziva was too close to the situation and couldn't do the job! If she couldn't take him down, someone else could have! She chose to do nothing!"
"She saved your life!"
"She shouldn't have had to! He should have been eliminated months ago! He didn't just lose his marbles towards the end, he had a long-term agenda planned out, and she watched him follow through with every part of it! Don't you ever wonder why, Director? Because I sure as hell do, and I know for a fact that it's been gnawing away at DiNozzo the past few months! And now she's dead set on pushing Tony out of the picture. Well, she got her way, Jen, for whatever reason. And you'd better goddamned hope it's not as bad as what DiNozzo sees coming."
Dismissing the younger man yet again with a flick of her hand, she settled back to take control of the conversation.
"You give DiNozzo too much credit sometimes. He over thinks a lot of things, you've said it yourself. He's overthinking this. She just wants to learn some of the ways of American law enforcement."
"Bullshit, Jen. Anytime DiNozzo tried to teach her anything, she rejected it right to his face!"
"So maybe he wasn't the best one for the job."
"He was. Her. Superior. Officer." Gibbs ground out, shocked even more than he thought he might be at his Director's hard-headed attitude. What the hell was going on here?
"Not anymore. It's up to you and a new SFA to train her."
Gibbs visibly sagged, realizing just how far out of his depth he was with his old flame and new Director. Saying anything more to her was useless at this point. Whatever was driving her in this shitstorm wasn't something she was ever going to admit, even to him. And anyways, he knew he had no perspective anymore. Everything he thought and said was tainted with the actions and people of his past, and churning emotions of the present. He needed to go home, and not come back until he had his head on a little straighter.
"I'm taking some time off, Director. Maybe you should consider enrolling Ms. David in FLETC if she's really that gung ho on learning our American legal customs."
"And why would I do that, Jethro? She's a liaison, not an agent, not yet, anyway."
The lightbulb exploded inside his head. DiNozzo was right, as usual. But he was too damned spent to start unraveling that knot of intrigue right now.
"Your call, Director. And from now on, you address me as Agent Gibbs, are we clear? I don't care what we had back in Paris, it was over when you decided our relationship was getting in the way of your career."
"How very chauvinistic of you, Agent Gibbs." she emphasized caustically. "Only men are allowed the big chair, even in the twenty-first century!"
"You know damned well that's not what I believe, Director. You seem to be conveniently forgetting exactly how our relationship ended. Didn't hear a word from you for weeks, then the old "'Dear Jethro' letter. 'It was fun, but…'"
He watched her cheeks flame with embarrassment.
"Oh yeah, Director. Why in hell did you think I'd forget something like that? Doesn't hurt anymore, but it sure does piss me off now. I'm out of here. I'm assigning McGee cold cases until I get back. You can do whatever the hell you want with Officer David."
"Jethro, you -"
"Special. Agent. Gibbs, Madame Director."
"Yes. Er…Yes. Submit your vacation paperwork before you leave."
"Not takin' a vacation, Director. Just putting in for a few personal days. Got about a hundred of them saved up. You'll get your forms."
He walked out on her, not looking back, and wondering why the hell he ever thought they could just take up where they'd left off, even on just a friendship level. They had both changed far too much, and neither one of them necessarily for the good. Each of them driven, single-minded, but with different purposes and goals. He needed to reacquaint himself with those things, with a part of himself that he seemed to have buried in the past many months. He wasn't sure how to start, but he knew it was his next mission, before any more of himself got lost in the rubble.
()()()()()()()(()()()()()()()()
In no hurry to be anywhere, Tony took his time on the way home, stopping for lunch at his favorite Italian bistro, and shopping for groceries that he'd neglected lately. His voracious appetite had finally found its groove again after a couple months of fits and starts. The coughing from his pneumonia had lingered for weeks after his release from the hospital and dampened his hunger. His stomach just couldn't handle much with the nonstop hacking, and not much had appealed to him, not to mention his emotions draining him of the will to eat. Abby had force fed him what she could, Ducky had lectured him, as if he was purposely not trying to get stronger. Gibbs had put a selection of foods in front of him at least once a day, and let him choose what he thought he could manage. Eventually he'd started putting on some weight, and the more he ate, the hungrier he got. Then things had gone sideways again, when he realized that Ziva was not only not a temporary fil-l in for Kate, but that she was proving to be much more an obstacle than a help to the team. When he'd tried to explain things to her regarding forensics or interrogating suspects, he was met with scorn, and often all-out derision. If he had to hear "Well in Mossad we…" one more time. Oh, that's right, he didn't have to. Yay for me he thought. It'd only cost him his beloved job and friends he'd once considered family, but what the hell? C'est la vie, right?
Putting the groceries away, he tried to tune out his past work-life. Rehashing what was, what had happened was useless other than to apply it as a life lesson. A huge life lesson, really. He wanted his mind to float, to let his intuition take over for a change in lieu of knee jerk responses he tended to have at work. When it got down to it, he was at his best when he worked alone. People actually made him nervous, never really having learned the finer points of interpersonal relationships. They were complex and messy, and while Tony was excellent at pulling together facts and nuances from complex and messy cases to help solve them, it was different with actual people. His responses were usually crap, because they'd caught him off-guard, his mind elsewhere. He really did struggle with attention deficits, which had gone undiagnosed as a child and had caused a lot of his misery when no one understood his situation. It's just that his mind worked differently than most other peoples'. It often raced ahead with startling ideas, or hung back picking apart a conundrum. There didn't seem to be much middle ground for him when he was at work. At home, though, he could decompress, watching movies or listening to music, not having to challenge his brain to anything. He thought he might like being home for a while, gone to ground while he thought out his future. A rapping on his door jarred him out of his pleasant contemplation. Damn it all. Could he not have just one damned afternoon to let things settle? It had to be Abby, and she'd be in full-tilt Caf-Pow madness by now.
Swinging open the door, he was both shocked and dismayed to see Gibbs on the other side, and Tony wondered if he was imagining things. The man looked beaten down and torn, two things Tony never even considered seeing in his boss. Ex boss. It was disturbing, regardless of how he currently felt about the older man.
"Come on in. I'll fix you a drink."
"I look that bad, do I?" Gibbs tried to infuse a little humor into his voice, but it fell flat.
"You look like shit, Boss. Gibbs. What the hell happened?"
Sinking himself down into Tony's ultra comfortable couch, he sighed long and loudly.
"What didn't happen, Tony? A year ago we were doing great, working together like I'd always envisioned the right team could do. Got McGee on board to help us with the tech crap. You and Kate tearing up the ground solving case after case. Then some whackjob I'd never even met before shows up out of the blue with some crazy ass revenge mission and starts tearing it all apart. I let him get to me, Tony. I swallowed his bait hook, line and sinker, until I brought him right into our turf, and lost the advantage."
"You couldn't know his plans, Gibbs, hell, I doubt even he knew them much in advance."
"You really believe that, DiNozzo? That Ari didn't have every move he made laid out like a damned battle plan?"
Gibbs jumped to his feet; obviously he'd been stewing on all of this as much as Tony had.
"I got target fixation,Tony; you tried warning me and I slapped you down. Didn't wanna hear it."
Tony settled a tumbler of high shelf bourbon into one of Gibbs' flailing hands.
"You were worried about us, Gibbs. You knew what he could do to us."
"Damned straight I was, but I went about it all wrong! Should've tracked him down and ended him myself. What you said, here, last night, about Ziva knowing he was off the rails and still letting him keep going…I can't answer that question, Tony. Beats the hell outta me. I just went five rounds with Jenny - with the Director - and got less than zilch from her as to why she put Ziva on our team."
Tony had poured a glass of wine for himself and settled in an armchair opposite Gibbs.
"You're not seeing the entire picture, Boss. Gibbs, sorry. Can't seem to break the habit."
Gibbs wanted to tell him not to try, to come back to the team and they'd figure things out. But this wasn't the time, and more importantly, he knew it just wouldn't work. Things were screwed up big time now and most likely would be for the foreseeable future. He couldn't ask the kid to step back into that viper's nest, no matter how badly he felt about Tony leaving.
"So fill in the blanks for me, DiNozzo! You've got a lot more insight into this clusterfuck than I do right now."
"Because I don't have blinders on, Boss! It's easy to see that you and the new Director have a history of some sort - "
" Had a history. She was one of my agents, years ago, it's in the past."
"Doesn't matter now. You came into the situation with the preconceived notion that you knew her, that you knew her motivations. That you had changed, but she hadn't. She's turned that right on its head. You don't know her connections now, or how she got up the ranks so fast. What does she owe, and to whom? And why in hell would she think Officer David was even a remotely decent fit even as a liaison? Which I'm going to presume will not be temporary, but somehow conveniently work itself into a special agent position?
"Gibbs, she singled me out of that party for a reason! And yeah, it hurt like hell at first until I could do the old Spock thing and let logic take over emotion. How do you deal with an enemy, or at least someone who's keeping you from your objective? You isolate them, demoralize them, find their weakest spots. She's been doing that with me since day one, and she's found that McGee is gullible enough to follow her lead instead of his Senior Field Agent's. He's like putty in her hands, Boss, and she knew that coming into this. And because the surface info that she got about me was more fiction than truth, she assumed she'd have me bedded and castrated the first week she was here. She didn't understand, Boss. Kate was…Kate was like my sister, she was…"
His throat closed up with tight emotions, and he looked away, struggling for a foothold. His voice was quiet, shaky, and oh, Gibbs ached for him. Even now, months later, it hurt his heart.
"She was the first partner that I could be myself with. Well, mostly myself. I mean, I know we sniped plenty, and it took a while for her to get used to my wonky style, but she did, and she always had my back. I never really thought - and then she was just gone, and I couldn't get the blood off my face no matter how many times I washed. And I looked up from my desk one day, and Ziva David was sitting there, like she thought she owned it now. And even though she acted all sorry that she had accidentally done something that offended - she wasn't. She knew exactly what she was doing, and I'll never quite forgive her for that. She knew that both you and the Director owed her - or her father, most likely regarding the Director, and that she didn't need to go anywhere. And even if she hadn't shot Ari and saved you - the Director would have made you keep her at that desk. I can imagine that she gave you the same choice you gave me last night -"
"Which I deeply regret." Gibbs interjected.
"Don't. It would have happened eventually, even without your ultimatum. She would have pulled a Vivian - well actually she did pull a Vivian letting off a round inside that container yesterday. I can't work with someone like that, and I would have come to you with my resignation by the time my sick leave was up."
"How is the arm?" Gibbs asked, taking a long sip of the bourbon and wanting to change the dark subject for just a bit.
"Still sore, but not unusable. Well, if you don't tell Ducky, that is. He wants me to have it in a sling for at least three days. Not gonna happen. I took some Motrin, it's as doctored as it's gonna get."
Gibbs smiled sadly, the alcohol hitting him and letting his defenses down even more than when he'd first arrived.
"Gonna miss having you on my six, Tony. I know I can't change things, or undo what I've done, but you're the best young agent I've ever worked with. Christ, you were like a freaking bat out of hell, everyone thought I'd finally lost all of my marbles when I brought you home from Baltimore."
Tony knew damned well that Gibbs was deflecting, feeling too vulnerable with the original line of conversation. But they needed to get this all out, needed to have some sort of closure to the gaping wounds of the last months.
"There's more than just the fact she shot Ari, isn't there, Boss? I know about your wife and daughter…"
Gibbs shot up off the couch like a wild man, MaCallan 18 flying from his glass.
"Who told you! Did Ziva tell you?"
He towered over Tony, every muscle in his body radiating fury.
"I've known for years, Boss. I did a deep background check on you just like you did me. Wasn't going to put myself through another Danny Price. I'm really sorry you went through that. But I'm not sorry that I did the background check. I did one on Kate and McGee, too. SOP for me from now on."
"No one knows, DiNozzo, not even Ducky! They can't know!"
"I've never told a soul, Boss, and never will." Tony pleaded quietly, not actually afraid of the man, but not wanting to cause him more hurt, either "It's your secret to keep for whatever reason. But I have to assume that Ziva knows, and unlike me, she doesn't feel the same loyalty to you. Figures the more she knows about you, the more she can get what she wants from you. Boss, you know you can take the agent out of Mossad, but you can't take the Mossad out of the agent. No matter how much she insists she wants to be an actual NCIS agent, she will always have her own agenda, or her father's. And you'll probably not ever know what it is until it's too late, just like Ari."
Gibbs deflated and sank back down onto the couch. Sometimes this young man who felt like a son to him was too damned perceptive. He didn't want that perception now, even though he knew it's exactly exactly what he'd come here for.
"I can't leave them to their own devices, Tony. I can't get Jen to get rid of Ziva, I already tried, and I can't get Jen out of the Director's chair. There's no doubt that she's got plenty of markers owed to her, and vice versa. That's a dangerous place for a director of a federal agency to be, but it's part of the job, too. Until I see her actually doing something that's not kosher, I can't do a damned thing. But I can keep track of her, and Officer David. The Director seems to have this belief that Ziva just wants to learn more about American law enforcement."
"Then she's delusional. Ziva won't even listen to you when she's got her mind set on how something should be done."
"I know, Tony. And at the time, I didn't think it was an issue, because I thought it was a temporary gig for her. I was in the same headspace as you were, still trying to deal with losing Kate and my part in her death. And no, don't bother, I'll carry that with me for as long as I live. Just like you secretly wish it'd been you instead of her."
"Boss, I - " Tony stuttered at the unexpected revelation. "All of her family, her parents, brothers - so devastated…their faces…"
He looked away, unable to show his tears.
"Tony, it could have happened protecting the President. It could have happened if she'd touched her boyfriend's uniform in the wrong place. We don't get to pick our time. For whatever reason, Ari chose her. We don't have to like it. We just have to accept it as best we can. And no, I'll never be able to accept what happened to my girls. But they weren't in our line of work, they…"
He cleared his throat and took another swig of the good stuff.
"We knew what we signed up for. Kate and her family knew that both her jobs were dangerous, and she chose to do them. It's what she was about, just like us. She wouldn't want you torturing yourself, at least not over that. Now that gay cowboy picture, maybe."
"Oh God, that was…really pretty inappropriate, Boss."
"I know, and I had a talk with her and Abby about it. They were sufficiently remorseful by the time I was done with them."
"Thanks, Boss, er, Gibbs."
Gibbs nodded, and stared down into his now empty glass.
"Didn't realize I'd drank it all. Goes down pretty smooth."
"Well, yeah, that and you sloshed some of it around the couch."
"Oh. Yeah, sorry."
"Don't worry. Leather cleans up just fine. But I'm thinking you're not gonna be driving home tonight. I can take you there if you want."
Gibbs didn't want to admit it to himself, much less Tony, but he was feeling decidedly wrong-footed right now, what with all the drama and revelations swirling around, and wasn't keen on spending the night passed out on his basement floor. Better DiNozzo's cushy sofa.
"Would you mind if I racked here for the night? Not real steady at the moment."
Tony smiled warmly, glad at least that his boss found comfort and not anger with him after the painful truths they'd both just divulged.
"No problem, Boss. Just stocked up on my groceries, we can order out or I'll cook something."
"I could really go for a home-cooked meal right about now as long as you're offering."
"Alright then." He tossed Gibbs the TV remote, who managed to catch it before it bonked him in the head. "There's gotta be a game on somewhere. Give it a spin while I get something going."
"You think we're gonna be okay, DiNozzo?
Gibbs asked quietly, surprising the younger man.
"We" as in you and me? I think we'll figure it out. Everybody else? I have no clue, it's up to them. Frankly I'm not putting my money on any of them, but I've had a few harsh weeks, so, probably not in the right frame of mind to do any betting."
"I hear ya, DiNozzo. I'll do what I can on my end."
"Of course you will, Boss. But don't expect
miracles. It's a dodgy situation at best."
"I know, Tony. I know." he sighed, resting his head back on the couch and just listening to the game instead of watching it for now. When Tony went to ask him what dressing Gibbs wanted on his salad, he found the man fast asleep and snoring lightly. He'd wake the man when everything was ready to eat. Then they'd talk about anything but Ziva David.
Ok, I sort of lied. I guess there's one more chapter after this, hopefully posted by tomorrow night.
