Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by the writers, producers, et al of the television show 'NCIS'. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person, internet persona, or other being, living or dead, is completely coincidental and unintentional unless otherwise noted.

A/N: This tale takes place in the same 'verse as Sand, Sun, and Sotol, but you needn't have read it to understand this – all you really need to know is that Tony and Ziva survived a couple of days in the desert after a plane crash, mostly because the pilot (Elizabeth Cambry) had grown up in the area. And I think I'll go along with keeping the timeline rather vague – Vance is the director, but other than that, the only other bit of info you really need to know is that this is after (obviously) SSS.

One other thing – though this is still written in my favored third-person style (so we get thoughts that aren't Tony's from time to time), it's not told in a very logical order (because our favorite whipping-boy's the main character, and his brain's somewhat addled). I'll apologize ahead of time if I managed to confuse everyone.

Whiteout

The wind might be howling at higher altitudes, but at ground level all it did – besides find new and improved ways to snake down his collar and up his cuffs – was cause the trees to creak and moan like living things not long for this world, though it was a little hard to hear over the ringing in his ears and his st-st-stutter of shivering breath, punctuated by cold-triggered coughing from his lungs, which then set off a lance of stabbity pain through his right side. He was pretty sure some ribs were bruised; he knew he had a concussion – though he didn't think it was too horribly bad, he was seeing only one of everything, but it was a little blurry; and his left arm hurt like hell.

The snow was falling at a forty-five degree angle; fat clusters of flakes that were the perfect consistency to pack into snowballs, but Tony wasn't thinking about snowballs at that moment. He was thinking about how much his head hurt and how it felt like his feet had become blocks of ice and how the hell could he have been so phenomenally stupid as to leave the car?

It was snowing hard enough that his footprints filled in not more than five minutes after he made them, but he didn't dare stop.

If I manage to make it out of this alive, Gibbs is gonna kill me.

For once, whatever gods who looked after Navy personnel were being kind – from the time the MCRT wrapped up a straightforward murder/suicide on December twentieth, there hadn't been any further calls. None that warranted the presence of Gibbs' team, at any rate. And so, by the time the clock had ticked over to 1600 on the afternoon of the twenty-third, all pertinent paperwork had been completed, and the team were back to reviewing cold cases – although they weren't pursuing it with much diligence; the absolute last thing McGee, Ziva, or Tony wanted was to make a break in an old case that would necessitate the delay of holiday plans.

From his desk, Gibbs was also merely pretending to read the case contained in the rather worn dark blue folder – it was much more interesting to watch his team counting down the last few hours before their long weekend. McGee was alternating between trying to read the case on his desk and sending messages back and forth to people on his phone – sure, he was using the computer, but Gibbs knew the techie could easily do something to make his cell forward the messages to the computer and vice-versa. Besides, it was a little hard to miss how just before Tim turned his attention to the computer, his cell blinked silently a couple of times. Ziva was a little more circumspect in her 'work', a casual observer would merely see her engrossed in an old file, but Gibbs had seen her sneak a magazine between its pages earlier. And then there was Tony, who had probably read the same page in his own casefile a dozen times over by now, constantly interrupting himself to glance at the clock or stare off into space with an odd little smile on his face.

Gibbs mentally smirked a little and closed the file he'd been 'reading' and stood up. Instantly, he had the complete attention of his team. He found it amusing that each of them had a hopeful expression on their faces that they were trying to hide. "Go home," he said. "Come back on Monday ready to actually work. Ziva, don't forget to remove the magazine from the file before you go. McGee, call your sister, let her know you'll be picking her up early."

Tim and Ziva wasted no time getting their things in order. Tony took even less time than either of his teammates, but lingered by his desk for another couple of minutes. "Yeah, DiNozzo," Gibbs said, "I remember – you'll be back on the fourth."

Tony grinned, "Merry Christmas, boss." He nearly tripped over his own feet in his haste to make it to the elevator.

As Tony crossed into the elevator's bluish lighting, out of nowhere the memory of his sooner-than-advised return to work following his brush with plague flashed into Gibbs' mind; for a split-second, the sight of his senior field agent had morphed into the one who had dark circles under his eyes, marring pale skin, and who was about twenty pounds lighter than was healthy. A cold chill crept down Gibbs' neck, and he blinked. The Tony now visible through the closing elevator doors was fine and grinning widely as he buttoned up his stupidly-expensive coat.

Come on, old man, Gibbs thought while pulling on his own coat. He's going to a wedding in Illinois. A wedding of two police officers, where at least half the guests are gonna also be cops – what the hell do you think's gonna happen? He shook his head and headed for Abby's lab. She'd never forgive him if he forgot to wish her a merry Christmas. Spending a few minutes with the forensic scientist allowed him to shelve the momentary flash of oddness he'd experienced upstairs. By the time he'd made it out to his car, he'd almost managed to force himself to forget about it.

Almost.

Scenes from Vertical Limit and High Ice flickered through his brain, as did scenes from Alive, but they were mostly fleeting images, nothing really stuck in his head. However, his thoughts kept circling around and around to a book he'd read as a senior in high school, Arthur Roth's Avalanche. One of the lower classmen – Tony thought his first name might have been Kenny, but he was almost positive the kid's last name had been Ruther – had left it in the dorm's common room just before the three-day mini-vacation in honor of Memorial Day. Had Tony not been suffering a moderate case of stomach flu at the time, he likely wouldn't have read it. But he had, and so images first conjured up nearly twenty years earlier were what his brain kept coming back to; specifically, how the main character had managed to keep track of his days buried in the snowbank by using the bones from… Had the kid been out hunting pheasant or quail? Anyway, the kid in the book had eaten the birds raw, and even as Tony's gag-reflex was convincing him that was a Bad Plan, his stomach was saying how it probably wouldn't be all that bad, that it had been at least a solid twelve or fourteen hours since that mystery-meat heat-and-eat from the gas station in the ironically-named Frostburg.

Tony paused by a snow-laden conifer for a moment, squinting through the blowing white haze, hoping to catch sight of something – anything – but more trees and snow. His head was throbbing, and the rapidly-lightening whiteness of the day was doing absolutely nothing for the headache. At least I'm not dizzy any more. His actions belied the thought as he pushed off the tree and staggered in a zig-zag pattern for some thirty or forty feet.

He barely noticed the cold and was grateful that his shivering finally seemed to be under control.

The Monday before his vacation was due to start, the transmission in his car suffered 'severe mechanical failure'. At least, that's what the mechanic called it – Tony was pretty sure that 'severe mechanical failure' was something of an understatement, considering that the transmission had parted company with the body of car as he'd gone to back out of his space at the Naval Yard. Luckily, Ducky had been working late and had taken him home after the tow-truck had come for the car, but it left Tony more than just a little upset. Not only was he going to wind up having to pay through the nose to get his wheels back on the road, but due to the backlog of fender-benders, his mechanic wouldn't even be able to get to it until after the start of the new year.

Fine, Tony figured. I'll fly to Peoria.

Unfortunately, there wasn't a single empty seat to be had, unless he wanted to suffer nearly a dozen connecting flights (which would rack up frequent-flyer points, sure, but would have him hopping from one airplane to another for nearly a straight twenty-four hours). He tried to find a spot on Amtrak, but they didn't have an open slot until the day after the wedding. And taking a bus didn't even bear thinking about.

After exhausting all other possibilities save hitchhiking, Tony finally admitted defeat and booked a rental for the trip. He only hoped that this time, the damn thing had working heat.

The wind picked up even as the snow started falling more thickly, its flakes changing from miniature fluff-balls from the sky to dryer, wind-driven needles. Tony continued onwards, moving on feet he could barely feel, leaving a rapidly-erased trail behind him. He wasn't really looking for a place to get out of the weather any more – his mind had drifted back to early that summer, standing on the tarmac of an old, run-down airstrip outside of El Paso, Texas, where the thermometer had read a solid hundred-twelve and the sun had beat down with an intensity he'd never before experienced. Just the memory was almost enough to make it seem warmer.

His brain kept trying to tell him something, but all he could really pull up between fond remembrances of Liz Cambry and her creative cussing was the dim and hazy memory of his mom reading him a bedtime story when he was four or five years old. He'd been sitting in a nest of fluffy pillows and thick blankets – it was sometime close to Christmas, then, too – while his mom read a story out of a thick book of fairytales that was bound in red leather. He couldn't remember just what story it was, only that there was a little girl selling matches in it, and to this day he didn't know why she would be selling matches, of all things.

As the snow blew horizontally around him, and made seeing trees even ten feet away nearly impossible, Tony's mind kept circling around the same three thoughts: The kid from Avalanche, who'd kept track of the days he was trapped by using bird-bones; standing on the tarmac of Liz's airstrip, heat-shimmer all around like a living thing, the sun high overhead and baking his brain inside his skull; and why had that little girl in the story been selling matches?

He briefly acknowledged the fact that a book of matches would come in handy, but then his thoughts went back to the kid trapped in a snowbank, counting days with raw-gnawed bird bones.

Some part of him, buried deep under all his normal day-to-day crap, hidden behind his personality – that same bit of instinct that normally told him when something bad was going down by making his stomach twist into new and better origami – had its own separate train of thought; but even it only had one train running at the time: I am so screwed.

The letter from Val Rossi was a surprise, albeit a good one. It came sandwiched between his electric bill and his latest delivery from Netflix; a standard legal-size envelope sporting a breast cancer awareness stamp with the address done in an almost-forgotten, crooked type. Even though it lacked a return address, Tony's first thought was, Still haven't gotten rid of that old Underwood, have ya, Val? A soft smirk played at the corners of his mouth.

He tossed the envelope from Netflix on his coffee table and stripped his coat off, taking care with his left arm – a suspect had rabbited on them earlier that week, and Tony being who he was, had managed to hyperextend his elbow in chasing him down. He hung his coat on the wrought-iron stand and flicked the light switch on as he closed his apartment door behind him.

Heading into the kitchen, Tony tucked the light bill into the wooden wall-rack where he organized such things and hung his keys on one of the pegs it contained for just such purposes. As it was too late for any decent delivery, Tony piled some salami onto a couple of slices of bread and grabbed a beer from his fridge. Between bites, he tapped the envelope on its narrow end a couple of times and ripped the opposite end open. A smallish card of heavy, pale blue paper fell out when he tipped the envelope over, followed by a slower reveal of normal typing paper.

The card contained black, gold, and silver inks, all crafting some incredibly hard-to-decipher text which proclaimed that he (and one guest) were invited to the wedding of Valentino Rossi and Angelica Silva on December the twenty-seventh. Tony's smile broadened somewhat on seeing it. "Damn, Val. You owe me fifty bucks. Told ya it was all just flirting, man." Tony then turned his attention to the letter.

Hey, Tony!

You probably read the card first. And yes, I remember our little wager – but you'll have to come to the wedding to collect it! It's going to be at St. Andrew's, at noon. Ironic, I know, considering that's where we met Angie to begin with, but she swears to this day that we met her a week later at Dario's. Speaking of, that's where she insisted we have the reception. Go figure.

Anyway, haven't heard much from you since you hooked up with the feds. They working you that much, mio amico? (1) Nah, I know better. You're working yourself that much. If I know you, I'm sure you haven't had a vacation in at least four years. I know it's short notice, but I expect you to come. Already have your name down as one of the ushers. The invite would have gotten to you sooner, but there was a screw-up with the printer. I think only half the folk Angie wanted to be there will be able to show. Luckily, with the exception of yourself, everyone I've invited is local, at least. Too bad Angie wanted a big wedding – she's going to have to make do with a smallish one instead.

Anyway again, other than Angie and myself, not a whole lot's changed lately. The arsonist we were after managed to catch himself in one of his own fires, so we don't have to worry about him any more. Lucky bastard managed to survive, but he's been shipped out to a specialist burn-center in Chicago. Danver transferred out to Moline and Parker's going through a rookie every three weeks to find a replacement. Mikael got winged by a perp during a hold-up at the Casey's just outside town last week and is bitching about having to ride a desk until the stitches come out. Oh, and before I forget, Sandra said to tell you 'hi' and that she's still got – here, I'll quote directly – "That thing from that time when he did that thing for me that he said I should forget about." One of these days, you're going to have to tell me what the hell she was talking about.

So, what's up with you lately? Last I heard, you'd just gotten back from some assignment at-sea. Honestly, I don't know why you were so upset about that. You do work for the Navy, right? Wouldn't you expect to be out on some boat or another from time to time? But that's beside the point. What I really want to know is if you and that sexy partner of yours have seen more of each other. Have to admit, Angie pitched a fit to find that snap of that beauty in her bikini in my correspondence box, but she calmed down some when I said it was from you.

Anyway the third, I should close this damn thing off before it gets any longer. See you later.

Faresti meglio a venire, (2)

Val Rossi

Tony chuckled. Contrary to most opinions he'd heard over the years, he hadn't left Peoria under duress – there had been no issues with his coworkers, no allegations of misconduct, nothing other than a couple of minor reprimands regarding pranks. Hell, his first four commendations had come from Peoria. It had been a visit by the Philadelphia Chief of Police (visiting his daughter and her family) during the summer of 1997 which had resulted in a job offer at twice his former salary; apparently the Philly Chief had been impressed by the flying tackle Tony had employed to subdue a kid strung out on meth who'd just attempted to rob the Peoria Bank and Trust. Considering he still had some severe debt from his student loans at the time, the transfer had been a no-brainer.

Smiling lightly, Tony raised his beer and toasted the letter. "Yeah, Val, I'll be there," his smile faded as he realized it was already the first of December. "Somehow."

The first few hours of the trip were pretty smooth. The only thing that bothered Tony at the time was the hassle of having to change the radio station every so often as whatever station he'd been listening to faded out of range. It wasn't until he'd stopped for gas in Frostburg that it had even started to snow. Sure, the sky had been grey and lifeless, but that was about par for the course during wintertime on the Atlantic seaboard. He'd grabbed a coffee and a heat-and-eat that the wrapper claimed was a 'double cheeseburger', but Tony wouldn't have been surprised had someone told him it was actually dog. Tasteless as it may have been, it did take the edge off quite nicely and would keep him going until it was time to stop for the night and he could have a real meal.

By the time he'd finished the sandwich, the snow was rapidly reaching the point where his rental's wipers had a hard time keeping up with it.

But then again – it was a rental. The radio simply warned of 'scattered flurries'.

Nothing to worry about.

Surprisingly, it wasn't all that difficult to arrange for the week between Christmas and New Years' off; it helped that not only did Tony have several weeks – nearly three months of paid leave, but who's counting? – of vacation time saved up, but that he'd also covered the last six major holidays as favors to other agents.

As easy as it was to arrange the time off, Tony should have known something was going to go wrong.

A combination of the short notice and a lengthy dry spell had his little black book spewing up nothing but rejections – mostly, they were pretty, polite, little white lies like 'I'm sorry, but I've already got plans that week' or 'I'm going to be with my family then', but there were a couple of instances of 'who is this again?' and one memorable 'not just no, but oh, hell no'. Needless to say, that particular reply had its entry blacked-out with Sharpie.

Sighing a little, Tony hung up his phone and went back to flipping through the last month's worth of casefiles. And McGee and Ziva think I don't work. Hah! I work more than the both of them combined. He scribbled his signature and sat the file off to the right before reaching for the next one in his stack. He ignored the little voice in the back of his head that was trying like hell to point out that he used to have fun. That getting a date used to be easy, for fuck's sake. He signed off on another of the team's reports and sat it on the 'done' stack. Wonder if Abby's got plans? Signing his name again, he huffed out a frustrated sigh and placed it on top of the previous file. Yeah, she does, DiNozzo. She's only been jabbering on about going home to visit her family for the last six weeks or so.

Hell, even Ziva's got plans already. He sighed again and reached for the last file needing review. Damn it, DiNozzo. Pull together already. It's a wedding, sure, but who says you have to go with someone? Remember your cousin's wedding? The bridesmaid – what was her name again? Whatever. All upset and gooey over the wedding and pissed about being single. Damn, that was a fun weekend. What the hell was her name? Gina? Jeri? Jess? Juh-something, I remember that much. He sat a little straighter and smirked.

Yeah, he had no problem going stag.

He nearly walked directly into the wall. The combination of the zero-visibility white-out and his somewhat scrambled brain had him taking a full five minutes to figure out just what the hell it was that was blocking his path.

Eventually enough neurons were diverted to realize it was a wall, made of horizontally-stacked logs. Right then, Tony didn't care if it was a shed, an outbuilding, or a barn (complete with cow-stench) – all that really mattered was that it was shelter.

Moving painfully slowly to keep the wall in sight – no mean feat, either, as it faded from view if he got more than about eighteen inches from it – Tony crept along its length. He tried keeping in physical contact with the log wall, but it just didn't work. His hands were too numb to register much more than dull pressure.

After what felt like an eternity, he located a corner and rounded it. It managed to block most of the wind, and his visibility increased to about four feet or so. With the added visibility, he was able to move a little faster and soon located a door atop a short series of three steps. He pounded on it for several minutes before realizing that it was likely that no one was home.

He tried the latch, but it was either locked or jammed.

Bracing himself for some major complaints from his bruised ribs, Tony rammed the door with his shoulder.

It simply shuddered in its frame, almost like it was laughing at him.

Tony had never felt so close to tears of frustration before.

Tony had graduated at the top of his class at the police academy; Val Rossi had come in at second. But Val hadn't begrudged Tony his place – just said it was fair play from the fates for having screwed-up his chance at going pro. They'd been roommates since freshman year at OSU, and so when that dweezel from Michigan had broke Tony's leg, most of the fallout had fallen squarely on Val's shoulders. While his best friend tried to get his life back together, Val had been there – sometimes as a sounding-board, sometimes as a punching-bag – but always there.

After graduation, Val invited Tony back to his family's place in Peoria.

Two weeks of general partying gave way to the worst three weeks in Val's life when someone had kidnapped his baby sister, who had only been seventeen at the time. It was then Tony's turn to be there for Val, through all the waiting and worrying and multiple interviews with the police.

Not that the police did much good – it was Tony who had brought Delanna home. However, the entire issue had given both Tony and Val a direction; previously, Val had been intending to go on to get his master's in applied psychology and Tony had resigned himself to obtaining a teacher's certificate and putting his phys ed degree to use in the most mundanely common way. But when Delanna came home, it had barely taken five minutes of discussion (in the hospital ER, of all places) for both Tony and Val to decide to go in a different direction.

They had applied for – and been accepted into – Peoria's Police Academy's very next training class. After graduating, the pair were partners.

Until Philly's Chief of Police had 'stolen' Tony away. But Val hadn't minded that, either. Tony had saved his baby sister, despite still being somewhat limited in his mobility (who knew that a shattered knee took so freaking long to heal?), and Val had a hard time begrudging his best friend anything.

The car Tony wound up with from the rental place was only two years old – and did indeed have both working heat and a functional radio – but that was about all that it had going for it. It was a brick-red Buick, to start with. An Enclave, to be precise. The type of car that was for soccer-moms who couldn't convince their husbands to let them buy a minivan. It didn't have much in the way of features, just power locks (operated by the key-fob) – hell, the radio was simply that, a radio, with nary a plug for his MP3 player in sight, to say nothing of the lack of CD-ability. And it definitely didn't have a GPS. So, once Tony'd made it back to his apartment, he packed for his trip and made sure to bring along an old, dog-eared copy of a Rand-McNally road atlas.

He packed the car and was all ready to head out the following morning by six in the evening.

He ordered a pizza and spent the next two hours staring blankly at one of the dozens of Christmas Classics playing that weekend on AMC.

"Damn it," Tony muttered, not aware that he was speaking out loud. "I am not gonna die today!"

He ignored the fatigue pushing itself in on his body and the reawakened pain from his ribs. He backed away from the door, crouched in the snow as far away as he could and still not lose sight of the building. Visions of the hundreds of times he'd played football flashed across his brain, a scrimmage line of opposing players momentarily replaced the vague outline of the building. A ghostly echo of a memory-quarterback called the play.

He charged the door.

He was warm. Kinda swimmy, but warm. That was really all that mattered.

"…you for your assistance, Mrs. Halbert. However, he needs his rest. I'll make sure that he knows who to thank when he wakes up…"

Tony had no idea where he was, or even how he got there, but he was warm.

"…gotten yourself into this time, DiNozzo. Gonna have Abby do that microchip-doodad thing…"

Sleep.

"…lucky not to have lost any fingers or toes. Don't know how he managed it…"

Sleep was good.

"…and then, when I couldn't reach you on your cell – 'cause, come on, man, it's not like you to miss something this important – I called that boss of yours…"

Sleep was bliss.

"…gonna be really ticked when he wakes up, you know that, right?" "Rule eighteen, Abs…"

Sleep when he was warm was absolute heaven.

"…minimum of complications. He's got to be one of the luckiest individuals I've ever had come through my ER…"

Every now and again, snippets of conversation interrupted his sleep, but he couldn't find it in himself to care.

The sluggish lassitude which had invaded his sleep finally faded away and Tony eventually pulled himself into the world of the living. Even before he opened his eyes, he could tell he was in a hospital. It took a few moments for him to remember what had happened – hitting a patch of black ice, running off the road, slamming into a tree and hitting his head. He vaguely recalled wondering if the car was going to blow up and running away from it and getting lost in the trees before reason could resurface. And then his memory simply supplied him with a long, white blank.

"I know you're awake, DiNozzo."

Tony cracked his eyes open, squinting in preparation for the light to start stabbing his brain. His face relaxed some when he realized that his head didn't hurt and that the light wasn't out to get him. This time.

"Boss," Tony said. He wasn't at all surprised to find Gibbs there. It just furthered his personal belief that Gibbs was at least a quarter-deity; the man simply knew more than any mere human possibly could.

"What do you remember?"

Tony shrugged, his left shoulder complaining about the motion. "Honestly? Not a whole lot. I know I hit a patch of black ice, then a tree… After that… It's mostly just a big, white blur." He did a quick internal inventory. His ribs still ached a little, his left shoulder he already knew about, there was a faint ache in his skull that wasn't persistent or sharp enough to truly qualify as a headache, and – oddly – the back of his neck itched like mad. He also couldn't fail to notice the bandages on his hands, and if he concentrated, he could feel similar ones on his feet. "What's the damage?" he asked.

"Some bruised ribs, sprained shoulder, mild concussion. Severe hypothermia and moderate frostbite. The docs say you were lucky not to lose any appendages, though it's gonna be a while for the frozen skin to grow back. You'll have a few interesting scars when it's all over and done with."

Tony couldn't take the itch and reached up to scratch the back of his neck, only to have Gibbs smack his hand down. "Leave it, DiNozzo."

"Frostbite supposed to itch like that?" he asked. "Because my hands don't itch… They're kinda numb."

"That's not frostbite."

Tony blinked at his boss. "What is it?"

"GPS tracker," Gibbs replied with a half-smile. "Had Abby do it while you were out. Figured it'd make life easier on all of us the next time you go missing."

Maybe it was the painkillers still coursing through his bloodstream, or maybe it was just his inner kid (who was never all that far from the surface to begin with) thought it was cool, but Tony couldn't control his reaction.

He laughed.

A/N2: No, I don't speak Italian (other than some names for food and please/thank you), all Italian comes directly from web-based translators (and I try to cross-check through several, re-translating from the Italian back into English to make sure it still makes sense), so any inaccuracies should be overlooked. That said, however, if there's something that you simply cannot ignore, please let me know and I'll fix it.

1. mio amico – my friend (Italian)
2. faresti meglio a venire – you better come (Italian)

Though I've never personally had a concussion, I have been severely hypothermic before (I got stranded in a broken-down pickup with no heater on one of the coldest nights on record in Iowa about eight years ago), and being that freakin' cold? Yeah, it seriously fucks with your brain. Not to mention that it's a really, really bad sign to stop shivering. And yes, I'm ecstatic that I now live in El Paso (I saw snow twice the first winter I was here – both times it was gone by noon – and three times the second winter, likewise gone in less than a day).

This was just something to take up some time – I'm still working on the next installments for all my WIPs. However, I thought y'all might like a little Tony-whump in the meantime. I don't really intend to go anywhere else with this, though I might wind up writing another story or two in this 'verse before it's all said and done.

Remember to lemme know what y'all think!