"Carry on my wayward son. There'll be peace when you are done. Lay your weary head to rest. Don't you cry no more." Kansas
.***.
"Don't touch him!"
"Jay," Tony explained for the tenth time, his hands up placating, "Jay, they have to touch him. They need to figure out how badly he's hurt." The other boys had mostly consented to examinations, though they were stiff and uncomfortable under the hands of the EMT's. The paramedics soon realized this and had a women, who had been driving the ambulance, start examining the boys instead.
But when she got to Bobby, Jay had gone off the edge. Spitting, he pulled the boy away from the young woman's careful hands, looking around distrustfully. "She's gonna hurt him." Jay said, looking imploringly at Tony as if he trusted the agent more than anyone in the world. "Bobby's always getting' hurt when I let people touch him."
"'Twas different, Jay." Said Adam, who was about Jay's age and seemed the more level-headed of the two. "These guys are…like…good cops."
"Ain't no such thing." Jay said, but settled uneasily next to his friend, watching the paramedic's every move warily.
Jordan, the little black-haired boy who'd held Tony's hand on the way out of the house, looked up at the agent with large, serious eyes. "Is your friend going to the hospital, too? Is that why you's riding with us?"
Tony had tried to forget about McGee, forget about the fact that, hours earlier, the kind-hearted computer geek had been arguing with him about whether or not to go investigate the house, forget about the plank sticking out of his friend's side, forget about Gibbs, about It doesn't look good. "Yes," he said, slowly, trying hard to mask the emotions boiling hurt and sad beneath the surface, "Yes, he's going to the hospital, but I'm not going to see him. I'm going to stick with you guys."
"You don't want to see your friend?" Jordan sidled closer to Tony, slipped a small, nine-year-old hand into his, taped ribs and black eye and all, "You sad 'cause he's hurt?"
"Yeah, I'm sad." Tony said, admitting the fact more readily to the group of boys than he would have to Abby, to Ziva. "But I'm also sad that someone hurt you." He locked eyes with Jay, who was angry, who was protective and loyal and angry. "There's a whole lot of sadness going on today."
And, of course, the fun couldn't just stop there.
Getting to the emergency room was an adventure by itself. Three of the kids – and Tony couldn't help but notice that they were the three oldest – needed their bones to be set surgically. Their breaks were healing wrong, the doctors said, but the operation was routine.
All three were still walking, which Tony found heartening, though the fact that no one had mentioned the pain they were in put a nagging worry in the back of Tony's mind. Jay knelt in front of Bobby before allowing himself to be led away. "You stay with Mr. Tony, okay kiddo? Don't let no other guys take you away from him." Jay locked eyes with Tony, who nodded, accepting the charge.
"What is 'operation'?" Don asked. In the ambulance, Tony had been able to gather than Don was short for Donkor.
"It means 'humble' in Swahili, which is almost like 'kind 'or something. Jay told me once." Jordan had supplied, touching Don's hand. Tony had already classified Jordan as one of the boys who liked the sensations of touch, while others – like Jay, like Don, shied away from it instinctively. "He's from, like, a whole 'nother world."
"Country." Adam had corrected automatically. "He's from Egypt. Just came to the US two years ago, right, Donny?"
Don had nodded, his thin, tanned face stark and serious, showing little expression besides pain as a paramedic probed at his arm. "I was separated from my family. To look for work."
"It's an awful story, mister." Jordan said, snuggling close to Tony, gripping his arm tight. "They has a mean life, and everyone wants Dom 'cause his voice is so pretty."
"Don't talk about that, Jordan." This was Charlie, who Tony hadn't heard from at all since meeting the kids. He was seven, perhaps, with soft brown eyes that were constantly wide, as if surprised by something. Or scared. "Can you just not talk about that?"
But as the three oldest boys were being led away, Adam rapidly explaining to Donkor what an operation would entail, Tony knew that they would have to talk about that. There was simply nothing left to talk about. It was the Titanic-sized elephant in the room, at least to Tony.
He just didn't know how to go about doing it. Oh, sure, he'd interviewed victims before, more than he cared to count. He'd even interviewed rape victims before. They just hadn't been six-to-eight-year-old boys. Where did you start with little kids? Little kids drove Tony crazy. They were impatient and high-strung, or else quiet and withdrawn. They didn't act in predictable patterns like adults.
McGee would know what to say. McGee was the troop leader for a troop of Woodland Scouts (or whatever the heck they were). He knew what video games kids were playing (he played half of them himself). He could relate. He could connect.
Something flipped in his stomach at the thought of McGee (with a plank sticking out of his chest, with a snake biting his wrist, with his eyes wide and scared when he couldn't find Tony the last time they were in a hospital, two days ago). He knew the he ragged on the Probie a lot, but that was only because he knew that the younger man had the potential to become a Senior Field Agent himself.
"Hey, mister." Tony whirled too fast and Bobby flinched horribly.
"Hey, kiddo." Tony took a knee, like he had in the basement, and gently, so gently, took Bobby's hand, and was insanely happy when the six-year-old didn't pull away from him. "Are you worried about Jay and those guys? They just got a little more banged up than you. We'll wait right here for them."
"M'kay." Bobby said amicably, bouncing up onto a chair. "Sit down, Charlie."
Charlie, who was undoubtedly older than Bobby, was three inches shorter, and Tony hoisted him from under the armpits so he could fold his legs into a chair. Jordan scrambled into another one, on the other side of Bobby. When they'd settled, they went perfectly still, staring at Tony expectantly. At least the wariness had mostly gone from their expressions.
"Okay, guys." Tony said, reaching instinctively into his breast pocket – the pocket of the coat that now lay across Bobby's scrawny shoulders. He motioned to the kid to give him and the pad and the blond did, handing the paper over mutely.
"Listen – there's going to be a lot of people asking you questions. You need to tell me everything right now, but after me you don't have to answer any more questions unless you want to, okay? But right now, I just need to know what happened."
The boys exchanged looks. "Can't tell." Charlie finally said, his soft voice barely carrying over the din of the waiting room. "Pu'shment."
Was there no end in sight for the lumps that kept rising to Tony's throat? "Oh…oh, no, kiddo, you won't be punished for telling me the truth. I just need to know what happened so I can know how much to punish the men who hurt you. You didn't do anything wrong."
"Can't tell." Jordan seconded, this time staring anxiously at the place where the other half of their little group had disappeared. "Jay said not to tell."
"Okay," Tony said, because he couldn't find anything in him that justified putting a six-year-old through this experience. "Maybe later? After you see Jay and Don and Adam again? Then you'll tell me?" It wasn't like they had the perpetrators yet, anyway. Gibbs was undoubtedly lying in wait in the cellar with a SWAT team or something equally dramatic. Tomorrow they'd have the monsters. Tonight they just had the scared kids with nowhere to go.
"There you are, Tony." Ziva's arms were laden with several varieties of food, from salads to McDonald's Kid's Meals. She tumbled the mass into a chair and collapsed into the next nearest one, hand to her forehead.
"How's McGee?" Tony asked quickly, willing his heart to slow before it banged right out of his chest.
"Still in surgery. Ducky and Palmer are here – no dead bodies from the house so far, but there will be some if Gibbs gets his way. Abby came, too, but she could not be pried away from McGee."
"Of course not." Tony relaxed just slightly, then turned to the boys, who were staring, not surprisingly, at the food. It must have been more food at one time than they'd seen in weeks. Though the paramedics and then the doctors who'd run the cursory examinations had found little physically wrong with the youngest three boys, they'd all said the same thing: malnutrition.
"Guys, this is agent Ziva. She works with me and McGee – the guy who fell through the ceiling?" the boys nodded. Bobby even managed a small smile. "Ziva, this is Charlie, Bobby, and Jordan."
Ziva stared at the boys as if she'd never seen children before, then a warm, soft expression – so feminine, so unlike Ziva – broke over her face. "You want some food? You look hungry enough to eat a goat."
"Horse." Tony corrected absent-mindedly, already sorting through the food for something that stomachs that weren't used to a lot of sustenance could tolerate. He came up with a few soft rolls and a medium-sized salad. He handed these over to the boys, who stared at the Happy Meal longingly.
"Sorry, big guys, but your stomachs will barely tolerate all this." But the look of longing never left their eyes. Tony sighed, then smiled at a tactic used against him many times by various house-keepers whenever he wanted to take double helpings. "Tell you what: you eat all that and in twenty minutes – I'll keep time – if you're still hungry you can eat the Happy Meal. Deal?"
The boys nodded eagerly, and Tony supposed to them it would be a great deal. They were so hungry now they couldn't imagine ever not wanting to eat. Tony allowed himself a sad smirk, knowing that their stomachs would be bloated with just the small amount of food.
He watched the kids eat in silence for a bit, idly wondering how Gibbs was doing on his end of the operations. Gibbs questioning child molesters was something even Tony was a little afraid of seeing. Gibbs taking them down must be awe-inspiring.
"It will all turn out alright, Tony." Ziva said, following his gaze to the three little boys but also following his thoughts across the hospital to the room where McGee was fighting for his life. "McGee will be fine. He is just a little over the weather."
"Under. Under the weather." Correcting idioms came easily now (and why did English have so many?) but Tony could think of a more appropriate one for this situation, one that his father was always fond of saying, one that would describe the boys, the prostitution ring, the snake, the gun, McGee…
He said, quietly, more to himself than anyone else, thinking of his twice-cursed father the whole time, "You always remember…when it rains, it pours."
So, to help everyone (including ourselves) keep them straight: it's Jay, Adam, and Donkor, who are about thirteen, and Charlie, 8, Jordan, 7, and Bobby, 6.
And if you love them at all, please review.
