WEDNESDAY
It was 9:30 a.m. on Wednesday when Tony's day began. The knock on the door came just as Tony was hacking the last of the morning phlegm out of his system. He felt better, but still had that raspy "morning breathing" that he hated.
"Hang on … I'm coming," he croaked out, as he slid on his socks out to the door. He had a momentary flash of Tom Cruise in "Risky Business" and made a mental note to do a little air-guitar later in the day, if he felt up to it. Tony opened the door to a DHL delivery man holding a box of substantial size. 'It's a B.O.S.S.', Tony thought with a chuckle. He envisioned Gibbs dressed as the dread pirate Roberts in "The Princess Bride."
Tony signed for the box, ignoring the DHL guy's once-over of him, standing there in his PJs and socks, with obvious bed-head and a just-a-little-too-pale complexion. "Thanks, man," Tony said, followed by a series of hacking coughs. The delivery man stepped back just a little too quickly, almost stumbling down the stairs.
"Dude," he said to Tony. "What do you have, the plague or something?"
Tony just stared at him and closed the door.
"Presents!" Tony said with glee. He put the box down on the kitchen table, forcing himself to wait to open it until after he'd taken his meds and had breakfast. Gibbs or Ducky would be calling soon, and he wanted to be ready. He was half-way through a bowl of shredded wheat with bananas when the phone rang. It's was three minutes after ten, and the phone screen read "Kate." That was a surprise.
"Katie!" Tony said, his mouth full of cereal. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"
"Hi Tony," Kate said, a bit startled. "You sound … good." He couldn't tell if she was happy about that, or if it kind of bugged her that he sounded good and wasn't at work.
"Well," he said, "it's early. I usually wait until later in the day to hack stuff up." He could imagine her face and the look of minor disgust that was on it. "What's up?"
"Gibbs is in MTAC and Ducky is swamped in Autopsy," she said. "They asked me to call and find out how you were doing." There was a pause. "How are you doing?"
Tony was momentarily disappointed by the fact that Kate herself didn't seem to care how he was, but he let it go. If it was busy at NCIS, she was probably trying to do three or more things at once, one of which was checking up on him. Besides, she'd stayed with him in Bethesda for nearly a week, keeping him company several hours each day and then going to the office every night to catch up on work. She deserved a Get Out of Jail Free card.
"Tell Gibbs and Ducky and anyone else who asks that I'm doing fine," Tony said, cheerfully. "And that they don't have to call me every day for a sit-rep. I'm taking my meds, eating healthy food …" Kate sniggered at that. "Hey!" Tony said, "I've got shredded wheat and a banana here, with a glass of orange juice and an apple-bran muffin. What did YOU have for breakfast, miss smarty-pants?" There was silence on the other end of the phone.
"Ah-hah!" Tony said, with a touch of smugness in his voice. "I thought so. Anyway … I'm good. Doing well. Coughing less. Bored out of my mind." His eyes moved to the still unopened box on the table with hope that its contents would assuage his boredom. "Tell them that I'm fine."
There was silence on the other end of the line and Tony wondered if Kate was taking notes, preparing to recite, word for word, what he'd just said.
"Kate?" Tony ventured. "You still there?"
"Yup … here, Tony," Kate said. "I'm sorry … just … well … I'm trying to listen to a conversation of McGee's while also talking to you."
"Really?" Tony said with interest. "What's going on?"
"I'm not sure," Kate said, conspiratorially, her voice dropping to a near-whisper. "I think he's got something going – a new girlfriend, maybe. He keeps dropping his voice and looking around to see if anyone is listening. I wish you were here – you could get it out of him."
"You wish I was there?" Tony teased. "Why Kate, I didn't know you cared." He grinned.
"I wish you were here because you're a better eavesdropper than me, Tony," Kate said in an exasperated tone. "That's not a ringing endorsement. It's not like I miss you or anything."
Tony laughed, which led to a short bout of light coughs, with just enough substance to sound worse than they were.
"If you're doing that for my benefit," Kate said, with a tinge of worry in her tone, "it's not working." She was a terrible liar.
"Nah," Tony assured her. "I'd have done that no matter who was on the phone." He could tell she was searching for a comeback, but again, he let her off the hook. "Anyway," he said, with a smile on his face and a cheerful tone, "thanks for checking up on me, Kate. I really do miss you guys."
"Yeah, Tony," Kate said, before she could stop herself. "We miss you too."
It took every bit of self-control Tony had not to pounce on that, but he figured that he'd let her off the hook twice already, what was once more?
"Thanks, Kate," he said again. "Don't work too hard." And then he hung up.
As Kate hung up her phone, McGee was looking at her incredulously. "You told him we missed him?" he said, his voice rising in pitch as he reached the end of the sentence. "Are you crazy? He'll hold that against us forever."
"Sorry, McGee," Kate said, crossly. "But we do miss him." McGee hung his head slightly. "And the man almost died," she continued. "The least we can do is let him know that we might be just a little bit glad that he didn't."
McGee opened his mouth to apologize, but Kate cut him off.
"Next time," she said, with a smile, "you do the 'check on Tony' call. If you can tear yourself away from whoever-she-is on the other line."
McGee reddened and turned his attention back to his computer just as Gibbs rounded the corner.
"Gear up!" he said. Then, he looked at Kate. "Well?" he asked, pointedly.
"He's awake, eating shredded wheat and bananas with orange juice and a bran muffin, he's bored, and he misses us."
"Good," Gibbs said with a hint of a smile, as he headed to the elevator, McGee and Kate on his heels.
Meanwhile, back at Tony's apartment, the breakfast dishes had been cleaned up, Tony had taken a shower and straightened his bed, and it was time to open "the box." You would have thought it was a bomb squad exercise, the way Tony carefully removed each line of tape and cautiously cut through the other binding. But this was a big deal. Tony didn't get presents often, and this one was unmarked. While everything pointed to it being a get-well gift from a far-flung friend ("far-flung friend, far-flung friend, far-flung friend" Tony repeated quickly, just to see if he could), there was just a sliver of a possibility that this was a not-so-nice surprise from some past perp with a grudge who was using Tony's convalescence as an excuse for a little payback.
Tony wiggled his fingers over the box like a magician getting ready to pull a rabbit out of a hat. He opened the flaps of the box, half expecting it glow. He saw a fitted piece of Styrofoam. 'Well', he thought, 'probably not a bomb then. Unless the sender was really anal.' Tony momentarily wondered if he'd ever done anything so horrible to McGee that McGee might create, pack and ship him a bomb. He made a mental note to let the secretarial pool know that he was only kidding and McGee wasn't gay.
Tony pulled an envelope off the top of the Styrofoam. He removed the card and saw a picture of a buxom woman in a nurse's uniform promising to help him "Get back in top form!" Tony grinned. He opened the card to find the signatures of six of his frat brothers from Ohio State. A hand-written note said, "Sorry we can't be there to nurse you back to health, but hopefully this will keep you busy until you're cleared for 'active duty' again." There were various off-color comments accompanying the signatures, along with one badly-drawn cartoon of an NCIS agent with a big "X" on the door behind him and a sign around his neck that said 'PLAGUE'. Tony took the card and added it to the collection he'd put up on the refrigerator. Then he pulled the Styrofoam top off and gasped with wonder at what was inside the box.
"Oh. My. God." Tony said, with shock, delight and anticipation. "An Xbox!" He was beside himself. Not only an Xbox, he discovered as he dug deeper, but an Xbox with all the latest accoutrements, including at least two dozen games. Tony stood up and went to the place in the living room where a picture of he and his frat brothers was hanging.
"My brothers!" he said, raising a fist in the air and then going through a set of odd "secret handshake" motions that probably made a lot more sense when there was someone else standing across from him doing the same thing. Then he bowed solemnly to the picture and went back into the dining room, humming the Ohio State fight song as he went.
It took about 45 minutes to set up the Xbox and properly connect it to all of the various components in the entertainment center. Tony read through the directions twice, just to make sure he'd done it all correctly. He didn't want to risk ruining his whole audio / visual / gaming system by being too eager and connecting everything too quickly.
Now came the big decision: which game first? "Kung Fu Chaos" or "Midtown Madness 3"? "Blood Wake" or "Quantum Redshift"?
By 2:30 p.m., Tony had sorted through all of the Xbox games and put them in categories: Action, Racing, Platform, Role-Playing. He'd just barely remembered to have lunch – a hastily thrown-together cheese sandwich with a glass of juice and a single carrot stick from the container on the bottom shelf. Game wrappers were everywhere, but instructions were neatly piled so that Tony could easily match strategy sheets with gaming software. He had pulled his computer into the living room and found the best "cheat" sites. And finally, after all the preparation, he selected his first game – "Tao Feng: Fist of the Lotus."
Tony made it fairly easily through the Versus mode and then moved into Quest. He lost all track of time as he fought through a series of rivals, one after another, sometimes emerging victorious, other times being beaten and pushed back to begin again. As he sat cross-legged on the floor in his pajamas, Tony looked like a nine-year-old who had climbed out of bed early on Saturday morning to watch cartoons. Except that he was the one controlling the cartoons. He was mesmerized by the clarity of the images and the action on the screen – he'd played video games before, of course, and he'd heard McGee talk about all his on-line geeky role-playing sites, but he'd never had so much fun in a virtual world as he was having within the fictional country of New China. In the game, he discovered that he could heal himself with his Chi – where was THAT when the plague hit, he wondered. His fighter swung around poles, flipped off walls, kicked other players into pinball machines, and performed all sorts of fight moves designed to diminish his opponent's fighting power. Utilizing hints he found on-line, Tony made it through challenge after challenge, fascinated by the relationship between his hands on the controls and the movements on the screen.
After three hours in the Fist of the Lotus, Tony pulled the game out of the controller, tossed it aside like a boxful of socks on Christmas morning and moved on to "Nightcaster: Defeat the Darkness." Just as Tony was beginning Arran's long and arduous quest to rid the village of Perth of the Nightcaster, the phone rang. It was 6 p.m. Tony rubbed his eyes and searched for the phone. He finally found it between the couch cushions.
"Hey Boss," Tony said, as he flipped open the phone to take the call. He was a little disoriented from his time in the virtual world, and Gibbs apparently caught the slightly confused tone of his voice.
"You okay, Tony?" Gibbs said, with some concern. "You sound a little strange."
"Nah, I'm good," Tony tried to reassure Gibbs, not particularly wanting his boss to make a little side trip to Tony's only to discover that he was glued to a video console as opposed to doing something more productive, like … recovering. "I dozed off, I guess; phone woke me up," he lied.
"You eat today?" Gibbs said, doubting Tony's explanation.
Tony chuckled. "Kate should have given you a full summary of my breakfast menu. I had a sandwich with some veggies and fruit for lunch." He winced as he made it past that tiny lie. Juice was liquid fruit, right? I mean, technically. And carrots are vegetables, even if all he ate was only one carrot. "I was just starting to think about dinner." Which wasn't too far from the truth. Now that his focus was somewhere other than the TV screen, he was feeling hungry.
"OK …" Gibbs said, tentatively. "You make sure to take your meds with dinner."
"Yes, Mom," Tony said with a grin that Gibbs could almost hear over the phone.
There was some mumbling in the background that sounded like Ducky. "Ducky wants to know how the cough is," Gibbs said.
"Haven't really coughed all day, Boss," Tony said, as he realized that he hadn't. Of course, all it took was the suggestion, and Tony felt the familiar tickle in his throat and the slight tightening in his chest. He coughed a few raspy coughs and then cleared his throat. "Until now," he finished. "But seriously," Tony added quickly, before Gibbs had time to interject a comment, "that was my first coughing spell since breakfast." There was silence. "Honestly, Boss. I promise."
"OK," Gibbs said again, and Tony breathed a sigh of relief. "Go get some dinner – hot food," Gibbs ordered. "Call if you need anything."
Tony had gotten as far as "On …" in his standard "On it, Boss" reply before Gibbs had snapped his phone closed ending the call.
Tony shook his head to clear the cobwebs and slowly worked his way up to a standing position. His legs were cramped from being in the same position for so long, and he had small muscle aches in his hands from the controller. He blinked a few times to focus and moved his head from side to side to work the kinks out of his neck. "I gotta pace myself," Tony said, as he stumbled into the kitchen.
Cooking dinner just didn't sound like something he had the desire to do, and Tony found his attention drawn to the selection of take-out menus in the basket by the phone. Gibbs had said "hot food." Pizza was hot food. Wings were hot food. Hot wings were very hot food. Tony grinned and dialed the number.
An hour later, Tony was back in the living room, perfecting his aim in order to use Arran's magical energy to destroy the swarms of beasts, demons, and other vile creatures populating the realm. The pizza place had delivered a pizza, breadsticks, wings (with celery, Tony noted, making sure to remember to stress "vegetables" in his next report-out), and soda. He could not believe how good it all tasted. It was as if he was discovering pizza and chicken wings for the first time.
After finally making it through all of the significant stages of Arran's life, not to mention conquering a fairly nasty gang of ice beasts, Tony moved on to "Blinx: The Time Sweeper." By the time Ducky called at 9:30 p.m. to check on his cough and wish him 'pleasant dreams', Tony was far more worried about rescuing the kidnapped princess and fighting the Time Monsters than he was about his medical prognosis. Thankfully, Ducky just assumed Tony had been woken from an odd dream about time crystals and ancient ruins, and the coroner went off on a tangent about his own childhood dreams, landing on one where he explored other eras and realms via the use of a time machine that he'd built with two chaps from school. Tony barely heard a word of it, but managed to thank Ducky for the call, wish him a good night, hang up the phone, grab another slice of pizza and make it through the canyon and into the caves all in one fluid motion.
At 11 p.m., a fleeting notion that he should be thinking about getting some sleep ran through Tony's mind. He considered it, but then … wait! … was that the kidnapped princess? YES!