I'm absolutely stunned by the response part 1 received. And not a little bit terrified! Thank you all, both those who've reviewed and those who've added this story as a favourite or who've set up alerts. It really does mean a lot to know that you're enjoying this as much as I'm enjoying writing it.

Please note, I've upped the rating, to cover some minorish bad language.

Disclaimer: Out of this story, all I own is the plot. The rest is borrowed from Bellisario et al with no offence intended and no (well, very little!) harm done.

No beta readers were harmed in the production of this story.

Five times that Anthony DiNozzo met his guardian angel.

A Very Special Guardian Angel

2 - Head

It was a bad bust before they even rolled. Tony had known it from the moment the lead detective swaggered into the briefing room long on confidence and short on information, but he was just the rookie on the team. The so-very-newly-minted-he-practically-squeaked detective who was, so say, taking part on a milk-run bust for the experience. He wasn't there to ask questions or raise doubts, he was expected to just sit in the corner of the room, lapping up the pearls of wisdom his seniors were dispensing. Which he'd done, because pissing off the nearest thing to God in the department was career suicide and he was still too close to those awful days of not knowing where the hell his life was going to go to want to risk that.

Lying now, in a pile of broken glass and shattered window frame, Tony couldn't help but wish he had pissed God off. Career suicide had to be less painful than taking a header through a window. He supposed he should have been grateful that it was only a first storey window he'd been shoved through, but with the house raised a good five feet above ground level, it had still been a fall of eight or nine feet, which was plenty high enough to hurt. Badly.

And that was ignoring the fact that he was pretty sure his back was probably shredded to ribbons by the glass.

He gave a long, pained groan and considered the relative merits of trying to stand up.

"I wouldn't," said a childish voice. "You might be really badly hurt."

A moment later and the owner of the voice was kneeling over him, regarding him with sympathetic blue eyes.

Tony blinked. He only hazily recalled the last time he'd seen this particular little girl. Four years earlier, while hopped up on morphine. Without the morphine- "Great. Hit my head hard enough to be hallucinating."

The girl giggled. "You're not hallucinating," she promised. "I said I'd come back."

"Kid-"

"Kelly," said the girl. "My name's Kelly, remember?"

And weirdly enough, Tony did remember.

"I thought you looked lonely again," she continued. She glanced up at the house. "I don't think this is a very nice place."

"It's not," Tony agreed, fighting the impulse to tell Kelly she shouldn't be here. As much as the front yard of a meth house wasn't a place for a little girl, telling a figment of his imagination to go away seemed a little redundant.

Kelly rolled her eyes. "I don't mean the house, silly. I mean Peoria."

"What?"

The look he got in return would have cheerfully melted steel. "You're not happy here."

"I'm lucky to be here," Tony shot back, even as he admitted to himself that she did have a point.

"Daddy would tell you it wasn't luck."

There was that word again. "Don't see why your dad would care about me."

That netted him another steel-melting glare. "Because he's your daddy too."

"Kid- Kelly, there's no-one who'd ever care like that about me." He tried for matter-of-fact, but he suspected his tone was closer to wistful if Kelly's smile was anything to go by.

"There will be," she promised.

Tony snorted. Somehow, he doubted it, but he didn't see much point in arguing with her. Assuming she was just a figment of his imagination, he'd just be arguing with himself and that was a pointless exercise - he always lost.

"But not here," she continued, taking a sterner tone and frowning heavily. "You know that, don't you?"

"It's not so bad."

The frown got heavier and she none-too-gently jabbed him in the arm. "Then why don't you ever drink from any coffee mug you haven't filled? Why don't you ever take food that's offered to you? They're not nice people. You deserve better."

If this was his subconscious, she was doing a bang up job of giving his inner thoughts a voice. The truth was things had gotten bad since he'd earned his shield - he was too smart and, perhaps more importantly, too smart-mouthed for most of the department. Hell, he might almost have suspected that the fall from the window was some kind of revenge prank from one of the other cops on the raid, except for the part where it was the tweaking son of a bitch they'd gone there to arrest who'd waltzed him out through the glass and while he knew some of the other detectives loathed him bad enough to make a deal with a meth-head, it had happened in the middle of a scuffle and someone that high on meth wasn't going to have been thinking clearly enough to make a plan stick.

No, the fall was an accident.

But the tampering with his coffee and the other pranks weren't. Nor was the sabotaging of his paperwork. Or any other other little things he'd noticed in recent week.

"Then do something about it," said Kelly, pitting him with another piercing glare.

"I've tried. Only transfers available right now are for NYPD and I can't risk that." New York was just too close to his father - both from the stand point of simply running into the man and from the possibility of having to investigate some of his shadier business deals.

The glare softened and this time, the child patted his arm gently as though she understood his reasoning. "Look again," she said. "There's something better just around the corner."

The world seemed to flicker. A burst of pain rippled out from his head and for just a moment, Tony saw a hospital room. "What the-"

"You're waking up," said Kelly.

"Waking up?" Now Tony felt really lost. "But I-"

"You hit your head bad enough to knock yourself out," she explained.

"I don't remember." Which was disconcerting, but more pain was radiating from the back of his head and thinking had suddenly become difficult. The meth house flickered and, disturbingly, so did Kelly. Tony wasn't altogether sure he wanted to rejoin reality.

Kelly smiled sadly. "You don't have a choice," she pointed out. "It is going to be okay, though, Tony." She patted him on the arm again. "Remember what I said and look again. There's better places than Peoria."

And in the next instant, she was gone - and so was the meth house. Instead, he found he was in a hospital bed with a nurse twitching at his blankets. The ripples of pain settled back into a grinding ache in the back of his head and he couldn't help the low groan that sounded in the back of his throat.

The nurse glanced down and smiled. "Good to see you back with us, Mr DiNozzo. I'll get the doctor for you."

And before he could object, she'd disappeared to do just that. Barely a moment later, the doctor arrived and the next fifteen minutes were a blur of medical tests and questions. During the exam he learned that there was no skull fracture (good), but he had bruised some ribs (not so good) in addition to the sizable concussion (definitely bad - though at least he wasn't actually seeing double) and the lacerations on his back (jury was out on them - but since they hadn't needed stitching, could have been worse).

"When can I get out of here?" Tony asked, as the doctor finally finished his poking and prodding.

"All being well, tomorrow afternoon," the doctor answered.

Tony grimaced. "Not any sooner?"

"We want to be sure there aren't any more consequences of that blow to the head," the doctor replied, looking amused. "That means a night under observation."

Tony wanted to argue about it, but given the way his head had started to throb in reaction to the doctor's efforts, maybe staying over night wouldn't be so bad.

He was just on the point of drifting back to sleep when there was a knock on the room's open door. He was blearily surprised to see John Phillips, his old partner, standing there looking amused.

"What're you doing here?" Tony asked.

John shook his head. "Visiting you - figured the jackasses you work with now wouldn't be around and figured you could use some company." He came fully into the room and slumped down onto a convenient seat. "Y'know this could never have happened if you'd stayed in uniform."

Tony groaned. "Thought you'd be happy to ditch me. Get yourself a quieter partner."

John snorted with amusement. "Eh; you were wasted in uniform and we both knew it. Besides, they've kid they've paired me with now makes you look like a functional mute."

Tony winced. "Ouch."

"Listen," John continued, "I got some news for you."

"News?"

"You remember me telling you my brother, who's a cop back east?"

Tony wracked his memories and finally the information floated free of the growing headache. "Jim, right? Philly?"

"That's him," John agreed. "Well, I was speaking him this morning and he reckons there's gonna be an opening in his precinct pretty soon. One of the detectives there is currently on IA leave pending a hearing. Jim says this guy is dirty and is gonna be losing his shield - might even be facing jail time, if the evidence is good enough."

Something better round the corner. Despite the headache, Tony found himself smirking. Seemed like Kelly had been right. "So, I should look at putting the transfer request in when they spring me tomorrow, huh?"