Unchained

By: dharmamonkey
Rating: T
Disclaimer: I don't own NCIS. I am, however, interested in renting DiNozzo. A five-hour minimum would apply.

A/N: This is my very first NCIS fic. It's not much more than a drabble. I hope you like it.

Gibbs thought he'd lost him.

In those long seconds after he left Kate to deal with the Japanese collector who was there to buy the stolen Iraqi antiquities, the blood was roaring in his ears as he approached the 1967 Ford Galaxie with the soft, flat baby blue paint.

"I've never lost an agent undercover," he'd told her. "I am not about to let DiNozzo screw that up."

Fear flickered in his mind as Gibbs' jaw hardened and his steely blue eyes narrowed, and he tightened his grip on his .40 Sig Sauer. He tried to ignore the sick swirl in the pit of his belly as he dialed in and focused on the only thing that mattered in that moment: the mission.

He led with the muzzle of his Sig as he slowly crept towards the car, step by long-legged step, pausing to check the trunk as he saw the misty spatter of blood on the driver's side window. Gibbs felt his heart suddenly stop and his breath catch in his throat as he saw a broad-shouldered, dark-haired male slumped in the driver's seat. He knew from the file that Jeffrey White was a little pipsqueak of a guy, leaving little doubt in his mind that the man slumped behind the steering wheel was his Senior Field Agent.

Unable to bring himself to look at the face of the motionless figure in the front seat because he couldn't face the possibility that DiNozzo was gone, Gibbs' eyes slowly swept across the driver's side and saw Jeffrey White in the back seat, staring blankly into space as he lay there with a gunshot wound in the base of his throat.

Those painful, heart-pounding seconds expanded and contracted like an accordion as Gibbs did a doubletake to make sure White wasn't going to move, then reached for the door handle, swallowing thickly as he yanked the driver's door open.

The first thing he saw was DiNozzo's familiar hands laying in his lap, splattered with fresh, uncongealed blood as his right hand gripped loosely around a compact, short-barrelled pistol, his bloodied finger curled gently under the trigger assembly. Tony's eyes were open—Gibbs could tell from the lay of DiNozzo's long eyelashes—but he neither moved nor blinked.

For a long, long second, Gibbs waited for DiNozzo to move, to speak—to do something to let Gibbs know he was alive.

That second was the longest of Leroy Jethro Gibbs' life.

Finally, Tony turned his head and looked up at Gibbs, his brow furrowing low and hard over his green eyes giving him a hardness that Gibbs had never, ever seen before in his Senior Field Agent. As alien and out of place as that hardness seemed on Tony's face, it was a look Gibbs instantly recognized. The look spoke of a dampened anguish Gibbs himself had felt a hundred times before, but which he'd never, ever seen blur Tony's normally bright, playful eyes. Tony's dark, shimmering eyes met Gibbs' own and he held the older man's gaze for a fraction of a second.

"I really liked him," he said as a faint smile flashed across his lips and vanished again.

Tony's voice was low and ragged in a way Gibbs had never heard before. Something about the darkness in Tony's voice unnerved Gibbs and he felt strangely bare to be in DiNozzo's presence without the tickle of levity in the air between them. Without thinking, he felt his hackles go up and in that moment, he responded the only way he could—the way he was sure Tony would have, had their places been switched.

"Yeah," Gibbs said, his tone sharp and edged with sarcasm as his eyes flicked towards the back seat where Jeffrey White lay dead, his bespectacled eyes staring sightlessly at the Galaxie's roof. "Yeah, I can see that."

Tony's eyes darkened further as deep creases formed across his broad, tanned forehead and the faint smile that had briefly curved his lips all but vanished. He nodded slightly and stared at Gibbs, his jaw tense and unforgiving as Gibbs noticed a shimmer in Tony's gaze.

Gibbs stood there, his gut awash with conflicting swirls of relief and guilt.

He felt nearly faint with relief that his worst of all fears—that he might lose the man who had become so much to him in so short a time—had not been made real, and yet his gut churned as he saw the familiar look of regret in Tony's cool green gaze dissolve into a watery-eyed pain as his instinctive quip dug like a barb into his lieutenant's raw psyche.

Shit, Gibbs thought as he stood next to the open door of the Galaxie and watched the pain simmer in Tony's eyes.

There was always a risk in undercover work, Gibbs knew. On an undercover op, there was always a risk that one could be exposed too early and compromised, putting not only the operation itself but one's own life in jeopardy. It was only then, as he saw the look in Tony's eyes and knew that DiNozzo's pain was burning inward, searing him as he sat behind the steering wheel with Jeffrey White's blood drying on his hands, that Gibbs realized the other risk. He cursed himself for not seeing it sooner, for not realizing earlier what he really knew all along.

Tony DiNozzo was an incredible undercover agent, undoubtedly the best that Gibbs had ever worked with, because he had a unique ability to disappear into an undercover persona and leave only the dimmest, most fleeting flickers of his real self exposed. Tony could play-act with the best of them because, as Gibbs had long since realized, he was always play-acting to one degree or another. DiNozzo was never really himself. The brash, cocky, and uniquely annoying court jester of the NCIS bullpen was also naturally empathetic and an intuitive listener—he could see what others didn't because, despite his chattery banter, he took people as they came and related to them on their own level. It gave him a unique ability to form rapports with witnesses and suspects, but it also made him vulnerable to their vulnerabilities.

Gibbs wasn't sure, as he stood there watching Tony, what exactly it was about Jeffrey White that tugged at something inside of the Senior Field Agent, but he knew that there was something. The voice of his own rationality murmured that Gibbs should be disappointed and angered by the danger posed by Tony's misguided empathy, but for reasons that Gibbs wasn't entirely sure he understood, as he stared into Tony's shimmery eyes, he felt his chest swell with warmth and could only feel an unexplainable but unmistakable fondness for the young agent as Tony sat in the old, sun-faded Galaxie and simmered in pain.

At some level, Gibbs realized, some of the things that frustrated him the most about Tony DiNozzo were also the things he admired about him.

So he extended his hand in a silent offer to help Tony out of the blood-spattered Ford, and couldn't suppress a smile as DiNozzo rolled his lips together in a firm line, nodded and accepted Gibbs' hand.

And instead of patting him on the back as they made their way to the company car, Gibbs rubbed Tony's shoulder, letting go of a breath as he felt the tension melt away beneath his fingers.

A/N: So was it horrible? I hope not. Just a bit of fill-in, fleshing out what might have been running through Gibbs' mind in the last 15 seconds of the season 2 episode "Chained." Hopefully it contributed something to the collective hive-mind. In any case, it offered me a quick distraction as I battled some writer's block on another project.