A/N - Un-beta'd if you see any mistakes, no matter how small, please tell me. Might be a little OOC. Enjoy.
Episode tag, Chained (S2xE9)
Spoilers: Chained (S2xE9)
Disclaimer: I do not own NCIS or any affiliated stuff. No copyright infringement intended.

I heard it. The sound was so quiet it seemed more like a feeling than a noise but then, my hearing had always been hyper sensitive. That and it was unmistakable. Nine and half years in law enforcement meant that I was well familiar with that particular sound. So quiet you could miss it if you so much as breathed but there. Always there. The lethal shing of a blade being drawn. Not your run of the mill paring knife either. Think more run of the mill Chef's knife. Considering what had been at the cabin and with what the knife was to be inevitably used for, it was the only thing that made sense. There were no giant carving knives or meat cleavers in the small wooden shack just a cheap three blade knife set, forty bucks at Wal-mart, twenty-five if you caught a good sale.

The small paring knife would be too small to slit anyone's throat and I do not see Jeffrey standing over me jabbing it into my bleeding, breathing, jerking body. For one I would have to be restrained because it would just not be hard to take it off him. Second, he just fit the slit your throat and make a very big mess profile. Not very strong, fairly timid and full of self-doubt. Yeah, most likely a slit your throat from behind type of guy.

The vegetable knife could slit your throat but it would be hard if the guy you were attacking was bigger and stringer than you. A long, thin, flexy blade meant for slicing vegetable needed more force and leverage than was likely Jeffrey White could give. Particularly on someone my size, even if I was sitting down.

That just left the Chef's knife. You used it for slicing up the meat. Or for the veggies if the vegetable knife was dirty. If they weren't to big you could use it to slice watermelons or honey dew melons or rock melons or whatever. In fact, it worked really well for melons. Better than the less sturdy vegetable knife ever could. Mainly for chopping meat and melons then. Not very sanitary when you think about it.

However, I doubted very much that Jeffrey would care that the knife that he just took out of his backpack to slit my throat with could be used to cut melons and meat and how that was not sanitary. More than likely he just cared that it would also cut throats. Which when you thought about it was just meat, bone and cartilage so I suppose that could just fall under the meat category but that seemed so callous. You're not human you're just meat. Like a bigger chunk of steak. No, that did not work at all however true it may be.

When I first heard the quiet shing from the back-seat, I had to try to relax my face. I could feel all the muscles in my jaw tensing up at the sound. No good would come of tipping him off to the fact that I now knew he had a knife. In fact, only bad could come out of that. So I tried with varying degrees of success to relax the muscles in my face and turned my attention to figuring out what knife it was. Of course, all of this was only supposition. There was a chance that I had imagined the sound. It may have just been my imagination; him shifting in his seat to get comfortable, something in his backpack shifting when he opened it.

All of that went out the window when he gave me the gun that I had seen on Lane earlier. No way Lane had just given it to White. Partners they may be but it was glaringly obviously what Lane thought of Jeffrey. Probably thought he was just as likely to shoot himself or Lane when he went to use it. However, I would not given Jeffrey a gun either, definitely not without seeing him use one before, for much the same reasons. Lane would have given Jeffrey that gun over his dead body.

Which is more than likely to be what happened. White killed Lane for whatever reason; to get more money, to silence him, to lessen the risk of a double cross, then took his gun. The gun that killed him. The gun I used to kill him when he pressed a stainless steel chef's knife to my throat. The gun that was sitting in my blood speckled hands. His blood. His voice ringing in my ears.

"You got my back, Tony? I feel like I've been running my whole life... He beat the crap out of me. You got my back, Tony? You got my back, Tony?"

I repeated my answer, the quiet words sounding hollow in the car entrenched in death. A lie fabricated by practised lips. "You know it." I snorted to myself, a faint grimace twisted my features. "You know it." I mumbled again, sadly this time. I would have, too. I would have had his back against Lane, against the buyer. Just not against the authority's. Not against me. He said he suspected but suspecting is not knowing. He actually trusted me. To a certain extent I got him to trust me.

"No-one have ever treated me like you have." I could still hear the note of sincerity running through his statement. I could only assume it was in the positive.

The car door opened. I looked at the gun a moment longer before painfully drawing my eyes up to meet those of my Boss.

"I really liked him."

Hope you liked it. Please review.
Cheers, Kat. :)