The Window: Tony (II)

"Now, it's just a routine series of questions, so I don't want you to be nervous."

"Yeah," he said, and pulled at a loose string on the inside of his coat pocket, "except for the part where I know this routine series of questions is the deciding factor in whether or not I get to keep my job. No reason to be nervous about that or anything, God forbid."

A chuckle. "Okay, I can see that you'd be concerned. Shall we start?"

"I'm game if you are, doc."

"Fine. You recertified on your weapons test, passed your physical fitness tests - barely, you could still stand to add on a little more weight, but you passed and that's the bottom line. To be honest, Agent Dinozzo, your superiors are concerned with your decision to not attend the recommended therapy, but they aren't throwing up any roadblocks for you: all of this is strictly routine. Everyone's amazed at how quickly you've put yourself back together: physically, mentally, and emotionally."

"Well, Abby started giving me gold stars for every five pounds I put back on, and that's a hell of a lot of motivation. You know, they're so shiny."

He gave another vicious tug at the string in his pocket, and it ripped free between his fingers.

"And Gibbs stole my address book until I passed physical therapy," he continued. "Ducky made sure that I remembered everything and - taught me a lot of things I never knew in the first place and I'm not sure that I really needed to know . . . and McGee . . . and Kate . . . well, I had a lot of help."

He smiled his best smile, all charm.

The doctor didn't seemed charmed, though, he just picked up his clipboard and removed the pen from the sleek metal clamp. Tony shrugged it off - at least the doctor wasn't one of the cold, completely clinical ones that looked him over as if all they were seeing was the shadow of old bones and old wounds underneath his newer skin. This one was a little more human - and, unfortunately, a little more intelligent, but Tony had always found that there were three kinds of people in the world: those he could charm, those he could fool, and NCIS agents.

The doctor wasn't the first, wasn't the last, and therefore had to be the second.

"How much do you remember about your actual abduction?"

"Very little," he admitted unselfconsciously. "I remember driving home from work that night, and then I remember waking up in Hale's room."

"I've read the evaluations of the room. Tell me your impression of it."

"It was small." He didn't have to close his eyes in order to recall the complete image to his mind, it was always layered over his present, like a half-realized fever dream, or a photograph developing over his real life. It had taunted him through his physical therapy, hung over every conversation, always a constant reminder that he could be returned there if it he wasn't as good as they wanted and as good as he'd promised. "The walls were concrete, the door was steel. I had a twin bed - thin mattress, single sheet, bolted to the floor. Half-bath and a pantry."

"What was your reaction? At first?"

"Nonchalance. I knew someone would come."

"And later?"

"Depends on how much later." He held up a hand. "I'm not trying to avoid the question, I just need you to be specific. I changed a lot while I was in there."

"How did you feel when you found out that the search had been called off?"

"Angry."

There, he'd done it - he'd reduced a screaming fit and hysterical ravings to a single word. It wasn't true, but it was a perfect lie because he managed to sound a little ashamed and a little self-conscious, as if anger was the only thing he had inside him that was shameful. It was the best lie - a perfect sound in the air, the perfect reaction from the doctor, a beautiful sound of a hammer striking a bell.

"Later?"

"I started to hallucinate. That was when I started to run out of food."

Gibbs had told him, later, that Bryant Hale had only really stocked the room with enough food for five months, and had been amazed when he'd still heard Tony's activity through the walls. Gibbs had put one hand on the back of Tony's neck and squeezed it in a brief backwards gesture of sentiment - a Gibbs sign of affection, the reverse slap of the head, had said, "You did good, Dinozzo. You stayed alive."

Pretty high praise.

"Do you still see things that aren't there?"

"For the first two weeks after NCIS took me out, I had some trouble telling the difference between real and my own imagination, but not anymore."

"Did you ever relapse?"

-()

"Before you do, don't."

Gibbs stopped three inches from the bed, looking wary. Old days, pre-confinement days, Gibbs would have gotten irritated or confused - on a good day, amused - but now, in these bright, shiny, post-confinement days, Gibbs was always cautious, always wary, and always so considerate that it hurt. It made everything fake, a joke he didn't find funny. Gibbs would come around and ask how he was doing, whether he'd been eating like he was supposed to, whether he was having trouble with nightmares, and then everyone would be surprised when he wasn't sure that Gibbs was real.

"Before I do what?"

Tony folded his arms across his chest. "Don't touch me."

Gibbs frowned. "Something wrong, Dinozzo?"

"I'm sick of everyone touching me. I'm sick of everyone making reassuring gestures. I'm over the acid trip hallucinations, I know where I am, and I don't need pats on the back to keep my head on straight."

"All right," Gibbs said agreeably. "No touching."

"Sit down. I'm too tired to stand up and I hate it when people loom over me."

Gibbs sat. Gibbs listening? Gibbs following his instructions? There was a distinctive advantage to having been crazy and still being doubtfully sane - a definite advantage to being locked in a cage for half-a-year. You got anything you wanted. Too bad hell came along first, or he would have really enjoyed this. Now it just pissed him off.

"Before you can ask, my physical therapy session was shitty, I haven't gained any weight, and I still won't agree to that plastic surgery. And before I can ask you anything, let me play out that side of the conversation, too. How was your day, boss? Same-old, same-old, Dinozzo. Catch any bad guys? Nothing special. Kate miss me? Like the plague. Anyone coming tomorrow? Blah-blah Kate, blah-blah Abby, blah-blah McGee, blah-blah Ducky. Blah-blah your parents, Dinozzo, anything you want to talk about?" He cut off his mimicry savagely and dug his fingers into his thighs, kneading the sore muscles. Physical therapy was a bitch and a half. "Let's start a new conversation, Gibbs."

"All right, Dinozzo."

"Because I don't want to talk about therapy or food or surgery, and I don't care about your day."

"And you don't want to talk about your parents."

"Given." If Gibbs started another mini-tirade about what kind of parents wouldn't come to see their son when he was stuck in the hospital after going through what Tony had gone through, Tony wasn't just going to cover his ears with pillows and hum, he was going to start throwing bed controls and water glasses across the room. "I just - I don't want to talk about that. I'm sick of talking about it, boss, we've worn it into the ground and then some. Can we just pretend for five minutes that nothing happened? Just five minutes, Gibbs, please - five normal minutes where I'm not in the hospital and you're not - pod Gibbs."

For a second, Gibbs looked indecisive, and then he said, "We have a dead lieutenant. Someone found him in a meat locker. Bludgeoned to death. Guess the instrument."

"Leg of lamb."

"Close. Pot roast." Gibbs laughed. "I had to get Kate to talk to the press about it - no one else could keep a straight face all the way through cause of death."

"Getting killed with pot roast."

"Smack over the head."

"If I ever suffer death by pot roast, I want you to be kind and have Ducky say I went out manfully in a hail of gunfire. Say it took six bullets to bring me down."

"You kidding, Dinozzo? You get knocked over the head with a pot roast and I'm putting it on my Christmas cards."

"You don't send Christmas cards."

"I'd start, if I had news like that."

They filled up their five minutes with meaningless debate, the respective merits of death by pot roast versus death by leg of lamb. No wheedling for him to keep on shoveling food he didn't want down his throat, no comments about how much better he was looking, no prodding questions about his parents, and most of all and best of all - no asking him if he intended to reconsider that plastic surgery option, reminded again that the cost would be covered.

They wanted to erase his scars.

They wanted to take his days away.

Tony had let them patch up the badly healed gashes on his face, but he hadn't let Gibbs or anyone else talk him into fixing the tally marks and numbers on his arms. He just wore the long-sleeved shirts he had McGee buy for him, and didn't look anyone in the eye when he once again refused to sign the papers.

"Thanks," he said finally. "For treating me like I'm real, not like I'm crazy -"

Gibbs walked into the room, pulled up the chair, and laid his hand across Tony's arm. Tony went absolutely still, trying to see the exact moment when the Gibbs he'd imagined turned into the Gibbs that was indisputably real, and then he snatched his hand away from underneath that reality, face burning with shame. Spontaneous recovery. The doctors had said it would happen. Too many glitches still stuck in his system to expect his coping method to vanish completely, right away. It sounded so logical when they explained it. Nobody told him that spontaneous recovery meant only his hallucinations would pretend that he was sane and always had been.

"Don't touch me," he said harshly.

Gibbs was nonplussed. "Why not?"

"Because I know real from fake now," he said, "and I don't need this constant reassurance."

Gibbs nodded. "How was your physical therapy today?"

"Good," he lied tonelessly. "It really went well."

He didn't try to broach the idea of a five-minute state of grace with Gibbs this time. There wouldn't be a point. They both knew he wasn't sane.

"I had what the doctors called periods of spontaneous recovery. Like post-traumatic stress disorder - I'd revert back to using my own mind to escape, but it wouldn't happen often, just after particularly rough physical sessions or bad nightmares. But the nightmares went away -" he wasn't sure that lie was quite as convincing, "and even the physical stuff stopped bothering me."

"You used it to deal with stress?"

"You could say that."

"But you don't think that, given the nature of your job, the stress would cause you to recall this practice?"

"I thought about that," Tony said, and he had. "They started bringing me files a few weeks ago, using me as a consult, gave me time limits. Pretty stressful situations, but I didn't have any problems handling it. I realize that it's not the same, and I can't know how I'm going to react when something really bad happens, but that's the same problem everyone has. Nobody knows."

"That's very true."

"I've had a lot of time to think about my options."

"I have to admit, Agent Dinozzo, I'd feel better if you'd agree to see someone professionally about your experience. I respect your privacy, of course, and I know that you're close to your coworkers and that they've been of great help to you, but there's some assistance that therapy would provide that your current support system lacks."

"Such as?"

"Do you feel uncomfortable with your coworkers now?"

Tony was blunt. "Special Agent Gibbs pulled me out of hell, doc. I couldn't walk. I was naked. He wrapped me in a sheet and practically carried me outside while I was raving in his ear about things that didn't exist. Agent Todd was in the room when I threw up all over myself trying to eat. If I were uncomfortable with my coworkers, I wouldn't be alive right now. I know things are supposed to look different after the dust clears, but things are still the same."

Except for how he couldn't look them in the eyes. Any of them.

"How do you feel about Bryant Hale?"

He'd been eating applesauce when Kate had told him. He remembered that not because the memory of food was indelibly tied to the memory of Hale, but because she had told him in the third week, and he'd still been on soft, mushy, nutritious foods. He still couldn't get the taste of all those sugary apples out of his mouth, no matter how many times he scrubbed his teeth. His toothbrush was starting to look bloody and ragged. Not important. What mattered was how he remembered pausing with the spoon halfway to his mouth, and when his hand had started shaking, a glob of lukewarm applesauce had toppled onto his hospital gown and seeped through to his skin.

-()

"I don't even know who that is," he said finally, wiping at the damp patch on the gown, his face burning. "I - I don't even know who that is." It seemed very significant to let her know that, because it was so inexplicable to him - how someone he'd never met would lock him away in a box.

"Gibbs put him away for kidnapping a Marine two years before you joined NCIS."

"So this was some personal thing." He took the napkin she extended and blotted the fabric. "Right?"

He didn't know what she wanted his reaction to be, and he could have tried to manufacture one, but he was too tired. Confusion had blurred the edges of all his responses, and left him with trying to scrub a spreading applesauce stain out of a cheap cloth gown. His mind drifted from the words, making the connections with the distant sound of a key turning in a lock. Gibbs. Personal. Marine. NCIS. He wondered if she wanted him to be angry about this.

"When Gibbs found out, he didn't handle it well."

"No," Tony said distantly, "I don't think he would."

He rubbed harder, but could still feel the dampness. Dammit. No matter how hard he scrubbed, it never went away. And if he didn't get it out, it would just become another blemish they'd want to erase it the way they wanted to erase the numbers from his arms - take away all of his days and all of his ingrained memories. Didn't they understand how easily you forgot things when you couldn't see them? If you didn't throw it out right away, you had to keep it forever, those were the rules.

"We just wanted you to know that he's in custody," Kate said, "and you won't have to testify."

"That's nice," he said, and turned his attention back to the spot. "I'm really very happy for you."

"Tony -"

"Don't take it so personally, Kate." He attacked it again. His skin ached, rubbed raw. "It's nothing personal, just like I shouldn't take it personally that I'm the one who got locked in a damned box until I lost my mind. I'm not taking it personally at all. No reason why you should feel a little guilty because it took you six months to get me out. No reason to feel guilty about fucking up the whole Eurydice parable we had going on here. I don't blame you, because I'm not taking it personally."

"Eurydice," she said softly.

He put a hand over his eyes. "When you want to impersonate people who are smarter than you, Kate, you have to dig up every iota of what you've forgotten. Did I ever tell you how amazing it is, all the things you can remember when you can barely think of your own name? I used to have these dreams where Gibbs would show up and tell me that I'd been recalled to life."

"Charles Dickens."

"A Tale of Two Cities," he said, nodding. "Can you hand me another napkin?"

She gave it to him, wordlessly, and he smiled as he took it.

"I just can't seem to get this stain out," he said, scrubbing harder. "I had to wash my clothes in there, did I tell you that? I mean, you probably could have guessed. I was naked when Gibbs brought me out, but I wore the clothes as long as I could, but there's not much you can do with bar soap and a tiny sink, especially when you wear the same thing day in and day out. You know, when I finally realized that I'd worn them to pieces, I pounded on the door for about an hour and demanded that he bring me more clothes. That's funny, isn't it?"

Kate shook her head. "No, it's not."

"I think it's funny," he said, almost offended. "Six months in there, and I was mostly at that door demanding luxury items. Of course, the one time, I told him he had to take me to the hospital."

"Why did you need to go to the hospital?"

He knew that she was looking at the scars on his arms, and he blocked them, turning them inward. "Smashed my face against a mirror," he said. "Didn't you see the scars?" Tony didn't wait for her to answer, just switched back to Hale as if they'd never been talking about anything else. "So he put me in the room because he wanted to annoy Gibbs?"

"He was crazy, Tony."

"It's going around," he said, putting the napkin down. There. The stain was gone. "And it's not so bad, not once you get used to it." He snapped his fingers, feeling his smile widen as the perfect thought occurred to him. "You know, they sent Eurydice back to hell."

-()

"Bryant Hale," he said, mulling over the words. "I never even really met him, did they tell you that? He was there when Agent Gibbs brought me out of confinement, but I didn't really understand what was happening, and they didn't really tell me who he was. Agent Todd told me, later, who he was - a pattern-criminal with a grudge against NCIS. This might sound crazy, but I didn't take it personally. Hearing that it was more of an act against an organization almost made me feel better - because I'd been trying to understand why someone I didn't even know had done that to me. Systematic terrorism almost makes more sense. But it doesn't fix anything."

You know that you are recalled to life?

"What do you mean?"

"I still hate him," he said.

It was very blunt for something that was a complete lie. He had never hated Bryant Hale. And after they had let him out of the box, he had even stopped hating Hale's experiment. It was as if a thick veil of indifference had settled over him and wrapped tight.

You know that you are recalled to life?

They tell me so.

"That's a perfectly reasonable reaction," the doctor said, and wrote it down.

I hope you care to live.

I can't say.

-()

Gibbs was waiting outside the door when Tony swung it open. Tony thought he'd seen walls with more of an expression. Gibbs's frown was set in concrete. Tony didn't bother having the inevitable conversation right there in front of the office, he just swung into step and let Gibbs try and catch up with him, hoping that he got far enough that Gibbs had to jog to meet him again once he broke out of that shock. But Gibbs, ever composed, was only a beat behind, in a second, was ahead.

"That was a lot of bullshit in there, Dinozzo," Gibbs said finally.

Tony listened to the sounds of their footsteps echoing in the hallway. There hadn't been any echoes in Hale's little room - all the walls had been too tight for that. Now he listened to the secondhand sound and caught Gibbs's remark a few seconds later, trailing behind the clicking heels.

"Now, boss," he said, "that's not very encouraging. Not in my tentative mental state."

"What the hell happened, Tony?"

"I think I just passed with flying colors. Weren't you listening to how happy he sounded? I'm just as sane as sane can be. I could give the Dalai Llama a run for his money. What do you think? I did pretty good in there, yeah, Gibbs? No running off at the mouth. Short and sweet and to-the-point, damn, I killed in there. Knocked him dead, didn't I? I know you were listening."

"You lied. You don't hate Bryant Hale."

"I can see how you'd know that," Tony said, wanting to be angry but not quite making it, "from all those heart-to-heart chats we've had about my feelings."

Gibbs turned his head to each side and then pushed him into the nearby bathroom, not giving him a chance to adjust to the new, closer walls before pinning him against one. He heard, more than felt, the distant crack of his head against the tile wall. The whole place reeked of ammonia and piss, and Tony squirmed, not wanting to touch any part of it, but Gibbs didn't move.

"You don't feel anything anymore, Dinozzo. You think I can't tell?"

"Get off me."

"You don't think I know what hate looks like? You don't think I'd be able to tell if you felt that way? I wouldn't have to look very far, I know damn well what I look like every time someone even mentions that bastard, I'd be able to see it in your eyes. They'd go dark, Dinozzo," his elbow ground into Tony's shoulder, "are you listening to me? And your mouth would tense up and you wouldn't even be able to talk because it would be like spitting nails. Are you getting any of this at all? Dry mouth. Your skin would crawl and you'd look down and see your hands in fists. That's hate. You don't have it. You're moving on autopilot and it's scaring the shit out of me."

"Get off me!" He wormed out from underneath Gibbs's weight and went into the open, arms spiraling, feeling as if he were going to topple onto the floor. He felt his face burning. "Don't touch me!" He swung wide, almost to counteract his tumble, and struck Gibbs in the jaw. It was a silly punch, ridiculous, weak. A roundhouse that barely connected, but the second he heard the dull thud, he felt something snap in his center. Breaking point.

Which was funny, because he thought he'd already broken.

"You lied all the way through that," Gibbs said, one hand over the side of his mouth. "You were good, but you were lying."

"I'm back on your team," he whispered. "They proved me sane six ways from Sunday."

"Not if I go in there and tell him -"

"Tell him what, Gibbs? I battered myself in there. Told him how the hallucinations hung around for a long time before they took off, told him that I was bitter and angry and scared. What can you possibly say, go in and start telling him that I must be really screwed up, because I don't hate enough? You know what, go ahead and try it. You'll be the one they lock in a padded cell."

Gibbs grinned hard at him, his smile all teeth. "Now that's what hate looks like, Dinozzo. Right there."

"I could really learn to hate you full-time," he said tiredly, straightening his jacket. "That's something to get used to, you know. I never hated you before."

Gibbs's hands were warm on his shoulders, and Tony turned his head to one side, not wanting to look.

"Talk to me, Dinozzo. You're more alive now than you've been in a month."

"I went crazy," he said to the wall. "I really lost it in there. But you know what sucks the most, Gibbs? I never lost all of it. I kept just enough to keep making it all end. I escaped from that place a hundred times, and then that little bit of logic kicked in and told me that I was still there. You know what does that now? Alarm clocks. I'll hear one go off and I'll feel like a bubble's rising in my head, getting ready to pull me out of another rescue dream. It always messed with me. You too."

"I wasn't there, Tony."

"Sure you were," Tony said. "Not really, but you were, because I never forgot you. Saw you more often than anyone. I mean, I had Kate to ask all the tough questions, and McGee to be my conscience, but I had you to - I don't even know what you were doing, but you were there more than anyone else. You talked to me. In the craziest way, you kept me sane."

"I can't blame you for hating me for that," Gibbs said, and let him go.

Tony leaned against the wall. The mixed scent of lemons and urine rose up and trickled into his nose. He thought that he might cry.

"You don't get it," he said. "You don't understand."

"I understand," Gibbs said, helping him away from the wall, using his hands like a rope-ladder descending from a vertical plane. And then, somehow, Tony fell against him, instead, and Gibbs didn't push him away, just pulled him closer. Tony wondered if Gibbs could feel the heat of his face burning through his shirt, and it wasn't comforting at all, just embarrassing, crying and being hugged by his boss in this sour, citrus-smelling bathroom. "I'm sorry, Dinozzo. We looked for you. I promise we looked for you."

That wasn't what Tony had meant, not at all.

"I know," he said into Gibbs's shoulder. "I know you did."

And he did know that, he hadn't needed verification from Kate to prove that once he was gone, Gibbs had lost a lot of his patience in the search. All he'd really needed to know that Gibbs had driven himself over the deep end looking for him was to remember how Gibbs had looked when he'd crashed into Bryant Hale's room, when Tony had still been a little absently confused, because it was rare that his hallucinations showed such independent emotions, and even rarer when they looked like they couldn't decide whether to scream or throw up or start praying. So yes, despite the announcement on the news, Tony was well-aware that Gibbs had been looking for him.

This stifling, uncomfortable hug was probably more for Gibbs than it was for him, so he tightened his arms around Gibbs and pressed his face into his shirt, waiting for the heat of tears to seep through him again. Nothing happened. Maybe it was just - maybe he was just worn out. It had been a long day.

Gibbs was going to let him go into the field again, he knew that - because the one thing Gibbs couldn't handle was guilt and the one thing Tony could handle was the orchestration of emotions. A virtuoso. He just needed to get back in practice before his skills started getting rusty - the psychiatrist had been good practice, but this was the real deal - Gibbs was what was really standing between him and his return. Gibbs, and Gibbs's guilt. But this would be easy. He'd had to lie in order to manipulate the doctor, he only had to tell the truth in order to play Gibbs's strings.

He raised his head and his mouth was near Gibbs's ear. "It was easy there," he said softly, and felt Gibbs go absolutely still. "I couldn't tell you that before. I didn't think you'd understand.

"But there," he continued, aware of how he could no longer feel Gibbs's breath on his neck, as if Gibbs had stopped breathing entirely, "after I stopped trying, I had everything I wanted. I had everything."

"Jesus, Dinozzo," Gibbs said faintly, and Tony, pulling back, smiled at him.

"That's why you shouldn't feel bad, boss," he said. "That's why it shouldn't bother you, how long it took to find me, or that Bryant Hale was trying to hurt you the whole time. It shouldn't bother you, because sometimes, Gibbs, when I didn't wonder about it - sometimes it was really good."