Chapter Text
Tony stood behind his desk, leaning over with his palms flat on its surface, doing his best to look menacing. "Come on, Magoo, give it to me! Let's not make this any harder on you than it has to be."
His teammate sat at his own desk, looking insufferably smug as he examined the seemingly innocuous black thumbdrive in his hand. "I don't know, Tony; I think it's about time I got some of my own back. How many times over the last few years have you humiliated me in front of Abby, Kate, Ziva, Ducky, especially Gibbs—and somehow I've survived. Now I've finally got something to hold over your head, and you can't take it! It's kinda sad." McGee's smirk gave way to an expression of wariness as Tony straightened and slowly began moving closer to him.
Tony had thought that Abby's Photoshopped rendition of him in leather fetish gear had disappeared long ago. Although he knew that Kate had sent it to Gibbs at the same time that Tony had e-mailed him her very real Spring Break photo, they had agreed to delete both bits of blackmail material afterward, and he knew Kate well enough to trust that she'd kept her word. Abby had sworn up and down that no one else had a copy of his picture, but now that he thought about it, he realized that she'd said that "no one else but Kate and Gibbs" had the file, and he should have guessed that Abby would be keeping it in her personal archive—she'd been very proud of her work. How McGee had gotten his grubby little hands on it, Tony didn't know, but he was willing to bet that Abby wasn't aware of it. "I'm serious, McGee. You do not want to play this game with me." He loosened his tie and started undoing his cuffs as if preparing for a fight. "It will not end well for you."
To his credit, the Probie didn't move a muscle; he stubbornly held his ground, and Tony was almost impressed, despite the tell-tale signs of nervousness that were beginning to show. He noted a slight twitch of his head, a barely perceptible hesitance when he spoke. "What are you going to do, Tony, jump me right in the middle of the squad room? Seems like that would attract a lot of attention. Is that what you want?" He slipped the thumb drive into the front pocket of his pants. "It's not like I'm going to send this around now. I just want you to know that I have it. It's not blackmail; it's…insurance."
"Insurance against what?" Tony was close enough now to reach out and touch McGee, but he refrained, folding his arms in front of his chest. "I know you, Probie. You can't sit on anything for long. You know Gibbs has already seen the picture, but Ziva doesn't even know it exists, and the temptation would just kill you. It's killing you already; I can see it. You won't be able to help yourself. You'll send it to her before the week is out, and then I will have no choice but to kill you, flee the country, and start over in Buenos Aires under an assumed name. Why don't you just give it to me now and save us both the trouble?" When his partner simply shook his head by way of an answer, Tony sighed. "You're being childish, McGee."
McGee snorted. "Right. And you're a model of maturity."
With all the dignity that he could muster, Tony answered, "I can be, Timothy, when the situation demands it." He was so convincing that he almost believed it himself, right up to the moment that he dived at McGee’s midsection, reaching for his adversary’s pocket. And then froze.
“Um.” McGee was very, very still. “Tony?”
Well, this was a whole new brand of awkward. “This just got weird, didn’t it?” His voice sounded tight even to his own ears.
“Yes. Yes, it did.”
Okay. Okay. Your head is pretty much in McGee’s lap. Don’t panic. Tony took a deep breath. “I’m going to get up now, McGee—nice and slow—and then you and I are going to forget that this ever happened. All right?” Without waiting for an answer, he carefully extracted himself and stood, straightening his jacket for want of something to with his hands.
“Okay.” McGee rose as well, stepping around him and heading toward the elevator. Clearly he thought that he was off the hook, that Tony would feel uncomfortable going after him after what had just transpired. He could not have been more wrong.
Tony launched himself at McGee’s back, overpowering the younger agent and pushing him down into a headlock. “How do you like me now, Probie!" he crowed. "Give me the thumb drive! Come on, I'm not playing."
But McGee was not to be defeated so easily. He struggled for a moment before making a desperate appeal to his attacker's sartorial sense. "Get off, Tony, or I'll stomp on your Cesare Paciottis! I'm not playing, either." He took a couple of half-hearted jabs at Tony's shoes to prove it, barely missing the toes.
"You wouldn't dare." Just in case, though, he eased his hold a little.
"Trying to decide whether your dignity's worth as much as your footwear?" McGee's face wasn't visible from that angle, but a smirk was apparent in his voice.
"It's a complicated equation, Probie. Give me a sec."
And then, suddenly, McGee was reaching into his pocket, taking out the thumb drive and holding it up where Tony could see it. "I give up, Tony. It's yours."
Yes. Grinning broadly at his good fortune, he released his hold on the other man, snatching the drive and unceremoniously pushing him away. "Thank you, Timothy. You've made the right decision." He held the thumb drive before his eyes, relishing the moment. "You get to live, and my life as a Photoshopped leather daddy will remain a well-guarded secret."
"Gee, I had almost forgotten about your spring break picture." Gibbs's voice was completely deadpan, but still managed to make Tony nearly jump out of his skin and drop his prize. Usually he could sense when the boss was behind him, but he'd been too distracted by wrestling with McGee to notice. It rankled that his partner had been more aware of his surroundings than he was. Tony almost fumbled the thumb drive again when Gibbs slapped the back of his head, snapping, "Back to work, Spanky! Molest your coworkers on your own time; right now you owe me a report. You, too, McGee."
The two agents went sheepishly back to their desks, Tony thanking his lucky stars that Ziva had not been present to witness the short battle. He locked the thumb drive in a desk drawer for safekeeping, then sat back in his chair. A moment later, a pop-up alerted him of an e-mail from McGee: "Now you and Abby have the last remaining copies of the picture—except Gibbs, I guess. But she likes you too much to blackmail you, and he's too technologically inept. So at least there's that."
If McGee noticed that Tony's thumbs-up was a little bit forced, he didn't say anything. Keeping his smirk fixed, Tony turned back to his monitor and returned to the business of playing Minesweeper and making it look like work. He could still feel the touch of Gibbs's hand on the back of his head.
There was no way that Gibbs could be unaware that Tony enjoyed the mild physical abuse that he dealt out, but Tony was pretty sure that if he realized the full effect of the head slaps and the penetrating stares, the boss would never so much as look at him again. Years of working closely with the man had taught him to keep his feelings tightly in check. He was sure that not even Ducky's amazing powers of psychoanalysis had hinted to the good doctor that DiNozzo saw Gibbs as anything but a father figure. Hell, it had taken Tony a long time to realize it himself.
All day long, he was at Gibbs's side, and often watching him surreptitiously when he wasn't right there with him. Somehow, despite that level of close contact, Tony had still been surprised at first when desires that he'd thought were long buried had begun to resurface. It had been some time since he had given up involvement with men on anything more than a platonic level, and between the amount of time that had passed and the boss's being straighter than straight, he'd thought that he was safe. But after the four or five hundredth time that he'd done something that he knew Gibbs wouldn't approve of, and felt that little thrill at being reprimanded, Tony had begun to see that something in him had changed.
Though he cultivated the image of a smooth ladies' man, never free on a Saturday night, the truth was that Tony didn't go out as often as his friends believed he did. If they'd given it a little thought, they probably could have figured out that there was no way he could possibly have time to have that much sex and watch all those movies, but he took no pains to disillusion anyone. A year or so after joining Gibbs's team, however, Tony realized that he was beginning to live up to his own hype, and not just because it was fun. Not only was he chasing after women more frequently than ever; his pursuits had also developed a certain air of desperation. Getting laid had formerly been sort of a game for Tony—lighthearted and entertaining, disappointing if he lost, but not devastating—but it now provided a much-needed release for the tension that built in him with every minute he spent in his boss's company. It was becoming more of a coping mechanism than an enjoyable activity.
His demeanor at work had gradually changed, too. Tony had always been a bit glib, maybe a little too heavy on the movie references, but over time he'd found that side of himself growing stronger. The stress was getting to be too much. When he found himself wanting to say something that he shouldn't, to grab the back of Gibbs's head and kiss him into oblivion, to turn an incidental brush of hands into a lingering caress…he covered all that with humor. Ever the master of misdirection, Tony was never more ready with jokes, quotations, and celebrity impressions than when he felt those urges coming too near the surface.
Initially, this worked pretty well on all fronts. No one seemed to suspect that Tony's feelings toward Gibbs were anything but filial; in fact, most people around the office believed that he had designs on Kate—and later, on Ziva. Gibbs seemed both annoyed and amused by his antics and often ended up smacking him on the head, which was becoming more satisfying by the day. Although fully aware of how pathetic it was that even that type of physical contact made him so happy, Tony was sufficiently distracted by being the class clown of NCIS that he was able to get through each day with relative ease. It was not an ideal arrangement, but it would suffice. Besides, what were the alternatives? He could let his desire show, be unguarded and risk revealing too much to the team, being subjected to their knowing glances and whispered conversations, eventually being reassigned—and worst of all, disappointing Gibbs. He could leave NCIS, removing himself from temptation, but he liked it there for many reasons aside from the boss. Or he could try talking to the man, which he didn't see going well at all. Gibbs had been married four times; he was straight as an arrow—as straight as everyone believed Tony was—and that was not likely to change. Short of a sex change and a dye job, there was no way that Tony would ever show up on his sexual radar. Even if things were different, experience had taught him that relationships with men could be even more complicated than they were with women, and while Tony didn't want to be alone forever, he wasn't quite ready to go back there yet. If nothing else, he was secure in the knowledge that the lack of options would keep him in line.
There came a time, however, when DiNozzo began to realize that his act wasn't going to keep him safe forever. It was hard to say exactly when it happened, or what set it off. It might have been anything: an off-hand remark, a lingering look at that ass that made even cheapo Sears trousers look good, one too many of Gibbs's sneaky, hidden smiles. Whatever it was, one day, Tony realized that what had been plain and simple lust had become something more.
He loved Gibbs. He was in love with him.
Shit.
Just knowing that he wanted the boss had been so much easier to handle. Tony had accepted a very long time ago that he was pretty much equal opportunity when it came to sex. He did have a deep love for breasts, and he certainly played up the "one hundred percent hetero man's man" angle at work, more so since the whole Gibbs thing had started. Aside from some experimental fumblings in high school and the occasional drunken blowjob in the back of a club, Tony had only had sex with a handful of guys, and only one instance of what could be termed a long-term relationship. The majority of his encounters had been with women, and he'd hardly so much as flirted with a man—other than Gibbs, who never seemed to notice—since he'd joined NCIS several years ago. But he was well aware that the attraction would always be there, whether he acted on it or not.
Love, though? That was different. That was something that Tony wasn't used to feeling very much at all. There was his mom, and there was the sort of sibling-rivalry type of affection that he felt for his teammates, but there were only one or two people for whom he could remember feeling that lump in the throat, that slow-burning ache punctuated by a punch in the gut every time their eyes met. Only a couple of women had managed to keep him interested for any length of time. He'd been devoted to them for as long as it lasted, but after only a few weeks, things had fallen apart. In neither case had he felt bad about it in the end; they'd driven each other crazy long before they'd managed to get whatever they felt for each other out of their systems. The break-ups had been mutual, messy, and absolutely necessary.
Truthfully, he could only say that he'd made a decent go of it once, and that had been with a man. It had not ended well with Brian, and that was something that Tony tried hard not to think about. The only good thing that he could say for that relationship was that it was the reason he'd ended up in Baltimore, where he'd met Gibbs.
And when it came down to it, Tony knew that he had to take the lion's share of the blame. Well, maybe not for the Brian thing, but certainly in his other failed relationships, and for having had nothing but a seemingly endless stream of one-night stands since then. He was a coward. Tony was a needy guy, so much so that it sometimes scared him. The trouble was, he was also…not paranoid, exactly, but not very trusting. He wanted to let himself rely on someone that much, but he was afraid. He'd been let down before, and he'd let other people down in enough different ways that he was pretty sure karma would never stop kicking his ass for it. So he went on dating the same shallow people, running into the same frustrations again and again, and never learning from his mistakes.
Until now. Until Gibbs, who seemed like he might be exactly what Tony had needed all his life and never realized it. And Tony couldn't have him. Unless he was willing to face rejection, possible violence, and reassignment, he would just have to go on holding it all in and playing the fool.
The longer he kept up the act, though, the more he found himself leaning on it, hoping desperately to keep his audience's eyes off the man behind the curtain. What was supposed to distract the others and keep him safe was now becoming a distraction to him. It felt less like a mask every day and more like his new, true face. Tony knew that he would never make it that way in his personal or professional life, but he didn't know how else he could be anymore.