Disgust splashed across the man's usually open and wizened face, worry eating his insides like an untamed and rampant parasite. Alarm bells were beginning to wail like claxons in his mind. There was something wrong with this picture, aside from his only child lying motionless, dependant on every tube under the sun imaginable to keep him alive. There was something else, something else entirely going on. There was an undercurrent in the room, he could feel it. Rage bubbled in the pit of his gut as he tore his gaze away from an ashen McGee and a trembling Abby. That ire increased to magma levels when his eyes fell upon the bed's occupant.

The holier than thou, thoroughly self impressed, patriarchal Gibbs.

Junior's freaking hero.

His teeth, expensively maintained and yet unpaid for, crunched together in painful irritation. "I don't think I have a speech impediment," he purred lowly, "But just in case I do, or if I'm speaking a different language, I'll repeat myself." He trained his gaze even more firmly on Gibbs, his jowls near salivating with anger. "My Tony is near death's door. I would like, as his father, to know how that came about. I would also like to know why not one of you cares enough to be in there with him. Knowing who that trio that is in there with him are would be pretty helpful as well."

Leaning once more against the nearby cabinet, he spoke to the room at large.

"Whenever you're ready of course, no rush. Not as if it's a matter of life or death is it?"

Abby's already startlingly white face paled at his words, a deadened squeak caught in her throat. Glancing at Tim anxiously, she was far from reassured. There was an odd twitch in the agent's jaw as he remained resolutely silent. Senior's eyes roved over them for a moment, bulging with impatience. Giving them up as a bad job with a snarling scowl, he pointed straight at Gibbs' chest. "You," he spat, worry causing his usually suave demeanour to be cast aside, "You're not exactly known for holding back, right? Please, don't start now. Answer me damnit, and tell me why you or your agency isn't doing more for my boy!"

Gibbs stared straight ahead, his heart hammering against his chest with a disturbing tempo.

"My agency," he muttered, not knowing what he was going to say, only knowing that his lips were moving, "Can't do anything for Tony." He paused for a moment, his eyes slipping shut as a yearning pain descended, fluttering cruelly down from the cursed cloud of his own life. "And neither can I, alright? There's nothing I can do….there's nothing…"

Tim made an explosive sound in his throat, but Abby silenced him with a pointed look at Tony's father. Biting his lip on that merit alone and knowing what Senior was about to hear was tough enough; McGee jerked his head in agreement. But not before shooting Gibbs a look that was in no way was shy about explaining his reasoning. Swallowing the look his agent shot him with difficulty, the team-lead made to open his mouth once more, but he was well and truly too late.

"Excuse me?" Anthony spluttered, sending his hands so violently into the air that a nearby vase of plastic flowers went volleying off the cabinet, crashing to the floor, splintering instantly. Ignoring the crunchy ceramic underneath his feet, Senior moved closer. "What in the good hell do you mean man? You're telling me that everything Tony has done for you and that damned NCIS…you and they….are just going to let him vegetate in this hellhole?" He glanced disdainfully at the pale, wearied walls. "Are you insane? What in the hell is wrong with you?"

"Good luck finding that out," Tim mumbled under his breath, loud enough to be heard. Feeling a scorching Gibbs gaze upon him, he shot back a look of scorn and cleared his throat. Taking Abby gently by the arm, he spoke directly to Senior. "We're going to go and see Tony now and let you two…uhh, catch up." Increasing the pressure on a clearly conflicted Abby's arm, he raised a brow.

She stared for a moment, before nodding and following him out the door without a word or a backwards glance. Watching them go with narrowing eyes, Senior eventually turned back to Gibbs with the beginnings of truly feral anger. "What is going on around here? I don't think I've ever heard one of your people say a single thing out of line around you." He felt his stomach contract painfully. "What aren't you telling me? What is the big damned secret?" He threw his arm in the direction of Tony's room. "I know I'm just his father, I know that, but humour me?"

Swallowing, Gibbs sat up in bed straighter, irritated by the acute sense of loss he felt by Abby and Tim's departure. In one way, he was shocked that Senior seemed so woefully uninformed. In another, he wasn't surprised. Tony's relationship or lack thereof with his father, rightly or wrongly was a pillar of foundation in their own relationship. Well…it had been. "What has Tony told you?" he heard himself saying, without really intending to say anything. Everything seemed so alien to him, it was as if he was enacting this scene through the body of another, through the mind of another.

He suddenly wished he'd never woken up.

"Told me?" echoed Senior blankly, "What do you mean, told me? He hasn't told me anything. I mean we had dinner a few weeks ago and he seemed fine, he didn't seem as if he had anything on his mind. In fact I remember thinking he seemed happier than I'd seen him in a long time. I figured it was something to do with work, a promotion or something. But he said he was just happy with how his life was turning out, something like that." He scrubbed a hand in agitation across his face with the cryptic nature of the conversation and sighed. "Look, Gibbs…you think what you think about me, and I think what I think about you…but we got one thing in common, right? Tony. So would you please…just tell me whatever it is that you don't want to tell me?"

The patient felt an impossible weariness cloak him, pulling him back down into the darkest corners of his own mind.

"You're wrong," he muttered, to his own knees, suddenly unable to make eye contact. "About us having the one thing in common. We don't. I mean, we did. But…we don't, not now. Not anymore…" As he spoke, he was ashamed to feel the tremor work its way into his vocals. The pain and the shame of the last two years threatened to engulf him, to laughingly drag him into its most depraved layer and encase him there for the rest of his days. The sterility of the room, and the hostility of its one other occupant seemed to splash a picture of his future in front of him. Loneliness and emptiness. Tony's voice suddenly echoed around his head, and despite the words he was unconsciously recalling, his voice was like a soothing balm.

Familiar, and loyal.

"The saddest thing is that you're going to die alone Gibbs. And it didn't have to be that way; you made it that way..."

The kid had never been more right.

"What are you talking about?" Senior asked quietly, the heat gone from his voice. He sensed that something had happened, something of a certain magnitude. Fear prickled him. He had never been a good father, he knew that. He had come to terms with that, as best as one could. And as much as it had galled him over the years, as much jealousy and anger as it had stirred in him, he grew glad of the fact Tony had Gibbs. Much and all as it should have been him, Junior deserved better. And Gibbs…he had always been better, without the constraints of blood and the complexities that went with it.

"What are you talking about?" the man repeated quietly, his stomach churning.

As the reality of Tony's sacrifice began to really drip into his skull, Gibbs suddenly found breathing a hard thing to do. Images of his once upon a time present protégée lying in a hospital bed, peppered in bullet wounds that were intended for him constricted his windpipe with a stranglehold force. Sucking in air was like breathing through a dented straw as he struggled to answer one of the must unfathomable questions he'd ever been asked. His once upon a time strategy, crafted in a haze of hurt and bourbon seemed to shriek and roar with stupidity. He could have handled it so much better; he should have handled it so much better. Tony, he deserved so much more.

"Tony…doesn't work for me anymore."

The words seemed to blow shrapnel into the room. A silence so profound spread over the two men. It was almost painful on the eardrums. Senior looked at Gibbs with a slack face, eyes beady with the strains of confusion. Shaking his head after a moment that seemed to stretch into eternity, he spluttered in indignant misunderstanding.

"You fired my son?"

He shook his head once more in amazement as anger began to grip him once more.

"You fired my son? After everything he's done for you, you fired him?"

Gibbs shook his head slowly, staring into his knees as if they were some sort of bizarre, individual cosmos. "No," he murmured, "But I should have done, it would have been better for him if I had. But…I was too much of a coward. So he quit, after a while. Has his own team now, over at Vice. Has done for a few months."

The entire air content of the room could have been lost in Senior's windpipe as he gaped widely.

"Excuse me?"

His words were whispered, and they rang with shock. Hurt coated him that Junior had essentially lied to him, but his dominant emotion was definitely shock. The Gibbs and Tony relationship was one that he knew to be renowned far and wide. The only way he had ever envisaged that relationship coming to an end was with the stepping aside or the fatal wounding of Gibbs. He felt his palms pulse with sweat as he struggled to make sense of the faulty explanation he was receiving.

"He quit," Gibbs repeated quietly, an intense and non-physical pain seeping into every pore of his body. "He took a lot, before he did though. He took a hell of a lot, more than anyone should ever have taken. But that's Tony, isn't it? Loyal to a fault." He smiled tightly, a self hatred evident on his suddenly aged features. "My loyal St Bernard," he muttered, to himself. "Guess it just goes to show that even the most loyal people have a breaking point, and I sure as hell found his."

Senior felt a migraine begin to make itself known behind his eyes.

Before inspiration struck him, as his eyes caught an IV tube, filled with a dripping liquid.

"You're medicated," he grunted, "Don't know what you're saying. Tony, quit? Don't be ridiculous man. You know my boy would live and die for you. He wouldn't quit, he loves his job." He shook his head in exasperation at the man he had such conflicting emotions for. "I'll let you rest. You clearly need it, you're addled. I'll go and find Tim and Abby, and find out from them." Turning on his heel before Gibbs could answer, he was at the door before the patient found his voice.

"If he dies, it's my fault. I might as well have put those bullets in him myself."

Senior stalled in the door, his back rigid with shock.

Turning back to Gibbs with an ashen face, he pulled his jaw up off the floor with much more of an effort that ought to be humanly necessary.

"What the devil are you talking about?"

Gibbs tore his gaze up from his knees and forced himself to look Tony's father in the eyes. That was the very least he could do. He had always known that his plan would involve pain, but he had never envisaged that it would cause this much. It would take an army of shrinks to unravel the entire web of misery they had been trapped in, that he had spun, but for now…he owed the man in front of him the truth. The machines beside him amped up their beeping as his heart continued to race uncomfortably, the sickly spread of nausea working its way through its gut.

"I've pretty much been killing your son, slowly but surely, for a very long time."

…

TBC

…