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Tony hadn’t intended to lie about everything, but well it just sort of happened. It was Gibbs’ fault if you wanted to get technical. He’d told Tony to think of his new job as a constant undercover position and he’d do fine, so Tony had done exactly that.
He’d gone into the position at NCIS with an eye for establishing a cover and establish one he had. There wasn’t a single person in the building that was unaware of playboy DiNozzo. After all, there were two ways to do undercover.
One, make sure no one remembers you and that you make no waves or two, make sure everyone remembers you and wouldn’t for one second think you capable of being anything other than what you showed them. Tony was pretty sure even Gibbs had bought into his cover by this point in time. The problem?
His real life was on a head on collision with his job. Why the hell did his father have to get suspected of murder? He’d spent years playing up the poor kid who got disowned background and guaranteed his dad was going to ruin everything.
Fuck. Fuckity. Fuck. Fuck.
Yep. His dad was trotting out the happy family stories. Fuck. He had to figure out a way to stop this before his dad killed his entire undercover persona.
He loved the guy, don’t get him wrong, but his dad did not understand the meaning of undercover. The only way he’d been able to survive undercover in Baltimore is that his dad had always been nowhere near him. McGee had already started giving him suspicious looks and Ziva, Abby, and Gibbs wouldn’t be far behind.
This wasn’t going to be pretty. He had to do some damage control, but what? Oh god and now Senior was talking about his mom and how much she missed him.
There was no damage control good enough to stop this trainwreck. Hopefully, the team would forget about it all, once Senior left and things could go back to normal. Yeah, that’s it. They’d forget.
Who was he fooling? There was no way they were going to forget something as juicy as this. Ziva was going to rake him over the coals for making a clown out of her or whatever other confused metaphor she’d end up using.
Maybe he should start looking for another job now. He’d obviously messed this one up beyond redemption. Fuck.
He felt like he was waiting for the other shoe to drop the entire time they were working on his father’s case. As far as he was concerned, everyone was just waiting to jump all over him once his father left. He wasn’t looking forward to it.
He could hear the whispers damn it. He knew the entire office was talking about this. He grew more and more tense the longer the case drew out.
When they finally closed the case, proving his father innocent, all Tony wanted to do was go home where he knew it would be safe. He wasn’t that much of a coward, however, and instead he went into the office like Tony DiNozzo would do and tried to play everything off as a joke. He only hoped it worked.
It failed miserably. As soon as he got to his desk, Ziva was practically on top of him. “When were you going to tell us?”
Still he tried to play the fool and keep his cover intact. “Tell you what?”
“That everything we thought we knew about you was a lie.” McGee crossed his arms and glared.
“Eh. Heh. Heh. That’s just my father. You can’t believe a word he says.”
“Actually, we can. Abby checked. Your mother is alive.”
The blood drained from Tony’s face and he went as white as a ghost. Abort. Abort. Mission compromised. Fuck. Now, what was he supposed to do?
As if that wasn’t bad enough, Gibbs pulled out rule #2, “Never screw over your partner,” and rule #17, “Always work as a team” and proceeded to castigate him for breaking them.
If Tony had been thinking normally, he would have called bullshit as Gibbs had broken his own rules multiple times in the past, but he was still whirling from watching everything he worked so hard for fall to pieces around him. The punishment Gibbs handed out wasn’t easy either. Apparently, Gibbs felt that since he had lied to them the entire time, that he needed to go back to the beginning and explain every single lie and then tell them the truth that he’d never told them.
Tony didn’t know what to think. What he was being asked to do was a doozy. It would take months, at least, to detail all of that.
Maybe he should just leave. He’d never really fit in anyway. He’d just been really good at acting like he did.
Did the team deserve to know the truth? Or was it better to just leave without explaining anything? It would make him look like a coward if he left now.
He knew that. He accepted that, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Gibbs hadn’t fired him on the spot. Maybe there was still hope. Maybe Gibbs still thought he was good.
Or maybe this was all just a bad dream and he’d wake up tomorrow and everything would be back to normal. He doubted he was that lucky, but he wasn’t sure where to go from here. He’d never had any contingencies for getting caught.
He’d been living this lie for so long that it had practically become his reality. All he knew for sure right now is that it didn’t matter what he did, he was screwed. His wake up call was when he came in the next morning and the whole team was talking about a dinner that Ziva had hosted; only she hadn’t invited him.
He could feel the emotions just draining from his face, being replaced with calm, cold certainty. It was time for Tony DiNozzo to die. Who would replace him, Tony didn’t know, yet. He only knew that the only way to get out of this situation alive was to kill Tony DiNozzo.
Whether that would be physically or emotionally, even he didn’t know.