A/N So just a few things. I have been wanting to write this story for a long while now but the spate of homicides from domestic violence in Oz during the past month was one of the reasons why I finally did. I do believe that the Tony character who would stop a bullet for his team mates or give his live to save a perfect stranger would volunteer for me make him suffer for a few chapters of abuse to raise awareness of such an important issue. Just to be clear – there will be no death of children in this story. My warning should have read major character death, not original character – my bad… that's what happens when you post late at night. :( I got it right on the other site thankfully.

Some people commented that Tony seemed out of character but even the strongest of individuals can find themselves in an abusive situation give the wrong set of circumstances. Tony might not seem to fit the stereotypical portrayal of a domestic violence victim but actually he ticks quite a few high risk behaviours/ environmental factors. He is a child of addicts, his pathological self-blaming and willingness to forgive other, his need to have a family and the fact he puts up with everyone else's crap at work. It isn't that surprising that he would leave one toxic situation and end up in another.

Second thing - yes in the first couple of chapters he is a doormat but people who are abused often have to hit rock bottom before they stop fooling themselves about what is happening. Actually, I don't see that his behaviour is that much exaggerated than how he is with his team - it is more that in a diffeent setting it seems much more exaggerated. Much will be revealed in chapter 3 – including who he married and how he ended up in such an abusive relationship and what it is that precipitated his decision to fight back because he wouldn't be Tony if he didn't. This chapter is hard to read but I didn't wump a character like Tony who is already such a doormat in the show without a damned good reason and certainly not for gratuitous entertainment or titilation.

Thanks for the reviews and as always thanks to Arress for the beta. (An a spoiler – as a huge Tony fan she wouldn't let me kill him or let him be permanently harmed.) Finally, I plan to post chapter 3 concurrently as I didn't get to post a chapter yesterday.

Chapter 2

25th October 2016

Tony sat Vivy in her highchair and gave her snack of cut up fruit, planting a big sloppy kiss on her cheek that made her giggle gleefully. They were just back from the park and he popped four-month-old Sarah Aurora DiNozzo, 'Rory', into her baby bouncer while he retrieved a bottle of cold water from the fridge to rehydrate. With two kids, he'd had to give up riding his bike to the park – he got up at dark o'clock to get in his bike riding now, knowing that his girls were sleeping and safe as he worked out. Even though he'd dropped weight, over thirty pound so far, it hadn't staunched the flow of derogatory comments about his appearance.

He wasn't exactly a fat lazy slob anymore, but he also wasn't ripped or hard bodied either. His body was soft and weak, and she'd always been turned on by extreme physical strength and muscles, so he'd started pumping iron as well as maintaining his cardiovascular workout. He'd never been a fan of pumping iron, even when he was playing college football and basketball – found it boring, but if it made her happy, then it was good for their family. He used to put his body on the line to protect his teammates from bullets and knives – this wasn't really any different. He'd do anything for his family.

As Vivy put a piece of apple into her mouth and grinned, revealing several teeth he could see that she would be crashing soon. The chubby fist ghosting over her eyes, the heavy eyelids and yawning suggesting that she was tired. But it was the tugging on her ear that confirmed her readiness to sleep; for some reason she always did it when she was tired.

Hopefully, Viv and Rory would both go down together and sleep for a while so he could finish up the housework. Somehow, it was much harder to keep the apartment spotless when there were two kids to look after. He'd really hoped that when their second child was born, their mother would feel better. At least she'd been able to resume her punishing regime of martial arts training that always seemed to calm her down, although these days it was always a temporary fix, unfortunately.

Tony had to work hard to make sure that the children didn't set her off and ensure that the apartment was perfectly ordered since it didn't take much to get her going. Her mood hadn't improved since Sarah's birth, even though she had set out to reclaim her pre-baby body back again by immediately setting up a punishing exercise schedule around her work. So, it was entirely predictable that she wasn't getting enough sleep and was therefore short tempered with them. He just had to make sure that they were patient and everything went smoothly when she got home so they didn't make her mad.

Although she had breast fed Aviva for a few months, she insisted she couldn't feed Sarah, that she was too busy at work. She said she couldn't be leaking all over the place during meetings. That in her male orientated workplace it would be viewed as weakness. Although to be honest, Tony thought that was more of an excuse since she seemed to find their baby daughter irritating – even when she was asleep. At first Tony thought she was suffering from postpartum depression and tried to get her to see a doctor, but after a massive argument which he lost, he didn't dare mention it to her again.

Then six weeks after giving birth to little Sarah, she'd decreed that they were going to have a third child as they must have a male child. Tony disagreed, maintaining that they needed to wait and let Sarah settle in, but she was insistent, cruelly taunting him that the only reason they'd had two girls was that Tony wasn't enough of a man, that his sperm was weak and time was rapidly running out for him to be able to sire a male child. It was then that he had one of those epiphanies where he realised she actually resented Sarah for being a girl. Apparently, she saw it as her duty to produce a male heir and felt that Tony had let her down for not giving her a boy. Personally, he was delighted to have two perfect little girls, just as he would have been delighted to have a son and a daughter, too, or two boys.

He finally agreed that they could try for a third child, since he hoped that if they had a boy this time, her relationship with Sarah would improve. While he still wasn't sure that it was a good idea, he had a feeling that it didn't really matter if he agreed or not, she'd still get her way. He didn't admit it to himself, but subconsciously he figured if he was seen as a serious impediment to her plan for a boy, then he'd simply be removed from the equation. And where would that leave Vivy and Rory, his two precious little princesses? Besides, it was hard to argue that he'd let her down since it is the man that determines the baby's sex, so therefore it was his failure that she hadn't had the son she longed for to make her feel complete. He was an abject failure as a man if he couldn't give her something so simple to make her happy and ensure their family was safe.

It became her obsession. She searched the internet to find ways of conceiving a boy and their existence revolved around the quest to make a male baby. He wasn't allowed to wear briefs, only boxers; in fact, she burned all his briefs. No wearing of Lycra bike shorts or tight jeans, either. No hot showers or hot tubs, and intercourse was confined to a short window of opportunity just before and slightly after she ovulated.

A few years ago if someone told him that he'd be happy to hear that he was only going to have sex once a month, he'd have laughed in their face, but he was actually relieved. Sex with her on a good day was an ordeal, because although she had a libido that would leave a testosterone driven jock for dead and needed to have sex every day, sometimes more, she was turned off by his body and would make derogatory comments about it when they had intercourse. He refused to call it making love because there was precious little emotional connection – more the wham bam thank you man, but definitely light on the gratitude.

Often she would wait til he was sleeping before initiating sex, and Tony decided that it was because by the time he was properly awake, she had already gotten off and didn't need to engage with him or have him fight his natural inclination to touch her or take control. She always had to be in control, not just for sex either, and hated it if he tried to be tender to her. Although she was a pain junkie and liked rough sex, she refused to let him inflict pain or even restrain her when he offered, even though he'd never really been into all that crap.

He wasn't sure if it was something she did with her previous partners and it was just him that she couldn't bear letting go with or if it was a generalised issue. Sometimes when her mood was especially dark, he would pretend to be asleep even when he wasn't, just to have it over and done with as quickly as possible. The only time when he was ever able to hold her was when she was sleeping really deeply and she would curl into him, but if she woke up in his arms, he always paid for it the next day.

So, Tony was thankful that her obsession to produce a baby boy would mean that sex was only going to be a once a month ordeal. Although the first month was a nightmare as her temper became increasingly short tempered. Come time to do the deed, there was so much riding on his performance that he felt he was drowning in expectations and his fear of what would happen if he failed to live up to her expectations again. It was timed to the nth degree, like a military mission – she forced him to swallow what seemed like half a gallon of the strongest coffee imaginable half an hour beforehand to make sure his male sperm were well and truly awake and reached their target first. Meanwhile, she gulped down cough syrup, supposedly because it thinned the mucosa of the cervix and let his pathetically weak Y sperm reach their target without petering out prematurely.

And speaking of prematurely petering[HT1] out, it was apparently important that she climaxed at least once and it normally wasn't an issue, especially after a month of abstinence. Normally… but she was so short tempered that Tony was feeling nervous about setting off her hair-trigger temper and he was definitely feeling the pressure to perform. Plus, she'd insisted that it be done doggy style so he could achieve the deep penetration all the information she'd consumed during her research insisted would increase her chances. But because she asserted his elderly sperm needed as much help as they could get, she insisted that they do it with her kneeling on cushions.

The rationale behind it being that her head was lower than her hips letting gravity help his boy swimmers reach her cervix faster. Apart from all the added pressure, trying to ignore her screaming at him to go deeper so that they didn't have another girl had ended up with him knocking her off the damned cushions, resulting in her screaming at him for being such a fuckup. It had been a real mood killer and, when finally the deed had been done, he couldn't help thinking that using a turkey baster might have been a hell of a lot easier. He was pretty sure it would have been a lot more enjoyable!

When she didn't get pregnant the first month, he'd suggested conceiving a male baby using IVF, but had been shot down with derogatory comments about his inability to make a baby. He put it down to her lack of sex, but it didn't explain why she'd refused to have IVF to create a boy, yet he didn't dare rock the boat. While he was used to being a relief valve for Gibbs and his temper for years, his wife was much more volatile and he couldn't afford to risk getting hurt, or worse, because his girls needed him. And the break from sex didn't last long, either. It seemed that using a vibrator had gotten old quickly and she'd decided that as long as he used a condom, which she hated, it would be safe to resume having sex or, she pointed out, her vagina wasn't her only option. When the condom broke during a particularly rough encounter, she became so enraged that he thought she was going to kill him for sure this time.

Fortunately, by the time she'd douched herself within an inch of her life, she was exhausted and more concerned with achieving the orgasm 'he'd' interrupted. He'd ended up satisfying her digitally since his 'mood' was effectively killed after the scene and he had just wanted her to fall asleep as quickly as possible. After that night, he religiously checked every condom for flaws and made sure he doubled up just to be on the safe side. It wasn't just a pregnancy at the wrong time of the month Tony was worried about but his own ass, and it was the first time he'd consciously admitted it to himself.

The thing was, he honestly wasn't sure if she tried to kill him that he'd be able to raise his hand to her and defend himself. He'd always had a problem hurting women physically; yes, he'd shot them before when he'd had no choice, but hand to hand combat was something else and smacked of bullying and abusiveness to use his superior strength against a woman, no matter what the provocation.

Then there was the fact that if it came down to it, when it came to the mother of his children, if she was enraged, restraining her simply wouldn't be an option. It would either be her or him, and Tony didn't know if that happened and he survived, how he would look into the faces of his children every day, knowing he'd killed their mother. And yet if anything happened to him, he was terrified about what would become of his little babies.

He just had to make sure not to get into that situation in the first place. If they got pregnant and had a boy then everything would be okay, she'd have fulfilled what she saw an obligation to her father and she'd bond with Sarah and they'd be a real family.

[HT1]