A/N Here is the second last instalment of this humble tag and I hope that you all enjoy it. Thanks to everyone who has supported this by following, reviewing, faving or simply reading. I never dreamed it would capture people's imaginations the way that it has. Briefly to address some of your comments: LAG0802 - no that phrase came from my fevered brain, I'm afraid, Joanne the lurker - I am honoured to hear from one of the silent majority and I hope the ending doesn't disappoint. And Smooth Doggie - I'm afraid I can't claim ownership of the phrase sperm donor, it is an oft used tag by those of us that can remember Senior post beatification season 7. He's the sleaze that told his son he''d end up in the gutter, that DiNozzo men didn't cry, faint, show weakness etc., who disowned his motherless 12 year old son and sent him to a Military Academy...but I digress. And for people to know if Gibbs is still Tony's proxy, the answer is no but you will need to wait til the last chapter to find out who is.

This chapter like the last few is proofed but not beta'ed. Fear not, Arress is back on board for the last one :) I have since spent considerable time tinkering with this, so there may be boo boos, sorry! And as a side note for people who are fed up with Tony's position as SFA being usurped constantly there is a poll on the NCIS website you might like to vote in. It asks who should be in charge when Gibbs is absent. - McGee or Tony? There is some indication it has been hijacked by the forces of darkness who are furious with Michael Weatherly not supporting their TIVA fantasies and decided to get revenge by trashing him. The link to the poll is on my profile page or PM and I'll send it to you. Time for the silent majority to express their disgust with the failure to observe chain of command. and also defeat the forces of evil :))

This is another shout out to moonstone glow's wonderful parody the Wizard of NCIS where it is languishing on the crossover list of NCIS and Wizard of Oz despite it not being a crossover . It is impossible to locate this piece unless you know to actually go looking for it. You can find it here - s/10295827/1/Wizard-of-NCIS So very sad that the actions of individuals who feel they should berate people for what they perceive as the terrible sin of wrongly classifying stories has driven this story off our list where many more people could get the health giving benefits of a great big belly laugh. So go and check it out. And let's not even start on stories where the universe may be *alternative.*

Be Careful What You Wish For

Chapter 6

Gibbs was sitting at his desk, glaring at everyone that came within a twenty foot radius of his desk. Of course the rest of the office had quickly learnt to avoid the twenty foot exclusion zone and gave the MCRT bullpen an even wider berth than usual. Well except for McGee and Ziva, obviously. Their desks were inside the exclusion zone, so they were constantly in the firing line, much to their irritation. This last week had definitely been the longest week that anyone could remember and the rumour mill was running rampant about the absence of one Very Special Anthony DiNozzo. Some said he'd been fired or gone to work for the CIA or Homeland Security, but Gibbs insisted he was on leave and threatened anyone with castration who he caught gossiping about his senior field agent.

Meanwhile, Abbs was alternating between busting his ass for making Tony resign and collapsing into paroxysms of tears, snot and drippy mascara. Most of the time she was refusing to talk to him and was only giving him forensic reports via email instead of face to face briefings. Even worse, she was reporting her findings (verbal and written) only in scientific mumbo-jumbo, necessitating either Ducky or McGee translating everything for him and as neither of them was known for their brevity or succinctness, it was a particularly cruel and unusual punishment. He was barely hanging on til week's end when DiNozzo would be back and he could go around, pick the lock on his apartment and talk some sense into him.

Cursing loudly when his cell phone rang, he scowled fiercely when he saw the number that appeared on the screen. Standing up and heading towards the stairwell where it afforded a degree of privacy, he answered tersely.

"When are ya going let me talk to my senior field agent, Tom?" He demanded, not bothering with preliminaries.

Tom Morrow sighed audibly. "Jethro, I'm afraid Tony won't be able to speak with you. He's been…"

"Damn it Tom, it's not up to you. I will drag him back here and I will talk to him and nothing you can say or do will stop me," he yelled, extremely frustrated.

"… and he was injured in New York and is now in a coma," The Assistant Director of Homeland Security finished speaking, his affect despondent as he ignored Gibbs irrational outburst. Gibbs figured he was used to his outburst until he registered the words 'injured' and 'coma.'

"What? What did you say? What the Hell did you do to him, Morrow?"

"What do they say about once a cop, Jethro? He was protecting a battered wife and her 16 month old son from her abusive husband trying to flee the relationship. Witnesses say the bastard tried to kill his wife, Susanna Curtis and Tony stepped in front of her, knocking her and her child out of the way and ended up getting stabbed in the heart in her stead. They lost him twice on the operating table, he suffered a stroke and lapsed into a coma. They aren't optimistic that he will even regain consciou…"

Any further information went unheeded as the phone slipped from Gibbs' nerveless hand, clattering on the concrete as it bounced down the steps to the landing below. He felt a terrible sense of deja-vu harking back to the time when he'd been deployed as a sniper in Iraq during Desert Storm and had been informed that his precious Shannon and Kelly had been murdered.

Déjà vu that forced him to remember all the times he'd had to have the last word in disagreements between Shan and himself. Plus he could also play the 'I'm not gonna talk to you since I'm holding a grudge' game after an argument like a pro, something which used to drive his sainted wife to distraction. Subsequently, she'd always been the one to mend fences because she couldn't bear to go to bed while they were still arguing. Once she and Kelly were gone, he realised how stupidly childish it was to waste even a minute of a day trying to be right constantly, instead of using the time telling them how much they truly meant to him.

Life was far too fleeting and impermanent not to make the most of every single last second and ensure that the people most important to you knew that they were cherished and appreciated. You'd think that he would have learnt that lesson the hard way but it seemed not. People always assumed that Shannon and Kelly's death had made him the bastard he was now but that was simply not true. He'd always been a bad tempered SOB. It was just that after he lost his girls he no longer cared about who he offended anymore. Grief just exacerbated his natural tendencies, and he no longer felt the need to censure his anger, probably because he'd lost his filter. Truth be told, he'd gotten a whole lotta perverse satisfaction in pissing off other people. It felt damn good!

And it wasn't as if he didn't have just cause to be an angry kid who'd grown up to be an equally angry guy. He'd grown up in a lame-ass, one horse town where the popular kids had picked on him without mercy and he'd lost his beloved mother when he was a 14 year old kid. He wasn't interested in going to college, didn't get along with his old man and he had no intention of working in the mines which was why he'd joined up. The Marine Corp was his ticket out of the shitty provincial backwater town of Stillwater and he leapt at the chance.

In return he'd gallantly defended his country, serving with distinction, considering it an honour and a cheap price to pay in return for escaping his parochial existence. But while he was deployed, Shannon had witnessed a murder and he wasn't there to protect them and they'd been killed. He figured that he'd earned the right to be angry and like anything else that Jethro pursued, he did so with an unfailing obsession and due diligence. His enthusiasm for his new persona helped to distract him from facing the truth that his successful quest for vengeance against Hernandez hadn't been able to quell his fury and pain. So instead, the bastard with two Bs for boorish bastard was born.

It seemed to Gibbs now that he hadn't bothered to learn from his past and to make the most of time, instead he'd become addicted over the years to acting petulant and outrageously. Even those around him who were his nearest and dearest were in the firing line as he'd rapidly become a law unto himself. In the last eight years especially, he'd delighting in having DiNozzo there on his on his team as his whipping boy. Knowing full well that his friend and second was desperate to win his approval and Jethro savoured the power he'd wielded, in mostly withholding it.

Denying it to him amused Gibbs and made him feel so damned powerful. Sometimes though, he would relent just a little, offering a wry compliment sandwiched between a stinging put down or a sarcastic insult; knowing full well it would rob the praise of much its power since it would never do for DiNozzo to get too cocksure or complacent. It would defeat the purpose of having his loyal Saint Bernard following him around, hungry to please. He justified it when called on his behaviour by declaring DiNozzo was that good that he had higher expectations of what his agent was capable of and so he pushed him more than everyone else, which sounded like a great excuse. As was the line that he didn't want him to become arrogant and overconfident but the reality was Tony was far too insecure, not to mention a consummate professional for it to occur. Then there was the old chestnut that DiNozzo didn't like him being nice as he'd told Morrow, which effectively gave him carte blanche to treat him like a pile of shit. Tom was the only person who had the guts to call him on that one.

And he admitted to himself, today at least, that he'd been even more vicious than normal with him in the last couple of years, even seeing how the rest of the team had taken their cues from him and acted accordingly. He'd left the team and returned, then left a second time before coming back, which had made him feel weak and indecisive which led to him usurping the position he'd bestowed on Tony, albeit it by damning him with the faintest of praise. He'd retaken it, in the most humiliating public fashion possible, returning again without prior warning that he was going to resume his role as SSA, meaning DiNozzo found out at the exact same time as the Mossad liaison officer and the barely junior agent and after anyone else who was already in the bullpen that morning. The implicit message that he took away from that was he wasn't important enough to rate the consideration of being informed privately.

This of course had been Gibbs intention, despite the bullpen scuttlebutt that had excused his behaviour as being because of his head injury and memory loss. Another theory in the peanut gallery was that he was a clueless, socially inept bastard and he had atrocious people skills. Although that was certainly the truth, his takeover had been utterly calculated to affect a bloodless coup and was intended to cause harm and distract from his own temporary weaknesses. The unanticipated gleeful, almost vicious reaction of Ziver and the Elf Lord to DiNozzo's fall from grace, metaphorically and literally, had been an unexpected benefit for Gibbs. One he nevertheless accepted with open arms, since it would have been foolish not to have taken advantage of any or all advantages.

Then afterwards, he'd set about achieving his single minded goal of putting DiNozzo firmly back in his place as his beta. That required his behaviour to become even more extreme and brutal in order to remind the temporary leader of his place as second banana. Unfortunately, he'd gone way too far, treating him like a rabid dog and tacitly allowing the rest of the team to do so, too. Since he thrived upon positive reinforcement and social interaction with the people he had formed strong bonds with, the regime of ridicule and ostracising by the team and inevitably other field agents had been a little like using electric shock collar on an eager to please working dog.

Yet when he'd found out that his trusty SFA had fooled him, successfully managing to carry out a year-long undercover mission involving Rene Benoit for Jen while working full-time on the MCRT without any of them realising, it had been a bitter pill for him to swallow. He'd felt belittled, marginalised and made to look foolish by his former protégé and his current one, an unaccustomed experience for the supremely self-confident Marine. So it shouldn't have come as a surprising to anyone that he'd made damn sure Tony suffered his wrath. No one got the better of Leroy Jethro Gibbs, not without paying dearly for the privilege.

Later, when he'd almost gotten Kelly's best friend killed and Tony had come to their rescue, it had been another harsh blow to his ego, perhaps another indication that he hadn't recovered from his amnesia completely as he'd always maintained. Since it was his modus operandi whenever he felt belittled or inadequate, he made sure those around him paid the price for those feelings, especially DiNozzo who'd been responsible for stepping in and saving both their lives. He was a constant reminder to Gibbs that he'd screwed the pooch royally and he found it an untenable position to be in as team leader.

Add in the mess of Jen's where her incompetence from their last special ops mission had ended up catching up with her after her failure to make her kill in Paris, that had been difficult for him to accept since he was her mentor and was responsible for her actions. Her decision to go all out in a blaze of glory instead of a whimper in a hospital bed, had been damn selfish and pissed him off. DiNozzo got shipped off to sea as agent afloat because of it and after he was finally transferred back to DC again, he'd been furious with Gibbs keeping him in the dark about the Domino debacle. It had perpetuated the ill-will and tension simmering between them both while Jethro continuing to insist the subterfuge was due to safety concerns resulted in their relationship becoming even more strained. Still, Gibbs ignored it, refusing to acknowledge that there was a problem that required fixing.

Gibbs was supremely confident in the knowledge that Tony would always come crawling back, looking for his approval in the end. He just had to wait him out and deny him all forms of the currency the former cop craved. His capacity to forgive and forget was legendary – hard as it was for someone like Jethro to comprehend since Gibbs didn't do forgiveness, as his long running feud with Jackson Gibbs demonstrated. Nevertheless he did demand forgiveness from his agents, especially his long suffering senior field agent who was expected to deal with his constant tantrums and unreasonable anger and afterwards, to simply shrug it off. Tony was the epitome of forgiveness – it was as immutable as Vance chewing on a toothpick or Abby wearing mini skirts, chains and downing Caff-pow daily.

Even with Tony's impulsive resignation, he'd been supremely confident he could talk him around. He always could manage him with a half-assed apology in the shape of a cup of coffee or a pizza or when it was a really serious transgression, the promise of cowboy steaks and an invitation to spend an evening with him one-on-one in the basement.

So his resignation pointed to his boss having to do some pretty damned serious grovelling – well grovel Gibbs-style - since he didn't apologise, and it suggested that he had some significant fence mending on the horizon. That said he knew once he talked to DiNozzo, his characteristic desire to win Gibbs' approval would reassert itself and permit him to manipulate the former cop into forgiving him. He'd then be able to convince him to return to the team.

Now though, his plans had turned to dust. Gibbs faced the terrifying realisation that he might not be able to fix things between them this time. And more importantly, that he had left it too long and lost any chance to give DiNozzo what he'd wanted and needed for the longest time. The knowledge that Gibbs was proud of him and cared about him was what he'd always hungered for. Not a lot to ask of a person yet he'd miserly held back his approval as if he was somehow better than the man who craved it.

Yes, you'd think he out of anyone should have learnt how precious a gift time really was and not to waste a moment of it. He'd had more than seven years, (less time he'd spent in Mexico or when DiNozzo was afloat) but still plenty of time to let Tony know what his friendship, respect and loyalty meant to him. Yet he was so busy playing childish mind games, utterly confident he could fix things between them if and when it suited him, merely by deigning to grace Tony with his oh so valuable attention.

Well it seemed like the universe had decided some major ass whooping was in order; that his arrogance made it necessary to reminded him that time was too short for his psychological manipulating and BS. That no one, not even him was ever truly Master of their own destiny, no matter how much they might delude themselves otherwise. He could beg Tony's forgiveness til he was blue in the face but if the doctors were right, then he would never be granted his chance at absolution.

Praying to his wife and daughter, because ever since their death he'd refused to believe in a God that would take them away, Leroy Jethro Gibbs – second B for bastard - beseeched them to send Tony back. Vowing that he would never again take the people he cared about for granted. He hoped that he would get chance to beg DiNozzo's forgiveness even if his gut was telling him otherwise. And he didn't even want to think about the guilt that Abby was going to be feeling for telling Tony about his pathetic comment about his attitude, if he were never to wake up. One stupid, cruel comment uttered without thought to its ability to cause harm but it just may have succeeded in destroying a life, no correction, multiple lives.

Tony didn't deserve any of this; it couldn't really have happen again, could it? Not when he saving an innocent life, that wasn't fair. He deserved so much more. But then again Shannon and Kelly didn't deserve to die either and yet they had still been taken from him. He more than anyone, should have known that bad things happened to good people all the time.

Tony wasn't the one who needed an attitude adjustment and yet the fates were going to demand him as the sacrificial lamb required for Gibbs to achieve something that was long overdue.

Resolute, he knew what he needed to do. Yesterday's Gibbs would storm the barricades, arrogantly and order him not to die, but that was before he broke things so badly that he no longer had that right. Today's Gibbs wasn't too proud to beg.