Rating: T

Disclosure: The characters do not belong to me, this piece is for entertainment purposes and no money will be made from the story.

Warnings: This story deals with child molestation, sexual harassment and assault but no graphic descriptions. It also deals with homophobic behaviour.

Summary: This is another 'what if' story. What if the gay cowboy photo of Tony that was created by Abby and Cate in the season 2 episode Conspiracy Theories ended up being seen by everyone at NCIS. What would be the consequences for Tony and the team? And for all those fans of Tom Morrow, I just want to warn you that every story needs a antagonist and in this one he is it. So if you're a fan you might want to skip this story.

A/N Well here we go again with another 'What If' story. Another supposedly comedic moment that bothered me greatly and lately I've been in a contemplative state. BuckeyeGirl00000 is kindly serving as Beta for this story and it's great to be collaborating again. Remaining mistakes are my bad as usual. Just to clarify the time line for this story, it takes place in season two and Don't Ask Don't Tell was still in effect. I hope you enjoy :D

Betrayals

Chapter 1

Special Agent Anthony DiNozzo was furious. Furious with his frat brother for letting slip a stupid nickname that he's always hated and what made it worse was that Steve Adler had known full well that was the case. Just because his partner Caitlyn Todd had been seeing Steve didn't give him carte blanche to divulge personal stuff to his girlfriend about a frat brother and friend. In fact quite the opposite because Steve had broken the code that he'd sworn to uphold and betrayed his frat brother for a casual affair.

The betrayal by his frat brother would be seen by the fraternity if they ever found out about it, as an extreme transgression indeed. It could have extremely serious, even life changing consequences and he would find himself completely ostracised by past, present and even future members of the fraternity, it could potentially contribute to genuine monetary penalties, essentially making life for Steve Adler incredibly difficult. What happened in the Fraternity was supposed to stay within the fraternity, not betrayed to spouses and certainly not for a casual lay. Tony couldn't help wondering what it was about himself that caused people he trusted to betray him over and over again.

He was also extremely pissed off with his partner Cate who didn't have to blab that stupid name to all and sundry in the bull pen. She had done the college thing and knew how fraternities and sororities operated; how could she divulge his stupid pledge name like that to simply score points off him? She would have elbowed him to death if the shoe had been on the other foot and he'd revealed something so personal about her, supposing he'd learnt about it from one of her sorority sisters. He could just imagine how outraged Cate would be if it happened to her.

Cate would have a complete cow if she knew that Steve had been less than chivalrous in how he talked about her to Tony too. She probably wouldn't believe that Tony had actually punched his frat brother in the nose to stop him bragging about their extra -curricular activities. Since he regarded Cate as the sister he'd never had, it nauseated him when Steve started giving him details about their sex life. His fraternity brother doing that had gone way too far.

Knowing that Cate was a good Catholic girl and definitely on the prudish side, he knew she would be completely mortified if she thought that Steve was talking out of turn. Tony had had every intention of gently breaking it to her because he thought she should know. After her disloyalty over the Sex Machine nickname though, he decided to damn her; she didn't deserve him looking out for her. In fact he was so angry with her that he showed her 'that' photo he'd found on the wall of the bar down in Panama City when he was down there with his frat brothers for their annual spring break reunion.

He couldn't believe it, when he saw it up on the wall of the bar where he'd been carousing with his frat brothers for their annual spring pilgrimage to Panama City. As he headed off to the men's room, he encountered a photo of a younger Cate Todd taking part in a wet t-shirt competition and rather scantily clad, staring back at him and the rest of the world to perve at. Looking at the photo he felt a mix of emotions including embarrassment and astonishment since Cate had been so vitriolic about the objectification of women and his chauvinist attitudes. To find her partaking in something she had been so scathing about was shocking to him. His drunken wicked side also recognised that it was something he could use to torture her with, if she got too smug and holier than thou. He took a digital copy of the photo and decided right there that even if he did tease her with it, he would never betray her by showing it to their colleagues and embarrassing her.

By the time he'd returned home, he'd sobered up and thought more about it and Tony had decided that he wouldn't tease her with her youthful indiscretion even if she could be a total prig at times. He figured it was her convent school education and he decided not to out her on her hypocrisy. He had plenty of his own secrets that he didn't want his colleagues to know about either and trust was important to him. Actually it was something he continually struggled with on a daily basis. He didn't trust easily and therefore it was important to him that he also didn't betray the trust of people who were important to him.

As annoying as Cate was at times, she was a teammate and his partner and Tony cared about her. So, while he would happily tease and embarrass her, there was a line that shouldn't be crossed. Plus, he knew she would be deeply mortified if the photo was to surface at work. Even if he didn't show it around she would be embarrassed enough that *he'd* seen it. *Especially* that he'd seen it.

This was why he was damned incensed when Cate crossed that line with hobnailed boots on and unfortunately his over-reaction ensured that everybody now knew that it was his Achilles' heel and they wouldn't hesitate to use it against him. Of course she couldn't know why he'd reacted so badly to the name but damn her to Hell she had no right to share that stupid moniker with everyone. That was not watching his six and he'd immediately retaliated with a vicious counter hook to her soft underbelly, when he revealed to her that he had the wet T-shirt photo he had been on the brink of deleting.

It was war as far as he was concerned but Tony still had his principles. While he might tease her gleefully about his plans to reveal the photo to the team - or put it up on the plasma for all to see, it was something he knew he would never actually do. Ever! He could never deliberately hurt someone that mattered to him, even if he was furious with them. Still she didn't have to know that and he was a good enough actor that she never thought otherwise, either. He knew he should have risen above the betrayal, turned the other cheek and all that crap and with the benefit of hindsight, he really wished that he'd done just that.

Unfortunately, he didn't have hindsight and he was also off kilter, so he lashed out because he was hurting. Stupid, he berated himself because while Cate had started it all, he knew that payback never ended well and he should have let it go. Should have known that it would simply escalate and it did. In between Cate being alternately pleading and whiney then snarky and vengeful, she was sneaking around with a smug expression of her face and whispering constantly with Abby. They'd stop as soon as he came into the room and it was plain that Cate had planned some sort of payback but he had no idea that she'd go that far. If blurting out the Sex Machine nick-name was crossing the line of betrayal, then what followed was the Judas Iscariot of betrayals in Tony's book and he was incandescent with rage and sickened with her treachery.

When Cate had shown him that stupid doctored gay photo of him, she had no idea how close he came to hitting a woman for the first time in his life. Something he'd always sworn he would never emulate from his father's many odious qualities, no matter what the provocation but he came close. Probably the only thing that saved Cate was his self-awareness that if he started, he probably wouldn't be able to stop. Cate seemed to have no idea what she'd done, but as a former Secret Service agent and one-time law student, she should have known that her behavior was totally unacceptable in any workplace.

As far as he was concerned, no one had betrayed his sense of trust so badly since he'd found out his partner in Baltimore was a crooked cop. And he wasn't even ready to deal with the fact that Abby had betrayed him too because there was no way that Cate had the computer skills to photo-shop that photo so that it looked kosher. If anyone ever saw it, it could make working at NCIS extremely problematic if not impossible.

So he'd panicked and threatened to email everyone the wet T-shirt photo to blackmail her, so she'd delete that piece of crap before it did any more damage than it already had, to their partnership and in resurrecting his barely slumbering demons. When they'd deleted on three as agreed he'd decided to get her back by letting her think he'd actually sent it to Gibbs, when in reality he'd sent him a copy of his report but the beep of the boss' computer obviously made her think Tony had reneged on their agreement and they both took off at a run for the elevator. He hoped she'd have a really unpleasant night wondering about Gibbs reaction. Because he knew damned well he was in for a tough time himself after he got home.

He resolved to tell her tomorrow that he'd actually deleted the picture and had simply sent Gibbs his SFA report on Petty Officer Jessica Smith's murder instead. Let her stew tonight, she so deserved it. Tony made his way home, stopping to pick up some takeout Japanese at a new place not far from his apartment even though he wasn't sure if he was hungry. Food was a distraction and he sure as hell needed that tonight.

~Betrayals~

When Gibbs saw his two agents bolting for the elevator he was surprised. Actually he hoped it meant that they'd finally sorted out whatever it was that was eating them. Tony had had a real bug up his ass with Cate today and it surprised him. While he had basically ignored whatever it was that had DiNozzo so furious and freaked out as if he's seen a ghost and Cate who was ten times more snarky than usual and sneaking around with Abby, he hoped that they'd sort it out amongst themselves. He absolutely hated having to talk and deal with all that emotional crap. If it wasn't sorted soon he'd probably bang their heads together and sort it out that way. Still maybe he wouldn't have to step in and referee, judging by the way they'd departed together in such a hurry.

When he noticed that he had two new messages on his computer he checked them, forgetting about the quarrelling agents when he saw the two messages from DiNozzo and Cate. He opened Tony's and saw with approval that it was the final report on the Petty Officer Smith murder they'd been working on and he scanned it roughly because Tony's reports were always of an excellent standard and admirably succinct. That never ceased to amaze Gibbs because DiNozzo could talk a blue streak without even trying, yet his reports were the height of brevity.

When he thought about it, working in several large city PDs, he would probably have had much more paper work, due to higher ratio of cases than he did now, even as his senior field agent, so he would have needed brevity to get through all the workload. Maybe it was where he developed the time honoured work smarter not harder dictum. Gibbs went ahead opening Cate's email, expecting her report too, forgetting he'd already been handed it earlier on and lacking computer savvy, he failed to notice her email was not a document file but a photo until he opened it up.

What he saw shocked him! His first thought was what the hell was Tony thinking, letting something that compromising get loose for anyone to see? While his second thought which managed to penetrate through his befuddled brain was why the devil did Caitlyn Todd have the photo anyway or perhaps more relevant, why did she decide to send it to him? Finally, when he managed to stop gawking at it long enough, he decided that it explained DiNozzo's over the top skirt chasing frat boy persona. He was obviously trying to hide the fact that he was gay, which, since he worked in law enforcement all these years, was a smart strategy. Especially smart because he now worked as a federal agent in a quasi- militaristic organisation that also dealt with two branches of the Armed Forces that weren't exactly warm and fuzzy with the concept of homosexuality. Which in and of itself was ironic because there were plenty of gays and lesbians in the Marines and Navy in his personal and professional experience, just as there were in everyday life.

While he personally had no problem with DiNozzo being gay and working for him, he knew that many law enforcement personnel didn't necessarily share his liberal views. He wondered again about Cate and her motive for sending him the photo. She was a pretty straight laced individual and pretty religious so perhaps she disapproved of DiNozzo's sexual preference and decided to out him to the boss. She probably thought as a hard assed Marine he'd can his ass. He was disappointed that she had him pegged as a bigot and she was supposed to be a profiler for Pete's sake.

Maybe she was after DiNozzo's job, in which case, she was in for a shock. Gibbs decided that the best thing was to simply delete the photo and forget that he'd ever seen it, if he could. Well perhaps pretend he didn't see it would be the best he could do, because he really doubted that he could forget he'd seen it. He still couldn't credit that DiNozzo could be so stupid as to allow himself to be photographed in such a blatantly camp context which would set homophobic pulses racing if they saw it. Maybe he should talk to him about being more discreet although as a cop he really should have known that already.

Actually, although he would never admit it to anybody else, he was more than a little hurt that DiNozzo hadn't trusted him enough to tell him the truth about his sexual orientation. They had been together for almost four years now and he really had thought he had managed to earn his trust but while he felt hurt, a part of him felt an over- riding sense of relief too. He had always secretly wondered if he was responsible for Wendy Miller leaving DiNozzo on the eve of their wedding because he'd offered the young detective a spot on his team and a move to DC. He had wondered if moving to a new city plus the fact that in his first few weeks on the team, Gibbs had worked him into the ground as he was wont to do with anyone who worked with him, even as he was attending training at FLETC. But now it was clear why she had called off the marriage; she must have discovered he was gay and that lifted a burden off his shoulders that he hadn't realised til now, had weighed so heavy upon him.

Gibbs decided to order Todd to destroy all copies of the photo and tear her a new one, too. He shook his head and wondered if this was what the pair had been arguing about during the case, as he hit what he thought was the button to delete the photo. Unfortunately in his ignorance of all things technological, never mind computers, he inadvertently managed to send the picture to the entire DC staff of NCIS instead of deleting it. Although it was a colossal mistake to make, it wasn't too surprising because Gibbs often found it challenging to do anything more complicated than boot up the computer when he arrived every morning. If there was anything more challenging, he would normally get either Abby or McGee to fix it for him, so while his intentions had been honourable, it was a understandable mistake but one with far reaching consequences. Unfortunately, he was far too slow in recognising those consequences when they occurred and subsequently, failed to act until it was too late.