COMING HOME

I love Agent Afloat. Great episode!

A wave of relief, that he hadn't expected, swept over Gibbs as Tony turned and grinned. It was the first time that he had seen Tony in person in four months. The younger man was tanned and looked well. The shorter hair, Gibbs noted, made him look sharper. The grin was reassuring. Tony's pleas via the MTAC screen to get him off the carrier had shaken Gibbs. Dinozzo complaining about paperwork always failed to move Gibbs, but his eyes had been desperate – at odds with the happy twinkling he saw in the same eyes right now.

…..

Tony glanced over at Ziva as she sweet-talked the local coroner and saw that she was extracting the information that they needed. Charm, he was well aware, could be as effective as brute force in a number of situations. He looked back to Gibbs who was barking orders at McGee via his cell phone. Tony was resisting, with every fibre of his being, the urge to beg Gibbs to take him home to DC. Gibbs HAD to know that being on the Seahawk was killing him but he wouldn't want to hear Tony whining about it like a three year old. Gibbs wanted to see efficiency and for him to focus on the task at hand. Tony wondered if Gibbs had spoken to Vance and whether there was any chance of the Director showing some compassion or returning a favour. But Tony wasn't going to dig for information or beg. There was surely a rule that forbade begging for anything. He decided to bask in the presence of his old team and pray that it took a long time to solve the case.

…

'I'm the squad and there's no room,' Gibbs heard Tony tell Ziva once they were in the Agent Afloat's quarters . And there was a fair degree of testiness in the man's tone. It made Gibbs even more determined to bring Tony home. While being physically confined and socially isolated might once have been Gibbs' idea of paradise when he didn't want to confront the world, he knew that it actually did a man's soul no good at all. He hated to imagine Tony cooped up in the stark room with nothing but dark thoughts to keep him company. There was true irony in loneliness aboard a ship of thousands of men..

Gibbs smiled inwardly for a moment as Ziva saw and reacted to the photographs of her that Tony had stuck to his wall, until his stomach twisted at the realization that Tony would have spent much of the last four months longing for the banter the photographs had provoked. Gibbs' eyes rested on the image of Abby in her labcoat and could almost hear her affirming that Tony WOULD be coming home and that Gibbs just had to make it happen.

…

The murderer was hand-cuffed. The familiar satisfaction of a job well done settled over Tony. It had been a team effort and it was something to celebrate, except that it also meant that Gibbs and Ziva no longer needed to be on the Seahawk. They'd be going back to the office to Abby and McGee and Ducky while he was going back to putting on a brave face and longing for postcards.

'Dinozzo, grab your gear,' was suddenly the order reaching his ears. He barely comprehended it before it finally sent him running through the ship to retrieve his belongings. He was smiling so hard his face was hurting.

The End