The Window

by Summertime

Tony wakes up alone in a locked room. Gradually, he creates his own way out, but when rescue finally comes, how can he reconcile what he sees with what he knows? Now, finally, complete.

2. Gibbs I

Thank you so much for all your replies - I'm overwhelmed. This chapter asks a few more questions about Tony's confinement, but they'll all be answered by the end of the story: writer's honor.

-()

The Window: Gibbs (I)

He wasn't a man who liked waiting.

When he had gone after Ari, he had gone after him knowing that the chase was going to be long, and even then, he had still been impatient. He had stalked around the office, burning midnight oil and forcing others to join him, and he knew that it had been unbearable. He'd known that even then but hadn't cared - the chase was too important and the quarry too valuable for him to care.

He had gone after Dinozzo expecting that he would find Tony in a day, but even in the first twenty-four golden hours after Tony's disappearance, he had felt the tension in him build to the breaking point. After the first forty-eight, he had rehearsed in his head everything he would do to the people who had dared to take Tony Dinozzo and not return him, immediately, and God help them if Tony was bruised. He'd thought about bruises because he hadn't been able to think about anything else. So he had yelled at them to make the searches work faster, to trace the leads they didn't have, and he had thought about all the things he would do when he found Tony. He had sipped his coffee and thought about shattered kneecaps and ripping their throats out, and he had smiled.

After the first week, the ideas had come whether he had wanted them or not. He would wake up with his hands curled into fists and leveled over his heart so that he could feel it pounding, trying to break out of his ribs. He'd rub the nightmares out of his eyes and spend the rest of the night in the office, trying to wrap his head around the why and how - but mostly the where. And he would be sitting there with his head in his hands when Kate would come up and hand him a coffee and explain that she hadn't been able to sleep, either, and they both put their heads together and came up with - nothing.

At the end of the first month, he had heard Kate say to McGee that he'd broken more computer units this month alone than in the last year.

All they had was a note. Dinozzo had disappeared into thin air and all they had left of him was a note pinned to a door - a note with generic ink, generic paper, and no fingerprints. Just a plain sheet of white paper with one word: Look. So Gibbs did, even though he hated following orders. He looked. They all did.

At the end of the second month, he was told that his first priority could no longer be official.

Gibbs had stayed in that night, despite everyone's attempts to surround him and keep him from seeing the broadcast that beamed across the airwaves at eleven, telling the world that he had stopped looking. Gibbs had watched the careful, emotionless message, and felt nothing at all. They had moved on to other stories, and he had been sitting across his bed with the remote next to his thigh, his eyes unblinking until midnight. All he could think about was what he had been trying to ignore: that Dinozzo could be dead. It was like an assault into the emptiness, the fear filling up the places in his head that couldn't be occupied by Tony himself. He would see Tony dead, and then he would think about how much he would hurt them, how much they would have to pay. Everything done to Tony times ten. Times ten thousand.

After that, he was surprised that they hadn't all left.

If Tony had been there, he would have been able to diffuse some of the tension. He would have drawn it onto himself, cracked a terrible joke, and let Gibbs yell without any of it making a single impression on him, his face just saying that he'd seen it all before and would see it all again. If Tony had been there, though, there would have been no reason for any of it - Tony was the reason he needed Tony.

He caught them all grieving when they thought he wasn't looking, and it inexplicably touched him, that they thought they had to protect him. He saw Kate marking off the days on her calendar, little X's in the very corner, and he saw the way the corners of her mouth tightened when she did it, how when she capped the pen and slid it back into her desk, she looked like she might cry. He saw how McGee would never, ever sit down at Tony's desk - not so much to use his computer or to take a sheet of paper from the printer. He left it untouched, and by unspoken agreement, they had all done the same - but Gibbs had been stepping out of the elevator when a gunny had tried to lift a pencil from Tony's cup, and McGee - McGee, of all people - had practically ripped him a new asshole, gesturing all over the place and explaining that it was Tony's desk, Special Agent Dinozzo's desk, and not to touch it.

He saw Abby with dark circles under her eyes from late nights spent staring at that note and its lack of evidence. And Ducky was all around them, talking about Tony when no one else dared to mention him, managing more than anyone else to talk Gibbs down from another peak of burning rage. It was Ducky he had been talking to in autopsy when the subject had turned to Tony's disappearance and the people who had taken him. Ducky had commented on how much he would enjoy "cutting them open - after you kill them, of course, Jethro."

He wasn't Kate. He didn't have to count off days on his calendar. He had the numbers fixed in his mind, and they were the first thing he saw every morning when he woke up. The only problem was that they kept getting bigger, when even the one had been too much.

The day the number became one hundred, he went to the gym and attacked a punching bag until the seams split. No one said a word, but he could hear the calculators in their minds running, practically see them counting backwards on their fingers until he heard the whispers: Dinozzo. One hundred days.

And then, on day one hundred seventy-one, they found him.

-()

Bryant Hale was not what Gibbs had expected.

When they had put all of the pieces together and narrowed it down to the one name, Gibbs had thought that any man who could have stolen Dinozzo and come out of it whole would have been a man to be reckoned with - a stone wall, a steel giant. But the man they found was scrawny, pale, and mushroom-like - looking as if he had grown too long in the dark. Sitting in front of the glowing computer screens that made up his world, he was a McGee gone bad - manipulating and toying with someone else's world through a series of keystrokes and punched numbers. He had sweaty palms and three days worth of pale blonde stubble growing over his face. And this was the man who had led them on a chase for their agent for six months, this was the man that they had caught only by a stroke of good luck - only because he had been hacking into their system to see how the search for Dinozzo was going, and Abby and McGee had teamed up and traced his signal. This was their super-genius and their second Ari.

This was the man that Gibbs wanted to kill so badly that he pushed Hale against the monitors before he could even ask a question - taking out six months of inaction, frustration, and pain as best he could, trying to condense his rage into one quick smash against the consoles.

"Where is he?"

Hale giggled, one damp palm cupped over his mouth. "Don't worry, Special Agent Gibbs. I didn't even bruise him. Didn't even touch him."

He shoved Hale back. "I'm sorry, that doesn't answer my question. I'm going to ask again, and if I don't get an answer, I'm going to start eliminating a few unnecessary body parts for you. Where is Agent Dinozzo? Where are you keeping him?"

"Down the hall," Hale said, but Gibbs didn't think his threat had really done the job, because Hale still had that nervous, goofy smile on his face.

"Kate. Hold him. If he moves, blow his brains out."

Kate drew her weapon. "Absolutely."

Gibbs didn't waste time after that. If he was on his way to Tony when he happened to hear a gunshot, he was convinced that would only be for the better. He moved down the hall, and midway through, broke into a run, because he'd waited six months for this, and maybe another second would be too much. However short the distance, it was still more than enough time to think of a dozen things to find in the room at the end of the hall. A corpse was first to come to mind, an endless shutter-film of possible deaths.

At the end of the hall was a door. He didn't even have to kick it down, there was just a line of sliding steel bolts that he threw to one side.

And then he opened the door, and there was Tony.

Gibbs almost closed the door again, almost went back to Kate and told her grimly that they'd had it wrong, that Hale didn't have Tony after all, but he had someone else penned up in that room, and that Hale was probably the sickest man he had ever seen, bar none, because what the man in that room looked like - it was beyond belief. How sick. How sad. But Tony was his responsibility and this man was not . . .

Except it really was Tony.

Tony was naked, crouched at the end of the bed, wrapped mummy-tight in the rattiest, dirtiest sheet Gibbs had ever seen. His eyes were unfocused, his jaw hanging slack - he looked drugged. The sheet wasn't thick enough to conceal how emaciated he had become, and it couldn't have been enough to keep him warm. The room temperature couldn't have been far above fifty degrees, but Gibbs barely felt it. He had wanted to do nothing but take action for the last half-year, but now he had found Tony and he was just standing in the doorway of Tony's prison, staring.

The way Tony was staring at the wall, his eyes glass and wide.

Gibbs put the gun back at this side, which was at least something he knew he had to do, but once it was done, he was again clueless and motionless.

He said Tony's name.

Tony turned towards him and smiled automatically. "Not time to drink yet. Not thirsty. Want to sit?"

"Tony, I'm here to get you out."

"Yeah, yeah. I know. Coming. Option number four. Hey, boss, what's the number?"

Gibbs didn't know what to say, and he turned into a parrot, just repeating the last thing said. "Number?"

"Yeah. Day. How many?"

That was something Gibbs knew - the number of days Tony had been missing. He could have pared it down to hours and minutes, if Tony had asked. With a few minutes to do the extra calculations, he could have given it in seconds.

"It's been one hundred seventy-one days, Dinozzo."

Tony nodded wearily. "Better start a new one," he said, which made no more sense to Gibbs than if Tony had replied in Swahili. But then Tony shifted, the sheet fell down around his waist, and Gibbs saw what Tony took for granted, what Tony intended to start all over again on his right hip - horizontal slashes, some of them pinkish scars, some of them healing scabs, and some of them were rubbed raw and still oozing blood. Tony's hand, previously buried in the sheet, moved, and Gibbs saw a reflective glimmer and finally had something to do.

He crossed the room in an instant and pulled the glass from Tony's hand. It cut into his own fingers, and, looking at the blood dried on the jagged edges, he dropped it in disgust.

Tony sighed. "What? You think - you're McGee?"

There was something wrong with his voice. It was choked, breathy, as if Tony had to struggle to get the words past some impossible stumbling block.

"What did he do to you?"

Tony blinked at him, big green eyes utterly without comprehension. "McGee? Nothing. That damned fourth option. You know what that is yet? Kate won't tell. She knows, though." He peered hopefully at Gibbs, his expression far too open to be completely sane. "You'd tell me? The fourth option?"

Gibbs put one hand on his shoulder. "If I find it, I'll tell you, I promise."

Tony started underneath his hand, and for the first time since Gibbs had entered the room, his eyes showed promise of an awareness and a horrible sanity. His mouth trembled as he backed away, legs shifting and arms pulling to crawl to the other side of the bed.

"You don't touch," Tony said. "You never touch. Never ever. Against the rules. Not even in the window. Can't touch. Not real. Ghost. Um, shadow." He made a snapping noise with his fingers that sounded too much like bones breaking, and a grin broke out on his face until Tony was just a grinning skull. "Hallucination! Right? Not real. Not option one."

Gibbs moved to the other side of the bed and put his hand on Tony's shoulder again. "I'm here, Tony. I'm real. You can leave now, I'm going to take you home."

"Go through the window?"

There was no window, and he couldn't begin to understand what Tony was talking about. He kept his hand there, kept his eyes intent on Tony's. "No, Dinozzo, through the door."

Tony cringed. "I'm sorry. Couldn't find the way. Couldn't get it open. I know. Hopeless. Pathetic. You said, the first time. I tried, I really did, but it still doesn't open. No way. Nothing's different. Nothing's changed." His lips crinkled, not in a smile this time, but in an effort to hold back tears. "I'm sorry. I'll drink if you want. Water doesn't make me as sick now."

"The water makes you sick?"

"McGee says it's not the rust," Tony informed him. "Says: something in the pipes."

He was going to break every single bone Bryant Hale had to offer, not just break it, but shatter it into a hundred million fragments, one splinter for every thing that was wrong about this situation. The hollowed-out look in Tony's eyes; the length of days; the scars and healing scratches; the ground-up bloody glass; the every rib he could see underneath Tony's skin; the chill of the room; the whatever-it-was in the water that made Tony loath to take the one thing that was probably comforting. Broken bones for the length of Tony's hair, for Tony's rambles, and for Tony's isolation.

He moved his hand from Tony's shoulder into his hair, feeling awkward but knowing that touch was the only thing getting through to him. Touch was what he hadn't had, left alone for so long.

"Can you walk?"

Tony closed his eyes. "Gotta lean against the walls."

"Not this time, Dinozzo. You can lean against me."

He wrapped one arm around Dinozzo's shoulders and helped him upright. Tony swayed alarmingly when he was on his feet, but then his legs seemed to steady. Holding himself by the bed, he managed to stand alone while Gibbs draped the sheet around him, hating to keep that bloodstained, filthy thing with them any longer, but he had a feeling that Tony wouldn't thank him later for being traipsed out in front of Kate stark naked. He took a moment to arrange the sheet almost like a toga around Dinozzo, and then put his arm back to help hold him up. After a few fumbling steps, he held steady. He still listed towards Gibbs as they walked to the door, but he wasn't falling flat on his face, and that was something. When they got to the open door, Tony stood there, smiling at it.

"Like another window," he said, sounding tired and satisfied.

Gibbs wasn't going to stand there and debate terminology: Tony had been in this damned place too long. He had been there too long, and it couldn't have been much more than five minutes. Kate must be worried, standing there outside with each second ticking away like an hour, her gun trained on Hale - and Gibbs wondered how much it had cost her to not turn her head and call back to them, not to head to the door and check that they were fine. Kate was a professional: she kept her eyes on her target. Time to go and relieve her. Time to go and relieve all of them.

He stepped through and took Tony with him.

Tony went still underneath his arm, resisting any motion. One look showed that his eyes had dilated, going from the lightning-bright room to the relative darkness of the hall, but that wasn't the only reason for the abrupt and terrible fear that was freezing him in place.

"You're going home now, Tony," he said.

"Home," Tony echoed, and the look he gave Gibbs was absolutely naked, ready to be either consoled or completely destroyed. "Real?"

He squeezed Tony's shoulder. "Real. I promise."

Tony nodded slowly. "Trust you," he said softly. "You said you would. Didn't really believe when they said - you weren't coming."

Six months of guilt wrapped around him and threatened to pull away all the light and air he had left. But now wasn't the time to be suffocated by everything that had happened to Tony, now was the time to piece him back together, and when Tony was back at work, back chasing skirts, and back running his mouth - then Gibbs could indulge his mea culpa. Not now. He didn't have time - he had Tony. But it had been so long: if they'd only been able to find him sooner, even just by a day - if only their real lead to Hale had been more than just an accident a bored Abby had taken an interest in - if only . . .

He resisted the line of thinking because he had never been one to try and turn back the clock: even with his marriages, he accepted the time of death with those and never attempted resurrection. But this wasn't a union or a lost opportunity - this was Dinozzo, someone who had trusted him and then been stolen and kept like an animal in a cage.

Not now. He doesn't have time for my guilt.

Tony moved against him anxiously. "Don't go away. Please."

He tried to answer, but his voice deserted him, and all he could do was shuffle forward, an awkward contestant in a three-legged race. He called forward to Kate that Tony was safe and that they were both coming, and was torn between asking her to get Hale out of Tony's sight before they reached him - to shove him in the car so hard that his skull cracked open on the line of roof and door in an unfortunate, unforeseen accident - and telling her that she could come and see him, but Kate resolved any of his indecision by making the choice herself. She came along the hall, dragging Hale by the collar, the barrel of her gun still pressed against his collarbone.

Her arm went lax at the sight of Tony, but steadied before Hale could even notice that she had dropped her guard. If anything, the gun dug deeper against his skin.

"Hey, Tony," she said.

If her voice trembled, Gibbs didn't notice it. She sounded almost casual, as if Tony had walked into the office on any ordinary morning, and any minute, she was going to ask him to get her some coffee, since he was already going by the community pot.

Tony gave her a wide smile. "Hey, Kate. I found it."

Gibbs tightened his arm around Tony's shoulders. "What did you find?"

"Fourth option," Tony said wearily. "Got it now, right? Tell McGee. This is better than anything. Or is it number two? Seems good enough . . . either way. Missed you, Kate. Boss," he added, leaning his head against Gibbs's shoulder in a gesture that was almost childlike in its affection. "Dreamed you came. It was nice. Not like this, but nice. Who's he?"

Gibbs was having trouble following Tony's new concept of conversation, its frequent changes in topic not helped by his staccato sentences. Kate understood, though, and shoved Hale against the wall.

"He's nobody, Tony," she said, her voice steely, as if daring Hale to object.

Tony nodded seriously. "Me too."

The words were like ice down Gibbs's neck, and he barely resisted the urge to pull Tony a little closer. Nobody. How long had that little mental revision taken? Sixty days? Seventy? A hundred? How many days left all alone had it taken before Tony had lost himself completely? It was basic psychology - human beings needed contact, needed affirmation of their own existence to feel real. So long had it taken before Tony had had to create his own affirmation in whatever hallucinations he could subconsciously conjure? How long before he'd invented that damn window he'd been talking about?

Hale was laughing, the sounds muffled against the wall. "Guess you're too late, Agent Gibbs. It's a shame - he tried very hard to hold himself together. You should have heard some of those conversations he had with himself, always trying to find the boundary between dead and insane. And he did such a good job for such a long time. I think he finally lost it when he ran out of water."

Water makes me sick, Tony's matter-of-fact explanation echoed in his mind.

Oh you son-of-a-bitch. Wasn't enough to keep him locked away, wasn't enough to watch him lose his mind, you were letting him starve to death - letting him try to keep down contaminated water just to survive and you know what, Hale? I think he did it. I think he lasted a hell of a lot longer than you thought he would, because he always does. And we'll take it from here, and I'll break every bone in your body into a million pieces - one fragment for every thing that's wrong about this situation.

"Agent Todd, shut him up!"

She'd been stunned motionless, but now she came alive and nodded at him, forcing Hale back down the hallway. "I'll radio for backup and take him in," she said over her shoulder. "Get Tony to a hospital."

No, Kate, I was thinking about putting him back in that room for a while, just to see how he'd react.

He squashed his bitterness. He couldn't blame Kate for this. He gave her a curt nod and refocused on Tony, who'd been waiting very quietly, observing them - the way he'd probably watched his imaginary outside world while he was in the room.

Gibbs patted his shoulder. "Let's get you somewhere else," he said, deciding that the idea of an elsewhere would probably do more to appeal to Tony right now than anything else.

Tony's face lit up at the idea. "Outside?"

"All the way out," he agreed, helping Tony walk to the door once he'd given Kate and Hale a twenty-count to clear the area. "Wherever you want to go."

Tony tugged on his sleeve, and again, the childishness morphed into that dreadful remaining sanity, and Gibbs could barely stand to look at him. It was almost easier when Tony barely understood what was happening - but this presence of mind was almost unbearable, because the insanity was gentler, but whatever understanding Tony had left had decidedly gone sour.

"What is it, Dinozzo?"

"It's just a damned dream," Tony said fiercely, "it's just a dream and you're not real. I know you're not real because Gibbs never came and I never left, I'm still there - this is just a dream." He rubbed a hand over his eyes, even though he wasn't crying. "You never came. I waited and you never came, and then they said that you weren't even looking anymore. I'm sorry for whatever I did, I'm sorry I wasn't a good agent, and I'll stay back there if you want - but don't make me dream about you and then have me wake up again."

"You're not dreaming, Tony," Gibbs said, trying to find some way to make the truth sound believable. "Hey, how do we know that I'm not dreaming? I've had a few of my own, you know."

Tony sighed. "You're too nice to be Gibbs."

That stung more than he'd expected, but at least it was something he could work with.

"Well, what do I have to do to convince you that I'm myself?"

Tony glared at him defiantly. "Hit me."

"You want to get punched, Dinozzo?"

"Back of the head," Tony said, not giving an inch. He'd gone from compliant to resistant in under a minute, gaining confidence and verbal skills once he thought that he was dreaming. "Like you always did before."

He'd been dragging Tony by the arm but now he stopped, his hand sliding up underneath Tony's shoulder and into a fold in the sheet, fingers suddenly encased in bloody cotton. "Are you crazy?" The choice of words made him wince, but he bulldozed through his own doubt. "I don't even know if you have a concussion, I don't know what's wrong with you, and you look like a breeze is going to send you into kingdom come - forget about getting hit."

Tony leaned against him in a gesture that Gibbs was sure he meant to be intimidating, but because of how thin he had gotten, it was more pathetic, as if Tony were falling and needed someone to catch him.

"If I wake up," Tony said, "I'm not going to go in there and have some more water." He said water the way most people said poison. "I'm going to cut deep, forget what McGee has to say about it."

Cut deep. When the sheet shifted over Tony's shoulder, Gibbs could see the tally marks and the numbers spelling out in hieroglyphics exactly how much this had cost him.

He tightened his hand on Tony. "You're not going to wake up. It's not a dream. We came to get you. It - it took a long time, Tony, but we're here."

Tony nodded as if he understood, gave him a dreamy smile, and then he fell forward, the last strings holding him together coming undone. Gibbs was barely able to catch him before he hit the floor. He turned him over, felt his pulse, and was relieved it was still there: uneven, but present. Time to get him to a hospital - time to get Tony out of this box and into someplace real.

-()

Once he'd secured Tony in the backseat of the car, he found his cell phone and dialed NCIS headquarters, holding it so tightly in his hand that he could almost hear the plastic cracking underneath his fingers. It rang three times before McGee finally picked up, sounding out-of-breath, as if he'd had to run across the office to find the phone.

"NCIS, Agent McGee speaking."

"McGee!"

"Yeah, boss?"

Gibbs saw his smile in the rearview mirror, a hard slash of teeth and thinned lips. Victory, sure, but the grimmest victory he'd ever known. "We've got him, McGee. We're on our way to the hospital. Meet us here - bring Abby and Ducky. He'll want to see someone familiar." As long as you can manage to convince him that you're real.

"Is he all right?"

"No," Gibbs said shortly. He peeled off the narrow road and into full-blown traffic, wishing he had a siren so that he would have free rein over the other cars on the road. "No, McGee, he's not. Come anyway." He suddenly remembered what Tony had been saying before, and added, "Do you have any idea what he's talking about when he mentions a fourth option? He seems to think you'd know something about it."

He heard McGee hesitate, thinking it over. "No," McGee said finally. "I don't know."

"It was worth a try." Probably the fourth option was something Dinozzo had invented to keep himself from becoming catatonic along with insane, but Gibbs hadn't been sure. Whatever Dinozzo had imagined, there had to be some kind of reason behind it - and the fourth option, as well as options one through three, had to mean something, the way the imaginary window obviously did. "If you think of anything, let me know."

"Absolutely," McGee said. "I'll - I'll go get them."

Gibbs closed his phone and watched Tony in the mirror, instead of studying the traffic. He forced himself to be dispassionate, to not care about the cargo he was bearing north, to not think at all about how Tony had been waiting for them. He made himself study Tony the way crime scenes were supposed to be studied, to examine him like a puzzle that needed to be reassembled.

He was pale from lack of sunlight, and even the glare through the car windows would probably give him a hell of a sunburn before they got to the hospital. Gibbs could see the veins and bones in his exposed hands, his skin having gotten papery thin enough to barely cover the framework it was wrapped around. Malnourishment, but he couldn't estimate to the extent, not until he talked to the doctors or at least examined whatever Tony had had to eat. All he knew was that Tony had lost enough weight to classify as a gift-wrapped skeleton, still lively enough to be stumbling around. His hair had gotten absurdly long, down past his shoulders, but the beard wasn't nearly to that extent - still bad, for a man who had always been clean-shaven, but Tony had obviously had some way of keeping it short before that he'd either lost or grown unable to use as things had progressed. He was filthy, hair matted with sweat and grease, as tacky with blood as the sheet he was currently cocooned in. Naked, although Gibbs had seen clothes in the corner. He thought that Tony's current birthday suit had less to do with insanity and more to do with necessity - the heap of fabric he'd seen back in that room had looked like it would barely qualify for cleaning rags. Tony must have worn it to tatters with constant use and harsh scrubbings of soap, until one of his last holds on humanity had turned into a useless scrap heap. He'd ingested some kind of toxin, because Tony had said that the water made him sick - he'd mentioned something about rust, but immediately added that that wasn't the problem, because "McGee" told him that it was really something in the pipes that was causing the nausea. He had ladder-marks of scars and healing gashes up and down both arms, and a few facial scars that Gibbs almost didn't want to understand.

And he might be insane.

Scratch that, he knew that Dinozzo currently didn't qualify anywhere near sanity. It wasn't a lack of marbles rolling around, it was that he had too many. He'd been dreaming of rescue, but Gibbs thought that wasn't part of his delirium - not as much as the window he'd been talking about and the apparent conversations he had been holding with people he hadn't seen in over six months.

Gibbs thought he could forgive Dinozzo for any kind of insanity he could bring to the table, because it wasn't like Gibbs hadn't had his own ideas of confrontation and conversation over the time Dinozzo had been missing. On one memorable occasion, investigating a midshipman who had supposedly hung himself, he had yelled at Kate to go find Tony and tell him to get his ass over here. The silence that followed had been enough to make him want to leave altogether, just storm off and leave the investigation in Kate's hands - the way she had been looking at him, the way McGee had shrunk against the wall, the way Ducky's hand had felt on his shoulder, and his voice calmly saying, "Maybe you should get some air, Jethro." It had been too much. It had been, well - crazy.

And now crazy was strapped into the backseat of his car while they were going seventy miles an hour in a fifty mile an hour zone, a rocket launched in a direction that he was barely able to control with a steering wheel and years of training. The cars lashed around him, blurs of painted steel, and Gibbs wasn't just driving to get somewhere, he was driving to put distance between the two of them and whatever had happened, whatever had gone so deadly wrong in that little room.

The sunny day around him was a bad joke. Tony was going to wake up with blisters on all of his exposed skin, and it would just be one more humiliation added on to the total he'd already mounted up.

He finally made it to the hospital in what he was sure had to be some kind of record, which should have meant something but somehow didn't. What meant something was how his hands started to shake when he reached for the handle of the car, and how feather-light Tony felt as Gibbs brought him upright. Tony stirred against his shoulder, eyelids fluttering, and said hoarsely, "Boss?"

"Right here, Dinozzo. You want to help me get you inside?"

"Inside . . ." Tony's face blanked and, if possible, went even whiter than before, and he started to struggle. As wasted as he was, it was like struggling with a dried-out leaf, but it was clear that Tony was putting everything he had into the fight, weak fists hammering against Gibbs's chest. "Don't take me back. Don't put me back in there."

"Tony." He caught one of Tony's fists in his hand. "I'm not taking you back there. No one's taking you back there. No one will ever make you go back there. I'm taking you to the hospital. You -" He almost laughed. "You're in pretty bad shape, Dinozzo. Someone's got to put all your pieces back in the right places again, and I can't do it all by myself. We're going to get you some professionals and they'll -"

What? What would they do? Maybe he could convince a Tony Dinozzo half-out-of-his-mind with hunger and isolation that it would be child's play for a real doctor to reassemble him, and maybe it would be simple enough to rehydrate him and add back a few layers of cushion between the world and his bones, but Gibbs had an idea that it would be much, much harder to fix what was happening inside Tony's head.

It didn't matter if he believed it or not - what mattered was that he convinced Dinozzo, who was still looking at him with shaky fear and a pleading need for reassurance.

"The doctors will be able to help you," Gibbs said finally. "And we'll get Ducky to give you all your regular checkups and you'll be back being a pain in the ass before we know it."

To say that Tony walked into the emergency room on his own free will would have been a vast exaggeration, but he at least allowed himself to be dragged there without anymore escape attempts, although when the electronic doors closed behind them and cut off the immediate view of open space, Tony went rigid with fear. Gibbs talked to him, never sure exactly what he was saying, but at least trying to soothe Tony so that those locked knees would start to move again and get them closer to the medical attention Tony obviously needed. After another few desperate, half-falling steps, with Tony clinging to him like a life raft, Gibbs began to regret not having called an ambulance. Maybe in his head, the reason for taking Tony himself was because the flashing lights and strangers would frighten Tony and send him into deeper shock, but the truth of it had been that he hadn't wanted to let Tony out of his sight. Now he thought he might need an ambulance just to get Tony into the waiting room.

Luckily, one of the great truths of the world was that no one who was pulling along an immobile, emaciated man wrapped in a bloody sheet had to spend very much time in a waiting room.

They were ushered - well, Tony was ushered, Gibbs just refused to go anywhere else - into a room immediately, doctors moving around them in a swarm. Gibbs distinctively heard at least one person say in a reverential voice, "Holy shit." He glared in the general direction of the whisper, cutting a swathe through the innocently confused faces until someone in the back went a dark shade of red and busied themselves hooking Dinozzo up with an IV.

"Sir, you really need to leave," someone said, trying to work around him and only succeeding in bumping into him three times. "We'll inform you on his condition as soon as he's stabilized."

Gibbs found his badge. "He's one of mine."

The doctor examined the ID for a moment before turning her attention back to her patient. "Stand in the corner, at least. You're interfering."

He backed into a featureless meeting of walls, grateful that at least no one had asked him what had happened to "one of his", grateful that no one had sent an accusatory glance his way, although God knew he deserved one. He was also profoundly grateful that Tony's flickering awareness had shifted back into unconsciousness, either from fear or exhaustion. He couldn't handle the incessant noise Dinozzo had been making in the back of his throat - he'd sounded like a trapped animal, pleading to be released.

The doctors barked meaningless things at each other over Tony's prone body, and Gibbs just tried to concentrate on taking in the basics. Most of it was stuff he had already realized: malnutrition, muscle loss, various superficial wounds. Gibbs looked at the ugly horizontal tallies on Tony's arms, like ladders descending from the scars of the numbers, and wondered how the hell anything like that managed to be classified as superficial, no matter how shallow the cuts were. When someone started using their own body as a timekeeper, they had moved beyond any diagnosis that included the word "superficial".

Finally, the same woman who had spoken to him gave the machines a once-over and said, "He's stable." Now the questions started. "Would you mind telling someone how on earth he managed to get in this condition?" And there it was - the barest whiff of accusation.

She was pitying Tony; Tony, who, if things had been right instead of so unbelievably wrong, would have already managed to secure her phone number into his cell. That somehow hurt more than his own guilt, the sudden flash of reminder at how Tony should have been, just a hideous reminder from his memories to complement the view before him.

He said coldly, "How much of the news did you watch a few months ago, doctor? That's Special Agent Tony Dinozzo, missing for six months and found maybe an hour ago. And that's everything I can tell you without getting more information myself - that he disappeared and now we have him. He wasn't really in the right mood to tell me all the details about whatever hell he's been through, but I intend to find out. Extensively. Now, instead of you asking me questions, why don't you try giving me a few answers?"

She surprised him. "How much do you think he weighed six months ago?"

His mind raced back to all the physicals that had been given, and tried to come up with an accurate representation. "Around one-ninety. Ten-fifteen pounds in either direction. It's not my specialty of observation."

"It's not mine, either, but I'm guessing he'd be lucky to tip the scales at one-thirty, as is."

When he had Bryant Hale in interrogation -

It was best not to think about that. The anticipation right now would only distract him. He curled his hands into tight fists and tried to focus, tried to somehow compute that weight loss and force it to make sense in terms of Tony. In terms of anyone at all. It wasn't supposed to be the kind of thing he could visualize, but, damn his luck, he had a full-body visual aid right in front of him, now swathed in a loose hospital gown and tucked between starched sheets. He could think of at least sixty pounds gone and then compare that figure to the hollow, gaunt look of Tony's face. Lucky, lucky him. No abstract thinking involved.

She moved a clipboard into a different position. "He isn't as dehydrated as he is malnourished. He's had something to drink -"

"Water," Gibbs said. "I know he had some." He was thinking about Bryant Hale saying, "I think he finally lost it when he ran out of water." But then Tony had said that the water from the faucet made him sick - but there had been the litter of plastic bottles around the bare room. "Probably most of it was pure, but he's had some contaminated."

"How much?"

"I don't know."

"How long?"

"I don't know." He drove a fist into his thigh. "Not that he wasn't in a talking mood, it was just that nothing he said made a lot of sense."

She checked his ID again. "Special Agent Gibbs. Why don't you go and wait outside?"

"He'll want me to be here when he wakes up," Gibbs said.

It was probably true - without his presence, Tony would probably be convinced that he was back in the room and he might even try to "cut deep" the way he had threatened. The hospital room did bear a certain resemblance to the sterile prison Tony had called home. But even if that hadn't been the case, Gibbs didn't want to leave him alone again.

"He won't be waking up anytime soon," she said coolly. "We're going to keep him under sedation for a while to get his strength up with the IVs. When we wake him, someone will come and get you. I don't think you'll be hard to find."

Gibbs couldn't find an argument rational enough to appeal to those steel-cold eyes, so he nodded and added an addendum that if Dinozzo woke up and he wasn't there, there would be hell to pay. He was hard-pressed to define what kind of hell, and counted himself fortunate that the doctor accepted this with a mildly-amused nod before shooing him out of the room. Well, he had promised Dinozzo medical professionals, and that was exactly what he had gotten.

He turned the corner and collided with Abby, eyes widening in temporary chill-shock as cold liquid spilled over his shirt when her Caff-Pow tilted into his chest.

"Warm welcome, Abs," he said.

She was flanked by McGee and Ducky, Kate apparently still with Hale, and all of them looked anxious, strained between being concerned and being happy, making their smiles look like ghastly, clown-painted parodies of tense muscles and flushed faces. If Ducky looked a little calmer than the rest, it was only conditioning and experience that allowed him to appear a little less haggard.

"How is he?"

"He's - alive," Gibbs said.

"Oh dear," Ducky said. "An opening like that usually indicates that life is the only good news you'll have to give to us."

"Life is good enough," Abby said, lifting her chin. "Yesterday, we didn't even have that."

McGee didn't say anything, he was staring at Gibbs with a look of deep concentration, as if he were able to flip open his mind, rifle through his memories, and come up with an accurate picture of Tony, complete with statistical references and footnotes. It was how he usually looked when he was bent over a computer with Abby at his side, two pairs of hands hammering into a keyboard in an odd unity, tongue and teeth against his lower lip until it was grooved and damp. Whatever he was looking for, he didn't find anything, because the brief flicker of disappointment showed from underneath the intent, and then Super McGee was just McGee again, a little bashful and a little confused.

Ducky finally broke the silence. "How bad are things, Jethro?"

"When I walked into that room," he said, trying to keep his voice level as if restraint would tell them more about how grave it had been than any outright rage, "I was the first person Tony had seen since he went missing. That's how bad things are."

McGee was the one who spoke, slowly and with growing horror, trying to reason things out as if, he offered enough sensible reasons as to why this was too terrible to have happened, he could turn back time and make it not be true after all.

"Tony's been . . . alone?"

"As far as I know, and as far as I was able to figure out from Hale, Tony was placed in one room and he never left it." He realized that his hands were shaking and he shoved them into his pockets. "When I found him, he . . . didn't understand what was happening. He thought it was a - a dream."

Dream wasn't really an accurate synonym for hallucination, but it was as close as Gibbs was willing to get. If he played things right, Tony's fluid conception of reality could stay between Kate and himself. Insanity was a black mark that Tony's record probably couldn't stand against.

"If you talk to him, touch him," he continued. "It makes me feel better."

Any other time, he thought bitterly, and this would have made them all laugh. Kate, had she been there, would have been smirking, saying: You want us to hold Tony's hand and lead him through the big bad adult conversations? Keep his attention from wandering? Oh, yeah. I'm sure he's going to love it - any excuse to throw in a little sideways pass . . . and Abby would have been wide-mouthed at the mental image of Gibbs making his way down a cold concrete hallway with Tony looped around his arm like a debutante. McGee would have flushed, trying to hold in laughter, and Ducky would have smiled indulgently at how foolish they all were, secretly amused himself.

Now they nodded gravely, all in unison, an orchestrated row of bobbing heads, and Gibbs would laugh if the curious obstruction in his throat could be moved.

They all look confused; grief-stricken; exhausted; betrayed.

It was the betrayal that Gibbs understood more than anything else. They had, after all, found him. They had looked for him for endless months, sacrificed their sleep and their serenity, and all for him. They were like war veterans marching back home with their wounds and their shell shock, only to find that their homes had been burned, their families slaughtered, and their livelihoods destroyed. They had earned these dark circles and paled faces so that Tony could be brought home safe and sound. And Dinozzo, damn him, had actually had the nerve to not be okay. How unbelievable. How selfish. He could see their fury, how, beneath everything, they wanted to shove Tony against the wall and scream at him for being so rude.

And all Gibbs could say to comfort them was: "If you talk to him, touch him." Fantastic. All right then.

"What else?" Abby asked. She was leaning against McGee. "There's more, isn't there?"

"He's lost a little weight."

He laughed. He couldn't help it. The sound just exploded from him and he bent forward, pushing his hands against his knees while it roared out of him, and he wasn't sure if he was going to keep on laughing or start to throw up, but all his years of military training took hold, and his stomach stopped its tap-dance. They were looking at him like he was crazy. Well. Might be so. He put one hand against the side of his mouth as if to keep another laugh from cracking through his skin, and explained how much weight had been lost, exactly. He detailed in technical terms and unintelligent gestures how the Tony they had known had become the Walking Skeleton, someone you'd pay to see in a freak show corner of an illegal carnival.

"God," McGee said finally, not an exclamation or a curse, not a prayer, just a flat statement that hung between them. Gibbs didn't understand it, couldn't personally think of a time he had believed less in God.

"Oh yeah," he said, "God, McGee. You want to see him?"

He didn't like the cruelty in his voice but there it was. He couldn't hear it, but saw it in the way they looked scalded in response. In his head, he went further:

You want to see him, the guy that gave you no end of grief? He's damn lucky that his bones don't go clean through his skin when he moves. Call Kate in here, no reason for her to miss the party, let's let her get a good, long look at him. He used to be such a hotshot, and didn't she hate that? Hate how he thought he was the best thing in the room, the best thing in the country, the best thing in the world? How he was such a pretty boy, and how he knew it? Oh, the cat-fights the two of them used to have, remember, when they couched all those arguments and indications of camaraderie into bitching? He's not so pretty now. Don't think he'll be anywhere close to it anytime soon, either, see - he's collapsed. Take notes, in case you need this for an investigation, in case Ducky can use it later in some anecdote that takes three hours to deliver. Know that the human body collapses in on itself, as if its trying to eat all that useless flesh that can barely keep itself alive. Know that the stomach shrinks and withers, caving in, and all those facial muscles that used to know the electrical codes for smiling and frowning and kissing draw downwards so that your former pretty boy looks like a concentration camp refugee who's just had a stroke. Of course, we don't think like that these days, no, we're too civilized, but what I'm trying to make you see is that the guy who used to turn heads because he had that charm and that smile is going to turn heads because he looks like a plastic surgeon's impending lawsuit, some facelift screwed up to hell and gone. So if you really want to see him, take some pictures. We'll get them on a before and after show along with his old ID, publish them in a diet magazine. Dear Conscientious Readers: All you have to do in order to shed those unwanted sixty-odd pounds is to get someone to lock you up in a little room and not let you out, no matter how much you start to scream.

All aboard: the last train to your sanity is leaving in this many seconds: 3, 2, 1 . . . gone.

He bit down on his tongue. "They're going to tell me when he wakes up. We can see him then."

"Not now?"

"Abby, sitting beside someone who doesn't know you're there only looks good in the movies." He kept his voice gentle this time. "We'll come in once Dinozzo's headed for the world of the living again."