Gregarious - Five Prompts Version

You think he would have learned by now. Despite Tony’s gregarious ability to fit in anywhere, he had a habit of trusting too easily. It started when he was younger.

You couldn’t really blame him, what kid didn’t trust their father. Only his father had never been worthy of trust, but how was he supposed to know that? He finally escaped his father’s clutches by going to college.

If he thought it would get better, he quickly found out differently. Professors that gave out crazy assignments just because they could and not because they had anything to do with the course work led him to wonder if the whole world was corrupt or lazy. He didn’t really fit in anywhere, so he joined a frat house.

Of course, that meant a bunch of jocks who always picked on the newest addition to the team. He could take it. His father had made sure of that, but he still hadn’t learned not to trust the authority figures.

Despite always seeming to find the corrupt authority figures, he still trusted in them. They screwed him over time and time again. His father spent his whole childhood abusing him physically and mentally.

His advisor at college, he trusted him the most, but the guy was actively doing his best to get him to drop out. Tony took it as a challenge, but he still wondered what people were thinking when they did stuff like this. His frat brothers were both the meanest and the nicest.

They did their level best to put him through the worst initiation rites ever, but once he was in and had proved himself they actually were his friends. Still as he graduated from college and moved on to finding a career for himself, he found even more abuses of power. At Peoria, the police chief was practically in the pocket of the mob.

At Philadelphia, the whole department was under the thumb of the mayor and he was the most corrupt official Tony had met so far. Then in Baltimore, not only was the police chief involved in money laundering, but so was Tony’s partner. He thought he was saved when he met Leroy Jethro Gibbs and the man invited him to start working at NCIS.

Not only did he immediately find out the man liked physical abuse, those head slaps hurt, man, but after the first director he worked under left, it just became one tale of corruption after another. Gibbs continued to physically abuse him via head slaps and everyone laughed about it including Tony. What else were you supposed to do when being abused?

It was still a damn site better than the emotional manipulation from Senior. Well that is… until it wasn’t. Tom Morrow, best damn director NCIS had, had moved on and now they were stuck with Jenny, an ex-flame of Gibbs.

Jenny spent more time trying to prove she was the boss and had control over Gibbs while trying to also lure Gibbs into her bed than she did effectively managing NCIS. Gibbs didn’t even listen to her most of the time and just did his own thing. They’d brought on some new agents though and Tony wasn’t sure what it was, but Gibbs jokes had changed from funny to emotional abuse.

He thought when Gibbs got disgusted with the decisions Jenny and others made and went to Mexico that the abuse would decrease. He was acting Team Lead that should actually give him the power, shouldn’t it? No, Jenny continued to prove that the greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.

She had him running from one end of DC to the other trying to manage a team that hated him and doled out emotional abuse like moths to a flame, even the ones he had previously considered friends, while also trying to woo Jeanne Benoit for an undercover op. In fact, she seemed dead set on making sure he was alone/lonely and desperate for her help. When it all came out that she was running an unsanctioned op, Tony’s only thoughts were thank god she didn’t make me take the fall for that.

Of course, it wasn’t over, yet. She hadn’t actually been kicked out of the office before she ended up dead for completely unrelated reasons. Still he thought the new director couldn’t be worse when they replaced her.

Wrong! The new director immediately split up the team, which would have been fine. The team hated him anyway, except that he put him on a ship amongst sailors who would all hate his guts. On top of that when the new director’s relationship with Eli came to light, Tony could only shake his head.

He was pretty sure there was nowhere in this world where power did not corrupt absolutely. His faith and trust had finally been shaken. He moved on, leaving NCIS behind and doing his own thing. At least, being his own boss meant he didn’t have to answer to a corrupt boss even if he still had to deal with those who abused their positions of power, since no one could avoid them entirely.