Work Text:
Divergent - Deviating from what is normal or usual, typically in a way that is undesirable or worrying
~NCIS HQ~
As Tony rounded the corner near the elevator, Borin at his side, he saw only McGee and Bishop in the bullpen. Gibbs’ desk was empty; the lights were off and workstation shut down. He was determined to confront Gibbs about his actions earlier, but it seemed he wouldn’t be doing it here. Maybe that was better done elsewhere anyway. He turned to Borin as they approached the elevator area and prepared to part ways.
“Well, good working with you,” Tony told Borin as they paused in front of the elevator door.
“Hey, you know if you ever wanted to make a change,” Borin offered, “there’s room on my team.”
Tony chuckled and asked, “Be your number two?”
“Oh, no no no. Omagi’s my number two,” Borin answered, an amused glint in her eyes. “But you’d be a solid number three.”
Gee, thanks for throwing me a bone, Borin, Tony thought. A cutting retort bubbled up and he suppressed it, knowing Borin meant well by the offer.
“I appreciate the offer and no offense, Borin,” he began, “But contrary to popular belief, my aspirations are a little bit higher than that.”
“Really.” Borin stopped and studied him a moment, seeing she’d unintentionally insulted DiNozzo. “You wouldn’t know it,” she told him bluntly.
“No, I suppose not,” Tony admitted, appreciating her candor. He decided to return it. “For the record, I’m not any more interested in being your number three than you were to be Gibbs’ number three."
“You knew about that?” Borin asked, seemingly surprised.
“That he offered you a spot on our team last year? Of course I did,” Tony answered. That was back when he still seemed to trust enough to keep me in the know on everything with the team and with cases, he thought.
Borin obviously didn’t think the team structure ramifications of her offer all the way through before she made it. With this new perspective, doubt crept into places it hadn’t visited in a while. Now he began to wonder if Gibbs had given it consideration himself when he made his own offer to her.
He really liked Borin. They collaborated well in an official capacity, and he certainly respected her as an agent. From a perspective of hierarchy, actually adding her onto their team would have been a nightmare.
“Were you thinking I’d just be bumped down the ladder if you transferred to our team?” he asked curiously.
Borin shook her head in dissent. “I was flattered by the offer, but I know it wouldn’t have been a good fit. For any of us,” she said, inclining her head at him meaningfully. Borin gave him that scrutinizing look again. “So…you’re content to remain Gibbs’ sidekick?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Why do you stay then?” Borin asked, honestly curious. “What keeps you here?”
“That’s a very good question,” Tony answered, realizing he should be asking himself that very thing.
~~~~~~~
Tony made his way to Gibbs’ house, trying to sort out his complex feelings on the events of the day. He couldn’t stop replaying it in his head, those less than three minutes that changed how he saw Gibbs, and his place on Gibbs’ team.
What keeps you here, Borin had asked him.
Yes, it was long past time he started asking himself that very question. Now that he had, it suddenly struck him that he was no longer certain of the answer.
He didn’t know when it happened, but after those three heart-stopping minutes on the San Dominick, he’d suddenly…painfully, become cognizant of the seeds of doubt. Doubt in Gibbs’ judgment and his own career choices. Tony thought back to those few minutes earlier that day.
~~~~~~~
“We’ve got a bomb down here, DiNozzo…need you to evacuate the ship,” Gibbs’ voice called from somewhere in the cargo hold.
Tony radioed the order to evacuate, then he and Borin edged cautiously around the cargo container, weapons drawn. Gibbs came into view, a wounded hijacker down on the ground next to him. They moved into position behind Gibbs, who had his back partly to them, weapon pointed at Jaime, another hijacker. Jaime was nearby holding Petty Officer Felton hostage and using her as a shield, a gun jammed threateningly against her neck.
Between him and Borin, Tony had the best line of sight angle on Jaime. He adjusted his aim, readying himself to take the shot, if necessary. In his panic over losing control of the situation, Jaime didn’t realize he was only half hidden behind his hostage.
“Got you covered, Boss,” he’d announced, to clue Gibbs in that he had a shot at the hijacker.
“How’s the timer on that bomb looking?” Borin asked.
“Less than three minutes,” Gibbs replied.
He and Borin followed Gibbs’ lead, but he’d been worried about the flicker of uncertainty in her eyes. He felt it too, but projected confidence instead, trusting Gibbs even as they wasted a precious two minutes convincing Jaime and Aranda how they’d been duped.
The bomb timer ticked irrevocably down toward zero as Gibbs taunted Jaime, and he himself played along, hoping this all wasn’t about to go awry. Felton’s fear surged and she began to struggle against Jaime.
“Shoot him, sir…I’ll take my chances,” she told Gibbs, barely keeping her fear under control.
“Yeah, you got it,” Gibbs answered, but he just stood there, maintaining the stare down and doing nothing to end the dangerous standoff.
The timer kept counting down as Jaime got even more agitated. In his peripheral vision, he saw Borin adjust her grip on her weapon.
“Thirty-five seconds. Running out of time, Boss,” Tony emphasized, hinting for Gibbs to put a stop to this, or signal him to do it. No reply.
“Twenty seconds,” Borin read off the time. Her tension was ratcheting higher, almost palpable now.
“Boss?” Tony urged.
As the timer ticked down inside fifteen seconds, she kept looking to him for reassurance; for a sign that he knew Gibbs had this under control.
Even as he projected calm assurance, he realized with a shock he felt to his bones that he actually didn’t know what the hell Gibbs was doing. For the first time in recent memory, he was following Gibbs’ lead without any indication from his partner, compelling or otherwise, that it was the right thing to do.
Agent Borin had nerves of steel, but she kept glancing at him, and he could see she was on the knife’s edge of taking matters into her own hands.
The timer counted down inside twelve seconds when Aranda and Gibbs finally talked Jaime into dropping his weapon and releasing Petty Officer Felton.
“Boss?” Tony prompted again, as Gibbs strode over to Jaime. He turned Jaime face first toward a shipping container and frisked him, infuriatingly unrushed as the timer approached zero. He had to know something they didn’t, right?
“Gibbs…the bomb,” Borin gritted out.
“Defuse it!” Aranda shouted, and then curled into a ball as time ran out.
When the bomb didn’t go off, Borin relaxed her stance and looked at them with a ‘what the hell just happened here’ look clear as day on her face.
Tony looked pointedly at Gibbs, right there with her on that sentiment.
Gibbs held Jaime against the container with one hand, and pulled a wire out of his pocket with the other, holding it up for them to see.
Tony gave a sarcastic little laugh; though the last thing he felt at this moment was humor. In fact, he was starting to feel more than a little pissed off.
“You removed that when you first saw the bomb, didn’t you?" he asserted.
Borin scowled at them both, and then walked over to cuff Jaime. Tony smothered a laugh as she punched Gibbs hard in the shoulder. Now that was funny.
“Ow,” Gibbs protested, making a face at Borin, who shot him a dirty look in return.
Seemed he wasn’t the only one ticked at Gibbs.
Tony moved closer to the open container and pulled his flashlight out, studying the device timer, his sharp eyes following the signs of Gibbs’ crude defusing technique. They’d gotten pretty damn lucky.
Gibbs joined him as he studied the device.
He turned to look at Gibbs with a wide grin he still didn’t feel. “Boy, that bomb thing. That was fun, huh?”
Gibbs just looked back at him, entirely unruffled.
“Next time, you might want to give us a heads up,” he told Gibbs, making sure it was obvious to the older man his amusement was manufactured. “Because I didn’t pack a diaper.”
~~~~~~~
~Gibbs' House~
Tony tread softly across Gibbs’ living room floor, following the sound of the radio drifting up from the basement. It was troubling, this sudden discord between him and Gibbs. They’d drifted away from that extra-sensory awareness of one another, those instincts that kept them so in sync and made for the best partnership he’d ever known.
The more he thought about it, the more it occurred to him that the discord wasn’t so sudden after all. Maybe it had crept in gradually and it took a charged, dangerous situation in the field for him to see it. It might even go back as far back as a year or more. He and Gibbs had come to a fork in the road, and had taken separate paths. He couldn’t pin it down when it started, and it had him questioning himself, and Gibbs. It was disconcerting, but more than that, in the field it could be dangerous, even deadly. It almost was today.
Tony descended the basement stairs and sat in his usual place near the bottom.
“Tony,” Gibbs greeted. He rose up from his stool to lean across the workbench and turn off the radio. He resettled on the seat and turned back to Tony and waited, regarding him curiously.
Fine, Tony thought. He’d be the conversation starter, as usual. “You pretty pleased with how things went today, Gibbs?” he asked. Gibbs had the nerve to look surprised at the question.
“What’s there to be unhappy about?”
“Since when do you defuse bombs, Gibbs?” he asked pointedly.
“I took a course.”
“Very funny,” Tony glowered. “You didn’t think it was necessary to tell me at any point you’d picked up that little skill? Or did you just wing it?”
“I’m not going to explain myself.”
“You don’t feel the need to explain a reckless and irresponsible fucking gamble that endangered us all?” Tony demanded. “One that’s got me questioning your judgment…and mine?”
Gibbs stiffened defensively. “You got a problem with my methods all of a sudden, DiNozzo?”
Yep, back to last names now that Gibbs got the message he wasn’t here for a social call. Good.
“Newsflash, Gibbs,” Tony shot back. “I’ve always had varying degrees of problems with some of your methods, but like Vance, I overlooked them because they got positive results. Doesn’t mean I agree with all of them, or would do things the same way.”
“And you think I did something out of line today?”
“Well yeah; the fact that you aren’t a demolition expert and yet you still felt qualified to pull a wire on a ticking time bomb. That’s the first thing.”
“Go on; what else?”
“I was standing there today practically holding my breath without the least sign or clue from you that you were calling his bluff.” Tony’s control slipped and his voice rose in anger. “Borin and I stood there not knowing whether we were about to get blown to kingdom come, because you wanted to measure dicks with that hijacker and see whose control issues were bigger. I was covering you, praying with everything I had that you knew something I didn’t.”
Gibbs lifted a shoulder in a half-shrug. “I did.”
Tony blinked in disbelief at the nonchalance. “Well obviously. The problem is I didn’t know it then. Borin doesn’t know you like I do, and even I wasn’t sure what the hell you were doing. Do you realize she was a split second away from taking the shot? The only reason she didn’t is because she was following my lead, not yours.”
“She followed your lead, and you followed mine. Things turned out just as I planned, and Borin was just fine.”
“She was fine? Well you weren’t standing next to her at the time, and that solid whack to the shoulder she landed on you afterward says different. You think I’m the only one who took exception to your plan? I'm just the only one who'd say anything.”
Gibbs absently rubbed his shoulder and glared on recalling how Borin socked him.
Tony went on. “You used a literal ticking time bomb to convince an armed hijacker to give himself up. What if your gamble backfired?” he asked. “Your plan could have panicked that hijacker into an act of desperation. You could have gotten any one of us shot, or worse, the hostage killed.”
“Except it didn’t happen that way, DiNozzo.”
“So…because it didn’t, that was all okay in your book?”
“Well yeah…case closed, no casualties,” Gibbs said, lifting a shoulder in a half shrug.
“Don’t you see how the situation could have gone sideways so easily?” Tony asked, frustrated by Gibbs’ dismissive attitude. “It didn’t have to escalate at all once Borin and I were there backing you up. The bomb drama was entirely unnecessary, especially after Jaime let the hostage go. You just strung everyone along, let us think it was still armed and counting down because you wanted to. Was that amusing to you?” Tony asked.
“Alright, I shouldn’t have done that,” Gibbs conceded. “Is that the real reason you’re all bent out of shape?”
Gibbs’ stubborn refusal to see the issues with his actions in those few minutes infuriated Tony at first, and then it just saddened him. Gibbs maintained the position that there was nothing wrong with his chosen course of action.
“Does the word hubris mean anything to you, Gibbs?
Tony saw Gibbs’ eyes narrow slightly at that, and they took on a dangerous glint. He was tired of being challenged. Something he’d always trusted, and even relied on Tony to do before when needed. Until now, apparently. Well, that was just too damn bad.
“Something more than just today on your mind, DiNozzo?” Gibbs asked in a deceptively mild voice.
“It hit home today how out of sync we’re becoming. Have you noticed?” Tony asked. At Gibbs’ blank look he went on. “You know,” he mused resignedly, “there was a time when we could read one another and anticipate each other’s every move in the field and out of it. Hell, I knew what you were thinking almost as soon as you did. Something’s changed lately. It’s like you’re closed off, especially when you’re doing something you damn well know is questionable.”
“What’s that supposed to mean, exactly?”
“What you did today, reminds me of all the other times you tossed aside your own goddamn rule about working as a team. You went lone wolf and left me out of the loop because the great all-knowing Gibbs knows best, right? Too many of those past decisions had fallout, Gibbs. They nearly did today.”
Something flickered in Gibbs’ eyes at that, as if maybe he was beginning to see at least part of Tony’s point.
“I’ll trust you anytime,” Tony continued. “That’s what you said, about this time last year. But its not really true any more, is it?”
“Of course it’s true,” Gibbs protested.
Tony ignored the protest that didn’t ring true. He hoped he was wrong.
“I’d like to think if that ever changed, you’d say so and not go on letting me believe otherwise. I followed your lead today because of the trust and loyalty that I have for you. But for the first time since I can remember, in a moment of crisis, I doubted it was the right thing to do.”
Tony realized he’d finally broken through when Gibbs inhaled sharply at his frank admission. It actually seemed to rock Gibbs, and drove home the notion that he might have played the situation wrong.
“Yet you stayed, covered my six.” Gibbs stated, now studying Tony intently.
“Yes,” Tony shrugged. “That’s what partners do, right?”
“You still trusted me implicitly…like you always have.”
“I did,” Tony agreed emotionlessly.
Gibbs began to get a sense for the damage he’d done to his relationship with Tony today. In his arrogance, and hubris, as Tony had correctly identified, he had not expected to be challenged on his reckless actions earlier in the day.
“I’m just not sure I deserve that,” he told Tony.
“I’m not sure you do either, and that’s the problem I’m wrestling with right now.”
Gibbs just stared a moment and then slumped a bit on the stool. His features softened and regret stole in.
“I get it; you’re pissed about how I handled things today, and maybe you’re right to be.” Gibbs scrubbed his hands over his face wearily. “I don’t want to keep butting heads with you about this, Tony,” he relented. “But none of the possibilities that have you tied in knots actually happened today, and I can’t go back to change what I did.”
He still doesn’t quite see it, Tony thought. It never should have happened that way in the first place.
“The point, Gibbs, is that you screwed up today. You got lucky; we all did. Your little gamble paid off this time, but it might not the next.” Tony stood, his expression grave.
“Loyalty can only go so far,” Tony warned somberly. “I’m calling you on this crap, Gibbs, and I’ll do it again if I think its necessary. Don’t create a situation where it is.”
“Fair enough,” Gibbs agreed easily. “We good now, Tony?”
We are so very far from good. Tony pasted on a mask even Gibbs wouldn’t see through and smiled reassuringly. “We are,” he lied.
Gibbs smiled, glad to put the contentious moments behind them.
“Good night Gibbs. I’ll see you tomorrow,” Tony said, turning and heading up the stairs. There was a time when Gibbs would have offered a beer and invited him to stay, maybe split a pizza. The invitation never came these days.
Gibbs truly didn’t see any problems. The divide between them was wider than he thought. They were on two divergent roads now, no longer walking together but growing further apart all the time.
Why do you stay? Borin’s question sounded in his head again.
Tony thought about the reasons; affection, loyalty and friendship…a sense of family. Once upon a time, he’d thought those sentiments were mutual. It certainly didn’t feel that way now. He’d outgrown his role here and stayed out of habit; the familiarity of the routine. Maybe it was time to consider how things changed, and give some thought to moving on.
He stayed because he thought he was valued, and still had things to learn from Gibbs. That was less true these days. In fact, of late, Gibbs’ way was all too often a primer in how not to handle things.
As he’d told Borin, he hadn’t planned to stay SFA indefinitely. Gibbs had seemingly gone from grooming Tony to take over his team, to digging his heels in and tightening his grip rather than think about retiring. He was holding himself back; had been for a while now.
Moving on was a big step, and there were those intangibles to consider. He wasn’t ready yet, not while there was still hope of fixing whatever was going wrong here. He wasn’t ready to let go of everything he’d built as a member of the MCRT.
Not yet.
~.~End~.~