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Lions and Tigers and Igigi, Oh My
Two chapters in two days, guys. Read 'em in orderTitle: Lions and Tigers and Igigi, Oh My
Fandom: NCIS, Stargate SG1
Characters: Gibbs, Tony, Jack
Rating: TEEN (Gibbs/Tony)
Summary: Tony had never heard of goa'uld or tok'ra or igigi, and he sure as hell didn't know Gibbs had a passenger riding around in his head, but if Gibbs thinks one little alien parasite is going to make him go running, he has another thought coming. He's Gibbs' second, and that means he doesn't give up on his boss.
Parts One and Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Tony stood up from the desk and stretched his back. And in the process, he nearly hit Gibbs. The cell was larger, but not really large enough for the desk, computer, large whiteboard they were using to pin clues up, bunk beds and two chairs. Tony gave Gibbs a small smile of apology.
“It has to be someone who knows Gibbs,” Tony said as he grabbed the edge of the bed and started stretching. “There’s a clear pattern of someone working backwards to try and trace your life, but I don’t know why they don’t just grab you if they suspect you have Samas.”
Gibbs shook his head. “These people have resources. If they even suspected I had Samas, they would have grabbed me, and there wouldn’t have been a damn thing I could do about it.”
“Well they’re working backward into your life. The first victim was Williamson.” Tony walked to the board and tapped it. “He was part of the Suzanne McNeil case we had—God, it must have been nearly two years ago now. You remember, the bomb tech who got buried alive, had amnesia and then blew herself and her boyfriend to smithereens.”
Gibbs nodded without adding anything to the discussion.
They had to figure this out, because O’Neill’s group seemed far too quick to rely on their technology for everything, and without a lead, they just sort of watched and scanned. It was like having a team of all Timmies. Okay, O’Neill and Murray weren’t Tim, but they tended to wander around after Carter as they waited for her computers to fix everything. If he and Gibbs ran their team that way, nothing would get done.
“They don’t know where to find me,” Samas said. “Of this I am sure.”
“Okay.” Tony stepped back and looked at the board. “But they know Gibbs is involved.”
“And if I did not reveal that, then something else in Gibbs’ life made it clear that he had access to me.”
“Your surveillance equipment,” Tony blurted out.
Samas looked at him. “I only use passive surveillance to avoid detection.”
“If there’s one thing I know from working with Tim it’s this. If you have tech, you have a security problem. Period. Full stop. How many times has Tim broken into supposedly secure networks?” Tony flinched. Way to out his probie to the federal government. Well, too late to do anything now except ignore the blunder and hope whoever was watching the security feeds didn’t notice.
Samas morphed into Gibbs. “If they suspected I had tech, they would have wanted to confirm that it was alien and not human.”
“Which meant they would have been in your house.” Tony felt that tightening in his gut that came with a really good lead.
Gibbs looked up at the camera. “I need to see O’Neill in here now,” he said in that tone of voice that meant people would die if someone didn’t obey. Tony leaned against the wall, his gut singing as he realized they finally had a clue. If someone stepped foot in Gibbs’ house, they’d find the trace evidence.
Tony had to give O’Neill credit. The man could get the military to move at a pace that Tony would have described as impossible. Getting him to believe that Tony and Gibbs needed to process the scene took longer than assembling the guards, the transportation, and the crime scene unit. A little over an hour later, they were in the back of a van along with O’Neill’s team and a half dozen special ops guys who were from the dark ops end of the pool—they didn’t have any marks on their fatigues that would have given away which branch they served in, much less a unit. It was a little over the top to secure a crime scene, but Tony suspected that O’Neill worried more about securing them.
“They are allies, but they are potentially compromised, so do not let them out of your sight,” O’Neill ordered the well-armed team. Most of them looked more confused than anything. Tony and Gibbs probably didn’t look like much of a threat.
O’Neill continued. “Gibbs kicked my ass last time we were in the field together. Luckily it turned out we were both on the same mission, sent independently because someone thought Gibbs was dead.”
“I’m harder to kill than that,” Gibbs added.
O’Neill gave him an odd look. “Do not underestimate him,” he told the soldiers, his gaze still on Gibbs. “He has more training than anyone in this van except me, and he will kick your ass if you’re not on guard. If he has been compromised, we cannot afford to let him loose in this area. Clear?”
The team answered with a chorus of enthusiastic, “Yes, sir.”
Finally O’Neill leaned toward them. “Letting you in the field is a huge risk, and I would rather explain why you’re dead or in the infirmary than I would explain why you’re running loose. Clear?”
Tony felt cold fear wash through him. This was O’Neill with all the jokes stripped away, and he was just as terrifying as Gibbs.
“Crystal,” Gibbs answered for both of them.
O’Neill leaned back and clapped his hands, and that façade of his slipped right back in place. “Excellent. So let’s see if our bad guys left us any evidence.” He rubbed his hands together and grinned before reaching for the van door. Tony had seen soldiers riding the edge of sanity before, but O’Neill scared him a little more than most of them. Then again, most weren’t personally invested in making Gibbs’ life miserable, and O’Neill was.
Tony followed two members of the team into Gibbs’ house, Gibbs right behind him. When they got to the basement stairs, Tony reached out and grabbed one. “Hold on.”
The man whirled on him, his weapon coming up.
Tony raised his hands in surrender. “Whoa there, Speed Racer. You’re about to walk into a crime scene, and unless you’re trained on ways to avoid fucking up the scene, you really need to guard from behind the crime scene techs. I don’t go out and single handedly save the world, you don’t walk on my crime scene,” Tony said. “God, it’s worse than having a dozen probies. Boss, you want left or right?”
“Right,” Gibbs said. He set his bag down and pulled out gloves. Tony knelt down to do the same, acutely aware of the eyes watching him.
“So, here’s how it goes,” Tony said as he looked up. He kept kneeling on the floor looking through his evidence bag as he talked. It reduced the tension when people felt in control, and Tony wasn’t above manipulating these guys to make them feel a little more powerful. “We will clear the scene, and you need to stay at least four feet behind where we’re working. I don’t have to impress on you the total embarrassment of spending two days investigating a boot tread only to find you’re chasing your own boots, do I?” Tony grinned up at them. “Of course, in my defense, I was a month out of the academy at the time. If I did that now, Gibbs would headslap me.”
“I’d fire you,” Gibbs corrected him.
“Gee, thanks, boss.”
Gibbs shrugged. “Luckily you aren’t that stupid.” He looked around at the rest of the team, making it very clear he did consider all of them just that stupid. Either Tony’s words or Gibbs’ glare worked because the two in front stepped to the side and allowed Tony and Gibbs access.
Tony moved onto the stairs, focusing on the railing to his left. Gibbs took the wall on the right. The environment was good for evidence. The rough wood had caught any number of fibers and Tony collected two shoe prints off the risers. He focused on his job so much that he didn’t realize he had reached the bottom until he looked up to find three special ops team members standing on the stairs, and Gibbs working his way across the floor.
“I’ve got twenty two fiber samples and two shoe prints,” Tony said. “No fingerprints.”
“Nine and six,” Gibbs said.
Tony nodded. It was a lot, and without Abby, they were going to have to trust O’Neill to bring in a good forensics tech. O’Neill. Shit. Tony looked up at the team. “Tell O’Neill we’re going to need a boot print from whatever he wore yesterday so we can eliminate him from the suspect evidence.”
“About time,” Gibbs groused.
“I’m having an off day,” Tony shot back. This felt good. Before Blackadder got added to the team in the wake of 9-11, he and Gibbs had worked cases together, just the two of them. They’d had a rhythm that hadn’t really been the same. In some ways they were better with a team. Kate brought a compassion that he and Gibbs lacked together. Tony still ached for her, but she was gone. And Ziva didn’t have that same energy. She was a great ninja, and Tony suspected she would become a great investigator, but Kate had been their heart.
When Ziva had invited everyone to her house for dinner except him, that had pretty much proven that. Tim had been gleeful to be one of the popular kids for a change, not even thinking about the damage to Tony’s ego. The only thing that had salvaged Tony’s sense of team was Gibbs. He’d sabotaged Tony’s car, and when everyone had gone home, announced he’d done it so that he could take Tony out for dinner without Tony running away. Passive aggressive? Hell yes, but Gibbs had done that for him. Ziva and Tim weren’t his partners the way Gibbs was… the way Kate had been.
“Tony?” Gibbs stood and looked over at him.
“Just being maudlin,” Tony admitted as he went back to working on the back wall of the basement while Gibbs worked his way around the boat and toward the bench. Gibbs always had done that—known the second Tony lost his emotional balance. After he’d been forced to kill Jeffery White, Gibbs had shown up at his apartment with pizza and beer and had just invited himself for an impromptu marathon of John Wayne movies. They hadn’t said more than a dozen words all night, and most of those involved “pass the beer,” but it had helped Tony find his balance again. It was uncanny the way Gibbs had known things, but Tony had grown used to Gibbs being damn near superhuman.
As he worked, he reviewed his knowledge of one Leroy Jethro Gibbs. Gibbs always knew his mental state and when to push in versus when to pull back. Tony would be tempted to go for telepathy, only Gibbs had never shown any hint of knowing all the sexual fantasies Tony indulged in on a regular basis. So empathy maybe… a way to judge emotional states. That would explain why Gibbs was always accusing him of chasing women, even though women were not the center of his frequent office fantasies. Hell, it wasn’t like he had much sex at all. Flirting, like kneeling on the floor when telling covert ops guys how to do their jobs, was a strategy. It got him information he wanted.
But it was more. Gibbs would sometimes need glasses so badly that he couldn’t see a damn thing, but then he’d turn around and pull off a sniper shot that only one sniper in a thousand would even attempt. He was terrifyingly silent, but that could be covert ops training. O’Neill’s footsteps were often impossibly to track, especially when he had Daniel stomping around beside him. However there was no doubt that Gibbs was getting some sort of upgrade out of this.
Tony stood up and stretched his back. After turning the light off on his magnifying glass, he asked Gibbs, “So, you pin any beautiful women up against this wall lately?”
“DiNozzo,” Gibbs growled, the threat palpable.
Tony held up his evidence tweezers. “Red silk. Of course it could be that you were twirling around in a nice red silk number around as you worked on the boat.” Tony tucked the fiber into a bag as he watched Gibbs fight through the frustration and amusement. If they had been alone, Tony would have asked which of them was amused and which frustrated. One of the soldiers snickered.
“Red silk’s not my thing,” Gibbs finally said. “Where was it?” He came over to join Tony near the hidden door to the computer equipment.
Tony used the end of his tweezers to tap the exact spot, and then he moved close to the wall and awkwardly half squatted and leaned forward until his knees touched the wall. “Either he bent his knees and leaned into it or—”
“It was a woman,” Gibbs said as he crouched down to study the spot.
“Her skirt hung out away from her body as she searched the wall for the hidden catch.”
“Stand straight.” Gibbs gave Tony’s thigh a slap, and Tony jumped. Gibbs eyed him and then the wall before putting his hand just below Tony’s knee. “No matter how tall she was, this was not a short skirt.”
“So we were right. Someone was looking for your tech.”
Gibbs grunted, which was as much of an affirmation as Tony usually got.
“If this was a woman, either she has huge feet and likes to wear men’s shoes with her red silk dress or we’re missing something. I didn’t see any women’s shoes, boss.” Tony couldn’t have missed that. He wouldn’t have. Seeing evidence of a woman in his boss’s house would be noteworthy, even if they weren’t on a case.
“Right there,” Gibbs pointed to the narrow toed imprint of a woman’s shoe near the hidden door.
“So she left a print here, but she didn’t leave any walking in? I’m not buying it. No offense, boss, but this place isn’t the cleanest.”
“It’s a workshop.”
“Exactly. And she didn’t leave any prints in the dust?” Tony took out the camera first, photographing the footprint before attempting to take the print.
“I don’t think she used the stairs.”
“What? You mean you have more hidden passages down here? That’s very Bela Lugosi of you boss.”
“DiNozzo!” Tony looked up to see O’Neill on the stairs. Thank god he hadn’t started taking the print yet.
“Good. Are those the boots you had on yesterday?” Tony started grabbing for clean transfer paper.
“What? Yes. Why?” O’Neill frowned at him.
“Good.” Tony grabbed the pressure paper and headed up the stairs, stopping a couple of risers below O’Neill. “I need you to step down on this and put your full weight. I’ll need both boots.”
“What are you doing?” O’Neill demanded. “And you. Why are you up here when those two are down there?”
The soldiers all stood a little straighter. “Sir, they asked us to not contaminate the scene.”
“For cryin’ out loud. Do you always listen to the people you’re ordered to guard?”
“Sir, no sir,” one snapped out.
“And the people they’re guarding aren’t usually federal employees just like them,” Tony said.
O’Neill gave him a long look. “You’d be surprised,” he said dryly.
Tony narrowed his eyes as he tried to figure out that level of in-fighting into his new view of the world. Meanwhile, the soldiers were coming downstairs and taking positions in the corners Tony and Gibbs had cleared.
“I still need a boot print from you so we can eliminate your prints from potential suspects,” Tony said. He set the pressure paper and the base down on the step below O’Neill. “Step down on this and put your full weight on it.” O’Neill sighed, but he did comply with that print and a second one of his left boot.
“Are we done?”
“Yep,” Tony said. He took his samples and went to head back down the stairs.
“Not so fast, DiNozzo. You have to come deal with a situation.”
“What situation?” Gibbs demanded as he stood up and moved toward the stairs. The soldiers on the stairs shifted, and Tony held his breath.
“A Daveed and McGee situation,” O’Neill said, drawing out Ziva’s last name enough to make it clear that he’d already been corrected on the pronunciation. “Apparently they asked neighbors to alert them to any activity.”
“And us showing up with half an army constitutes activity,” Tony said with a sigh. “I’ve got this, boss.”
Gibbs crossed his arms over his chest. “I expect you to keep them clear of this, DiNozzo.”
“Yeah, what he said,” O’Neill added.
Tony gave O’Neill a fake grin. “You’re just lucky I take his orders because I think I’ve proven I don’t take yours.” With that, Tony headed past O’Neill and trotted up the stairs.
Behind him, O’Neill was saying, “I don’t see how you avoid the temptation to shoot him.”
Tony didn’t have time to listen to Gibbs’ answer—he headed out to the front lawn, and sure enough, McGeek and Ziva stood near an NCIS issued car, and a half dozen guards covered them. Murray even stood near the van looking supremely prepared to shoot everyone if that’s what it took to accomplish the mission. At least no one had pulled out weapons. Yet.
“Hey guys!” Tony called out brightly. This was so going to suck.
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Love competent Tony to no end. And I love seeing the difference between Gibbs and Samas. And Tony and Gibbs(Samas) as a duo again! Tony's going to need a vacation after this is over... or maybe some alone time with Gibbs(Samas).
And loved the byplay about the red silk. Awesome! Looking forward to more!!
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Hmm will McGee and Ziva be convinced by Tony's cover story whatever that might be or will you be adding more to the mix?
So is the villainous goa'uld a female or someone wearing a dashiki or something?
As always looking forward to more.
Shakatany
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And the boys are about to find out who is after them rather quickly, and Samas' secrets are about to get told. I love teasing!!
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(Anonymous) 2013-10-07 01:37 pm (UTC)(link)no subject