East Coast Gazette

All right, this might be avoidance.

Quick post-SWAK missing scene for NCIS, technically gen, but I mean, come on:

Room 609 was dozing, still too skinny and sallow, when an entirely new man in a (much more expensive) suit wandered up to the nurses station.

“Is Anthony DiNozzo here?” he asked, checking a pink slip he unfolded from his pocket.  He was older, handsome, and Julie briefly wondered if Nice Suit and Off the Rack weren’t going to fight for 609, which would be hot, in a wrong sort of way.  But anyway, it was ICU, and everybody was unconscious so you had to make your own fun.

“I’m sorry, he’s only receiving immediate family as visitors,” Julie said, and consulted her chart.  Off the Rack, who always answered the cell phone he was *not supposed to have* as Gibbs, was the only visitor 609 had had so far — but what 609 lacked in quantity Gibbs more than made up for with devotion, and he seemed to haunt the hallways.

Nice Suit smiled tightly.  “I am family,” he said.  “I’m his father.”

“Oh,” Julie said, eyes rounding.  “I’m sorry — I didn’t — ”

“That’s fine,” 609’s dad said, tense.  “Just — I’d like to see my son.”

Julie thought that if he really wanted to see his son, he should have probably rushed there as soon as 609 had been taken out of isolation and moved into recovery at the ICU.  His chart was three inches thick and his lungs would never be the same, and no matter how long Gibbs sat in silent guard at his bedside, 609 had mostly spent his time shifting into and out of feverish sleep.  He was alive, and he would make it, but he’d crashed three times, before, and Julie had personally put ice packs at his groin and underarms to push down his fever.

“He’s in room 609,” Julie said, hesitating.  “He’s still very sick.”

Nice Suit gave her a smile.  “That’s fine,” he said.

“I’ll come with you,” Julie rushed to say, circling the side of the counter and waving at Maurey in back to tag her out.  “I can answer any questions you have.”  And keep you from doing anything to make him worse, Julie thought to herself.

Anthony DiNozzo was still the same as she’d left him half an hour again, sleeping fitfully on one side, his breathing a painful rasp in the relative quiet of the room.  His heart monitor was beeping at regular intervals and all his pulmonary systems were acceptable for someone who’d just outrun a disease that claimed 2/3rds of Europe.

“He’s been having trouble resting,” Julie murmured, keeping her voice soft, standing in the doorway of the room with Nice Suit and watching his face transform from steady to shocked to wary as the machines and monitors whirred.  “We’ve been trying to let him sleep as much as he can whenever he can.”

“What happened?” Nice Suit asks, stepping into the room, and Julie resists the urge to drag him back into the hall.

“You don’t know?”

Nice Suit glares at her.  “My secretary handed me a message saying my son was in the hospital — I’ve been out of the country at a board event the last week and a half.”

When Julie got the flu, her mother drove the six hours from the next state to bring her chicken soup and tell her she was going to die single if she didn’t clean her apartment.

“He — he was infected with a variation of the plague,” Julie said, and wished that Gibbs were here.  There were rules, obviously, about family and what they were legally allowed to know and how much she should tell them, but she couldn’t help but think that Nice Suit was family in name only, and that here, blood couldn’t be thicker than water.

Nice Suit swallowed hard, fisting his hands at his sides.  “He’ll live?” he asked.

Julie smiled, genuine.  “He’ll be fine — his recovery will take a while, but he should be right as rain as long as he’s careful.”

“He never should have run off to be a cop,” Nice Suit muttered, charging to the end of the bed to grab Tony’s chart.  “That’s what — what does this mean?” he asked, pointing at something on the first page.

Julie tried to take it away from him.  “Sir!  You’re not allowed to — !”

“*What the hell is going on in here*?” Gibbs suddenly said, appearing out of nowhere and hovering just over Julie’s shoulder.  And as soon as her heart calmed, she felt a sense of enormous relief.

“Sir,” she said, “this is Mr. DiNozzo’s father and — ”

Gibbs favored her with a tight smile.  “I know who he is,” he said, voice terse, and turned back to glare at Nice Suit.  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“The better question is who the fuck are *you*,” Nice Suit said, his voice rising in pitch and loudness, and Julie waved at them frantically, watching DiNozzo stir on the bed, his eyelashes fluttering.

“Guys!” Julie hissed, both men froze, turning to the bed.

DiNozzo moaned a little, fingers sliding across the sheets, searching, whispering, “Boss?”

Gibbs’ face hardened, and with a deceptively soft voice, eyes never straying from Nice Suit, he said, “I’ll be right there, DiNozzo,” before grabbing Nice Suit by the collar and dragging him out the sickroom door, down the hall and around a corner.

Julie ended up having to piece together the fight from later hospital gossip accounts. They varied from Maurey’s, which included Gibbs’ declaration of love for 609 and his warning that Nice Suit had better leave them alone to Amy’s, which emphasized the way Gibbs had loomed in warning.  Henry from orthopedics said the important thing was that Gibbs had said, “You lost the right to wander into his life when you didn’t come running the minute I called to say he was hurt, you piece of shit.”

And okay, so, Julie was a little upset about missing that, because obviously her underwear would have spontaneously incinerated on the spot but she thought the trade off was probably fair.

After all, she was the only person who had been hovering around in 609’s room, changing his IV’s by the time Gibbs finally came back and took up his regular seat in the wretchedly uncomfortable plastic chair by DiNozzo’s bed.

“Boss?” 609 croaked again, opening his eyes just a sliver — hazel against bloodshot eyes.

Gibbs leaned in, close enough to touch his fingertips to 609’s on the bed linens, and ran his fingers through DiNozzo’s hair, tender, letting his palm cup the back of the man’s skull, and whispered, secret and dear and close:

“Yeah, DiNozzo — I’m right here.”